3:AM Magazine

12 of what I’ve read this year: The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796-1880. Frederick Beiser. Beiser is an essential read and this is a great and readable book about an important sub-field of continental philosophy. It includes, for the Beckett fans amongst us, a chapter on Windelband, one of whose books Beckett read and from which […]

By the time photography got into its stride it was accepted pretty much as a documentary index of reality. This was why it became very popular in spirit circles because it proved that spirits existed. Well now of course we know so much more about this very peculiar state of being which has been called ‘image flesh’ – a term of Maurice Merleau-Ponty that I like very much. It’s an expression I like because it implies flesh that is not flesh. He applied it to other forms of iconography, which are also image flesh. They might be more material than a photograph – a sculpture, a painting – but they share the relationship to the mind’s eye that photography does.

Richard Marshall talks Catholicism, zombies and Beckton Alps with Marina Warner.

Now after reading the psychology literature, one view you might hold is the depressing one that most of us are vicious people to some extent or other – cruel, callous, dishonest, and the like. We belong on one end of the spectrum.

But I don’t see a lot of support for drawing that conclusion, just like I don’t see a lot of support for widespread virtue either. For instance, in the cheating literature just mentioned above, cheating was basically eliminated when participants recalled the Ten Commandments or signed the honor code. Yet to a truly dishonest person, neither of those would matter a great deal if at all.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Christian Miller.

With regard to Averroes and Hegel, it must be said that neither of them defended the double truth thesis in the medieval sense of the phrase. They both advocated that the truth can be expressed in different ways by philosophy and by religion. The content which these disciplines conveyed remained the same. Perhaps an ambiguity remains in the case of both philosophers as to their views on religion, because they both stated that religion portrays the truth in a metaphorical way, while philosophy expresses the truth in a rigorous, explicit or literal way. There is clearly a preference for the philosophical way of expressing the truth in both Averroes and Hegel.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Catarina Belo.

It’s all DIY  – hardly proof-read and done too fast in between day jobs to be anything but jump-start writing. So forget about the writing. What matters is what its about. It adds up to a boss reading list and a cranked up gang of characters smoking up the haunted back bars of the eerie early morning. 3:AM’s been around since 2000 and I joined Gallix’s punkstorm early on. It’s one of the oldest literary sites on the web. And back in the early days there was hardly anything out there so we were literally making it up as we went along.

Keep Up: a 3:AM backlist.

Whitehead argues that we experience causation all the time. Notoriously, this is precisely what Hume denies; according to him, we just experience succession, not the action of one thing upon another. Whitehead does not deny that we apprehend sense-impressions; when an object hits me, however, I have direct experience of causal forces acting upon me. Whitehead charges the entire British tradition with having neglected this fundamental dimension of experience. This failure has led to the strange view that experience is like a cage – that it encloses us within the circle of our perceptions, instead of doing what it so obviously does, namely bringing us in touch with the outside world.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Pierfrancesco Basile.

Our anticipations regarding the hidden side of a modern sculpture tend to be more indeterminate than our anticipations about the hidden sides of more familiar objects. Contrast a situation in which you look at a modern sculpture for the first time with a situation in which you look at a familiar object, such as your favorite coffee cup. I suggest that you will anticipate seeing the hidden side of each object as you change your perspective. But the anticipations in the case of the sculpture will be more indeterminate than in the case of the coffee cup. It may even seem to you as if you are “guessing” in the case of the sculpture.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Michael Madary.

Consolation philosophy posits the primacy of mood in the universe. Since I conceive mood as a proto-mind, my thought-system is an African idealism. It is monistic because it reduces everything in the universe to mood, a creative principle driven by an all-pervading logic that is nothing more than yearning. This assertion has implication for determinism and freedom. Rigid determinism and freedom are denied, with the notion of fatalism taking precedence.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Ada Agada.

There could probably be a perfectly logical advocate of the claim that the moon landing was a hoax, but few would regard such a person rational.  It’s frequently noted that when one becomes aware that certain of one’s beliefs are logically inconsistent, the most rational response is often to keep the inconsistency, because one is not sure how best to eliminate it.  The ability to manage known inconsistencies and other tensions in one’s beliefs is one of the many important factors in rationality that stress on “being logical” obscures.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Hartry Field.

Kripke, and perhaps Wittgenstein, were in favor of norms of meaning, but it is not so clear that either was in favor of norms of assertion, in the current sense, although Kripke spoke of correct assertions. Dummett also spoke of correct/incorrect assertions, but not with an appeal to norms in the current sense. He is still a little different, since he in addition made appeal to conventions of assertion. He did not, however, try to explain what assertion is by appeal to such conventions. One of Dummett’s memorable statements on the matter is this: “A man makes an assertion if he says something in such a manner as deliberately to convey the impression of saying it with the overriding intention of saying something true.”

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Peter Pagin.