Literature as Speculative Thought

This chapter spells out the conceptual stakes of the reformist literary mode by turning to British state theory’s ‘Hegelian moment’. Hegel’s state theory converges on an understanding of the state as an aspect of social life (Sittlichkeit), making it possible to think about the state’s institutional structures as a moment in the actualization of social life rather than as a Foucauldian assemblage of administrative means external to social life. Britain’s Hegelian moment makes visible a reformist idiom in which the state appears as an aspirational figure that makes it possible to imagine the transition from capitalist society (Hegel’s bürgerliche Gesellschaft) towards a more egalitarian socio-political order. This transformation is imagined through close engagement with existing social forms rather than through a complete revolutionary overhaul of existing social arrangements. The chapter ends by asking why Britain’s Hegelian moment ended around 1914 and what were its more immediate afterlives.

Toward a Continuous-Matter Philosophy

In this paper I make a case for a philosophy of continuous matter, in dialogue with object-oriented ontology. A continuous-matter philosophy is one that focuses not on the identity, properties, and relations of discrete, countable objects, but on the nature of extended substances, both in relation to human experience and in terms of their own “inner life.” I explore why and under what conditions humans might perceive the world as objects or as continuous substances, and the language that humans use for talking about both. I argue that approaching the world as continua requires the foregrounding of concepts that emphasize the immanent (internal to a region of space), the inclusive (with contrasting properties coexisting in the same substance), the gradual (manifesting differentially at different points), and the generative or virtual (involving the constant production of form and new gradients). I suggest that starting philosophy from continuous matter rather than objects also has wider implications for speculative thought

Contextual Information in Social How-To Questions That Initiate Documentation

This study introduces social question-and-answer (SQA) documentation to technical and professional communication scholarship. It conceptualizes SQA as interactive, user-generated documentation and describes contextual information types within social how-to questions that initiate documentation. It also explores whether contextual information associates with answers that complete the interactive documentation. Results reliably describe 15 information types based on content analysis of 3,529 contextual information types from 500 questions. Exploratory statistical analysis suggests that askers may increase answerability by including less speculative thought, more error messages, and less general situation information. To facilitate complete SQA documentation, the study calls for additional research into question content and answerability.

Anticipating Other Worlds, Animating Our Selves: An Invitation to Comparative Education

Purpose: This article aims to reimagine education—and our selves—within the context of multiple, more-than-human worlds where everything and everyone are interrelated. Design/Approach/Methods: The aim is achieved by pursuing two speculative thought experiments to connect and bring into conversation seemingly unrelated knowledge systems across space and time—European “paganism” and 13th-century Japanese Buddhism, as well as excerpts from indigenous, ecofeminist, and decolonial scholarship. These thought experiments are conducted through a series of “and if” questions around education and schooling. Findings: The article proposes to radically reimagine education in two ways. First, it invites readers to reconfigure education as a “connective tissue” between different worlds, bringing together rather than hierarchizing them. Second, it proposes to reframe education as an opportunity to learn how to anticipate and animate our ongoing entanglement with more-than-human worlds. Originality/Value: Using the concept of “metamorphosis” as an antidote to Western metaphysics, the article re-situates education within a wider set of possibilities in relation to the taken-for-granted ways of knowing and being, as well as the notions of space and time.

Ideal-real beauty in the theurgical creativity: Themes and concepts of visual art aesthetics of the silver age of Russian culture

The paper explores the Christian-intoned philosophical aesthetics of the figurative arts during the silver age of Russian culture. In this period, which covers the second half of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth century, Russia's speculative thought, based on the Orthodox patristic and philosophical idealism, promoted the original religious philosophy, which highly valorized the importance of comprehensive gnoseology and ontology of "total-unity", true knowledge sought only through the absolute - an ideal which in itself synthesizes a real beauty, truth and goodness. That is why the Christian fine arts and aesthetics of this period in Russia were built only as an organic segment of a holistically interpreted philosophy of life, recapitulated by its essential principle - Christ. In order to systematize various aspirations, ideas and concepts of this artistic aesthetics, the paper singles out and explains three major themes that are intertwined. These are: the beauty (integral with goodness and truth), Christlike according to Dostoevsky, ideal-real according to Soloviev; theurgical creation, viewed both as artistic (free and transformative) and as an ascetic likeness to God; and the icon, which - through a philosophical-theological interpretation of an apophatic-kataphatic antinomy, reverse perspective and symbolism - integrates the issue of beauty and creativity into a common discourse, entering the Orthodox apologetic front before western art and culture, from the renaissance to the modern digital age.

