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There has been a backlash against academic writing in the humanities that can be found in popular culture at least since the 1990s. By considering a selection of arguments from critics of academic writing in the humanities, I then defend a certain kind of 'obscurity' or 'difficulty' in scholarly prose by developing a concise genealogy of obscure academic writing. This paper develops the notion that an 'uncommon sense' should be situated against 'common sense' to unveil an assumed 'world' or 'reality' alongside the structural formations of that which is considered 'useful' language. Often, complicated academic language grapples with the intrinsic complexity that is hidden behind 'simple' ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graham Harman writes that the “basic dualism in the world lies…between things in their intimate reality and things as confronted by other things.” However, dualism implies irreconcilable difference; what Harman points to is better expressed as a dyad, where the two components imply one another and interact. This article shows that systems theory has long asserted the fundamental character of Harman’s dyad, expressing it as the union of internal structure and external function, which correspond exactly to what Levi Bryant, characterizing Harman’s views, refers to as the intra-ontic and the inter-ontic, respectively. After interpreting Harman’s dyad in terms of the ontology of systems theory, the article illustrates his dyad with a variety of examples, including conceptions about truth, ethics, value, and intelligence. The structure–function dyad is a spatial conception of a system as an object. It is usefully augmented with a temporal dimension, expressed in a third component or with an additional orthogonal dyad. Adding a temporal dyad to the structure–function dyad joins the idea of an event and/or process to the idea of an object.

In this article, we aimed to evaluate the utility of critical posthumanism for nurses interested in planetary health—a growing area of study that requires a decentering of the human, and environmental justice considerations. We used Chinn and colleagues' method to describe and critically reflect on critical posthumanism, extending the theory analysis method to include a wide range of academic and video sources. We found that critical posthumanism is like a double‐edged sword: It provides a lens through which to transcend human‐centric approaches to healthcare but is marred by its lack of clarity and inaccessibility. We argue critical posthumanism can be adapted to enhance its potential at the intersection of nursing and planetary health. An analysis of critical posthumanism is followed by a discussion framed by five ways of knowing in nursing, highlighting real‐world examples of how critical posthumanism can aid nurses in dealing with planetary health concerns. By exploring the intersections of critical posthumanism with nursing knowledge, we demonstrate how critical posthumanism can enable nurses to comprehend and tackle environmental issues intricately linked to human health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a multilevel and multidisciplinary field, neuroscience is designed to interact with various branches of natural and applied sciences as well as with humanities and philosophy. The continental tradition in philosophy, particularly over the past 20 years, tended to establish strong connections with biology and neuroscience findings. This cross fertilization can however be impeded by conceptual intricacies, such as those surrounding the concept of plasticity. The use of this concept has broadened as scientists applied it to explore an ever‐growing range of biological phenomena. Here, we examine the consequences of this ambiguity in an interdisciplinary context through the analysis of the concept of "destructive plasticity" in the philosophical writings of Catherine Malabou. The term "destructive plasticity" was coined by Malabou in 2009 to refer to all processes leading to psycho‐cognitive and emotional alterations following traumatic or nontraumatic brain injuries or resulting from neurodevelopmental disorders. By comparing it with the neuroscientific definitions of plasticity, we discuss the epistemological obstacles and possibilities related to the integration of this concept into neuroscience. Improving interdisciplinary exchanges requires an advanced and sophisticated manipulation of neurobiological concepts. These concepts are not only intended to guide research programmes within neuroscience but also to organize and frame the dialogue between different theoretical backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the outset, metaphysics was already implicated in theology thorugh Aristotle's assertion of their identity. This is something refuted by St. Thomas Aquinas by clarifying that, despite their univocity, sacred theology remains different since it is derived from the Sacred Scriptures, beyond the scope of metaphysics. Despite the distinction, Aquinas is still constantly dragged in any talk about theology and metaphysics, and there are those who hold that since metaphysics no longer has a place in Western thought the same fate is also for Aquinas' metaphysical theology. However, there are those who hold an extremely different view. They contend that his theology is not metaphysical but rather resonating with the appelation of "post-metaphysical." This paper highlights these two competing views along with a re-statement of the relevance of Aquinas' intellectual legacy vis-à-vis Vatican II's aggiornamento campaign. This paper's argument rests on Aquinas' position on the clear boundaries between metaphysics and sacred