Internally Inconsistent, Self-Refuting, and Self-Undermining Views

In Chapter 8, the author articulates two more principles of epistemic irrationality, one that applies to self-refuting views and one that applies to self-undermining views. A self-refuting view is one that says, or in an indirect way communicates, “I am not true nor approximately true nor true enough.” A self-undermining view is one that says, or in an indirect way communicates, “It is not epistemically rational to believe me to be true or approximately true or true enough.” The author uses Grice’s idea of a conversation implicature and the Apel-Habermas idea of a performative contradiction to explain and formulate three presuppositions of making an argument and uses them to explain why any arguments for a behaviorist or eliminative materialist position are self-undermining. He then proposes an Epistemic Anthropic Principle: when scientists present arguments for a scientific theory, the theory must be compatible with the possibility of making rational arguments for it.

Metaphilosophical pessimism of C. McGinn

This article is dedicated to the metaphilosophical pessimism of C. McGinn. McGinn is known as a main proponent of “new mysterianism” in the contemporary analytic philosophy of mind. According to mysterianism, we can’t solve the mind-body problem because of the natural cognitive limitations on our side. McGinn’s view on the nature of philosophy is the component of this conception. In general, mysterian metaphilosophy didn’t get enough coverage in the research literature but it deserves a bigger interest. McGinn argues that philosophy is actually a combination of unsolvable problems. He identifies the scientific/philosophical demarcation criterion as the potential solvability for the human mind. However, this metaphilosophical position faces serious difficulties. At first, if the objections of U. Kriegel and D. Dennett are right and the mysterian cognitive closure thesis is not sufficiently proved, then the termination of research on a number of philosophical issues may also be an unreasoned decision. Secondly, there is a threat of performative contradiction. But we could try to explain this contradiction by considering the style of analytic philosophy itself which is characterized by dialogical form and free dealing with the ideas considered as possible options. In the article, the standard methods of historicophilosophical investigation are used including the comparative analysis and the principle of objective analysis of a text in the work with sources.

‘Which I Presume is Permitted, Since We Are Talking About A Writer.’ Lateness, Memory, and Imagination in Literary Autobiography

In Summertime, a fictional biographer, Mr Vincent, conducts interviews with contemporaries of the novelist J.M. Coetzee for a biography of the late author. However, every claim made about the late Coetzee by the characters in Summertime is composed by the author himself, so the hidden, yet obvious presence of the novelist gives the book’s supposedly biographical outlook an autobiographical twist. Summertime’s Coetzee is distinctly both alive and dead. I propose to analyse works such as Summertime as literary autobiographies that employ narrative strategies otherwise found in fiction in order to creatively explore lateness, belatedness, and a sense of ending with regard to their writing life. Performative contradiction, as a deliberate stylistic manifestation of paradoxical contradictions, is a result of such narrative strategies. This enables a portrayal of memory and sincerity in autobiography that acknowledges the fraught nature of these notions. Drawing on autobiographical writing by novelists, such as Coetzee, Philip Roth, and Günter Grass, this article analyses the use of tense and fictionality to create performative contradiction. It shows how the novelist’s memory and imagination engage with the ever-present possibility of death to subvert traditional ideas of lateness as well as perceived limitations to the temporality of autobiographical writing.

Acting Irrespective of Hope

Must we ascribe hope for better times to those who (take themselves to) act morally? Kant and later theorists in the Frankfurt School tradition thought we must. In this article, I disclose that it is possible – and ethical – to refrain from ascribing hope in all such cases. I draw on two key examples of acting irrespective of hope: one from a recent political context and one from the life of Jean Améry. I also suggest that, once we see that it is possible to make sense of (what I call) ‘merely expressive acts’, we can also see that the early Frankfurt School was not guilty of a performative contradiction in seeking to enlighten Enlightenment about its (self-)destructive tendencies, while rejecting the (providential) idea of progress.