THE ROOTS OF HUMAN RIGHTS: THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL TURN PROVOKED BY FRANCISCO DE VITÓRIA

The late Spanish scholastic had proposed a great turn in knowledge. The head of this school, Francisco de Vitoria, broken the medieval speculative thought and replaced it. By the humanist lenses, a practical thought was developed for solving problems arising from the great navigations, namely, the rights of man in lower civilizations standards. In this panorama, Vitoria proposed the concept of potentiae rationales and many others, which had extraordinary importance to the subsequent German’s natural law school. Thus, Vitoria is in the roots of the concept of Human rights.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides a background of al-Andalus. Within the Islamic world, “al-Andalus” (Islamic Spain) constituted a distinct cultural unit with its own unique characteristics. The borders of this territory changed over time, following the advance of the Christian conquests. Toward the end of the second/eighth century, al-Andalus covered most of the peninsula (today's Spain as well as Portugal), while in the eighth/fifteenth century, the shrunken Emirate of Granada alone, at the southernmost tip of the peninsula, remained in Muslim hands. This book's period of interest extends mainly from the tenth to the sixth/twelfth century, when Jews living under Islam in the Iberian Peninsula played a significant cultural role, and when philosophy flourished in al-Andalus. The philosophy and theology that were produced in this cultural unit developed as a continuation of speculative thought in the Islamic East and remained in constant dialogue with it. Yet the philosophical and theological works of Andalusian authors are not servile replicas of Maghreban or Eastern sources. They have a distinctive character that, while showing their different sources, displays their originality and their Andalusian provenance.

Metaphorical Bridges

This study considers Paul Ricoeur’s theory of discourses within the context of a phenomenology of religion. I focus on the eighth study of La métaphore vive, wherein Ricoeur explores the possibility of interanimation between speculative and poetic discourses. While Ricoeur is willing to consider the interactions between religious and philosophical discourse in a number of essays, he does not develop the further possibility of the interanimation between religious and speculative thought. I take up this unexplored possibility by suggesting that metaphors are capable of slipping between discourses and animating speculative and religious discourses. Specifically, I use Jean-Louis Chrétien’s metaphor of “wounding” as a case study wherein the phenomenal form of paradox defines one meaning of wounding, while another meaning is connected to a poetic expression that refers to our belonging in the world. Together, the two meanings of the metaphor enliven Chrétien’s phenomenology of religion.

The Literary Artwork between Word and Concept

This chapter investigates another set of problems with which the uncoercive gaze must contend when it fastens upon a work: the relationship of speculative thought to the work of art and the ways in which the chasm between literal and figurative speech bears upon that relationship. One of the themes that a reading of Kafka’s The Trial should emphasize is the way in which a literary text both calls for philosophical interpretation and resists such interpretation at the same time. One problem that arises out of this constellation concerns the question of the relationship between the literal and the figurative nature of a text’s rhetorical operations. If Kafka’s novel, by causing the relation between the literal and the figural to enter a space of indeterminacy, enacts a situation in which, as Adorno characterizes it, “a sickness means everything [eine Krankheit alles Bedeuten],” no reading of Kafka—at least no reading informed by the sensibilities of the uncoercive gaze—can afford to ignore the precise conceptual terms of this sickness. Finally, to cast Adorno’s reflections on Kafka into sharper relief, the chapter also considers them in relation to Giorgio Agamben’s recent interpretation of The Trial as Kafka’s commentary on the imbrication of law and slander.

Two Hundred Years of Debate

The Greeks' evident fascination with the Indian “philosophers” they encountered reflects the fact that both peoples had a strong tradition of speculative thought. Though it takes the present discussion outside the chronological limits of the fourth to second centuries BCE, it is impossible to assess the interactions of Indian and Greek thinkers in the period without considering the possible antecedents from the sixth century BCE, and, to some extent, the later echoes of Indian ideas in Neo-Platonism. Accordingly, this chapter consists of a series of case studies, either of possible philosophical common ground, or of known personal interactions of Greeks with Indian thought. They are a heterogeneous group, but the cumulative effect will be a nuanced view of the Greek experience of Indian thought.