Dialectical Philosophy

This 2019 paper discusses the biography, main works, legacy, and selected arcs in the philosophy of Shaykh Aḥmad al-Aḥsāʾī:

1. Biography (life, character, and charisma)
2. Works (with emphasis on his *opera majora*)
3. Legacy (students, licensees, Shaykhism, and later trends)
4. Selected Arcs in the Philosophy of Shaykh Aḥmad (background, dialectics (with mention of Hegel), engagement with the followers of Mullā Ṣadrā, and the overall position of dialectical metaphysics within the project of Islamaic Illuminationism, with mention of Heraclitus).

This is the penultimate proof of Chapter Two, Shaykh Aḥmad al-Aḥsāʾī, in Philosophy in Qajar Iran, edited by Reza Pourjavady.

For accurate academic citation and quotation, kindly use the final, published version -- available from the author upon request.

Or you may order the published version here:

https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004387843/BP000010.xml

The attempt to establish a unified taxonomy for the field of Information Ethics is both unattainable and unwarranted. The categorization of Information Ethics as a defined discipline, an applicable practice, a philosophy and a worldview remains constantly in flux due to, what Luciano Floridi terms, ‘philosophical naturalism’. As such, a broadening understanding of the field will only serve to further collapse categorization. The following paper will outline, using a discourse analysis methodology, how the nature of the field of Information Ethics at a foundational level must necessarily defy classification. The assumptions behind the current classifications of the field will be questioned. Beginning with the history of the inception of the field through Librarianship and Cybernetics and questioning the yet unresolved ontological debates between information philosophers such as Rafael Capurro and Floridi, this paper will explicate how any such attempt to develop an agreed upon taxonomy will and should always remain incomplete.

The complete Lightning Storm Mind: Pre-Ancientist Meditations, extensively illustrated with images by Michel Varisco, is forthcoming from Autonomedia.  The few excerpts included here were published in Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination, Vol 6, No 1 & 2 (2016): 55-56 in an issue on "The Mediterranean Imaginary."

A critique of "The Politics of Cosmology," a thousand-page manuscript by social ecologist and political theorist Murray Bookchin, based on his study of the history of philosophy and his lectures on that topic. It appears on my PM Press blog and my "It Is What It Isn't" blog from Changing Suns Press.

This call is no longer current -- the volume in question should appear in the fall of 2021. But if you work in this area, I'd still be interested in hearing about your research. 

In recent years there has been an increasing level of interest in connections between phenomenology and political philosophy, including the very idea of 'the political' itself. In this context, a wide-ranging body of new work has appeared, much of it engaging productively with emerging tendencies in political theory. What is largely absent from these developments, however, is a serious encounter between phenomenology and Marxism as a philosophical tradition. This absence is all the more notable inasmuch as there is currently a general resurgence of interest in Marxist ideas as providing a framework for the critical analysis of the contemporary world. There is, to be sure, an older tradition of phenomenological Marxism that includes many important contributions. But much of that work is now rather dated in terms of the salient political issues, as well as with regard to current levels of scholarship within the phenomenological tradition. What motivated those contributions, however, remains as pertinent as ever, if not more so—to wit, the recognition of important methodological and philosophical complementarities between a phenomenological analysis of lived experience and a Marxist approach to understanding the historical dynamics of capitalist society.

This volume is intended to gather together new work aiming to revitalize the tradition of phenomenological Marxism (or Marxist phenomenology) by combining cutting-edge scholarship that is fresh and rigorous, with a lucid sensitivity for the practical no less than the theoretical complementarity of the respective traditions. The emphasis will be on philosophical issues as opposed to political-economy as such, but in ways that are not oblivious to the political-economic realities of our time. Although historically-oriented and figure-focused contributions are welcome, preference will be given to proposals having substantive consequences that advance important contemporary debates.

The following is a study of Jean-Paul Sartre’s ontology of conscious awareness. Ontology, for Sartre, consists in the delineation of the constituent elements, structures and dimensions of Being as well as the way in which such constituent features interact within the ekstatic dynamics of the lived experience of the being for whom such ontological features are capable of becoming phenomena of possible awareness. Sartre’s methodology, then, is manifold. The ontological project which Sartre undertakes to develop is at once transcendental, phenomenological and dialectical. It is transcendental inasmuch as it is a theory of the way in which phenomena become experientially possible for a being whose primary existential mode of conscious awareness is as an act of immanent self-relation, as pure auto-affection, and is capable of divesting itself of its modality of active self-affective immanence in constituting for itself a particular phenomenon transcendent to itself. This is to say that w...

The premise of this paper is that the goal of signifying Being central to ontological phenomenology has been tacitly subverted by the semiotic structure of conventional phenomenological writing. First it is demonstrated that the three components of the sign—sign-vehicle, object, and interpretant (C. S. Peirce)—bear an external relationship to each other when treated conventionally. This is linked to the abstractness of alphabetic language, which objectifies nature and splits subject and object. It is the subject-object divide that phenomenology must surmount if it is to signify Being. To this end, we go beyond alphabetic convention and explore the use of iconic signs. Following the lead of Merleau-Ponty, the iconic expression of Being is seen as entailing paradox, and we are directed to the fields of visual geometry and topology, where we work with three paradoxical figures: the Necker cube, Moebius strip, and Klein bottle. While the Necker cube and Moebius prove to have their limitations in fully signifying Being, the Klein bottle, possessing an added dimension (made palpable via a stereogram), can embody Being more intimately, provided that it is approached in a radically non-classical way. The essay closes with the realization that the most concrete signification of Being must be a self-signification. Here the author removes his cloak of anonymity and makes his presence tangibly felt in the text.