Evil Genius Research Articles

Buddhism and Techno-Physicalism: Is the Eightfold Path a Program?

Buddhism and Techno-Physicalism:Is the Eightfold Path a Program? Mark Siderits Indian Buddhism is decidedly anti-physicalist in outlook. While the Buddha himself seems to have left open the nature of the relation between the bodily and mental constituents of persons (the rūpa and nāma skandhas), the Abhidharma schools clearly espouse a dualism1 about the mental and the physical, and the idealist Yogācāra of course denies that there exists anything other than mental events. But recent developments in material culture seem to threaten the availability of any view about mentality other than the physicalist one that the mind is just a sophisticated program running on the wetware of the brain. These developments include advances in neuroscience and in the computer modeling of various cognitive activities. But perhaps more important than these is the proliferation throughout the culture of the metaphor of mind as computer. Several recent films, for instance, have featured the conceit that what we take for reality might in fact be virtual reality, with the role of deceiver played by some form of artificial intelligence.2 In the philosophy classroom we may be tempted to rely on these devices when we teach the arguments found in such texts as Descartes' Meditations or Vasubandhu's Vimśatikā. But while they do help students see that reality might be quite different from what we ordinarily take it to be, they cannot convey the anti-physicalist force of these arguments. For if the reality behind the appearance of ordinary waking experience is not dream images (as in Vasubandhu's version) or illusions created by an evil genius (as in Descartes' version), but is instead the computer stimulation of neurons, then our inability to rule this out would give us no reason to deny (with Vasubandhu) the existence of physical objects, or to affirm (with Descartes) the existence of the mental as something distinct from the physical. Spiritual traditions such as Buddhism have confronted the specter of physicalism in the past. Often the threat is seen as stemming from the development of new technologies that make physicalism seem more plausible. The premise of this essay, though, is that the current form of techno-physicalism may prove more difficult to resist than earlier episodes.3 Of course, it might be that when intricate clockwork mechanisms first became widely available in the seventeenth century, people found the metaphor of mind as clockwork equally persuasive. But suppose that this is not so, and that the computer metaphor is especially powerful, so that any other view about persons besides the one that we are just our bodies and brains comes to seem implausible to most people. Would this prove especially damaging to the Indian Buddhist tradition? In answering this question we should be careful to distinguish between physicalism and what is sometimes popularly called materialism. On the use of [End Page 307] "materialist" I have in mind, materialism is the view that the only worthwhile goal for persons is the attainment of material possessions and wealth. Physicalism makes no such claim, for it is not a theory about the good for humans. Physicalism is a strictly metaphysical view, namely that all that exists is physical in nature. Of course, it might be thought that if physicalism is true, then the only kinds of goods that there can be are material goods of the above-mentioned sort. And it is true that most spiritual traditions—Buddhism included—have stoutly opposed a "materialistic" ethic of this sort. But it does not at all follow from physicalism that these are the only sorts of goods on offer. There is nothing in physicalism per se to keep one from claiming, for instance, that helping those in need is of far greater value than acquiring wealth and material possessions. Of course, we shall want to know what evidence there is to support such a claim. But consistency requires that we ask this of the dualist as well. Why should it automatically be thought that a dualist view about our constitution is better positioned to defend a nonmaterialistic ethics than a physicalist view? There are spiritual traditions for which a sort of body/spirit dualism does...

The Origins of Progressive Education

By the dawn of the twentieth century, a new way of thinking about the nature of the child, classroom methods, and the purposes of the school increasingly dominated educational discourse. Something loosely called progressive education, especially its more child-centered aspects, became part of a larger revolt against the formalism of the schools and an assault on tradition. Our finest scholars, such as Lawrence A. Cremin, in his magisterial study of progressivism forty years ago, have tried to explain the origins and meaning of this movement. One should be humbled by their achievements and by the magnitude of the subject. Variously defined, progressivism continues to find its champions and critics, the latter occasionally blaming it for low economic productivity, immorality among the young, and the decline of academic standards. In the popular press, John Dewey's name is often invoked as the evil genius behind the movement, even though he criticized sugar-coated education and letting children do as they please. While scholars doubt whether any unified, coherent movement called progressivism ever existed, its offspring, progressive education, apparently did exist, wreaking havoc on the schools.