On Universals

Many on the Left have looked upon “universal” as a dirty word, one that signals liberalism's failure to recognize the masculinist and Eurocentric assumptions from which it proceeds. In rejecting universalism, we have learned to reorient politics around particulars, positionalities, identities, immanence, and multiple modernities. This book builds on these critiques of the tacit exclusions of Enlightenment thought, while at the same time working to rescue and reinvent what universal claims can offer for a revolutionary politics answerable to the common. In the contemporary quarrel of universals, the book shows, the stakes are no less than the future of our democracies. The book investigates the paradoxical processes by which the universal is constructed and deconstructed, instituted and challenged, in modern society. It shows that every statement and institution of the universal—such as declarations of human rights—carry an exclusionary, particularizing principle within themselves and that every universalism immediately falls prey to countervailing universalisms. Always equivocal and plural, the universal is thus a persistent site of conflict within societies and within subjects themselves. And yet, the book suggests, the very conflict of the universal—constituted as an ever-unfolding performative contradiction—also provides the emancipatory force needed to reinvigorate and reimagine contemporary politics and philosophy. In conversation with a range of thinkers from Marx, Freud, and Benjamin through Foucault, Derrida, and Scott, the book shows the power that resides not in the adoption of a single universalism but in harnessing the energies made available by claims to universality in order to establish a common answerable to difference.

Unrepresentable Justice: Looking for a Postqualitative Theory of Social Change

I believe posthumanist philosophy promises the possibility of a more robustly ethical and political practice of social inquiry. I do not, however, believe analytic and rhetorical tools have been developed that deliver amply on that promise. This is less a reflection on the quality of efforts to do so, than it is on the scope of the challenge before us. Since this is an essay about what “postqualitative means to me,” I speak from within the desire to see that promise more fully realized and the belief that there is much work yet to be done. Simply stating that concern directly and describing the grounds for it, however, would involve a performative contradiction. It would presume the challenge is an epistemic one that yields to better information and clearer representation. The challenge, however, lies within the limitations of representation itself and the way convention compels us to address our scholarship to a humanist spectator subject, as opposed to seeking to transform the subject of address. This essay, therefore, departs from standard prose conventions in an effort to both do and describe what needs to be done.

Deleuze's Infernal Book: Reflections on Difference and Repetition

Deleuze's Difference and Repetition is a notoriously difficult work of philosophy. Moreover, it is a work of philosophy that has led to quite divergent interpretations. How are we to account for this phenomenon of generating such distinct interpretations and appropriations? In this article, I apply Deleuze's theory of problems, questions and individuation to Deleuze's text as a way of understanding the stylistic strategy of his writing. Given Deleuze's critique of identity and representation, he would fall into a performative contradiction if his writing were designed to transmit an identical thought from sender to receiver such that the receiver then could be said to represent Deleuze's thought. Rather, I argue, Deleuze aims to write ‘machinic’ or ‘productive’ works that lead to the production of something new through the reader's encounter with the work. Not only does Difference and Repetition theorise the process of creative individuation in the production of beings, I contend, but it also forces the reader to undergo a process of creative individuation, through which they produce a non-identical double of the work in the process of their reading that then takes on a life of its own. It is this phenomenon of the book as a machine for producing difference, I contend, that helps to account for the tremendous creative fecundity it has generated in being appropriated by a wide variety of disciplines and practices.

Performance Philosophy: an introduction

This article introduces performance philosophy, despite the risk of performative contradiction such an act involves. First, it considers performance philosophy as a field that questions how performance thinks and thought is performed (including, specifically as philosophy). Drawing from Laruelle’s non-philosophy, it then addresses performance philosophy as method, framing it as an alternative, performative paradigm to the philosophy of the arts approach that has historically dominated approaches to aesthetics. It concludes by affirming the call to the field to address the ethico-political dimensions of knowledge-production in not only disciplinary, but also geopolitical terms.

Philosophy and Contemporary Reality Beyond the Event?

Etienne Balibar’s essay explores the category of the ‘event’ in contemporary philosophy as well as what he calls its ‘essential, strategic function.’ Balibar offers a critique of what he calls eventialism (an –ism in the sense of existentialism, structuralism, and so on), alongside a consideration of the relation between philosophy and contemporary reality (actualité). He identifies a turn in twentieth-century philosophy’s consideration of the event, which resulted in a ‘crucial equivalence between the problem of being and that of time.’ He traces these intertwined questions of ontology and historicity—and their paradoxes—through the legacies of Hegel and Heidegger. Then turning to Foucault and Althusser, Balibar highlights what Judith Butler calls the ‘performative contradiction’ in their writing to underscore the paradoxes that arise from the philosophers’ attempts to articulate their relation to contemporary reality.