theology. Metaphysics is important but only as a preamble to faith; it is neither the origin nor the destination of sacred theology. This important distinction is what secures a space for the thought of Saint Thomas in the contemporary intellectual discourse, be it in the local or continental context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the philosophical perspectives of Nietzsche and Heidegger, tracing their analyses of the death of God and its aftermath. My aim is to clarify the diagnosis of this nihilism and its underlying causes, as well as evaluate the proposed remedies put forth by Nietzsche and Heidegger. Ultimately, I argue that the seemingly ambiguous consequences of the death of God are not only hopeful, but necessary, if human beings are to rise above and transmute a meaningless, resentment-laced existence, however, not by jettisoning Judeo-Christianity and its values, but rather by reinterpreting them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of meaning developed within the analytic tradition, starting with Gottlob Frege, and within continental philosophy, starting with Husserl, can be distinguished by their disagreement about the phenomenon of collapse or failure of meaning. Our text focuses on Frege's legacy, taken up by Rudolph Carnap, which culminated in a view of the collapse of meaning defined first by a purely syntactic conception of categorial error and second, when Tarski entered the scene, by the paradoxes created by the conflict between the use of the predicate truth and the concept of proof. As positivism's conventionalism and late model-theoretic semantics became the paradigms derived from this position, the result, in our view, was a conception of meaning success and meaning failure dominated by dependence on a technological conception. We will argue that this dependence leads to the inability to evaluate the breaks in rational parameters and crises of meaning addressed by the phenomenological and transcendental perspectives. Husserl's critique of logic as technology is the basis for the reflexive standpoint on the phenomena of meaning failure that leads to a theoretical and eidetic ideal approach to that phenomenon. It is then suggested that this phenomenological reflective standpoint on the problem of meaning failure is the origin of the doors that lead to the divergent paths between the analytic and continental traditions. Thus, this is an article with three argumentative phases connected into a larger unity. The first phase presents Husserl's critique of a purely extensional, syntactic, and recursive conception of logical consequence and the concept of truth; the second presents Hussel's larger conception of meaning-failure; the third—presented in an appendix— presents a lesson on the division between continental and analytic philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophy in the 20th century witnessed a schism between so called 'analytic' and 'continental' schools of philosophy. One of the aims of the IJPS from its inception was to provide a space for articles attempting to overcome, or at least foreshorten, that divide. This paper critically examines the various understandings of the divide and takes a quick glance at some of the attempts to bridge it [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bijan Abdul Karimi is one of the Iranian Muslim thinkers who has many criticisms of the idea of religious science. These critiques are of two types: critiques based on continental philosophy, which Abdul Karimi is philosophically affiliated with, and critiques that are more in line with analytical philosophy. In this article, his criticism about the ambiguity of the meaning of the idea of religious science is proposed and evaluated. Abdul Karimi believes that: 1. The abundance of views about the concept of religious science shows that this idea was not based on a clear knowledge system (Episteme) but based on suspicion (Doxa); 2. The analysis of the meanings of science and religion shows that the idea of religious science is a paradoxical concept resulting from the mixing of different levels of consciousness. In this article, the brief history of religious science is shown and it is revealed that 1. Some of the definitions presented by Abdul Karimi are not related to the flow of religious science, and 2. the idea of religious science is not a paradox and does not mix levels of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Posthumanist educational methodologists, theorists, and researchers tend to reproduce zoocentrism by privileging animals over plants in their scholarship. This comes at a time when disciplines from across the academy are taking “plant turns” by attending to plants’ abilities to sense and communicate, as well as their material relationships, representational significance, and lively entanglements with non-plants. This amounts to a rejection of traditional Western science and philosophy that treat plants as passive forms of life. To encourage this plant turn in posthumanist educational scholarship, I turn toward Anishinaabe-gikendaasowin, plant science, and continental philosophy to help recognize the agencies and behaviors of plants that challenge human exceptionalism. I engage with these knowledge systems through multispecies storytelling about the collaborative design of a library computer science learning environment. Multispecies stories from these collaborations not only show how plants contributed to computer science learning, but also how they affected and were affected by humans, nonhumans, and technologies in the library. These findings have implications for posthumanist educational research and computer science education