Preparing for the Next Attack

In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, America has been mourning its dead and tending to its wounded. But the country also has been building up an angry resolve to respond to this outrage against humanity, and a pragmatic resolve to reduce its vulnerability to future attacks. The world has seen just how terrible the consequences can be when terrorists have the hatred to murder innocent civilians, the resources to coordinate and conduct systematic operations, and the fanaticism to sacrifice their own lives. The evil genius who conceived of using a passenger airplane in kamikaze mode calculated that its 200,000 pounds of jet fuel would make it a weapon of mass destruction. And so it was, with more than 3,000 deaths resulting from each plane used against the World Trade Center, more than ten times the fatality rate caused by past attacks with truck bombs. The United States can take many actions to make this sort of attack more difficult to carry out, and it will do so, despite the inconvenience and expense. But as Washington moves to reduce the vulnerabilities exposed by the last strike, it should also try to anticipate the next one. As deadly as the World Trade Center disaster was, it could have produced a hundredfold more victims if the terrorists had possessed nuclear or biological weapons. And the future threat could come from hostile nations as well as terrorists.

Psychiatric aspects of violence: issues in prevention and treatment working with AIDS bereavement: A comprehensive approach for mental health providers

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewFull AccessMemorandaKenneth E. Fletcher, Ph.D.Kenneth E. FletcherSearch for more papers by this author, Ph.D.Published Online:1 Sep 2000https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.51.9.1193AboutSectionsView EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Set in the far distant future, after the destruction of any civilization that we might find recognizable, this fantasy novel attempts to take us inside the mind of a future evil genius—literally inside his mind. Memoranda is a sequel to an apparently well-received previous novel by Jeffrey Ford, The Physiognomy, which covered a period of time just before the setting of this book. I have not read the first book, so I cannot say how well it lives up to its promise. I must say, however, that I found the story in this second novel disappointing.It is not because I disdain the genre. Fantasy and science fiction are among my favorite kinds of fiction. I believe that some of the best modern writing and storytelling are done in these genres. In fact, this book is extremely well written. Its prose is lucid and paints a clear picture.It was the story that left me cold. The basic notion is that the protagonist must rummage around inside the mental world of an evil genius in order to find the remedy for a deadly virus the big meany has let loose on the remains of civilization and has himself fallen victim to. To accomplish his quest, the protagonist is magically inserted into the living inner world of the evil genius. That is, he feels as though he is physically transported into a world that represents the inner workings of this evil mind. There he finds three other characters who have previously been imported into this mind-world.In an afterword, the author acknowledges his debt to the scholarly works of Frances Yates, in particular The Art of Memory (1). Unfortunately, Ford's book is but a pale shadow of that work. Well written as Memoranda is, it is never involving. Indeed, it is frequently stagnant and insipid. I won't bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that once we've forced ourselves to work our way through the surprisingly tepid insides of the mind of the evil genius, we find that the solution is not really there after all.When the antidote to the virus is finally found, it is strangely unsatisfying to one and all—not only to the reader but also to the characters to whom it must be administered. I found the book as unsatisfying as the antidote.Dr. Fletcher is assistant professor of psychiatry and director of the behavioral sciences research core at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.by Jeffrey Ford; New York City, Avon Books, 1999, 230 pages, $12 softcover

The new jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the future of terrorism

