Modes Of Knowing Research Articles

Shapeshifting Subjects: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Naguala and Border Arte by Kelli D. Zaytoun

Reviewed by: Shapeshifting Subjects: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Naguala and Border Arte by Kelli D. Zaytoun Andrea Hernández Holm SHAPESHIFTING SUBJECTS: GLORIA ANZALDÚA’S NAGUALA AND BORDER ARTE, by Kelli D. Zaytoun. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022. 172 pp. $110 hardback; $25 paperback; $19.95 ebook. Kelli D. Zaytoun’s Shapeshifting Subjects: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Naguala and Border Arte offers an exploration of Chicana feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldúa’s theories surrounding subjectivity and the power of identity and identity-making. Zaytoun focuses on Anzaldúa’s concept of nagualismo—a state of being in which change is possible and constant. To name processes of identity-making and shifting that build resiliency, Anzaldúa draws upon ways of knowing from Nahua (Aztec) cultures. Zaytoun brings this concept of nagualismo into conversation with Arab American feminism to illustrate how it can be applied to the navigation of shared experiences and the work [End Page 170] toward solutions for marginalization. Zaytoun’s examination aligns with most existing thought on Anzaldúa’s work, effectively describing the elements of nagualismo and acknowledging common critiques. Nagualismo provides for the possibility of not only surviving but healing the legacies of exclusion and oppression. It derives from Nahua epistemologies and an Indigenous approach to self-realization, and Zaytoun argues that it presents a means of resistance to Western modes of knowing (p. 64). She acknowledges that the tenets of nagualismo cannot be generalized, as they are rooted in the Nahua experience, as interpreted and lived by Anzaldúa. The attention to the complex role of Indigenous philosophies is helpful in complicating the theory and exploring how it may be understood in Anzaldúa’s work, but Zaytoun’s examination of nagualismo would have been enhanced by a deeper discussion that unpacks Anzaldúa’s development of the concept and the problematics that other scholars have identified. Zaytoun does point to criticism of Anzaldúa’s approaches to Indigeneity, particularly Anzaldúa’s nod to Mexican scholar José Vasconcelos’s La Raza Cosmica (1925). Vasconcelos promoted the idea that from Mexican mestizaje (“mixing” of races) emerged the ideal individual, identifiable by the “best” qualities of contributing races (that is, European, Indigenous, and African). This theory has long been criticized as racist. Vasconcelos glossed over the violence from which mestizaje emerged, promoted erasure of cultural identity, and furthered the political agenda of the conservative Mexican government of the early twentieth century. Critics argue that in the development of her theories, Anzaldúa accepted Vasconcelos’s ideas. Other concerns about Anzaldúa’s approach include the exclusion of Afro-Mexican, Afro-Mestizo, and Indigenous experiences other than Nahua. There is also an absence of attention to Asian and Middle Eastern influences in the United States-Mexico borderlands, where Anzaldúa’s theories are rooted. Zaytoun suggests that an examination of nagualismo affords members of other cultural groups—in the case of her work Arab Americans—means to draw upon their own place-based knowledge as they work to resist and heal against colonial structures. In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Anzaldúa explains that her resiliency to violence includes the resources of “home,” which she carries with her wherever she goes.1 It is important to acknowledge the significance of place and place-based knowledge in resistance and survival among marginalized communities. Many have been displaced from their homelands due to a number of circumstances, including colonialism, war, and climate change, but cultural knowledge derived from the experience of place can be sustaining and support persistence, growth, and continuing movement forward. [End Page 171] In chapter three, “Connections with Arab American Feminism,” Zaytoun presents interesting considerations for aligning nagualismo with Arab American feminism. She gestures to self-actualization as an important commonality, pointing to aspects in reflective writings by Arab American feminists that are similar to nagualismo. For example, Zaytoun finds similarities among writings by Joanna Kadi, Therese Saliba, Diana Abu-Jaber, and Anzaldúa in the ways that the senses and the body are invoked in the processes of reflection and awareness. She goes on to suggest that, in the writing of Arab American feminists and among other women of color, self...

