Abstract: The scientific and philosophical approach to pain must be supplemented by a hermeneutics studying how racism has complicated the communication of pain. Such an investigation reveals that not only are non-white people seen as credibly speaking their pain, but also pain “science” is one of the ways races have historically been constructed. I illustrate this…
Abstract: Concerning artistic research, the state of affairs is still one of delusions and confusions. The reason for this is the pluralization and dedifferentiation of rationality pushed forward by the postmodern period. The way out of it is the way of differentiations. Thus, it seems helpful, first, to remember what we already have…
Abstract: “Human beings have two fundamentally different ways of thinking about and engaging with the world.” Some variant of this proposition is shared by many thinkers across time. This paper focuses on the core similarities and the subtle (but significant) differences between Freud’s theory of primary and secondary processes, Karl Stern’s theory…
Abstract: In the following paper, both Max Scheler and Edgar Sheffield Brightman’s rankings of value are compared. In so doing, Brightman’s table of values is found wanting along the lines of Scheler’s value rankings. The reason is, in part, that Scheler’s ordering of preference and hierarchy of feelings more readily explain what Brightman’s account…
Abstract: This essay aims to analyze the conception of a work of art in the thought of Susanne K. Langer. The author offers us a definition of art, grounded on the idea that art is the “creation of symbolic forms of human feeling”. This thesis is, in turn, constructed from a robust theory of the symbolic function…
Abstract: This essay notes the relationship between meaning and the felt passage of time. The concrete experience of fluctuations in the rapidity of passage seems to be universal to the human condition. We often associate the rapid passage of time with pleasure. This article shows that this commonly held view of passage is mistaken and…
Abstract: In the first part of the paper the author focuses on the way the great historian and thinker Gershom Scholem understood the Lurianic idea of tsimtsum (i.e. divine contraction as the first act of creation) as the key category of Jewish theology. Next, he combines the conceptual structure emerging from the Scholemian understanding of…
Abstract: Are emotions internal episodes – psychical or neurological – as is often claimed? Some certainly are; but I maintain that an important class of emotions are “peripheral”; by this I mean that they consist in what we pick up from others’ expressions of their emotions in words, gestures, or actions – or from surrounding circumstances of various sorts. These…
Abstract: Here is a philosophical examination of some themes presented by Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel, as well as in his novels Immortality and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The discussions of the first-personal perspectives of the novel’s author, both as appearing in and as contrasted with that of a character in the novel, as these unfold in implicit subtle…
Abstract: God’s name “Elohim,” common in the Hebrew Bible and Jewish tradition, is always used with verbs in the singular even though it is in the plural form. It is shown here that the ungrammatical usage can be seen as the best solution to a natural problem. Namely, tradition assumes that it should be impossible to talk about a general…