On 26 February 1993 a massive bomb hit New York's World Trade Center, creating more hospital casualties than any event in American history since Civil War. Ramzi Yousef, young British-educated terrorist who masterminded attack, had been seeking to topple twin towers and cause tens of thousands of fatalities. An intensive FBI investigation into crime quickly developed into a man-hunt that took top FBI agents across globe. But even with FBI on his trail, Yousef continued with his campaign of terror. He bombed airplane and Iranian shrine. He tried to kill Benazir Bhutto, former Pakistani Prime Minister, and planned to assassinate Pope, President Clinton and simultaneously destroy 11 airliners over Pacific Ocean using tiny undetectable bombs. He also plotted attack on CIA headquarters with a plane loaded with chemical weapons. His pursuers dubbed Yousef an evil genius. During their investigation, FBI agents discovered that Yousef was funded and sent on some of his attacks by Osama bin Laden, a mysterious Saudi millionaire. By mid-1990s they realized bin Laden had become most influential sponsor of terrorism in world, and agents now conclude that since early 1990s a small group of terrorists supported by bin Laden have dominated international terrorism. These Afghan Arabs helped defeat Soviets in Afghanistan before killing thousands of people in campaigns against governments in West, Africa, Middle East and Asia. When bin Laden's followers attacked American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on 7 August 1998, killing 224 people, U.S. finally launched cruise missile strikes in attempt to destroy his secret organization. Drawing on unpublished reports, interrogation files, interviews with senior FBI agents who hunted Yousef, intelligence sources and government figures including Benazir Bhutto, Simon Reeve gives a harrowing account of Yousef's bombings, offers a revealing insight into his background, and details FBI's man-hunt to catch him. Reeve explains how Yousef was one of bin Laden's first operatives and documents bin Laden's life and emergence as leader of a potent terrorist organization, giving fascinating insights into man President Clinton has called the pre-eminent organizer and financier of international terrorism in world today. Highly detailed and yet immensely readable, The New Jackals sheds new light on two of world's most notorious terrorists. Reeve warns that Yousef and bin Laden are just first of a new breed of terrorist, men with no restrictions on mass killing. Reeve also offers evidence that bin Laden's organization may already have chemical and nuclear weapons and explains why world could soon face attacks by terrorists with weapons of mass destruction.

Censor with a flower

Mirjana Markovic is not only the influential wife of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, she is Serbia's supreme censor. Most Serbs also believe she is the ‘passionate ideologue’ ‐ or evil genius ‐ behind her husband's wars

Charlotte Brontë and the Realists

AbstractMr. Chesterton devoted his address to the relation of Charlotte Bronte to Realism, and at the outset referred to the letter written to her by George Henry Lewes, who, he considered, represented the evil genius of England in the middle of the nineteenth century. Lewes was, he said, a man of great intellect, but a man of a peculiar kind of stupidity or insensibility, and ranged perpetually with extraordinary energy and intelligence, doing nothing but harm.

Ethics and Optics

The world map traditionally represents the Northern hemisphere at the top and the Southern hemisphere at the bottom, but in that representation is something more than arbitrary: a geography of signification. In the area where the geo-signification is below, the intellectual work, specifically the work of knowledge, immediately faces the unfinished process of an historical heritage of painful human and ecological destitution. Here, think is enact the archeology of the verb to think: dress a wound, minister a patch.' The generous Heideggerian es gibt, the trusting ontology of Being's donation, contradicts itself in deficiencies and in the blurred sight of Being. At the same time this geo-signification of a below builds resistance within a fragmented identity the use of other sources, different recourses, even though this is a modest identity questioning traditions and cultures. This is the reason why Latin America is not just geography, but a disquieting puzzle that makes one think. Here in the last decades of this century, the Levinasian categories of totality, alterity, and subjectivity are functioning as signifiers those wishing think Latin America, its contradictions and its revelations. For me, the almost convulsive movement from a predominantly Heideggerian a Levinasian perspective opened the possibility of giving expression both a muted reality, and a human and spiritual experience heretofore hidden. It allowed me, as a Christian theologian, a surprising proximity the biblical text and a reinterpretation of systematic treatises. Although the acceptance and rigor of Levinasian categories of and alterity remain slow and controversial, we work today, in Southern Brazil, as a group of translators and commentators of Levinas determined think our economic, political, spiritual, and ecological context. Levinas' thought has allowed us discuss ecology in terms of alterities.2 Among these thinkers are Enrique Dussel, Marcelo Fabri, and Marcelo Pelizzoli, who have contributed significantly the appropriation of Levinas' thought in the Latin American context.3 Emmanuel Levinas is not a lonely genius in Western thought; like others, Levinas has precedents, such as Franz Rosenzweig, and a philosophical context: phenomenology and the experience with his teacher, Husserl.' But Levinas' thought has sparked much interest in both Europe and Latin America. He seemed have the vocation of the Evil Genius, the Cartesian malin genie: one who disturbed the discourse of Western-Greek tradition, corroded its most obvious certainties, tarnished and paralyzed thought. Levinas probed Western discourse with the resolution of a surgeon whose scalpel runs deeper and deeper into the depths of discourse and reality, Truth and subjectivity. What Levinas exhumed was the pain of loss, the seriousness of responsibility, and the ecstasy of freedom. What Levinas sought was a philosophy that would inaugurate a truer world, one that is better conceived, better cared for. In the contradictory crossroads of the West, and its often troubled condition in the twentieth century that is living out the celebration of totality at the time of globalization, (for its joy and pain the arch of totalization), the title evil genius would be more appropriately applied Nietzsche or even Kierkegaard than Levinas. But it is in this same twentieth century that the masters of suspicion multiply in the Western tradition, with their philosophical, scientific, religious and artistic discourses. The malaise of Western culture has a few precise landmarks. Levinas was dramatically involved in one of them, World War II (1939-1945). This poignant experience which was a central concern for Levinas as a Jew, is clearly expressed in the preface of one of his most remarkable works, Totality, and Infinit: Does not lucidity, the mind's openness upon the true, consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war? …