Poetic Language in Plato’s Cratylus

This paper addresses Socrates’ claim in the Cratylus that he and Hermogenes must learn of the correctness of names from “Homer and the other poets.” I argue that, in treating poetry as the starting point for investigating the relationship of language to reality, Plato reveals language to be a discursive articulation of non-discursive divine Being. Thus, while language cannot fully capture Being once and for all, it can function as a moving image of it by being kept in continual motion. Poetic language, as divinely inspired, sits at the threshold between language’s discursivity and the unified reality it strives to articulate, and can therefore reinvigorate philosophical contemplation by de-sedimenting concepts articulated in language that have become stagnant, re-opening them for examination in new, previously unarticulated, ways. This vision of philosophical contemplation through language is part of a greater theme of the tension between mortal and divine modes of knowing. Humans desire divine understanding but only approach it through the motion of contemplation. Plato’s treatment of Apollo at 404e–406a reveals the two-fold nature of philosophical contemplation as relying on a certain tension between the revelation of the inarticulable, unchanging divine Being and the attempt to employ reason to test and interpret such disclosures through the unfolding motion of dialectic.

The hammer and the nail: The triple lock of methods, realities and institutional contexts in Australian research on nightlife violence.

There is considerable public and policy debate in Australia about measures to reduce violence associated with alcohol and young people in the night-time economy. Though overrepresented in violence, the role of men and masculinities is rarely explicitly addressed in policy responses to such violence, which rest on a narrow range of mainly quantitative research and recommendations favouring blanket alcohol restrictions. Drawing on John Law and colleagues' account of the 'double social life of methods' (2011), we analyse interviews conducted with Australian quantitative researchers about the role of gender in such violence. According to Law etal., methods inhabit and reproduce particular ecologies and reflect the concerns of those who advocate them. From this 'triple lock' of methods, realities, and institutional advocacies and contexts emerges particular modes of knowing. Participants described a research ecology in which the authority of quantitative research methods emerged in relation to an imperative to respond in a 'timely' and 'pragmatic' fashion to public policy debates, and prevailing governmental and policy priorities and public framings of violence. Though participants frequently acknowledged the role of men in violence, these arrangements sustain taken-for-granted assumptions about the properties and effects of alcohol while displacing men and masculinities from policy attention. The political consequences of these arrangements demand the development of innovative policy responses and new modes of knowing that make visible the gendering of violence.

An Aesthetic Frame for Three Modes of Knowing.

This is the claim: Human knowledge expresses itself in three different modes: explicit, implicit, and sensory (e.g., visual) knowledge. The reference to knowledge as explicit knowledge only (as it is usually done) neglects the other modes of knowledge. Instead of using the noun "knowledge," it is suggested that we use "knowing" as a term to stress the active mode in cognition. The three modes of knowing are reflected in different mechanisms of cognitive and neural processing; these can already be observed in classical documents of humankind. This unity of the different modes of knowing can also be extracted from cultural artifacts such as poetry. Although possessing different characteristics, the three modes of knowing are related to each other in a complementary way, thus providing an integrative network for cognition. We suggest that a unifying frame of the modes of knowing lies in aesthetic principles. These different modes of knowing with their unifying frame reflect some general features of cognition. We stress that basic concepts in "artificial or machine intelligence" do not match at all human modes of knowing.

Toward a (“Dissolved”) Psychology of Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Relations: A Complexity-Informed Proposal

Our world is in a state of critical transition demanding new, creative, ecosystemically fit and sustainable responses to complex challenges. We need both new types of knowledge and new modes of knowledge production. Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity have the potential to support more congruently complex forms of knowledge (differentiated, integrated, recursive, emergent, ecosystemically fit). Their success is dependent on a deeper understanding of their own organizational complexity. In this paper, I highlight key knowledge gaps and research questions for the development of a richer knowledge base to guide the intentional management and facilitation of Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinary Relations toward creative and abductive outcomes. I defend the investigation of creativity and abduction, as hallmarks of the complexity of Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity, from a process, relational and complexity-informed perspective, mobilizing contributions from Psychology. I discuss Psychology’s modes of engagement with Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity in addressing complex challenges. In this context, I introduce the notion of “dissolution” as an Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary relational process supporting the theoretical, methodological and pragmatic enrichment or transformation and increased complexity of different disciplines, bodies of knowledge or modes of knowing. Finally, I propose a new domain for research and practice: a (“Dissolved”) Psychology of Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Relations.

