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The mark of the mental is its intensionality (with an ‘s’); that’s to say that mental states have content; they are typically about things. And (with caveats presently to be considered) only what is mental has content. It’s thus unsurprising that considerations about content are most of what drives intuitions about what’s mental.

The mark of the mental is its intensionality (with an ‘s’); that’s to say that mental states have content; they are typically about things. And (with caveats presently to be considered) only what is mental has content. It’s thus unsurprising that considerations about content are most of what drives intuitions about what’s mental.

n line with Hegel's Christology, Žižek insists that Christianity ought to help bring about an end to the God of transcendence and "the beyond", thus enabling us, as a Lacanian would say, "to traverse the fantasy" of the Christian desire for the Divine (and the Judaic desire for God)

What in his view requires further thought is Christianity's reliance on "violent love", which nevertheless accords with the spirit of a radical event, namely the crucifixion. Žižek opposes this spirit to the poetics of harmony and compassion espoused by Eastern religions such as Taoism and Buddhism that have become fashionable in Western culture and function as a mere supplement of capitalism.

This was a time that was noteworthy for epoch-ending triumphalisms: arguably, starting with Daniel Bell’s “End of Ideology” thesis, reaching an (anti-)climax with Fukuyama’s “End of History”. Yet today, there are signs of a revival of interest in the areas of overlap between translation in philosophy and ideology in politics.

the first chapter of Raymond Geuss’s “The Idea of a Critical Theory” and apply it to key readings in the Frankfurt School. I will draw attention to the notion of ideology as it is used in critical theory, and describe the manner that Geuss believes the concept is most usefully deployed in relation to other conceptions of ideology.

3rd
10:36 am: The Utopian Mask of WIlliam O. Douglas: Law and Anticipatory Illumination
4th
06:19 pm: The Public Matter of Song v. The Republic of Hypocisy: The Basement Tapes & Greil Marcus #1
6th
07:28 pm: The Policy of Torture: What is New About the U.S. Policy of Torture?
7th
10:55 pm: The Policy of Torture II: Who is Torture For?
9th
06:52 pm: The Policy of Torture III: What are the Legal Ideologists of Torture Creating? The New Civil Death
15th
02:25 pm: Best Friends of Bush: The New Saddam Hussein

Ineffability and Philosophy is divided into four main parts, which are: Ineffability: The Very Idea; Mysticism, Epistemic Boundedness and Ineffability; Believing the Mystic; and Five Types of Ineffability. Kukla opens the first of these chapters by pointing out that, apart from religion, there has been a group of influential but heterodox mathematicians, including Cantor, Bolzano, Dedekind, A. W. Moore, and Rudy Rucker, who argue in favor of mathematical ineffability, and that such contemporary cognitive scientists as Fodor, Chomsky, and McGinn have held, in Fodor's term, that human minds are "epistemically bounded," meaning that there are some hypotheses that they are incapable of entertaining. In any case, "the idea that there is an ineffable being, or truth, or experience, and that this ineffability profoundly matters to our assessment of the human condition" is identified with mysticism and leads to the claim, in both mathematics and religion, that "the attempt to express the ineffable must systematically embroil us in contradictory assertions."

Kukla approaches the problem of ineffability from, as he says, the standpoint of Tarski, in the attempt to see if it is able to accommodate the idea of a state of affairs that cannot be expressed in any language that is humanly accessible. He works his way through one criticism after another of the Tarskian approach to language, finds that none of them is fatal, and reaches the conclusion that, if he will succeed in making the case for ineffability in the Tarskian context, he will have shown that "scientific discourse does not rule out the possibility of ineffable experience."

The final chapter of Ineffability and Philosophy again takes up the types of ineffability. The weak grade of ineffability is exemplified by the inadequacy of the language of a young child to express much of what adults say, or of the inadequacy of the language of the blind to represent colors. It is also exemplified by the claim of the anthro

The troubling aspect of the subject/object divide is the same problem as we run up against when using such terms as 'mind/body', 'nominal/real', 'mental/material', 'consciousness/physical'. Unlike most philosophers I don't think that the left-side of these inequalities are very problematic. We know what the 'mental' looks like and can define it; we know what 'mind' looks like and can define it. We may not know what 'consciousness' is, but we can easily point to what we call intentionality and reference, etc. In other words we recognize consciousness when we see it. But do we recognize everything that is physical when we see it? We are able to define the left-side of these inequalities because we live with those notions form within our own intimate selves. This is what I think is the real problem, it is a sort of human narcissism, which is hard to get beyond with our imagination. We somehow have the idea that our consciousness is 'special.' an exception within nature, without realizing that we run into all the same theoretical problems when studying insects as we do when we study those aspects of reality that we call our subjectivity. In fact we run into most of the same problems (minus notions of intentionality) when studying subatomic processes. This is because the real and intractable problem is how we define the right-side of these 'inequalities.' It is 'body', 'reality', the physical, and 'matter' that we are unable to define. Chomsky is correct, that this has been so ever since Newton's theory of gravity became well known and accepted. It is hard to understand why most philosopher's have not come to terms with the news but in fact everytime I read another article about 'consciousness and the physical' it is obvious that most philosophers just don't understand basic physics. They absurdly assume that they know what the physical is and then just as absurdly define the 'problem' as why consciousness, intention, qualia, cannot be reduced to the physical. I will lea