The Common Folk in the Revolution

Figes, Orlando, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution

Ronald Dworkin, Inside-Out

That is not a terribly precise vocabulary, but it seems to be capturing some of the anti-intellectual spirit in Sunstein's case against and no good interpreter should deny that Americans can be anti-intellectual. Political philosophy cannot coerce our consideredion, and no good interpreter should deny that Americans can be anti-intellectual. Political philosophy cannot coerce our considered convictions any more than the principles of logic can.... It is a mistake to think of abstract conceptions and general principles as always overriding our more particular judgments, Rawls writes. In other words, pre-reflective intuitions sometimes trump our reflective abstractions, and there is nothing necessarily wrong with this. But this is not a frontal assault on Dworkin. We ought not to damn him to neverions, and there is nothing necessarily wrong with this. But this is not a frontal assault on Dworkin. We ought not to damn him to never being believed, like some modem Cassandra, on account of his being too smart. It is, rather, a decision on the merits of a particular case, from within the method. Dworkin simply loses the round, perhaps because he is too clever by a half, at least for us mortals. He still ought to be invited to participate in the next round of discussions. None of this is an outside critique of Dworkin's method. We may subscribe to a perfectly sensible meta-principle of acting publicly and politically only on the basis of advice that we can understand, and then we would look for simpler arguments to follow. But these simpler arguments still must reasonably fit our past, and must be subject to the tests of whatever political theory we can understand. We might have to tell Dworkin that he will have to wait until we can catch up to him. But rather than, as Sunstein would have us, ascending to the lowest necessary level of abstraction, we are reaching to the highest level of abstraction that we can follow. We'll listen, that is, to anyone we can understand. Why wouldn't we? I do not, in fact, think that this reading of Dworkin as a real life Hercules is compelling. Dworkin is a very able legal philosopher to be sure, but he is also a clear and coherent one, and many of us at least think that we are able to follow him quite well. The charge also insults judges and other legal theorists. Many of Dworkin's arguments are based or build incrementally on the work of other lawyers. If, in the end, he is tricking us, he is doubly skilled, for he hides the deception so well. It would also be an extraordinarily odd claim to accuse Dworkin of malicious sophistry-as if an evil genius were out to deceive us, 98. Id. [Vol. 85:1043 1084