Tread lightly: Liminality and Covid‐19 reflections

AbstractThe COVID‐19 pandemic has reshaped people's lives in a multitude of different ways, and women especially have found themselves managing in‐between identities, spaces, and realities due to increased domestic, homeschooling, and work demands. In this paper, I share fragmented observations on COVID‐19 inequalities on a societal level, but I anchor those observations with my personal reflections. I use liminality as a theoretical anchor and an artistic methodological tool to explore being in‐between experiences, thoughts, and modes of writing. I stage my reflections as a 10 KM run, with points of discussion set at each kilometer. The run is symbolic of the liminal space the pandemic represents, where bodies and minds, whether knowingly or unknowingly, are in an in‐between journey – from places of origin to unfamiliar destinations. This paper adds to feminist efforts of writing differently which shows that knowledge can be produced and conveyed beyond the rigid script of academic convention. It also expands the use of liminality beyond a theoretical lens and into a methodological approach that considers writing as a melding between different genres, states, and modes of knowing.

Between Mysticism and Philosophical Rationality: Al-Ghazālī on the Reasons of the Heart

In his seminal Orientalism and Religion (1999), Richard King argues that Western scholars of religion have constructed a conceptual dichotomy between “mysticism” and “rationality” that has caused them to systematically distort the claims and arguments of Eastern thinkers. While King focuses primarily on Western scholarship on the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, this essay shows that his argument can also be extended to apply to Western scholarship on al-Ghazālī, whose sympathy for Sufism and apparent rejection of Greek philosophy has often earned him the reputation of being a champion of Islamic mysticism. I argue that al-Ghazālī transcends the dueling categories of ‘rationality’ and ‘mysticism’ that have been imposed on him by offering a conception of experiential knowledge that retains its roots in the ‘mystical’ Sufi tradition, even while also highlighting the rational merits of experientially-grounded modes of knowing. In particular, I argue that al-Ghazālī shows us how experiential knowledge is both important to providing motivation for rational action and also critical to underwriting persons’ genuine understanding of the evaluative properties of that which is known.

Is the Eighteenth Century a Colonizing Temporality?

This essay queries how the temporal foundation of “eighteenth-century studies” is an obstacle to the goal of “indigenizing” knowledge. It argues that the most basic organizing principle of the field—periodization—is anathema to Indigenous modes of knowing. In order to indigenize we would need to abandon chronology and begin from the perspective of land and space. What might such an approach look like? The essay includes first-person descriptions of experiences from the land in which the author lives, Treaty 6 territory in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Interspecies Bodies and Watery Sonospheres: Listening in the Lab, the Archives and the Field

In this text, the author brings together scientific interspecies communication experiments, artistic practice and feminist posthumanities to inquire into the transformative role of sound and listening. Departing from an archive with recordings of human-dolphin language experiments, this research attends to sound as evidence and listening as a situated knowledge practice, with ethico-political implications that trouble Western, visually oriented knowledge systems. By imploding interfaces into situations of shared surfaces, the author directs attention to the logics of the skin to bring forth matters of care and suggest how listening might contribute to more careful and attentive modes of knowing.

Learning to Dwell with Micro-Organisms

In this article, I enquire in which ways the corona-induced lockdown in Austria has reshaped intimacy in our household by scrutinising my husband’s sourdough bread-making journey. As physical distancing has thrown us back onto ourselves, my field of research is equivalent to that which is immediately available – our everyday life within the confines of domestic space, at times expanded via digital technologies. My elaborations are based on my (research) diary in which I usually conflate personal and research-related aspects of my everyday life. As, during lockdown, (entries on) bread-making and caring for sourdoughs came to play an important role, I became inspired to unfold issues of corporeality, relationality and temporality with regard to newly developing intimacies, interdependencies and modes of knowing.

