Secularization, Countersecularization, and the Fate of the Flesh in Donne

The chapter begins by examining the thought of Edward Herbert. In his de Veritate Herbert articulates a reasonable, rationalized version of Christianity that is founded on dualist assumptions and that is compatible with science and rational inquiry. Donne oscillates between between Herbert’s secularization project and a counter-secularization built on embracing the “rump” elements of Christianity, including monist-materialism. In his sermons and other religious writings Donne foregrounds the body as a material life that is alien to any conventionally socialized sense of agency or identity. This use of the body also energizes Donne’s formally experimental erotic verse. Donne’s erotic poems suggest an understanding of sexuality in which interruption, deferral, and blockage are valued as a way of intensifying and increasing the experience of being a body with a life of its own separate from the conscious and reasoning life of a supposed soul. The formal experimentalism generated by Donne’s commitment to resurrection is precisely what T.S.Eliot later recognizes as modernism avant la lettre so that this chapter argues that Donne’s writings should be termed not “metaphysical” but “avant-garde.”

Drafted into a Foreign War?

This paper examines the central criticisms that come, broadly, from the modern, ‘analytic’ tradition, of Pierre Hadot’s idea of ancient philosophy as a way of life.: Firstly, ancient philosophy just did not or could not have involved anything like the ‘spiritual practices’ or ‘technologies of the self’, aiming at curing subjects’ unnecessary desires or bettering their lives, contra Hadot and Foucault et al. Secondly, any such metaphilosophical account of putative ‘philosophy’ must unacceptably downplay the role of ‘serious philosophical reasoning’ or ‘rigorous argument’ in philosophy. Thirdly, claims that ancient philosophy aimed at securing wisdom by a variety of means including but not restricted to rational inquiry are accordingly false also as historical claims about the ancient philosophers. Fourthly, to the extent that we must (despite (3)) admit that some ancient thinkers did engage in or recommend extra-cognitive forms of transformative practice, these thinkers were not true or ‘mainline’ philosophers. I contend that the historical claims (3) and (4) are highly contestable, risking erroneously projecting a later modern conception of philosophy back onto the past. Of the theoretical or metaphilosophical claims (1) and (2), I argue that the second claim, as framed here, points to real, hard questions that surround the conception(s) of philosophy as a way of life.

Do Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence?

This chapter looks at Carl Sagan's famous dictum: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The gist seems to be that one does not have sufficient reason to credit an extraordinary claim unless one also has commensurately extraordinary evidence to support it. This looks reasonable enough at first glance but its vagueness leaves it open to several interpretations, some of which are incompatible with the norms of rational inquiry. In particular, while Sagan's dictum is a justified skeptical response to claims that are known to be highly improbable or contrary to well-substantiated science, it is irrational and contrary to scientific objectivity to demand extraordinary evidence for those that are merely amazing or bizarre, and thus Sagan's dictum must be handled with caution in astrobiology. The chapter then sets out the conditions under which an appeal to Sagan's dictum is justified and those under which it is not, with special reference to existing and anticipated astrobiological debates.

Architectural Technologies and the Origins of Greek Philosophy

In this essay on ancient architectural technologies, I propose to challenge the largely conventional idea of the transcendent origins of philosophy, that philosophy dawned only when the mind turned inside, away from the world grasped by the body and senses. By focusing on one premier episode in the history of western thinking – the emergence of Greek philosophical thought in the cosmic architecture of Anaximander of Miletus – I am arguing that the abstract, speculative, rationalising thinking characteristic of philosophy, is indeed rooted in practical activities, and emerges by means of them rather than in repudiation of them. The spirit of rational inquiry emerged from several factors but the contributing role of monumental architecture and building technologies has been vastly under-appreciated. In the process of figuring out how to build on an enormous scale that the eastern Greeks had never before tried, the architects discovered and revealed nature’s order in their thaumata, the very experience with which Aristotle claims that philosophy begins. Ancient architecture and building technologies were on display for decades with monumental temple building. In front of Anaximander and his community, a new vision of nature spawned that, surprisingly, humans could grasp and command. The building of these thaumata, these objects of wonder, offered proof of the human capacity to control nature, and opened a new vision of our human rational capacity to understand the world and our place in it.

Catastrophe in an Age of Enlightenment

The greatest European calamity of the eighteenth century, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake is often called the “first modern disaster” in part because of the vigorously rational inquiry into its causes, which informed a self-consciously scientific post-disaster rebuilding effort. Examining responses to the Lisbon earthquake (and to the seemingly related Cape Ann earthquake, which occurred in Massachusetts three weeks later), this chapter interprets these episodes as a cultural event that drew on both Enlightenment rationalism and ideals of sensibility to forge a modern culture of disaster in embryonic form. This chapter focuses on three key developments: the interplay between religious and scientific explanations for the earthquake, even among some clergy; its unusually rich popular culture, which included unprecedented numbers of visual representations and Voltaire’s Candide, along with widely circulated eyewitness accounts by merchants and sea captains; and the remarkable international relief effort to aid earthquake victims, which included significant and widely publicized contributions from King George II and the British Parliament.