The present article, while emphasizing the field and time leading to the emergence of analytical and continental philosophy, tries to study the main and fundamental origins of their emergence in Kant’s philosophy and to identify the strengths and weaknesses of both, to analyze the positive and efficient and the negative aspects of Kant’s philosophical heritage. To reach this purpose, at first some characteristics and differences of the two approaches are described. Then after presenting necessary introductions, through Kant’s general and strong philosophy, we get the two general outputs of analytic and continental approaches. In this way we develop from Kant’s episteme-sophia controversy to his nomen-phenomen dualism to get closer to his uninvited philosophy, i.e., nihilism so as to put into test the analytic-continental controversy. Finally, we try to present some conjectures regarding the required accompaniment of both.

This article interrogates the role of the human imagination in ordinary perception and orientation, in encounters with art, and in practices of faith. Philosophers and psychologists have long argued that perception is irreducibly imaginative, in the sense that to perceive intelligibly is, in part, to integrate sensory data into forms or wholes that are not simply given. The ability to do this is what continental philosophy calls 'the imagination', and the imagination in this sense is central to how humans apprehend and orient themselves in the world. This centrality introduces an element of risk into all human apprehension of the world, other people, and the divine, which cannot be overcome by spiritual or epistemological safeguards. Rather, such risk is inalienable, not least to a life of faith. The article discusses ways to understand and engage this dynamic, especially through theological encounters with art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the philosophical perspectives of Nietzsche and Heidegger, tracing their analyses of the death of God and its aftermath. My aim is to clarify the diagnosis of this nihilism and its underlying causes, as well as evaluate the proposed remedies put forth by Nietzsche and Heidegger. Ultimately, I argue that the seemingly ambiguous consequences of the death of God are not only hopeful, but necessary, if human beings are to rise above and transmute a meaningless, resentment-laced existence, however, not by jettisoning Judeo-Christianity and its values, but rather by reinterpreting them.

The present article, while emphasizing the field and time leading to the emergence of analytical and continental philosophy, tries to study the main and fundamental origins of their emergence in Kant's philosophy and to identify the strengths and weaknesses of both, to analyze the positive and efficient and the negative aspects of Kant's philosophical heritage. To reach this purpose, at first some characteristics and differences of the two approaches are described. Then after presenting necessary introductions, through Kant's general and strong philosophy, we get the two general outputs of analytic and continental approaches. In this way we develop from Kant's episteme-sophia controversy to his nomen-phenomen dualism to get closer to his uninvited philosophy, i.e., nihilism so as to put into test the analytic-continental controversy. Finally, we try to present some conjectures regarding the required accompaniment of both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent Metaphilosophy article, Moti Mizrahi and Michael Dickinson argue against characterizing the divide between analytical and continental philosophy as a divide in the use of arguments. This hypothesis is rejected on the basis of a text‐mining approach. The present paper argues that the results they extracted do not answer the questions they set out to answer as well as would have been possible. This is due to Mizrahi and Dickinson's choice to disregard duplicate occurrences of argument word pairs, their main indicator for the occurrence of arguments in articles. This paper reconstructs their method by now also counting duplicates. A small corpus (n = 436) of recent (2015–2021) analytical and continental articles is used to rerun the experiment; the results oppose Mizrahi and Dickinson's and suggest that arguments (as operationalized by Mizrahi and Dickinson) occur more in analytical articles. The paper argues that part of the discrepancy derives from the specific methodological choices they made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Luigi Russolo's Intonarumori together with his manifesto L'arte dei rumori (1913) marked a break with the art of clear signification. From here on, noise and dispersed sounds replaced the concept of music reverberating the harmony of the spheres by propelling the quandaries of immanence contingent on palpable resonance performing the differential relational manner of heterogeneous existence. This somatic turn is central to Jean-Luc Nancy's Listening, where he proposes listening as a tangible fundamental resonance rumbling the corpse sonore. This paper elaborates on the move from the art of music to the plurality of rhythmic worlds. Nancy's proposition of sonorous existence demonstrates two movements, one that retreats from hearing the Pythagorean musical-arithmetical cosmos exhibited in Robert Fludd's Monochord, the other plays the singular plural pulsations of dispersed creation performed by Michael Snow's Tap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The years following Israel's founding were formative ones for the development of philosophy as an academic discipline in this country. During this period, the distinction between philosophy seen as contiguous with the humanities and social sciences, and philosophy seen as adjacent to the natural and