Timur Cengiz Uçan

This article delves into the intricacies of uses of the words and concepts of borders, boundaries, frontiers, and limits, to address epistemological difficulties related to linguistic and philosophical confusions, sometimes used to target migrants populations. These confusions accordingly can and should be ended to coherently pose and sufficiently address social and ecological difficulties whose interrelatedness is increasingly acknowledged. This objective can be attained criticizing the confusion of borders as frontiers and borders as outlines, which tends to lead to conceiving of (unrestrictive) limits as (restrictive) boundaries and inversely. Assumptions about languages (as English, French, Turkish, etc.) according to which some languages could somehow be as such inherently provided with expressive resources that could somehow be as such inherently lacking within other languages are necessarily misled and misleading: expressive resources necessary and sufficient to account for interrelated uses of the mentioned concepts are available in and across different languages. The establishment of such availability suffices to cast into doubt the projection of an inherent lack of such expressive resources on other languages. Analysis of language uses can manifest that distinctions between applications of the mentioned concepts can be achieved without a one-to-one correlation of concepts and words within and across languages.

This article proposes an elucidation of the respective and mutual contributions of martial art and philosophy. Wisdom can be conceived as an unrestrictive limit of martially artistic and philosophical practices, in ways which are independent from etymologicalist conceptions, if conceived in undichotomistic, unessentialistic, and unsubstantialistic ways. Dichotomies are not required as boundaries to account for the limits of knowledges and practices. Essences are not required as unificatory immaterial standards of (instances of) moves, techniques, and practices. And substances could not be required as atemporal and aspatial grounds of the practice and its philosophy. Thusly, problems related to the confusions of dimensions of oppositive events (notably differences between agonisms, antagonisms, and oppositions) can be addressed in coherent, sensitive and efficient ways. Unsubstantially, unessentialistically, undichotomically conceived, that wisdom is a desirable and unrestrictive limit of philosophical and martial practices is unproblematic and truly renders achievable a contemporarily egalitarian, liberatory, democratic, antisexist, antixenophobic, scientific and artistic conception of the mutual contributions of martial and philosophical practices. Bodies and souls can find both the techniques and the objectives of their applications in the ways of martial arts and philosophies. Martially and philosophically artistic practices can mutually contribute to education to (contemporary) democracy.

Cet article présente les éléments d’une analyse structurale des attentats du 11 septembre 2001. Nous proposons d’abord une critique des approches sensationnalistes, des approches qui recourent à l’idée d’un supposé « choc des civilisations », des approches complotistes, des approches islamophobes, des approches légalistes et des approches vengeresses. Car ces approches ont rendu au moins difficile de comprendre l’événement de ces attentats. Nous proposons par contraste une analyse structurale de ces attentats. La critique de la supposée attractivité de la réunion des conditions dans lesquelles des pratiques d’instrumentalisation de la terreur implique la critique non pas seulement de structures, mais encore de systèmes de structures dont le développement s’est réalisé de manière surtout inconsciente. Nous proposons ainsi une analyse critique de l’approche selon laquelle la répression aurait pu être la seule réponse concevable au problème du terrorisme – une analyse critique qui tient compte de l’indésirabilité non seulement de désavantages structuraux mais aussi du développement des (néo-)colonialismes au vingtième siècle.

The first objective of this article is to propose a reflexion about the limits of the comparison or analogy or metaphor between humans and machines. This comparison which runs through the history of European philosophy (Aristotle, 1995, 1253b23; Descartes, 2006, pp. 157–159; Onfray de la Mettrie, 1996, 3–39; Kant, 2007, §65; Lewis, 1934, p. 144; Sartre, 2003, p. 248; Wittgenstein, 1947, Ts-229, 448), is basic for functionalism, and central for the development of medical sciences. For the distinction between parts of living bodies, in particular, between organs, involves the consideration of distinct and mutually compatible biological ends, whose coordinated functioning together renders satisfaction possible. However, although the affirmation of the comparability of these two types of cases is not problematic as such, the affirmation of the identity or indistinctness of these relations is not without posing problems, whether conceptual or practical. If humans are under some aspects like machines and inversely, as some tasks are realizable by humans or machines, another thing is to suppose affirming that humans are machines, or that machines are humans (see C. I. Lewis, 1934). The stake of this point is considerable, for its range is not only the literality of the personification involved by the humanization or biologization of machines as robots (for we are not surprised by saying that such robot sweeps, achieves actions, smiles), but also that the depersonification involved by the machinization or metaphorical dehumanization of humans (whether to express an appreciation of the realization of a task by a person or to express the horror and the inhumanity, the absence of emotions involved by the realization of an action by a person). But its range also concerns: the extension of our concept of autonomy, the asymmetry of our relations to rules, principles, laws, of humans and machines, and in fact to a stronger extent our concept of relation. The question is thus whether this comparison, pertinent under some aspects in some contexts for certain ends, could have been adequate, turned out not be a comparison at all, such that the metaphorical could have become in such cases, literal. This affirmation could have seemed entirely incompatible with new possibilities of liberation rendered possible by technological innovations. In reality that is not the case since these possibilities are understood as such against the background of precedent possibilities. The problem we then shall pose is the following: to which extent does the comparison or metaphor or analogy of human machine render possible the necessarily nonrestrictive limits of intelligibility? What are the limits of this comparison? To which extent does the recourse to this comparison turn out beneficial? To contribute to the resolution of this problem, I shall propose to put the comparison between machines and us and of us with machines at the test of the problematic of solipsism. To achieve this task, I present the criticism made by Lewis of solipsism (1934), and then present Turing’s critical reconception of solipsism (1950). I then attempt to establish the way in which Wittgenstein, with his criticism of solipsism (1953), functionalism, and reductionism, solves the problems encountered by the conceptions of solipsism of Turing and Lewis.

This paper proposes an exploration of relationships and exchanges between the philosophies of Cavell and Kuhn by the study of aspects of the philosophy of Wittgenstein. Although the notions of language games and family resemblances used by Kuhn in "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" have been elaborated by Wittgenstein, Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein inspired that of Kuhn. I will attempt to show that against this background, Cavell’s conception of the relations of arts, works of arts, and artists, can be relevantly compared to Kuhn’s conception of the relations of sciences, scientific successes, and scientific practitioners.

This paper consists in a comparative study of the notions of negative fact in the early works of Russell and Wittgenstein. How to account for our ability to think both that it is false that what is not the case is the case and incorrect to think that it is true that what is not the case is the case? Are the truth and the correctness of such thoughts and of their expressions meant to be insured by the existence of negative facts? Or do we need to think of negative facts differently? In his early works, Russell argues not only that negative facts exist, but also that the philosophical problem they suffice to solve is real. While in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein dissolves the philosophical problem by letting the superfluity and misleadingness of the affirmation of the existence of negative facts be seen as such.

How to think a unique and determinative turn in analytic philosophy of mind? To answer this question this article first presents an attempt to render clear that analytic phenomenology, by contrast with conceptions of phenomenology of the XXth century, beneficially dispenses with several methodological and conceptual assumptions that were assumed to be compulsory, as phenomenological reduction, a notion of synthesis, and a philosophical notion of the a priori. It then presents some eventual difficulties to the achievement of a phenomenological turn within analytic philosophy, which are, the neglect of historicity, abstractionism, the acknowledgement of the place of language in our lives, and solipsism. It finally presents several demands that concern the felicity of contemporary analytic phenomenologies, namely, anti-abstractionism, fallibilism, attention to polyadic relations, and the integration of ecological and decolonial concerns of our cultures.

This paper introduces the Special Issue on 'post-truth'. The contributions to this special issue try between them to strike a right balance. To establish how new ‘post-truthism’ really is – or isn’t. To seek a point of reflection on whatever is new in our current socio-political straits. And to consider seriously how philosophy can help. Whether by wondering about the extent to which reason, or truth, may rightly, if one follows Wittgenstein, be viewed in certain respects as a constraint upon thought or opinion. Or indeed by wondering whether we still have a long way to go in approaching truth at all.