NON-VERBAL REASONING IN FIGURATIVE TREATMENT A CORRELATION BETWEEN THE PROCESSES OF RESEARCH AND DRAWING: A CASE STUDY OF SADEQUAIN

This paper draws a correlation between processes of research and drawing by analyzing the formation of emotional content and stylistic representation in art. The paper suggests that research process fundamentally involves a systematic development of understanding on a particular issue through a process of rational inquiry. The research outcome or an intellectual understanding is therefore nothing more than a thoroughly investigated form of a hypothesis/ premise/ theory/ idea that has undergone a careful process of scrutiny, comparison and evaluation. On similar grounds, drawing process also involves a systematic development of form in which adjustments are made with the help of nonverbal reasoning till the final form is evolved. The development of form in drawing becomes a systematic rational process but operates at a subconscious plane; reason is substituted by aesthetic sensibility. It is suggested that aesthetic sensibility is a judgment that the human mind tailors through the use of non-verbal criteria of evaluating the beautiful and ugly. The paper develops a theoretical model in the light of above and then applies it to analyze various drawing conventions used by Sadequain in figurative treatment.

The Credulity of Conspiracy Theorists

Where does entertaining (or promoting) conspiracy theories stand with respect to rational inquiry? According to one view, conspiracy theorists are open-minded skeptics, being careful not to accept uncritically common wisdom, exploring alternative explanations of events no matter how unlikely they might seem at first glance. Seen this way, they are akin to scientists attempting to explain the social world. On the other hand, they are also sometimes seen as overly credulous, believing everything they read on the Internet, say. In addition to conspiracy theorists and scientists, another significant form of explanation of the events of the world can be found in religious contexts, such as when a disaster is explained as being an “act of God.” By comparing conspiratorial thinking with scientific and religious forms of explanation, features of all three are brought into clearer focus. For example, anomalies and a commitment to naturalist explanation are seen as important elements of scientific explanation, although the details are less clear. This paper uses conspiracy theories as a lens through which to investigate rational or scientific inquiry. In addition, a better understanding of the scientific method as it might be applied in the study of events of interest to conspiracy theorists can help understand their epistemic virtues and vices.

Academic Freedom and the Politics of Truth

This chapter argues that academic freedom is justified because it is an inherently epistemic practice that serves the ideals of democracy. With Dewey, it is argued that “The one thing that is inherent and essential [to the idea of a university] is the ideal of truth.” But far from being apolitical, the value of pursuing truth and knowledge—the value that justifies academic freedom, both within and without the public mind—is a fundamental democratic value, and for three reasons: the practices of academic inquiry exemplify rational inquiry of the kind needed for democratic deliberation; those practices serve to train students to pursue that kind of inquiry; and those practices are important engines of democratic dissent.

Inference, Indian theories of

The use of argument in rational inquiry in India reaches almost as far back in time as its oldest extant literature. Even in very early texts, one finds the deliberate use of modus tollens, for example, to refute positions thought to be false. In light of such practice, it is not surprising to discover that Indian thinkers came to identify certain forms of reasoning and to study them systematically. The study of inference in India is, as Karl Potter (1977) has emphasized, not the study of valid reasoning as reflected in linguistic or paralinguistic forms, but the study of the circumstances in which knowledge of some facts permits knowledge of another fact, and of when acceptance by one person of some state of affairs as a fact requires that that person accept another as a fact. Still, the form of inference which came to be systematically investigated in India can be given schematically (see below). At the core of the study of inference in India is the use of a naïve realist ontology. The world consists of individual substances or things (dravya), universals (sāmānya), and relations between them. The fundamental relation is the one of occurrence (vṛtti). The relata of this relation are known as substratum (dharmin) and superstratum (dharma) respectively. The relation has two forms: contact (saṃyoga) and inherence (samavāya). So, for example, one individual substance, say a pot, may occur on another, say the ground, by the relation of contact. In this case, the pot is the superstratum and the ground is the substratum. Or a universal, say brownness, may occur in an individual substance, say a pot, by the relation of inherence. Here, brownness, the superstratum, inheres in the pot, the substratum. The converse of the relation of occurrence is the relation of possession. Another important relation is the relation that one superstratum bears to another. This relation, known as pervasion (vyāpti), can be defined in terms of the occurrence relation. One superstratum pervades another just in case wherever the second occurs the first occurs. The converse of the pervasion relation is the concomitance relation. As a result of these relations, the world embodies a structure: if one superstratum H is concomitant with another superstratum S, and if a particular substratum p possesses the former superstratum, then it possesses the second. This structure is captured in this inferential schema: Pakṣa (thesis): p has S.Hetu (ground): p has H.Vyāpti (pervasion): Whatever has H has S. Here are two paradigmatic cases of such an inference: Pakṣa (thesis): p has fire.Hetu (ground): p has smoke.Vyāpti (pervasion): Whatever has smoke has fire. Pakṣa (thesis): p is a tree (that is, has tree-ness).Hetu (ground): p is an oak (that is, has oak-ness).Vyāpti (pervasion): Whatever is an oak (that is, has oak-ness) is a tree (that is, has tree-ness).