Queering the Waters: The Subversive Potential in E. Pauline Johnson's Canoe

Queering the WatersThe Subversive Potential in E. Pauline Johnson's Canoe Kristen Brown (bio) O, sweetest of all music, the far-off laughter of a rapid, rollicking and scampering among its stones. Nearer, nearer it came; the ripple grew into a roar, the sweet, wild laughter arose into boisterous, tempestuous merriment, and in another moment we swirled round a bend, dashing headlong into a tossing, twirling mass of waters that fretted and fumed themselves into eddies and whirlpools and showers of pearly spray, with a petulance that defied restraint. —E. Pauline Johnson, "Forty-Five Miles on the Grand" (1892) Thinking about queerness through gesture animates how bodies move in the world, and how we assign meaning in ways that are always already infused with cultural modes of knowing. —Juana María Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings Emily Pauline Johnson was a master of gestures, both literal and figurative. Whether steering her canoe through the rapids of the Grand River or taking her recital tour to the elite of London, her hyperconscious self-fashioning of her public persona emphasized her doubleness as Mohawk princess and Victorian New Woman. The quote above, taken from an article in Ontario's Brantford Expositor, appeared during the emergence of Canada's recreational canoe craze in the late-Victorian era. The newspaper situates Johnson's essay after a leading, multipage article proudly touts Brantford's "early settlement" a century earlier, when the "sturdy and true pioneers of the province appeared upon the scene" (1). What follows are two pages replete with dozens of photographs of "The Representative Men of Brantford County," a visual reminder of the hierarchy and ambition in the growing town. Juxtaposing this account of settler [End Page 137] colonialism with Johnson's relatively lighthearted narrative of paddling forty-five miles on the Grand River renders both texts testaments to British North America's successful navigation of settler-Indigenous relations and concomitant establishment of patriarchal power structures. Interspersing her story with photographs of the Brantford Canoe Club and other athletic organizations, the emerging newspaper culture simultaneously posits the newly named province of Ontario's—and, by extension, Canada's—dedication to physical vitality and modern leisure. Like the calculating editorial staff at the Expositor, Johnson, too, had a knack for shrewd moves and nuanced navigation. A close look at her article reveals the often overlapping and seemingly contradictory characteristics that affected a great deal of her writing and performance. First she fashions herself as a modern Mohawk who is loyal to the British Crown, taking care along her narrated canoe run to identify sites like the home of Alexander Graham Bell (who was a friend of her father's and named an honorary chief of the Mohawks) and "the oldest chapel in Upper Canada … built especially for the Mohawks" (20). While Johnson's amicable references to these constructed sites suggest a cultural hybridity, her narration is also prone to place-based musings of an ecologically dynamic, pre-settler space.1 Though she opens the article with the declaration that "Ontario boasts many a beautiful inland river" and reminds readers that "a lovelier run cannot be found in the province," she still laments the loss of the "erstwhile rapids" whose remaining ripples and rills are but "souvenirs of the long ago" and recalls "the olden days" before the Grand became "a broad, semi-sluggish stretch of water, owing to many mills and their requisite dams" (17). The photograph accompanying Johnson's narrative depicts her attired in the materials of modern leisure expected of proper female canoeists, yet she sits alone in the stern, poised and in possession of the sole means with which to navigate the fragile vessel through the rapids that remain—the paddle (fig. 1). While her rhetoric and appearance express congenial acceptance of late-Victorian era behavior and the British empire's land claims with their requisite names and borders, she simultaneously embodies the memory and unchecked energy of precolonial, prepatriarchal, [End Page 138] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. E. Pauline Johnson in canoe. Photo courtesy of the Brant Historical Society. unbordered ecology, proudly aligning herself with what once was "the most...

Taboos and Ideological Values of Ndebele Society

This article critically examines taboos and the role they play in Ndebele society. Taboos represent that which is prohibited by a particular society. A taboo is a social sanction that inhibits society from adopting certain behavioural traits. Taboos come as a stern warning against unwanted behaviour and are an important part of any social identity. Adopting an identity implies accepting the taboos and the social norms associated with that identity. This article argues that taboos are legitimate sources of information and knowledge against the background of negative ideologies that have devalued African modes of knowing. Information for this article was gathered through interviews conducted with Ndebele speakers and through intuition, since the researcher is a native speaker of Ndebele. Several taboos will be discussed that pertain to environmental knowledge, general scientific education, environmental health, preservation and conservation and social behavioural patterns. The article upholds the need to put taboos at the centre of discourse on the ideological values of a particular society, as they create and validate the worldview of a particular society.

