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Moving Towards JMDA Volume 14
Get PDFI note at this get-go that I am writing to those who are participating in the scramble for new controls of meaning that is to be this volume. Perhaps it, and its pressures towards the effective engineering, will reach others. Indeed, slowly it, and its companion volumes, may seed the new culture of the positive Anthropocene age. But the modest aim here is to seed a shift of competence in this volume of the Duffy Exercise
Schelling and the Satanic: On Naturvernichtung
No full textIn her unsettling book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert quotes Joseph Mendelson, a herpetologist at Zoo Atlanta: “I sought a career in herpetology because I enjoy working with animals. I did not anticipate that it would come to resemble paleontology.” Kolbert elaborates on Mendelson’s despair: Today, amphibians enjoy the dubious distinction of being the world’s most endangered class of animals; it’s been calculated that the group’s extinction rate could be as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate. But extinction rates among many other groups are approaching amphibian levels. It is estimated that one third of all reef building corals, a third of all freshwater mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion. The losses are occurring all over: in the South Pacific and in the North Atlantic, in the Artic and the Sahel, in lakes and on islands, on mountaintops and in valleys. If you know how to look, you can probably find signs of the current extinction event in your own backyard."At the heart of this natural catastrophe is perhaps the earth’s most problematic creature: ourselves. Schelling prophetically grasped this pandemic outbreak amid the earth’s natural systems when he warned of “the true annihilation [Vernichtung] of nature” (SW V: 275) and when he characterized modernity as constituted by the absence of nature because “it lacks a living ground” (SW VII: 361)
Assembling the Meaning of Probability
Get PDFMy positioning focuses on the meaning of a single word, probability. As in the prior exercise,1 my tasks are to (i) make explicit, to talk about, that which I am capable of talking about; (ii) to identify that which I am not capable of talking about; and (iii) to describe the view that results from developing what I take to be positional and reversing what I take to be counter-positional
The Potential of Field Education as Transformative Learning
No full textSocial work field education has reached a crisis point due to the imposition of neoliberal logics in both university and practice settings. As a result, social work programs are faced with challenges such as practicum shortages, barriers to field instructor recruitment and retention, and increased workload for those involved in field education (Ayala et al., 2017; Barnoff et al., 2017). Concerned by this reality, a team of critically oriented pedagogues and students from four Canadian universities hosted a workshop in May 2017 in order to foster collective dialogue with a diverse group of stakeholders about the ways in which the encroachment of neoliberalism may be confronted. This article presents key reflections that surfaced during the workshop related to the themes, such as identifying disjunctures between what is taught versus what is experienced and how intersecting identities and marginalization shape the field education process. Drawing from two case studies that were also presented during the workshop, we suggest strategies for inciting politicized and emancipatory social work field education, notably through fostering ongoing critical reflexivity, developing models for mentorship, and mapping out how field education is socially organized from the standpoint of the oppressed and marginalized
Exploring Three Dialectical-Foundational Missing Links in Academia That Lonergan Retrieves
Get PDFIgor Stravinsky and Pablo Picasso—respectively pioneers of modern music and painting—were staunch friends. Stravinsky's “Rite of Spring” (1913) was intended to shock. Its “savage violence confronted head-on the aesthetics of impressionism—then at the apogee of Parisian musical fashion—just as the razor-sharp editing between phrases subverted the smooth, seamless flow of the Germanic symphonic tradition with pitiless efficacy. It has been said that the ‘Rite of Spring’ is ‘cubist music’—where musical materials slice into one another, interact and superimpose with the most brutal edges, thus challenging the musical approach and form that had dominated European ears for centuries.”In some ways, Lonergan’s lifework parallels Stravinsky and Picasso's achievements in their fields. As is the case with the two giants of modern music and art, Lonergan’s method incorporates previous achievements while opening vistas able to guide the future. His method is able to integrate revolutionary efforts within various traditions while opening up paths to interfaith, interdisciplinary perspectives. His work offers us several dialectical-foundational missing links2 that can help connect the intellectual and spiritual facets of our lives both personally and multicultural endeavors. But opposed to this optimistic prognosis for Lonergan’s method, the effectiveness of his achievement is undermined if not vitiated by what Phil McShane calls the “darkness” affecting humans—a darkness that has not spared the efforts of Lonergan students. “That darkness gives us the possibility, even some slim probabilities, of a fresh start on the stumbling meaning of Method in Theology from Section 5 of chapter ten to the end of the book. That stumbling meaning has to become a precise lean-forward meaning”3 hinted at in Method in Theology’s chapter on history
Dialectic Exercise on ‘the General Bias’
Get PDFThe assembled text is Insight, Chapter 7, section 8, on the “general bias” of common sense. First, I attempt to identify key counterpositions that previously guided my thinking about general bias. Second, I identify a position that can be developed. Third, I attempt to indicate the view that would result from reversing those counterpositions and promoting that position
