Philosophy

The question concerning technology lies at the heart of human existence. As such it must take a central place in philosophy today. This importance, however, is veiled by a historical interpretation of technology as instrumental. This instrumentalism is the result of an ambiguity in the Aristotelian legacy that arises from an understanding of reality rooted in a theory of the categories, on the one hand, and a theory of causality on the other. This has left us with an ambiguous understanding of human making split by the twofold structure of artistic and representational thinking. The former is characteristic of empirical knowledge, the latter epistemological knowledge. This thesis follows Heidegger in arguing that an integral understanding of technology can only be achieved through a creative retrieval of Aristotle's ontology that interweaves the question of causality and the question of the categories, which we have outlined below as the interplay between potentiality and actuality, between being and non-being, and between truth and untruth.  While indebted to Aristotle, this involves an important re-thinking of the nature of ontology, for it is made possible by exposing the limits of Aristotle’s theory of time, which understands time as a succession of present instants, and moving towards the Heideggerian understanding of presencing as the opening of a horizon in which things perdure. Consequently, this is an ontology in which technology is tied to our notion of time just as much as to our notion of being.  After establishing this temporal ontology as the basis for an understanding of technology, in a unique way we apply it to the particular case of 3D printing and come to see that this technology is indeed more than an instrument; it is an interweaving of the epistemic and the poetic, the rational and the artistic.  Thus I accept the consensus in contemporary philosophy of technology that questions of technology must be understood in terms of their political and social implications.  However, unlike many thinkers in this field I also argue that they can be fruitfully understood in terms of a temporal ontology. I call this temporal ontology of technology, hyperology.

Myers, Andrew (March 16th, 2013). Presentation of “We Can Deserve to Suffer: On Parfit, Free Will, and the Responsibility Morality Requires” at “Theory and Practice: The Limits of Ethics for Guiding Action,” held at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics.

Throughout the term in "Monsters and Evil" we've studied different forms of monsters. In Othello, Iago invokes an image of a devilish deceiver who seemingly only wants to destroy beauty in an act of vengeance. Frankenstein's monster depicts a purely constructed other only capable of creating havoc, despair and death. In the "Island of Dr. Moreau," H.G. Wells paints a picture of a lunatic doctor that challenges assumptions about the "unique" nature of humankind. Possibly more important than the monsters themselves, the social reaction to an intrusive and destructive force has been at the forefront of most of our discussions. In studying the relationship between society and a monster, understanding important themes meant continually questioning the characters in the story. What about Beowulf killing monsters makes him heroic? Why does Othello fall victim to Iago's deception? Was there anything wrong with what Dr. Moreau did? Our culture conveniently provides a new application of these ideas. Unfortunately, monsters now extend beyond the confines of story. Monsters are not just for kids anymore-the effects of creating the divide between what is right, what is human, what is normal and the corresponding creation of an outsider have tangible political consequences. The culture of the monster and "us" extends beyond just a destructive xenophobia. Instead, the image of the monster more importantly reveals the internal psyche of those who wish to normalize a naïve populace. In response to terror, fear, and trepidation society has succumbed to normative enforcements of otherness, specifically using sexuality to justify the separation between the "innocent" civilian and the monster.

What would happen if one morning you wake up clumsy, as if your sense of touch were unreliable, arbitrarily on and off? And what would this clumsiness look like if we could transfer it to the moral sense? The article expounds an interesting analogy between the sense of touch, loosely construed, and the moral sense: just as a sort of consistency is necessary for the sense of touch to do its job, so it is for the moral sense to play its part. Touch enables us to navigate the everyday world of coffee pots and staircases; our moral sensibility comes into play when we act or when we judge our actions and those of others, and plays a directive role in what we feel, how we feel it, and how we react to it. Taking the analogy further, I will suggest that inconsistency causes, in both cases, a certain clumsiness, and that clumsiness is linked to arbitrariness—like the person that helps others in dire need, but only does so on some rainy days.

I argue that Husserl’s concept of position-taking, Stellungnahme, is adequate to understand the idea of second nature as an issue of philosophical anthropology. I claim that the methodological focus must be the living subject that acts and lives among others, and that the notion of second nature must respond to precisely this fundamental active character of subjectivity. The appropriate concept should satisfy two additional desiderata. First, it should be able to develop alongside the biological, psychological, and social individual development. Second, it should be able to underlie the vast diversity of human beings within and across communities. As possible candidates, I contrast position-taking with two types of habit-like concepts: instinct and habitus, on the one hand, and customary habits, on the other. I argue that position-taking represents the active aspect of the subject while the habit-like concepts are passive. A subject’s position-takings and ensuing comportments are tied together by motivations, which evince a certain consistency, and for this reason are expression of the subject's identity. I conclude by nuancing the relation between Stellungnahme and passivity. Passivity is deemed necessary to action but subservient to it; position-taking is thought to be prior to passivity.

I develop an argument for the pragmatic dependence of perception based on the notion of position-taking (Stellungnahme) as an overarching structure of intentionality, suggesting a more decidedly pragmatic-oriented picture of Husserl’s philosophy than is common in the literature. I first examine the idea of multiple strata constitutively at work at the level of the full person and her experiences. The person’s identity resides in her active position-takings. I argue that position-taking defines the actual workings of perception and its contents. I identify position-taking as a noetic moment, and broadly outline its noematic correlative, specifically for the case of perception. To perceive something is not a relation with a ready-made object but includes the very thematization of the perceptual object, which is partly the object directly perceived, pace Hopp (2011a). In virtue of the dynamism of position-takings I infer that the noema must be seen as essentially dynamic.

Through a critical engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the concepts of nature, life, and behavior, and with contemporary accounts of animal groups, this article argues that animal groups exhibit sociality and that sociality is a fundamental ontological condition. I situate my account in relation to the superorganism and selfish individual accounts of animal groups in recent biology and zoology. I argue that both accounts are inadequate. I propose an alternative account of animal groups and animal sociality through a Merleau-Pontian inspired definition of behavior. I criticize Merleau-Ponty’s individualistic prejudice, but show that his philosophy contains the resources necessary to overcome this bias. I define behavior as a holistic, ongoing, meaningful and Umwelt-oriented intrinsically configured expression of living forms of existence. By looking at cases of animal groups drawn from contemporary studies in zoology and behavioral ecology, I show that animal groups, in the fact that they behave, manifest themselves to be a fundamental form of existence, namely, the social form of existence.

Este ensayo presenta una manera de entender el sentido de la enseñanza de las humanidades a partir de algunas ideas de la pensadora alemana Hannah Arendt. A partir de los conceptos de verdad, opinión y realidad, y mostrando cómo la realidad es una unión de diferentes opiniones o perspectivas, el ensayo deriva una forma de pensar y de juzgar situaciones cotidianas caracterizada por tener en cuenta las opiniones de otros, pensando en compañía con ellos, de manera que el propio pensamiento se construya y afirme. Es allí, en la formación de esa particular capacidad de juzgar las situaciones presentes donde se ubica el sentido de las humanidades.

Proponents of enactivism should be interested in exploring what notion of action best captures the type of action-perception link that the view proposes, such that it covers all the aspects in which our doings constitute and are constituted by our perceiving. This article proposes and defends the thesis that the notion of sensorimotor dependencies is insufficient to account for the reality of human perception, and that the central enactive notion should be that of perceptual practices. Sensorimotor enactivism is insufficient because it has no traction on socially dependent perceptions, which are essential to the role and significance of perception in our lives. Since the social dimension is a central desideratum in a theory of human perception, enactivism needs a notion that accounts for such an aspect. This article sketches the main features of the Wittgenstein-inspired notion of perceptual practices as the central notion to understand perception. Perception, I claim, is properly understood as woven into a type of social practices that includes food, dance, dress, music, etc. More specifically, perceptual practices are the enactment of culturally structured, normatively rich techniques of commerce of meaningful multi-and intermodal perceptible material. I argue that perceptual practices explain three central features of socially dependent perception: attentional focus, aspects' saliency, and modal-specific harmony-like relations.

In this paper I argue that Richard Kearney’s notion of anatheism can be grafted onto the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, such that we arrive at a notion of alterity that maintains a tension between the transcendence and immanence of the Other. In other words, the Other is both transcendent – as thinkers such as Levinas and Derrida want to maintain – and therefore beyond the reach of any totalizing conceptualization; but at the same time, the Other is present to me in embodied form, and thus not so radically Other that there is an unbridgeable chasm between Same and Other. The sacramental language that Kearney employs in developing anatheism therefore seems particularly apropos, as it is through the physical, finite body before me that the transcendent, in-finite Other appears, and I am thus faced with the choice, much like Abraham, Mary, and Christ’s disciples before me, between extending hospitality or hostility to this sacred stranger.

Concerns over the inherent violence of language reached new heights in the latter half of the 20 th century, particularly with the work of Jacques Derrida and his development of deconstruction. In short, the worry is that in speaking I am forcing my concepts onto the person or thing about which I am speaking, rather than allowing the Other to appear as Other (i.e., as transcending my own language and concepts). While I acknowledge that these criticisms have their place, in the present paper I seek to push us toward a re-affirmation of language in the wake of this deconstructive critique. I will draw upon the work of Richard Kearney, Jean-Louis Chretien, and Ezra Pound, in order to argue that stories and poetry stand as instances of language arising in a faithfully responsive way out of a genuine encounter with the earth and with others.

The aim of this paper is twofold: First, to provide an account of the way that our stories, and the languages in which we tell them, orient us towards the world; and, second, to explore the implications of such an account for the question of how to welcome the Stranger/Foreigner/Other. Taking my cue from Hans-Georg Gadamer’s claim that a language-view is a worldview, I will argue that language plays an integral role in our encounter with the world. And when we tell stories, sing songs, and recite poems, we are bearing witness to this encounter. Accordingly, by giving place to the Other’s story, we open ourselves up to broader and richer ways of understanding and being oriented towards the world, insofar as the world-orientation inherent in the Other’s story can bring to light aspects of reality that our own stories miss. We thus allow our stories to be dis-placed not at the expense of our respective truth claims, but of the hegemony of the notion of One, True Story.

This thesis is a work in hermeneutic phenomenology, which seeks to develop both carefully descriptive and carefully interpretive studies of poetic texts. I am particularly interested in the new, possible worlds and ways of being opened by poetic texts, as well as the ways that poetry can reveal the present world. I argue that a good text – a true text – should reveal something true about the world, even if this is accomplished via the invention of some other world in which mythological beasts and magical powers exist and justice always carries the day. Poetic imagination, in other words, is constantly figuring and re-figuring reality. In view of these claims, my aim in this thesis is to interrogate the works of recent Continental philosophy and English and American poetry.

In particular, I focus on (1) anatheistic epiphanies of the sacred, or poetic retrievals of the sacred in the material world after the passing away of the otherworldly master God; and (2) the tension between language and silence, by which the language of poetry can help to overcome the imposition of the ego and subjugation of the Other, and can instead open spaces for the silence of the world to be heard.

In Chapter One, I will explicate Richard Kearney’s understanding of anatheism, which calls us to “revisit the sacred in the midst of the secular.” This distinctly post-theist move accepts the critical work of atheism while not being content to rest in this negation. Rather, a new affirmation is called for – a rediscovery of the sacred in even the smallest of things.

In Chapter Two, I will argue that Philip Larkin, Wallace Stevens, Galway Kinnell, and William Blake enact anatheistic explorations of the sacred in their poetry. I will begin with selections from the works of Philip Larkin and Wallace Stevens, in which I read an anatheist retrieval of the sacred in the material world. Next, having established anatheism as a hermeneutical method that seeks to recover the sacred in the material world, and having explored the works of poets who show us what this hermeneutics looks like in practice, I will delve deeper into what an anatheist theology looks like in order to offer readings of Galway Kinnell and William Blake. Specifically, I will explicate Kearney’s understanding of (1) microtheology, which allows us to locate the divine within the least of these – a God of little things, following the title of Arundhati Roy’s novel; and (2) microeschatology, which challenges us to hear the divine may-be – the possibility of God’s impossible kingdom to which we give flesh through concrete acts of love and hospitality. Microtheology and microeschatology are two sides of the anatheistic coin, and I will read works by Kinnell and Blake through the lenses of these concepts. In the poetry of Kinnell, I read a microtheology that finds God in the least of these; and in the work of Blake, I read a microeschatological call for justice and for the building of God’s kingdom on earth.

In Chapter Three, I will look to Jean-Louis Chrétien for an account of the necessity of silence in art, as well as to Gadamer for an account of language as arising out of our encounters with the world and with others rather than simply being the abstract imposition of the Same onto the Other. Such an account stands as an important companion to Kearney’s anatheism, insofar as anatheism emphasizes the ethics of human encounters, while Chrétien’s account offers a way to think through not only hospitality to human others, but to non-human others as well. In other words, Chrétien’s demand that we not speak over the silence of the world stands as a faithful and necessary expansion of the concerns driving Kearney’s work. Furthermore, I will argue that Chrétien’s and Gadamer’s accounts help us to better understand the work of poets such as Li-Young Lee and Wallace Stevens. I will then provide an analysis of the poetics of the Imagist movement. This movement, I will argue, puts into practice many of the ideals not only of Chrétien and Gadamer, but of Ricoeur and Kearney as well.

In Chapter Four, I will conduct close readings of Imagist poets such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, who exemplify the practice of not using language as what Pound calls ornamentation, but rather see poetic language as presenting the phenomenological opportunity to be attentive and responsive to the things themselves.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Truth and Poetic Imagination … 3

1. After God: Richard Kearney’s Anatheist Hermeneutics of the Sacred … 11

2. After Disbelief: Anatheistic Retrievals of the Sacred in Romantic, Modernist, and Contemporary Poetry … 33

3. Between Speech and Silence: Jean-Louis Chrétien and Imagist Poetics … 51

4. Between Ideas and Things: Phenomenological Studies in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound … 63

Conclusion: Silence, Speech, and the Sacred … 74

Bibliography … 77

The purpose of this paper is to read Imagist poetry and poetics through the lens, first and foremost, of Jean-Louis Chrétien’s phenomenological aesthetics, as well as, secondarily, Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of metaphor. The basic question with which I begin is this: If we accept what we might call Chrétien’s “criterion of silence” for painting, what does this mean for poetry, as an art of language? Is even poetic language doomed to impose abstract concepts onto the things rather than allowing the things to show themselves from themselves? I argue that Chrétien’s account allows for a powerful rebuttal to such claims and instead shows how poetic language can be responsive to the world, and can cultivate spaces for that which does not speak in human language—or, indeed, speaks in human language other than one’s own—to be heard.
To make this argument, I will look to the poetry and poetics of Imagism, a fascinating, short-lived movement in early-twentieth-century poetry, whose adherents—including poetic titans such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams—called for poetry’s return from (what they saw as) the lofty, disembodied heights of Romanticism back to the world of lived experience. I will argue that this movement gives us a powerful case study for a Chrétien-inspired phenomenology of poetry.