Mind As Knower of Forms, And Awareness as The Knower of Being: A Phenomenological View

Este artículo describe fenomenológicamente nuestra situación ontológica y nuestros dos modos de conocimiento. Existe el conocimiento de la mente como el conocedor de las formas y el conocedor de la conciencia como el conocedor del Ser. Este documento vincula e integra la visión tántrica Dzogchen de la distinción mente-conciencia con la visión fenomenológica europea de los siglos XIX y XX de la distinción mente-conciencia expresada en el trabajo de Heidegger y Merleau Ponty. Esta distinción de mente y conciencia nos permite aclarar la confusión sobre nuestro conocimiento de las formas y nuestro conocimiento del Ser. El artículo enfatiza el entrelazamiento de la conciencia y la mente. Cuando la mente y la conciencia están en unidad, el conocedor puede conocer el Ser del ser a través de un ser. La persona puede conocer la dualidad de los seres dentro de la no dualidad del Ser. Y la persona puede conocer la no dualidad del Ser dentro de la dualidad de los seres.

Šabac

Drawn from a longstanding collaboration between the authors, this contribution explores the common ground between filmmaking and archaeological investigation and in particular a shared interest in haptic experiences and the material properties of the world. This leads us to propose the use of the camera and the moving image it produces as valuable archaeological research tools. To illustrate this we present both a short film and brief discussion paper focusing on the Serbian town of Šabac as a Holocaust landscape and its link with a group of Jewish refugees known as the “Kladovo transport”. Based on this case study we aim to highlight the transformative potential of artistic interventions in archaeological questions, and indeed vice versa, to construct new modes of knowing.

Are The Canterbury Tales a Book?

This article offers a new interpretation of the pilgrimage framework for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I argue that the Tales have an ironic relationship to books that bear them, one that confronts readers with the difference between their own experience and the author’s fictions. My case is empirical as well as literary: it relies on transnational taxonomies of multi-text codices, and overlooked physical evidence of fifteenth-century bookbinding techniques. I suggest that in their ordering of Chaucer’s text and in their various and dynamic forms, manuscripts of the Tales successfully instantiate Chaucer’s dynamic idea of his text, the complex conditions for pre-print book production, and the disaggregated forms of the medieval codex. The Tales are thus shaped as an answer to the question posted by my title—are The Canterbury Tales a book?—and to some of Chaucer’s broader questions, about experience, authority, and the limits to human modes of knowing.

Environment and society in the ancient world: New perspectives

Recent scholarly interest in the environment would not have surprised Pliny the Elder, the great Roman polymath and naturalist. From his perspective, the world of history and human events was tightly linked to inquiry into the natural world. The environment was responsible first and foremost for the material conditions of human societies, but its importance transcended being a package of resources. Landscapes produced thinking about difficult questions of culture and difference, and generated metaphors, cosmologies, and maps of a social world. Natural phenomena were similarly of historical interest. For contemporary historians and archaeologists, the environment is no less seductive: like a palimpsest, environments encode histories. New scientific techniques have radically shifted our evidentiary record, and offered scholars ways of addressing previously unanswerable questions. (Pliny, who met his end studying the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, would likely be pleased that we now have robust tools for understanding the environmental impact of volcanoes.) The best histories to have emerged from this new emphasis on the ancient environment have nonetheless combined these new perspectives with the traditional toolbox of the ancient historian—in particular, close attention to written and material evidence. The emerging dialectic, then, between new questions and traditional techniques, has offered an opportunity. The papers included in this symposium provide only a snapshot of some of the best aspects of this new and exciting moment: written by scholars working across multiple disciplines, across geographic regions, and over diverse chronological periods, they ask us to consider the historiographical consequences of thinking about relationships between the human and the natural—if indeed this is a relationship to be interrogated, rather than an analytical construct which obscures other modes of knowing. Pliny would have approved.

Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus and the Petrarchan Tradition

Abstract Venus reconfigures the Western view of love pioneered by Ovid, adapted by Petrarch, and perpetuated by Shakespeare and others. Parks appropriates this tradition to dismantle its gendered models of agency, which she shows influenced modern scientific thinking. If Venus is about a black woman whose venerean corpse is dissected by the white men who love her, it is also by a black woman who resurrects the venerable corpus of the dead white men she loves. Ultimately, Parks returns to premodern poetry because it allows for creative interventions precluded by modern modes of knowing.