The Jewish and German Roots of Psychoanalysis and the Impact of the Holocaust

The Jewish and German Roots of Psychoanalysis and the Impact of the Holocaust Martin S. Bergmann Introductory Remarks The Holocaust is an event in world history, an important event in the twentieth century, a terrible century that is just coming to a close. But it is also an event in German history that has to be faced and an event in Jewish history that has to be mastered. I and a group of colleagues spent ten years studying the effect of the Holocaust on its victims and their children. One of the painful events we had to face was that the Holocaust is transmitted by the survivors to their children and even to the third generation. In that book we also included a chapter on the children of Nazis and we made the discovery that came as a surprise to all of us, that children of Nazis who knew about the participation of their parents in the Holocaust often identified themselves with the Jews and feared that they would be annihilated by their parents should they show signs of any weakness. Beyond the Jewish tragedy we all were forced to recognize that given certain social circumstances such as a national humiliation, unemployment, and loss of religious and humanistic scruples, a democratic society did the equivalent of suicide by allowing an evil genius embodying the frustrations of many socially powerless people to gain power. Once in absolute control, he and his associates plunged the world into a devastating war. Were it not for the grace of God and the fact that so many European atomic scientists found refuge on these shores, the atomic bomb could have been discovered in Germany with results none of us dare imagine. We psychoanalysts have learned to differentiate between at least three attitudes toward trauma: (1) The trauma has never been mastered, the Holocaust remains for its victim the only psychologically real event. One remains Hitler’s victim for [End Page 243] the rest of one’s life. For such people, the Holocaust is forever in danger of returning. They think of a refuge somewhere in middle America and keep flight tickets ready just in case. These are admittedly extreme examples, but we have encountered them. (2) Under ordinary circumstances, the Holocaust has been successfully relegated to the past, but the past has not been mastered. It threatens to return. An example would be as follows: A refugee woman driving beyond the speed limit is followed by an officer. Without awareness, the officer becomes a Nazi. She steps on the gas to escape for her life and thus transforms a simple punishment into a much more severe one. (3) The Holocaust is denied. It never happened. We hear continuously of books appearing and denying the unbearable historical events. Denial, however, as the psychoanalyst Robert Walder (1951) has found, is a weak defense and it has to be buttressed by a stable but dangerous paranoid defense. If the Holocaust cannot be denied it is because Jews and communists are perpetrating the lie that it did take place. By comparison with these major issues, our symposium and exhibit is only a small event, but it reminds us that the Holocaust is also a part of psychoanalytic history. And we psychoanalysts must make sure that we have recorded it correctly without distortions or false idealizations, for any distortion of the past is conducive to recreation of the myth and is dangerous to our reality testing. The Jewish Roots of Psychoanalysis It is an historical fact that the creator of psychoanalysis was an Austrian Jew and the first circle of Freud’s disciples were Jews. The first gentile “converts” to psychoanalysis were psychiatrists in Bergholzi, a mental hospital in Zurich under the leadership of Bleuler and Jung. Freud was elated about this conquest of psychoanalysis. In his correspondence with Karl Abraham in 1908 we read: Please be tolerant and do not forget that it is easier for you than it is for Jung to follow my ideas, for in the first [End Page 244] place you are completely independent, and then you are closer to my intellectual constitution because of racial kinship, while he, as a Christian and a pastor...

Skeptical Problems, Semantical Solutions

Skeptics have often challenged our standard beliefs about the world by constructing alternative descriptions of how the world might be. The alternative description the skeptic offers is intended to have two essential features. First, the kind of world that would fit the skeptic's description would be very different from the kind of world we believe ourselves to inhabit. Second, a world fitting the skeptic's description would appear to its inhabitants just as our world appears to us. The skeptic challenges us to give reasons for holding on to our standard beliefs rather than taking our world to be one that fits the alternative description. Many strategies have been employed in defense against this sort of skeptical attack. In this century, a number of philosophers have looked to linguistic considerations to defend our standard beliefs. This tradition includes verificationist attempts to show that the alternative description offered by the skeptic is not, after all, incompatible with our standard description, but actually equivalent to it. It also includes quite a different strand of semantical antiskepticism which encompasses paradigm case arguments as well as certain arguments put forward by contemporary philosophers such as Donald Davidson (1984), Paul Horwich (1982), and, perhaps most famously, Hilary Putnam (1981). This second type of argument seeks to use semantical considerations to show that the skeptic's alternative description of the world is not the true one. It is this latter anti-skeptical strategy that I would like to examine here. I will begin by discussing two sorts of objections, one more technical and the other more intuitive, that have been brought against the method of dismissing a skeptic's hypothesis about the (extralinguistic) world by linguistic means. This discussion will center on Putnam's semantical refutation of an updated brain-in-vat version of Descartes' evil genius hypothesis. Put-

The Claws of the Dragon: Kang Sheng—The Evil Genius behind Mao—and His Legacy of Terror in People's China

(1993). The Claws of the Dragon: Kang Sheng—The Evil Genius behind Mao—and His Legacy of Terror in People's China. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 137-137.