exact sciences began to make its presence felt in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This distinction, which was manifest in the curriculum, was by no means unique to the Hebrew University, but reflected the broader bifurcation between two schools of Western philosophy in the twentieth century. In English-speaking countries, it is generally referred to as the divide between analytic and continental philosophy. What was special about the situation at the Hebrew University, however, was that the split manifested itself in a rather small department, being embodied, basically, in one prominent representative of each school – Nathan Rotenstreich and Yehoshua Bar-Hillel. This article will focus on some key aspects of the lives and thought of Rotenstreich and Bar-Hillel. It will address their philosophical maturation as S.H. Bergmann's students, their views on the goals of twentieth-century philosophy, on the philosopher's role in public life, and the circumstances under which they started teaching in Jerusalem right after the founding of the State of Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that critical posthumanism is a crucial tool in nursing philosophy and scholarship. Posthumanism entails a reconsideration of what 'human' is and a rejection of the whole tradition founding Western life in the 2500 years of our civilization as narrated in founding texts and embodied in governments, economic formations and everyday life. Through an overview of historical periods, texts and philosophy movements, I problematize humanism, showing how it centres white, heterosexual, able‐bodied Man at the top of a hierarchy of beings, and runs counter to many current aspirations in nursing and other disciplines: decolonization, antiracism, anti‐sexism and Indigenous resurgence. In nursing, the term humanism is often used colloquially to mean kind and humane; yet philosophically, humanism denotes a Western philosophical tradition whose tenets underpin much of nursing scholarship. These underpinnings of Western humanism have increasingly become problematic, especially since the 1960s motivating nurse scholars to engage with antihumanist and, recently, posthumanist theory. However, even current antihumanist nursing arguments manifest deep embeddedness in humanistic methodologies. I show both the problematic underside of humanism and critical posthumanism's usefulness as a tool to fight injustice and examine the materiality of nursing practice. In doing so, I hope to persuade readers not to be afraid of understanding and employing this critical tool in nursing research and scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having become known as one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, Lev Shestov (1866–1938) advanced his pioneering ideas in parallel to Freud's development of psychoanalysis. Originating in his earlier works, his views of philosophy as art and the corresponding idea of the possibility of a fundamental, inner and creative transformation of one's worldview found its further expression in his mature writings, in which his insight into the nature of other thinkers' creativity took on a definitively active role in his philosophy. With the focus on the notion of the transformative capability of thought in Shestov's writing and based on my archival research and translations, in this article, I explore the Kyiv-born philosopher's ideas in dialogue with Freud's psychoanalytical theory and in the context of the postmodern view of reality as a symbolical and multifaceted representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the possibility of qualitative completion of the anthropological matrix proposed in this issue of the journal. We give a methodological distinction between the filling that proceeds from ready-made theses, and the filling in that has an individual as the object of application and critical verification of the theses, and the filling that has an individual as the instance of application of facts and events intended to salvation. In this case the structure of human cannot be thought only as a combination of separate elements, harmonious or subordinated to any other abstract beginning, but must be understood as a field of deployment of those conceptual orders, which are connected with salvation, and which do not contradict each other as orders, even if in disciplinary use these concepts appear to contradict each other. We question that reflection on the difference between the pre-modern and modern understanding of the tasks of theology and anthropology which is presented in some interdisciplinary works. The article argues that a certain type of work has been most productive for a new anthropology that understands the human being not as a substance but as an instance; the paper refuses to focus on the accumulation of knowledge and application, but problematizes marginal disciplines allied to theology. These works, including those by Horuzhy and Bibikhin, set the stage both for the justification of a two-dimensional matrix instead of a one-dimensional model and for its justified disclosure. Modeling in these works always precedes the argument, so models are often given sketchily, and developing of the argument is possible only with knowledge of the polemical contexts. Based on a thorough reconstruction of the history of two-dimensional anthropology, which can be formalized as a matrix, a substantive filling of the matrix cells is proposed. This content takes into account the peculiarities of modern postmetaphysical philosophy and allows to use this matrix as a consistent way to study salvation as an interdisciplinary phenomenon of experience which does not contradict the presumptions of particular philosophical disciplines.