Parody after identity: Digital music and the politics of uncertainty in West Africa

The FOKN Bois are an irreverent, cosmopolitan hip-hop duo from Ghana. They came to fame as part of the digital-music boom centered in Nigeria that has dominated African popular culture since the mid-2000s. Their most popular track, “Thank God We're Not a Nigerians,” mocks the national rivalry between Ghana and Nigeria and the idea of national allegiance itself. The song's production and circulation reveal that digital parody is increasingly central to how a rising generation of urban Africans live. Through sounds and images circulating on social media, young cosmopolitan Africans rely on a smartphone-driven social media–scape to reimagine national territorial identity in virtual terms. The FOKN Bois’ work shows that uncertainty and contradiction can be modes of knowing.

John Law & Evelyn Ruppert (eds) (forthcoming, 2016) Modes of Knowing: Resources from the Baroque. Manchester: Mattering Press

John Law & Evelyn Ruppert (eds) (forthcoming, 2016) Modes of Knowing: Resources from the Baroque. Manchester: Mattering Press

Response to Linda Zagzebski’s “Omnisubjectivity: Why It Is a Divine Attribute”

Response to Linda Zagzebski’s “Omnisubjectivity: Why It Is a Divine Attribute” Bernhard Blankenhorn, O.P. Linda Zagzebski has made a strong case for the need to expand the list of divine attributes. In my view, she has successfully taken the philosophy of divine knowledge one step further. I agree with her main thesis: I think that omnisubjectivity follows directly from a classical Christian notion of God’s perfect knowledge coupled with a modern notion of human subjectivity. My comments will therefore focus on ways in which Zagzebski’s proposal might be nuanced or developed. Her stimulating insights deserve our closest attention. Zagzebski nicely distinguishes between human and divine empathy. In a human relationship, we try to represent for ourselves what another person experiences. But divine knowledge is direct, as Zagzebski affirms. God does not try to copy our consciousness within himself. That is, Zagzebski rightly warns us to recognize the immense difference between human and divine modes of knowing. I would like to take this approach a bit further by integrating the scholastic notion that God is present in all things as their cause. God’s knowledge of our conscious states and our first-person perspective is somewhat like a kind of direct window into the depth of the human self, yet it is also much more. For, God’s way of knowing individual creatures follows directly from his relationship to them as their Creator. Thus, God’s cognition occurs by his being the first cause of our conscious states, first-person perspectives, and acts of knowing, yet without violating [End Page 451] human freedom.1 Any actuality and goodness that can be found in our mental acts utterly depend on the constant operation of the Creator God within us. According to Thomas Aquinas, God is the first cause of every human act (except for the evil element in human acts, though evil can never deprive an act of all metaphysical goodness). Consequently, God is also the first cause of our mode of knowing and of my way of perceiving my surroundings right now. If we do not give some account of divine knowledge as essentially causal (Thomistic or otherwise), then we end up making God’s knowledge reactive to our activity. This approach leads to endless metaphysical and theological problems and ultimately renders a Christian account of the divine life incoherent.2 Now, if we propose that God possesses omnisubjectivity as the first cause of all human subjectivity, then we move even further away from the notion that God’s knowledge involves an external perspective whereby he tries to climb into our heads and our emotions. In this way, God can precisely be aware of how Mary is aware of being Mary. Yet, because he is aware of Mary’s self-awareness as her Creator, God’s so-called conscious awareness remains distinct from hers. That is to say, God can have each of Mary’s thoughts and know them from her perspective, but because he always knows them as her primary cause, those thoughts remain distinctly hers. God’s knowledge as cause goes hand-in-hand with divine simplicity. The latter notion also helps us to grasp omnisubjectivity in a more coherent way. In himself, God does not have multiple thoughts, but only a single infinite thought whereby he knows all things, events, persons, and the whole of our lives. This single divine thought is identical with the divine essence. Now, when we posit God knowing things as cause and in an utterly simple way, we further transcend the problematic notion that divine cognition remains limited to the objects [End Page 452] of propositional or factual knowledge, an idea that Zagzebski rightly rejects. Indeed, the latter model would seem to reduce the divine mind to some type of supercomputer. Now, the cosmos is filled with fascinating elements that can ground divine naming, such as love, beauty, and power, but computers make for very bad analogies when it comes to our way of conceiving and speaking about God, just as computers make for terribly misleading analogies for our way of conceiving the human mind. Thus, overall, omnisubjectivity deserves to be integrated more fully with a notion...