The Face of Janus: Debatable Issues in Mariken van Nieumeghen

On the threshold of the sixteenth century, old ideas were defended and new issues came to the fore in the jostling which took place in a period that we, for want of a better description, call the transition from late medieval to early Renaissance culture. The Dutch play Mariken van Nieumeghen is a product of this period since it is a defense of the old and at the same time shows an awareness of the new. This Janus-faced play is thus to be seen as a liminal drama that resourcefully defends orthodox ideas about salvation and about the means by which it may be achieved by an individual at the same time that it utilizes theatrically innovative means to achieve its purpose. It is my view that the author1 was very much attracted by some of the new issues which he felt himself compelled to oppose. The ideas involved seem even to have frightened him, and yet he could not set them aside. Hence the portrayal of salvation could not passively reflect the earlier orthodoxy, and herein lies an aspect of the play's originality. As previous criticism has observed, the cultural tension exists in the context of the early sixteenth-century conflict between a milieu dominated by (1) Dominican thinking and the traditional Rhetoricians' ideas about salvation and the importance of rhetoric and (2) humanist opinions about the function of art and learning.2 The play provides ample scope for interpreting the attitude of the author with regard to contemporary debates concerning the value of humanist learning, of art, and of a range of attendant ethical and moral issues. Furthermore, the author leaves no doubt where his political sympathies lie and has portrayed the evil genius of the play, Mariken's aunt, as backing the wrong political horse.3 But more importantly, we are challenged to interpret

Henry VIII and the English Nobility

`The picture which Miss Miller paints of Henry as a ruthless realist throughout his reign is more convincing than Pollard's image of a political innocent or the older Catholic historians' hypothesis of evil genius or the now discredited explanation of a degeneration brought about by lascivious living. In every sense he remains, as Churchill christened him, an enormous man and this scholarly study helps us to understand why.' G. R. Batho, University of Durham, for the Times Higher Education Supplement `This book is essential reading for specialists and will be a welcome addition to undergraduate reading lists.' Rosemary O'Day, British Book News `This book provides invaluable foundation for the further study of a major topic which is only beginning to emerge from several decades of scholarly neglect.' Times Literary Supplement What did the King expect from his nobility? How generously did he reward service to the crown? What, on the other hand, was the attitude of the peerage to the monarchy? How important for noblemen was attendance in war and in such key areas of political activity as the court, council and parliament? In addressing these and many other questions, this book provides a fresh and vivid account of this central aspect of Tudor government.

Choosing Conceptions of Realism: The Case of the Brains in a Vat

Choosing Conceptions of Realism: The Case of the Brains in a Vat Get access MASSIMO DELL'UTRI MASSIMO DELL'UTRI Università di Roma “La Sapiente”, Facoltà di Magistero, Istituto di Filosofia e Storia Della Filosofiavia Magenta 5, 00185 Roma, Italy Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Mind, Volume XCIX, Issue 393, January 1990, Pages 79–90, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/XCIX.393.79 Published: 01 January 1990

Back to Descartes? The Very Idea!

At the risk of damning with faint praise, let me say at the outset that Woolgar's latest book is the rhetorically most effective attempt yet at keeping alive the Big Questions of classical epistemology which is no mean feat given the scaled-down, 'naturalized' expectations for knowledge that have attended the Age of Science Studies. Philosophers could learn a lot from a man (Woolgar) who seems to have become an intimate of Descartes' Evil Genius. It has always been difficult to sell scepticism as the fundamental problem of knowledge, as long as philosophers have followed Descartes in confining their arguments to bizarre thought experiments in which you cannot tell whether you are in contact with reality or merely with some clever simulation. In contrast, Woolgar hits uncomfortably close to home in the way he promotes sceptical intuitions, namely, by focusing on how the nature of objective reality is parasitic on the technologies available for representing that reality where these 'technologies' are construed broadly to encompass all the material resources (from texts to laboratory equipment) that the knower has at her disposal for persuading others that she does indeed possess knowledge. The book does a particularly good job of detailing the Evil Genius's trade secrets to wit, the means by which scientists and other knowledgemongerers demarcate 'objects' from their 'representations', and persuade their audiences that the former have some sort of ontological priority over the latter. Woolgar's overall strategy is to instill doubts about the legitimacy of the representational practices of a successively wider range of science studies inquirers. In the beginning, an undifferentiated band

