Cora Cruz

“You have an architect and a ditch-digger working together on a construction project. Who gets paid more, and why?” Does a tendency toward abstraction and quantification, a pretense of objectivity, obscure the character, situation and bias from which all economic and political theorems stem? Following the principle that arguments neither arise nor persist in a vacuum, that they live and die by their context and character, we can describe two sorts of response corresponding to two rather timeless worldviews, along with their accompanying “mind-sets”. The degree to which these views indicate differing “kinds” in human nature, beyond which there can be no further reduction to common ground, whether conversely they simply reflect historical and economic circumstance, or to what extent they are both, will be left to the reader. One might discern in the sensibilities described some alignment along traditional epithets of “bourgeois” vs. “working class”, but this is not necessarily so. I will therefore avoid overwrought labels, but admit that such family resemblances speak to a longer historical view and a persistent problematic.

The subject of free will has suffered something of a renascence in recent popularized American philosophy. The issue is, of course, a Gordian knot of underlying metaphysical and ontological presupposition, in both the analytic and continental traditions. In this paper, I attempt a bit of an untangling, and in doing so, I find that the fundamental position of the contemporary champion of “no freedom” (Galen Strawson) is not only compatible with a radical Sartrean freedom, but that the two philosophers’ deeper ontology is much the same, supports the same metaphysics and the same outline of an existentialist ethics. My approach is a combination of analytic and continental method and background: I continue to believe that there is no necessary separation between the analytic and continental camps, and that there is much to be gained from the reabsorption of analytic style into the broader philosophic tradition.

The Meditations of Manuel de la Vega addresses the "hard" problem of consciousness in a nonreductive way. Which is to say, the question is posited as to why, no matter how much structural or functional explanation we may devise, this does not quite satisfy attempts to grasp the essence, the "what it is like," of being an embodied consciousness. The book’s method aims to be faithful to its subject by its choice of format. It does not intend to offer fully articulated theory, as univocal argument, but to facilitate theory, over the course of several exemplars, and by way of various perspectives which in the end form a whole—albeit not a closed or finalized whole. While fully compatible with certain theories of consciousness, and while yet incorporating much theorizing itself, the book makes the point, by its example, that explanations of consciousness must not necessarily be theories and models, and that the mode in which theories are rendered may be only part, and perhaps not the most important part, of what consciousness "is" or "does." This is much in keeping with phenomenological methods, with the anthropological-genealogical approaches of existentialists, and with certain takes on aesthetics; in keeping also with the insights of post-structuralism, and yet it does not exclude (and may even complement) some current computational or neurophysiological models of consciousness.