Why God Thinks what He is Thinking? An Argument against Samuel Newlands’ Brute–Fact–Theory of Divine Ideas in Leibniz’s Metaphysics

According to the most prominent principle of early modern rationalists, the Principle of Sufficient Reason [PSR], there are no brute facts, hence, there are no facts without any explanation. Contrary to the PSR, some philosophers have argued that divine ideas are brute facts within Leibniz’s metaphysics. In this paper, I argue against brute-fact-theories of divine ideas, especially represented by Samuel Newlands in Leibniz and the Ground of Possibility, and elaborate an alternative Leibnizian theory of divine ideas.

Brute Fact

Concerns about contingency are explored further by way of a consideration of brute facts. Facts (ways the universe is) that are explanatorily brute are distinguished from those that are ontologically brute. Explanation, being a product of finite minds, must end somewhere, it would seem, but this leaves open the question whether the universe, or its nature, is in any respect ontologically brute. The difficulty of answering this question is registered and the suggestion advanced that reality, being itself, determines what could or must be the case. This leads to an ontological argument of the form, if there is something, if there is anything at all, there could not have been nothing: nothing comes from nothing. The upshot is something like a metaphysical counterpart to the principle of sufficient reason.

Marginality and Liminality in Tara Sullivan’s Golden Boy

In Tara Sullivan’s Golden Boy, the protagonist Habo is a young adult with albinism who struggles and eventually succeeds in navigating his multiple marginal spaces before eventually finding his position in society. Employing Victor Turner’s concept of liminality, I adopt a postcolonial lens to scrutinize in greater depth than literary critics have so far revealed the positive aspects of the marginal space occupied by Habo in virtue of the layered complexity of his social geography. Because his whole society is located in the global South, this disabled young adult faces a variety of marginalisations. Rather than an end point, the multiple margins traversed by Habo become for him a liminal space. Margins serve as a threshold for this teenager to discover and establish his position in his society. I deviate from Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s theorising about disability as a social construct, since her analysis overlooks the brute fact that Habo’s albinism is a disability which constitutes a constant life threat. The disambiguation of marginality and liminality argued here is particularly important to maintain when critiquing narratives that depict the life experience of protagonists overcoming the very real-world challenges encountered at the margins of the global economic order.

Waiting for other people: a psychoanalytic interpretation of the time for action

Typical responses to a confrontation with failures in authority, or what Lacanians term ‘the lack in the Other’, involve attempts to shore it up. A patient undergoing psychoanalysis eventually faces the impossibility of doing this successfully; the Other will always be lacking. This creates a space through which she can reimagine how she might intervene in her suffering. Similarly, when coronavirus forces us to confront the brute fact of the lack in the Other at the socio-political level, we have the opportunity to discover a space for acting rather than continuing symptomatic behaviour that increasingly fails to work.

Cetaceans as Exemplars of Evolution and Evolutionary Ecology: A Glossary

Extant cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) and their extinct ancestors offer some of the strongest and best-known examples of macroevolutionary transition as well as microevolutionary adaptation. Unlike most reviews of cetacean evolution, which are intended to chronicle the timeline of cetacean ancestry, document the current knowledge of cetacean adaptations, or simply validate the brute fact of evolution, this review is instead intended to demonstrate how cetaceans fittingly illustrate hundreds of specific, detailed terms and concepts within evolutionary biology and evolutionary ecology. This review, arrayed in alphabetical glossary format, is not meant to offer an exhaustive listing of case studies or scholarly sources, but aims to show the breadth and depth of cetacean research studies supporting and investigating numerous evolutionary themes.

Philosophy’s dark heir: On Nick Land’s abstract horror fiction

Nick Land is a British philosopher who developed a compelling transcendental materialist critique of anthropocentric philosophies throughout the 1990s before leaving academia at the turn of the century and moving to Shanghai. While he is now best known for his controversial pro-capitalist political writings, he has also recently developed a theory of what he calls ‘abstract horror fiction’, as well as applied it in practice by writing two abstract horror novellas. Although one might think that Land’s horror fiction, like his recent far-right politics, marks a new and independent body of work from his earlier academic writings as a philosopher, this article argues that Land turns to writing horror fiction, because he sees the genre as a better compositional form than traditional philosophy to continue his critique of anthropomorphism insofar as it is able to stage a confrontation with that which lies beyond all parochial human comprehension. I begin by outlining Land’s earlier critique of anthropocentric philosophies with recourse to the brute fact of humanity’s inexorable extinction as a way to undermine their attempts to project human values and concepts onto an inhuman cosmos for all time. I then examine Land’s theory of abstract horror to see how he envisions horror fiction as the best aesthetic means for transcendentally channeling the traumatic limits of human experience. I conclude with an analysis of Land’s two horror novellas, Phyl-Undhu and Chasm, to draw out the ways in which his earlier critical philosophy continues to inform their literary motifs. What ultimately emerges from this analysis of Land’s fiction is a conception of horror as the dark heir to critical philosophy.

ʿAbdul Majid Daryabadi

Chapter 8 looks at Abdul Majid Daryabadi, who first translated Western emotion knowledge into Urdu, as brought forth by the new discipline of psychology. The psychology of emotions in the writings of Daryabadi was divided not only from religion, but from any considerations of morality. On the one hand, this is due to his downplaying of the role of the will, which was no longer an autonomous force guided by rationality as in the Aristotelian tradition, but only one power among many, and not one of the strongest—the will could neither reach the subconscious nor fight the forces of heredity. On the other hand, emotions no longer needed a moral education, which transformed them from a brute fact of nature into a polished work of art fit for civilized society. Nature could not and should not be tamed by morality, but on the contrary indicated the path the race had to travel to secure its survival and its position of dominance.

Consciousness, Metacognition, & Perceptual Reality Monitoring

I introduce an empirically-grounded version of a higher-order theory of conscious perception. Traditionally, theories of consciousness either focus on the global availability of conscious information, or take conscious phenomenology as a brute fact due to some biological or basic representational properties. Here I argue instead that the key to characterizing the consciousness lies in its connections to belief formation and epistemic justification on a subjective level.

The Mechanical Art of Laughter

Our aesthetic experiences are today conditioned by machines, which operate at multiple levels: at the moment of conception of a work, at the moment of conservation and distribution of the work, and at the moment of its contemplation. For art today, it is no longer a theoretical question of asking whether the machine can act with freedom in the sense of a game that remains as of yet open-ended—or if humans themselves can still so act in a world entirely conditioned by technology—because the brute fact is that machines are becoming ever more autonomous, and humans ever more dependent upon them. For some artists, therefore, the ideas of autonomy and sacralization are best addressed, not in the posing of serious questions, but rather through the subversive activity of enticing the machine to reveal its comic nature—and wherein we discover, with Bergson, the essentially rigid and mechanical nature of the humorous.

The Struggle for Recognition

This chapter clarifies the relationship between recognition and state identity formation in international anarchy, highlighting the effects of social uncertainty in this process. Acts of recognition are constructive of a state’s identity, providing it with the authority it needs to act in ways that are consistent with its self-understanding and endowing it with a recognized social status in the international order. This inherently social process of identity formation is deeply uncertain because states can never discern beforehand the recognition responses of other states and as a result state interaction is fraught with the danger of misrecognition. In response to this ongoing social uncertainty, states attempt to take independent control over the meaning of their identities by grounding them in concrete material practices. As an effective expression of an identity, the material world gives substance to the recognition-seeking state’s aspiring social identity and allows it to experience its social status as a brute fact, rather than as the uncertain effect of an ongoing political practice of social construction.