Transcendental Arguments I

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant attempts to formulate a distinctive refutation of an extreme Cartesian skepticism about knowledge of the existence of physical objects. According to this skeptical view, one cannot know whether there exist any physical objects, since one cannot rule out some possibilities which, if they obtained, would entail that there are no physical objects. Since one cannot know that a possibility such as that of a Cartesian evil genius does not obtain, one is not entitled to claim to know the truth of propositions about the existence of physical objects which would be false if the possibility did obtain. I Kant's general aim is to supply us with an internal refutation of such a view, i.e., one which would proceed from a premise which would itself form a part of the skeptic's position, or which he would accept. The crucial premise would be that one is the subject of self-conscious experience. An examination of the conditions for the possibility of self-conscious experience would yield the result that the existence of physical objects is such a condition. Therefore, the falsity of the skeptic's claim about lack of knowledge of the existence of physical objects would follow from his acknowledgement that he is a self-conscious experience. A weaker kind of skeptical position regarding knowledge of physical objects is suggested by Descartes' dream argument. On such a position, it would be conceded that one can know that there are physical objects, but it would be argued that one cannot know whether any of one's beliefs about the particular physical objects one seems to encounter are in fact true. This skeptical position could be supported in the following way. One cannot rule out the possibility that one's current experience is merely a dream experience. If one is dreaming, then one's current experience is not a waking experience. One cannot, then, claim to know that one is awake. From this it would appear to follow that one is not entitled to claim to know that one's current experience as of physical objects is veridical. It would appear to follow, in other

The Gallous Story and the Dirty Deed: The Two Playboys

The Playboy of the Western World is the most controversial play in Irish history. When The Playboy was first produced in January, 1907, it sparked a turbulent week of demonstrations and riots. Even such a devotee of the Dublin theater as Joseph Holloway labeled the play "Blackguardism!" and Synge "the evil genius of the Abbey." Yet Synge's "able lieutenant" and most incisive early commentator, W.B. Yeats, immediately responded to the "mischievous extravagance" and verbal brilliance of the play, and he considered the failure of the audience to understand it the one serious failure of the Irish dramatic movement. During the length of its first production the play spawned a diversity of opinions which in effect break down into two violently opposed camps, represented by Yeats on one side and the opening-night Abbey audience on the other. The Yeatsian, or modernist, reading of Synge emphasized how much of the mind of Ireland the play contained, while praising its imaginative extravagance and exuberance, its satiric force, and, perhaps most crucially, its rich linguistic plenitude. The initial audience, responding to what it understood as the representational mode of The Playboy, dismissed the portrayal of Irish life as false naturalism, and objected to the plot and the language of the play on social and political grounds. The audiences who rioted in New York and Philadelphia in 1911-1912 when the Irish actors took the play on tour were heirs to the representational "reading" of Synge.

Unger's Neo-classical Scepticism

Unger introduces his case for Ignorance with what he calls 'the classical argument for scepticism', which he claims is 'the same in form as the demon argument in Descartes's Meditations'. His version 'is but a more modern, scientific counter-part' to the Cartesian dilemma, in which the evil genius is incarnated as a neuroscientist who accomplishes his deceptions by means of implanted electrodes.' Unger's classical argument, however, is radically defective. Because of this, and because some have accepted Unger's claim to have updated Descartes,' it seems worthwhile to point out the differing roles of diabolical deception in Unger's argument and the original. Here is Unger's brief statement of the argument, before it is complicated to meet contingencies which do not concern us here: