Jason Dockstader

There have been a number of recent readings of Daoist creativity in terms of contextual responsiveness, playfulness, flexibility, adaptivity, novelty, and epistemic virtue. These readings emphasize how the Daoist classics, the Laozi and the Zhuangzi, offer a model of agency that avoids excessive conscious intentionality, control, rigidity, dogmatism, and perspectival myopia. This paper claims that these readings, while not incorrect, are one-sidedly in favor of the “everyday” at the expense of the more “fantastical” aspects of Daoist creativity. These readings appear to be rooted in an understanding of Daoist creation that mostly ignores the constant, self-causal, and absolutely inclusive nature of the Dao’s generative power. By contrast, this paper argues that Daoist creativity is better viewed as the local expression of Daoist creation, thus rendering Daoist creation itself global creativity. This view of Daoist creativity reads the famous examples of creators in Daoist texts as cases of beings who receive inspiration from, and ultimately identify with, the Dao’s or nature’s global creativity. This is a thoroughly non-supernatural notion of inspiration. Daoist creativity is thus the making explicit of Daoist creation in specific aesthetic forms and objects. This is a reading that requires championing the fantastical, paradoxical, and stranger aspects of Daoist metaphysics. Through a switch of perspective to the source of creation itself, Daoist creativity is no longer addressed only in terms of the reactive traits listed above, but rather seen in its full positive identity as an expression of the Dao’s constant self-generation.

This article places the thought of the Neo-Daoist philosopher, Guo Xiang 郭象 (ca. 252–312 c.e.), within contemporary value theory. It does so in order to claim that Guo, in his commentary upon the Daoist classic, the Zhuangzi 莊子, offers a novel form of value monism, the view that there is only one basic, ultimate, or fundamental value. Guo's value monism differs from the versions of the position presently available insofar as it claims that while there is only one basic value, all other, nonbasic values somehow are this value as well. To make sense of this claim, I situate Guo within the contemporary debate between value monism and value pluralism in order to show how he offers not an existence or priority value monism, but instead what I call a "one-all value monism." I conclude by emphasizing the therapeutic motivation for Guo's metaphysical and axiological views.

In this paper, I address what a Pyrrhonian moral skeptic would say about the ‘now what’ debate amongst another set of moral skeptics, moral error theorists. The ‘now what’ debate stems from the ways error theorists try to solve the ‘now what’ problem of deciding what to do with moral discourse once error theory is accepted. Error theorists agree the criterion for solving the ‘now what’ problem must be motivated by a concern for achieving the most collectively or socially beneficial results from accepting error theory while yet not falling back into genuinely asserting full beliefs in nonexistent moral facts. The solutions they offer range from continuing to use morality as usual (conservationism), to eliminating morality altogether (abolitionism), to replacing genuinely asserting full beliefs in moral facts with quasi-asserting moral make-beliefs (fictionalism), and so on. By taking a Pyrrhonian perspective, I question the merely epistemic aims of error theory and the collectivist criterion for solving the ‘now what’ problem. I argue Pyrrhonian moral skepticism offers preferable solutions to the ‘now what’ problem because it is driven by a mostly individualist and therapeutic concern for avoiding the agitation and anxiety that attends morality. I call these solutions ‘nonassertive moral abolitionism’ and ‘reactionary moral fictionalism.’

This paper aims to discern the latent positive metaphysics of divinity in Brook Ziporyn’s concept of mystical atheism. Ziporyn provides a taxonomy of four ways of characterizing the relationship between divinity, the ultimate character of existence, and human experience: Emulative Theism, Compensatory Theism, Compensatory Atheism, and Emulative Atheism. Ziporyn favors Emulative Atheism. He then adds a further subcategorization to the view: Emulative Intersubsumptive Atheism. This is the view Ziporyn finds most clearly in Tiantai Buddhism, though he hints that Classical Daoism, Confucianism, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bataille may also count as cases. This paper claims that there is a latent positive metaphysics of divinity to Emulative Intersubsumptive Atheism. It does so by showing that Ziporyn’s modal notion of the divine as ‘raw infinity’ resembles logical pantheism, the view that God is the greatest conceivable being insofar as it is the totality of all possible and impossible worlds, logical space itself. However, Ziporyn modifies logical pantheism to involve a novel global metaphysical view, one-all monism. In other words, this paper claims that Emulative Intersubsumptive Atheism entails a one-all monist version of logical pantheism. Ziporyn’s positive view of divinity involves a kind of pantheism wherein a fully symmetrical and reflexive identity is found between the one perfect divine being and each and every possible and impossible world.

This paper contributes to the emerging field of comparative metaethics by placing the thought of the Neo-Daoist, Guo Xiang 郭象, within the taxonomy of contemporary metaethics in order to offer two novel views: nonassertive moral abolitionism and reactionary moral fictionalism. These views help answer the ‘now what?’ question that arises for moral error theorists after they come to believe that all moral judgments are false. The views also assist in the understanding of Guo’s attempt to combine Daoism and Confucianism through his synthesis of ziran 自然 and mingjiao 名教, spontaneity and morality. The paper defends the claims that Guo was a proto-error theorist and used a distinct criterion to answer the ‘now what?’ question. With this criterion, Guo recommends morality’s quiet abolition along with the reservation of occasionally implementing a passive and reactive pretense performance of moral speech-acts when socially required.

This paper defends the claim that metaethics can be done therapeutically. It does so by first showing how metaethics can fit into recent systemizations of philosophy as therapy. Borrowing from the work of Martha Nussbaum and Eugen Fischer, the paper discusses how metaethics can fulfill the criterion for both a philosophical therapy and a therapeutic philosophy. Then, it argues that there are examples of both robust moral realists and anti-realists doing metaethics as therapy. On the realist side, there is evidence of moral naturalists and non-naturalists doing metaethics for therapeutic ends. Likewise, on the anti-realist side, there are cases of both Pyrrhonian moral skeptics and moral error theorists, in how they answer the “now what?” question, displaying therapeutic motivations for their views. In the process, the concepts of health often implicitly employed by metaethicists are addressed and made explicit. The paper thus suggests that not only has metaethics been done as a kind of therapy, doing metaethics as therapy remains a live option for us today.

Recently, British Prime Minister Theresa May made a bold anti-cosmopolitan claim: ‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means’. Given that many have never found nationalism particularly appealing, some have been moved to become citizens of the world after hearing these lines. But how is one to become a cosmopolitan? The answer is found in the history of philosophy. Cosmopolitanism has taken many forms. There are moral, political, legal, economic and cultural cosmopolitanisms. A form that has not received much attention is therapeutic cosmopolitanism. The focus of this form is on how being a world-citizen entails certain health benefits. I argue that therapeutic cosmopolitanism is both the original and best way of being a world-citizen. To do so, I summarize the present taxonomy of cosmopolitanisms and show how therapeutic cosmopolitanism contrasts with these options. I use classical Cynicism as the primary example of therapeutic cosmopolitanism. Instead of the universalist humanism and supranational communitarianism that characterizes cosmopolitan options, Cynic cosmopolitanism employs extreme naturalism. I show how being a Cynic cosmopolitan is the preferable way of rejecting nationalists of all stripes.

This paper contributes to the emerging field of comparative metaethics by offering a reconstruction of the metaethical views implicit to the Daoist classic, the Laozi 老子 or Daodejing 道德經. It offers two novel views developed out of the Laozi: one-all value monism and moral trivialism. The paper proceeds by discussing Brook Ziporyn’s reading of the Laozi in terms of omnipresence and irony, and then applies his reading to moral properties like values and names (ming 名). The paper emboldens Ziporyn’s monistic tendencies in order to claim that the Laozi not only treats the Dao as an omnipresent value, but also as the one value that is all values. I call this view one-all value monism. I then argue that, in terms of moral epistemology, one-all value monism entails moral trivialism, the view that all moral judgments are true. I conclude by emphasizing the therapeutic motivation for holding such apparently outrageous metaethical views. The paper thus defends the basic claim that there is a point at which Ziporyn’s omnipresence and irony become monism and true contradiction, and that further exploring the consequences of these inevitable transitions leads to the discovery of novel metaethical views.

In this essay, I aim to defend Spinoza against Hegel’s claim that he annihilated finite things and the real differences they instantiate. To counter Hegel’s charge of acosmism, I try to conceive of a Spinozist kind of acosmism that would mean not a metaphysical eliminativism or nihilism about finitude and diversity, but rather a metaphysical fictionalism about finitude that entails a latent application of the principle of the discernibility of identicals. I do this by focusing on the correspondence between Spinoza’s three kinds of knowledge – imagination, intellection, and intuition – and his understanding of things as being finite, infinite in kind, and absolutely infinite. In the process, I also entertain Yitzhak Melamed’s argument that Hegel was wrong to accuse Spinoza of acosmism, but was onto something by noting the lack of full or self-subsistent existence on the part of finite modes. Melamed offers a reading that claims Spinozist individuals are weak and functional properties that follow from God as his effects. I respond that Melamed would be correct only if we view things from the perspective of the first kind of knowledge, which is a perspective that is by definition false. I conclude, then, that finite things in Spinoza, qua finite, are not illusions, but fictions, and that when viewed truly or truthfully they are so many infinite in kind or absolutely infinite ways one infinite and eternal substance, God or nature, is discernibly identical to itself.

We do two things in this article: develop a novel conception of domination and show how the Kurdish people are dominated in this novel sense. Conceptions of domination are usually distinguished in terms of paradigm cases and whether they are moralised and/or norm- dependent accounts, or neither. By contrast, we argue there is a way of understanding domination in terms of distinct social kinds. Among kinds of domination, like economic or racial or sexual domination, there must be a specifically political kind of domination. Borrowing from Carl Schmitt’s framework of differing degrees of political enmity, we argue political domination is best understood as an existential form of domination whereby one people aim to prevent the independent exis- tence of another people mainly through the uncontrolled power and extreme violence involved in absolute enmity. This conception of exis- tential domination is offered as an example of a non-moralised, norm- independent account of domination. We then argue that the Kurdish people, who are the largest stateless people in the world, suffer existen- tial domination from the absolute enmity expressed towards them by the four nation-states they find themselves dominated within: Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

It is rarely noticed that Oakeshott occasionally quotes the Zhuangzi in Rationalism in Politics. The Zhuangzi was an ancient Daoist text emphasizing the free and wandering life of someone who skillfully acts without pretension or independent purpose. Oakeshott quoted it in support of his own typically Oakeshottian conclusions. But I argue in this paper that Oakeshott misunderstood the actual force of the anecdotes to which he referred. Oakeshott used Daoist wisdom to support his practical philosophy but entirely missed that the Zhuangzi was all about achieving a higher immersion in or indifference to reality, and hence was not about battling against ‘rationalism in politics’ but about transcending rationalism, irrationalism and even practice in order to achieve a higher therapeutic end.

This paper develops two novel views that help solve the ‘now what’ problem for moral error theorists concerning what they should do with morality once they accept it is systematically false. It does so by reconstructing aspects of the metaethical and metanormative reflections found in the Madhyamaka Buddhist, and in particular the Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka Buddhist, tradition. It also aims to resolve the debate among contemporary scholars of Madhyamaka Buddhism concerning the precise metaethical status of its views, namely, whether Madhyamaka Buddhism can count as a genuine moral skepticism. The paper argues that Mādhyamikas are indeed moral skeptics, and moral skeptics more in a ‘Pyrrhonian,’ or quietist, sense if one follows the Prāsaṅgika line of thinkers. Overall, the claim is that Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka Buddhists treat morality and normativity more broadly as a source of suffering to be ultimately overcome for therapeutic reasons. They propose to do this by abolishing fully asserting genuine moral and normative beliefs while also occasionally passively and reactively pretending some normative judgments are true when it appears doing so would be salutary. These two approaches are called ‘nonassertive moral abolitionism’ and ‘reactionary moral fictionalism,’ respectively. They are developed and offered to contemporary error theorists willing to consider a non-normative and non-collectivist criterion for solving the ‘now what’ problem.

This paper is a contribution to the emerging field of comparative metaethics, which aims to analyse the metaethical views of philosophical traditions outside the Western mainstream. It argues that the metaethical views implicit in the mediaeval Chinese school of Tiantai Buddhism can be reconstructed in contemporary terms in order to develop two novel views. These views are moral dialetheism and moral trivialism. The taxonomy of contemporary metaethical views, in epistemic terms, is exhausted by either partial success, or complete error, theories. They claim, respectively, either that some moral judgments are true (and some false) or that all moral judgments are false. There are also noncognitivist and nonfactualist views, claiming that all moral judgments are technically neither true nor false. In opposition to this moral truth gap, moral dialetheism and moral trivialism offer a moral truth glut. These views say, respectively, that some moral judgments and their negations are true and that all moral judgments and their negations are true. The upshot of this metaethical reconstruction of Tiantai Buddhism is that it allows us to complete the contemporary metaethical taxonomy, and to contribute to the therapeutic goal of finding ways to utilize metaethical reflection for the sake of release from the pathologies of morality.

Most politically minded Kurds agree that their people need liberty. Moreover, they agree they need liberation from the domination they suffer from the four states that divide them: Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. What is less certain is the precise nature of this liberty. A key debate that characterizes Kurdish political discourse is over whether the liberty they seek requires the existence of an independent Kurdish nation-state. Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed intellectual leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, has argued that Kurdish liberty can only be achieved through liberation from the nation-state model itself. Instead of founding an independent Kurdistan, Öcalan proposes regional autonomy for the Kurds through a strictly egalitarian and directly democratic confederalism reminiscent of Murray Bookchin’s anarchist-inspired libertarian municipalism. We argue, in response to Öcalan’s approach, that employing an anarchist rejection of the state is largely mistaken. We diagnose certain historical and conceptual problems with the anarchist understanding of the state and develop the admission made in passing by certain anarchists, including Öcalan, that anarchist liberty could only be achieved after a long period of statist existence. Mostly counter to the anarchist model of non-domination, we propose a republican model of liberty and liberation, also as non-domination, that necessitates the formation of an independent state, at least in this historical period, for Kurds and hence any dominated people to count as truly free. We conclude by attempting to combine certain elements of the anarchist and republican conceptions and offer a synthetic communitarian view that could serve as a better foundation for Kurdish aspirations for liberty.

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 8, Page 1174-1196, October 2022. Most politically minded Kurds agree that their people need liberty. Moreover, they agree they need liberation from the domination they suffer from the four states that divide them: Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. What is less certain is the precise nature of this liberty. A key debate that characterizes Kurdish political discourse is over whether the liberty they seek requires the existence of an independent Kurdish nation-state. Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed intellectual leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, has argued that Kurdish liberty can only be achieved through liberation from the nation-state model itself. Instead of founding an independent Kurdistan, Öcalan proposes regional autonomy for the Kurds through a strictly egalitarian and directly democratic confederalism reminiscent of Murray Bookchin’s anarchist-inspired libertarian municipalism. We argue, in response to Öcalan’s approach, that employing an anarchist rejection of the state is largely mistaken. We diagnose certain historical and conceptual problems with the anarchist understanding of the state and develop the admission made in passing by certain anarchists, including Öcalan, that anarchist liberty could only be achieved after a long period of statist existence. Mostly counter to the anarchist model of non-domination, we propose a republican model of liberty and liberation, also as non-domination, that necessitates the formation of an independent state, at least in this historical period, for Kurds and hence any dominated people to count as truly free. We conclude by attempting to combine certain elements of the anarchist and republican conceptions and offer a synthetic communitarian view that could serve as a better foundation for Kurdish aspirations for liberty.