The Method and Structure of Schelling’s Late Philosophy
No full textThe period of Schelling’s final mature philosophy started with his appointment to Berlin (1840), where he undertook a profound revision of his Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation (which he still considered to be purely “positive” during his time in Munich). The chief concern of the later Schelling is a philosophically legitimate knowledge, that is, a knowledge established under the conditions of the Kantian critique, of the actuality of a first principle of things, a principle the tradition referred to as “God” and recent philosophies up until that time as “the absolute.” Before Schelling’s latest period, philosophy—including Schelling’s own philosophy— proceeded in three paths towards one goal of metaphysical knowledge, none of which, however, fully overcame the Kantian critique or led to possible knowledge of the real:1. As a practical postulate of classic but now critically obsolete metaphysical certainties;2. As speculative ways for mobilizing internal structures of reason itself (e.g.,Schelling’s intellectual intuition of absolute identity or Hegel’s theory of the speculative proposition);3. As (pace Kant) a critically purified way to legitimately connect the upshot of the cosmological argument, i.e., the proof of an ens necessarium of a completely unknown kind, with the goal of the ontological argument, thatis, a rich concept of God (ens realissimum).Schelling’s new and different path can be described as a strategy of “divide et impera” of philosophical thinking itself. As long as philosophical thinking undertakes to bring the principle to knowledge as a factual actuality in one go, it must fail according to the standards of the critique. However, if philosophy splits itself in two consistently different movements of thought, which are not connected by inner coherency or logic, but only through the external circumstances of those who entertain these lines of thought, philosophy can win back a rational claim to knowledge regarding the factual actuality of the principle in question and can defend itself in every aspect against the Kantian critique. These essentially different movements of thought are Schelling’s “negative philosophy” on the one hand and his “positive philosophy” on the other
“The Unity that is Indivisibly Present in Each Thing”: Reason, Activity, and Construction in Schelling’s Identity Philosophy
No full textOn May 15th, 1801, Schelling sent Fichte a copy of his recently published Presentation of my System of Philosophy along with a letter. In the letter Schelling claims to “stand on a point whose discussion falls outside this circle on which, for this very reason, the whole meaning of your system depends.” He continues, “I indeed do not know whether the kind of enlargement I provide is of the same sort or is harmonious with that which you have intended for idealism.”2 The letters between the two men after the Presentation are marked by deep mutual misunderstanding and wounded pride, and it is clear that an important philosophical break between them is at stake in Schelling’s new work. Whereas in previous writings, Schelling was concerned with unifying the systems of idealism and nature philosophy, he now seeks a unity prior to the very distinction between them. Schelling names this unity “absolute reason,” and he further claims that “construction” is the method for doing philosophy from such a standpoint
To Break All Finite Spheres: Bliss, the Absolute I, and the End of the World in Schelling’s 1795 Metaphysics
No full text“The ultimate end goal of the finite I and the not-I, i.e., the end goal of the world,” writes Schelling in Of the I as Principle of Philosophy, “is its annihilation as a world, i.e., as the exemplification of finitude” (SW I: 200 1). In this paper, I will explicate this statement and its theoretical stakes in Schelling’s 1795 writings: Of the I and Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, written later in the same year. In these works, antagonism (Widerstreit), opposition (Gegensatz) and striving (Streben) are central characteristics of finitude. The finite world is here a world of negativity, alienation, separation. It is, as Schelling defines “the world” in the above quotation, a structure of subject opposed to object, “the finite I and the not-I” in their original division. Finding itself in the world, the I is faced with external reality as something other, yet to be known and appropriated something over and against which the I asserts itself. What the I finds in this external world of incessant change (Wandel) and transition, is an endless chain (Kette) of things and causes. Attempt as one may to find one way’s out by following this chain, one will never arrive at anything other than further things—always remaining within the sphere (Sphäre) of finite knowledge and existence (Daseyn)
Extended Book Review On Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise And Fall Of The Dollar And The Future Of The International Monetary System
Get PDFAs the world’s only international currency, the US dollar continues to solidify the United States’ position in world finance and trade despite no longer contributing to the majority of industrial production as it once did. This has been referred to as the United States’ exorbitant privilege and plays into US exceptionalism. Evaluating Barry Eichengreen’s: Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the future of the International Monetary System an argument is made for a future with multiple international currencies or at least regional currencies. Such currencies would be able to counter the supremacy of the US dollar in international trade and affairs, resulting in a safer international financial system less susceptible to external critical conjunctures, which could bring world markets into a tizzy. The prospects for the internationalization of the Euro and the Renminbi are explored in keeping with Eichengreen’s postulations.0 Link