There are those, even our enemies, we want to live; there are those, even our friends, we want to die. We imagine death may be the end of pain, but we may well will our pain. We honor those who die with dignity, but dignity is not something we ascribe to ourselves or can be our objective.

Following allusions that Melville scatters throughout "Bartleby the Scrivener," the article develops the writer's subtle criticism of Jonathan Edwards. The attorney's way of thinking is taken as an example of reasoning on the basis of "necessary" assumptions, which Melville finds in Edwards' "The Freedom of the Will." From the perspective of that philosophy, Barleby's existence appears inexplicable, or understandable only as a "loose existence," which, according to Edwards, would have to represent an error in the universe. By anayzing Edwards' (the attorney's) way of thinking, the author advances arguments concerning the identity of persons as well as the complex relationship the story constructs between certain types of activity and passivity.

Douglas Hoffstadter shows in his hybrid of fiction and mathematical introduction Godel, Escher, Bach—An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), how the paradoxes inherent in Godel's theorem (that "no fixed system, no matter how complicated, could represent the complexity of the whole numbers" (p. 19).), Escher's complex drawings and Bach's compositional techniques are isomorphic across disciplines. From Latin in venire, to come upon something, the word invention already suggests an element of accident: finding something that is already there. This paper shows how Hoffstadter's discussions and fictionalisations (via Lewis Carroll) of Bach's two-part and three-part inventions, illuminate complex yet simple processes in aesthetic work: coming upon, stumbling over, and ultimately writing stories out of ones ideas and imagination. Looking at the books fragmented patterns via Derrida's inventions of the 'other' (such as in his discussion of Leibniz and de Man) the paper argues that the relation between imagination and inventiveness in Hoffstadter is mediated by propositions on incompleteness and their paradoxical relation to 'whole' fragments.

Auster contributed an extract from Moon Palace to the collection "Edward Hopper and the American Imagination," and it is clear that Hopper's images of alienated individuals have had a profound resonance for him. This paper employs two main ideas to compare them. First, a pivotal moment in American literature: the hotel room drama watched by Coverdale in Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance. Secondly, Aby Warburg's concept of the "pathos formula" in art, which bypasses the problematic issue of influence, choosing instead to posit sets of inherited cultural memories. It therefore allows discussion of the re-emergence of Hawthorne's puritan tropes of paranoid specularity and transcendence in the work of Hopper and Auster.

This paper challenges the accepted interpretation of Oedipus Rex, which takes Oedipus' ignorance of the relevant facts to be an established matter. I argue that Oedipus epistemic state is ambiguous, and that this in turn generates a moral ambiguity with respect to his actions. Because ignorance serves as a moral excuse, my demonstration that Oedipus was not ignorant bears significantly on the moral meaning of the play. I next propose to anchor this ambiguity in the Freudian notion of the unconscious, by presenting an interpretation that treats Oedipus knowledge as unconscious. I discuss the moral status of an agent acting from unconscious knowledge andfind it to be genuinely indeterminate, thus supporting my claim that the play is epistemically and morally ambiguous.

Ruber's and Kant's views as to how to achieve mutual respect are intertwined, contrary to the way each would likely see the others position. To this end, the author discussed each writers view of mutual respect and shows how the deficiencies in each are made up for in the arguments of the other. The author concludes by suggesting that a conception of liberal civil society, at its best and most democratic, embodied both Buber s and Kant's views of mutual respect.

The relations between the neurosciences and phenomenology enable us today—thanks to the works of M, Merleau-Ponty, G. Simondon, F. Varela, A.R. Damasio and V.S. Ramachandran—to define the brain as a biosubjective organ: its constitution, its functioning, and its interactions prove that a description of individuation can fit in a cognitive neurophenomenology. In this framework, the mental state acquires a subjective autonomy even if it is an illusion in regard to the determining conditions of brain functioning.

Georges Bataille is one of the most influential thinkers to have seriously considered the work of Donatien Alphonse Frangois, the Marquis de Sade. What is undeniable is that the two thinkers share a number of thematic and theoretical commonalities, in particular on the subject of human nature and sexuality. However, there are serious theoretical divergences between the two, a fact generally overlooked in the secondary literature. Rather than being a mere precursor to Bataille, as himself implies, I suggest that Sade is a very different thinker, a fact that Bataille does not fully acknowledge.

"Reality television" is inspired by a particular fascination with "reality." The detached way of "narrating" events with its occasional emergence of all-too-human constellations comes closer to that of dreaming than to that of analysis, consumption, or first-degree simulation. In the end, however, reality television adopts the form of an anti-narrative in which conventional narrative and receptive devices have not been overcome in order to create a real aesthetic of dreams, but have been overturned in order to create a strange kind of fiction.

A certain standard of approach, methodology, and content in a young artist's early education has been accepted by society at large without any demand for validation and essentially ignored by the philosophical and therapeutic community until dysfunction actually presents itself. What we seek here is to describe some of the constituents of the lived world of a young artist and from that phenomenological description, determine whether the philosophical basis thereof (vaguely articulated though it may be) supports a healthy style ofbeing-in-the-world. We also wish to suggest alternative ways, based on better articulated philosophical tenets, to foster both fine artistry and an integrated, authenticity-directed life, rather than sacrificing one for the other, presumably without recourse.

Starting from a forgotten machinic site in London I introduce the idea of shifted spaces whose investigation is the purpose of this work. Shifted spaces are seen as the deconstructed territory of the object where the subject is revealed. They provide the potential to act as an urgently necessary counterweight to the technological revelation in a Heideggerian sense. He sees technology's revealing is a transformation of things as they are by a self-assertive and calculative mode of thinking that excludes the subject. To establish a methodology for dealing with shifted spaces the theory of a sensible geometry by Jean Nicod is discussed. In his geometric order which is built around a perceiving observer, the fragmentation of sense data and the notion of a sensible time form the core aspects. Furthermore the power of poetry is examined to open spaces beyond fixed objects. Bothy poetry and the idea of an intuitive geometric order, are then applied to the ultimate operator of technological revealing—the machine. This leads us to the construction of sensitive machines as site for shifted spaces.