Fictionalism is the view that the claims of a target discourse are best seen as being fictional in some way, as being expressed in some pretense manner, or as not being about the traditional posits of the discourse. The contemporary taxonomy of fictionalist views is quite elaborate. Yet, there is a version of fictionalism that has failed to develop and which corresponds to the earliest form of the view found in the history of philosophy, East and West. I call this view “reactionary fictionalism.” I argue that traces of reactionary fictionalism can be found in Classical Daoism, Madhyamaka Buddhism, and Pyrrhonian Skepticism. Reactionary fictionalism is a kind of fictionalism that differs from both the hermeneutic and revolutionary kinds discussed today. Hermeneutic fictionalism says we already treat the claims of a target discourse in a fictional manner. Revolutionary fictionalism recommends we all start treating the claims of a target discourse in a fictional manner for reasons mostly of social utility. Reactionary fictionalism recommends, by contrast, that only those concerned with obtaining maximal therapeutic release from the pathology of literally asserting genuine beliefs in the claims of a target discourse should react in a pretense manner to inescapable contexts demanding the use of the claims of that discourse. I aim to show that reactionary fictionalism was a technique utilized in premodern skeptical traditions as a means for enduring one's condemnation to near‐permanent sociality. I recommend slotting reactionary fictionalism into our present taxonomy once we note that employing fictionalism can have a primarily therapeutic motivation and not merely a semantic, epistemic, or metaphysical one.

There is a debate among moral error theorists. It concerns what is to be done with moral discourse once it is believed to be systematically false or untrue. It has been called the ‘now what’ problem. Should error theorists abolish morality or insulate themselves in some way from this nihilistic consequence of belief in error theory? Assertive moral abolitionism aims to have error theorists avoid any insulation and abolish morality altogether. Revolutionary moral fictionalism aims for insulation by having error theorists start treating morality as a useful fiction. There are certain problems with assertive moral abolitionism and revolutionary moral fictionalism, however. This paper argues for a hybrid view that combines the best parts of both views. I call this position ‘reactionary moral fictionalism.’ It says it might be wise for certain individual error theorists to abolish morality in most cases, but remain quiet about their abolition. It also says that these error theorists should use morality as a fiction in those situations where it would be practically detrimental not to use moral discourse. In such situations, the error theorist should employ moral fictionalism. A fictionalist approach should thus be used only as a passive reaction to contexts where it cannot be avoided. The advice offered to certain individual error theorists by reactionary moral fictionalism is thus ‘abolish morality when one can, but use morality as a fiction when one has to.’ It is argued that this solution to the ‘now what’ problem offers superior therapeutic benefits for these individuals and could possibly serve as a compromise between assertive moral abolitionism and revolutionary moral fictionalism.

Proponents of moral abolitionism, like Richard Garner, qualify their view as an â assertiveâ version of the position. They counsel moral realists and anti-realists alike to accept moral error theory, abolish morality, and encourage others to abolish morality. In response, this paper argues that moral error theorists should abolish morality, but become quiet about such abolition. It offers a quietist or nonassertive version of moral abolitionism. It does so by first clarifying and addressing the arguments for and against assertive moral abolitionism. Second, it develops novel criticisms of assertive moral abolitionism and offers nonassertive moral abolitionism in response. Third, it discusses how various metaethical views might respond to nonassertive moral abolitionism. Its basic claim is that nonassertive moral abolitionism provides superior therapeutic benefits over assertive moral abolitionism and other conserving and reforming approaches to moral discourse.

This paper seeks to show how classical Chinese Daoist philosophy (道家) contributes to contemporary metaethics. Daoism offers an early form of moral error theory and provides unique suggestions for what one can do with a false discourse like morality. Recent error theorists have disagreed about whether they should conserve moral discourse (moral conservationism), retain it only as a useful fiction (revolutionary moral fictionalism), substitute it with a discourse concerned with subjective normative attitudes (moral substitutionism), or abolish it altogether (assertive moral abolitionism). In Daoist texts, I argue, we find unique versions of abolitionism and fictionalism that go a long way to resolving debates between error theorists. They can do so because the motivation Daoists have for holding their metaethical views is primarily therapeutic. I argue Daoism offers a nonassertive kind of moral abolitionism and a reactionary form of moral fictionalism as means toward the achievement of tranquility and joy.