Despite Sergey Averintsev’s belonging to the hermeneutic tradition, radically transformed for the purpose of religious-philosophical generalizations and a general critique of language and culture, a number of provisions of this critique in scientist’s final works are close to analytic philosophy rather than continental philosophy. A number of parallels are established between Averintsev’s position in distinguishing between poetry and prose genres in a dynamic and ambiguous system of literary production and that of A. Lovejoy, who criticized the Hegelian tradition for introducing new speech genres. Averintsev also admits the continental tradition of genre production as part of literary and intellectual life, while believing that self-identified classical genres can be described in roughly the same way that continental philosophy describes everyday language. But a radical critique of everyday language, based on religious-philosophical presumptions, demands that literary everyday life be recognized as the privilege of an alternative epistemology, inscribing new genres in the epistemological quest of continental philosophy and endorsing its radical moments.

Eve Tuck’s reflection on a “breakup with Deleuze” and her critical feminist relationship toward Deleuze’s philosophical position leads to my exploration of a feminist approach to a theory of concepts. I argue that in order to be applicable and useful for feminist philosophical scholarship, concepts assume a sheltering function for experiences that have lacked adequate forms of representation in the past. Feminist thinkers like Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant support the idea of concepts as shelter through their methodological employment of affect as a resource of knowledge. Gayatri Spivak and bell hooks reckon with the structural necessity for sheltering concepts through their respective notions of the subaltern and homemaking. Finally, Eve Meltzer’s study of the relevance of affect for conceptual art underscores the general importance of thinking through the connections between these seemingly opposed categories in order to arrive at a better understanding of what philosophical concepts can do.

Eve Tuck's reflection on a "breakup with Deleuze" and her critical feminist relationship toward Deleuze's philosophical position leads to my exploration of a feminist approach to a theory of concepts. I argue that in order to be applicable and useful for feminist philosophical scholarship, concepts assume a sheltering function for experiences that have lacked adequate forms of representation in the past. Feminist thinkers like Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant support the idea of concepts as shelter through their methodological employment of affect as a resource of knowledge. Gayatri Spivak and bell hooks reckon with the structural necessity for sheltering concepts through their respective notions of the subaltern and homemaking. Finally, Eve Meltzer's study of the relevance of affect for conceptual art underscores the general importance of thinking through the connections between these seemingly opposed categories in order to arrive at a better understanding of what philosophical concepts can do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I examine the often-denigrated concept of the novel of ideas from its inception and critical decline to its relatively recent revival. Using a variant of the exploitation-exploration dilemma in psychology, I suggest that early usage referred to works that exploit philosophical principles—or better, enact them—by setting philosophical positions in conflict. By contrast, use of the concept for more recent works sees characters and plots exploring philosophical stances. The shift corresponds with the greater attention paid to complexity and ambiguity that are hallmarks of continental philosophy and neopragmatism, and with it greater need to explore philosophical stances through fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]