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first measure of freedom In this discussion of Mitchel Becker and Boaz Shalgi's paper “On Being, Disappearing, and Becoming: A Journey of Surrender,” I briefly discuss the context of the idea of negation and the negative in psychoanalytic thinking, and suggest the need for a more nuanced and specific language to distinguish the multiple kinds of being and not-being the authors invoke. I suggest, for example, that there are constitutive kinds of negation and traumatic ones. I resonate with the authors’ emphasis on flows and movement and the necessity of tolerating nothingness in the process of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the doctrine of creation ex nihilo and its significances for natural theology. It discusses the contemporary theories of cosmogenesis which permit the term "nothing" to depict the initial moment after the explosion of the universe. It explores the ambiguous utilization of the term "nothing" which prevents astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss from providing a comprehensive answer to philosophy's perennial question.

In his early essay on transcendence of the ego, Sartre attempted to follow Husserl's Logical Investigations and to draw the consequences of his phenomenological criticism of subjectivity. Both authors have emphasized the elusiveness of the self as a result of intentionality of consciousness. However, Sartre's analysis of ego led him quite far from Husserl's philosophical project, insofar as it was somehow already raising the question about the moral nature of the self, and was thus establishing the basis of the conception of moral consciousness that has been displayed later in Being and Nothingness. This article stresses the importance of such a turn in Sartre's philosophy, which reorients him from a strict description of consciousness toward a moral assessment of the structure of the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the experience of nothingness by Blessed Mother Theresa of Calcutta. It says that Mother Theresa suffered the dark night of the soul after her consolations by which the Lord drew her into the ministry of the poorest of the poor. Father Brian Kolodiejchuk believes that the darkness suffered by Mother Theresa was a reparatory darkness, which helped complete Jesus Christ's sufferings on the cross for the sinners and for the poor.

The article examines the use and interpretation of the concept of nothingness in Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre's twentieth century philosophy. It explores the connection between this concept of nothingness and philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis' radical ontology of indeterminacy. It also discusses the relationship of Castoriadis to Heidegger and Sartre.

This papers works on Hegel's doctrine of being in the Science of Logic and tries to present Hegels viewpoint in regard of the category of being: being is an empty significant, because if everything is being then nothing is being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the new modal form of Meinongianism defended by, among others, Graham Priest in Towards Non-Being, the golden mountain is an object in every world, but only in certain worlds is this object golden and a mountain—and the actual world is not one of these worlds, since for something to be golden and a mountain it must exist. In this paper I show that a modal Meinongianism of this kind has some strikingly counterintuitive consequences. Among other things, it cannot even guarantee that the golden mountain doesn't exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bu çalışmada vahdet-i şühud ve vahdet-i vücud mekteplerinin yoktan yaratmaya dair görüşleri karşılaştırılmış ve Ehl-i sünnet'e uyumu incelenmiştir. Tartışma "yok"a şey denip denmeyeceğine dair karara göre şekillendiği için bu mesele de araştırılmıştır. "Zihni sübut" olarak da bilinen yokluğun varlığa dönüşüne dair görüşler karşılaştırılmış, âlemin kadim veya hadis oluşuna dair görüşler ele alınmıştır. Her iki tasavvuf mektebinin, "yok"un var edilişini Allah'ın kendini tanıtma isteğinin bir tezahürü olarak gördüğü ve bunun zat makamında değil, sıfat makamında gerçekleştiğine inandığı görülmüştür. Eski Yunan filozofları, yoktan yaratmayı reddederken İslam meşşaileri kabul etmiş ama onlar yokluğu hiçlik olarak görmemiştir. Mutezile de âlemin kendine şeylik atfedilebilen bir yokluktan var edildiğine inandığı için âlemin ezeli olduğunu iddia etmişlerdir. Ehlisünnet Allah'ın yoktan yaratmasını mutlak kudretini ifade etmesi bakımından daha tutarlı bulmuşlardır. Vahdet-i şühut mektebi, yokluğun vehim mertebesinde gölge fakat hakiki bir varlığa dönüştüğüne inanmakla Ehl-i sünnete paralel bir görüşü benimsemiştir. Hâlbuki vahdet-i vücud mektebi, yokluğu ilahi ilimde sabit özler kabul etmiştir. Bununla hiçlik manasındaki yoktan yaratmayı kabul etmemekle mutezileye yakın bir duruş sergilemişlerdir. In this study, the views of "vahdat-i shuhud" and "vahdat-i vucud" schools on creation from nihility (adam) were compared, and their conformity to Ahlessunna was investigated. Since the discussion depends on whether nihility can be termed "thing," it was also studied. The views on how nihility, known also as "existence in mind" (subut dihni), turned to exist were also compared and the views about whether the universe is eternal or created in due course were studied. It was seen that both sufi schools considered bringing nihility into existence as manifestation of Allah's desire to make Himself known, which they believed ıt could only actualize in the rank of attributes not essence (zât). Ancient Greek Phylosophers disaffirmed creation from nihility. Although Muslim phylosophers affirmed it, they disaffirm nothingness of nihility. Since Mutazilis believed that universe was created from nihility they termed a "thing," they calimed its eternity. Ahlassunna considered creation from nihility more consistent with regard to Allah's omnipotence. School of vahdat-i shuhud took place among Ahlassunna preferring the view that nihility turned out to be a shadowy but real existence. However, school of vahdat-i vujud took a place nearer to Mutezilites by disapproving creation from nothingness and believing nihility to be fixed prototypes by the Omniscient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article deals with the logic of comedy and its inherent connection with the “functioning” of love (or better “the love which does work”). The comical along with laughter is a Nietzschean theme par excellence; love, on its turn, the most “tangible” figure of duality. Here “two” does not represent a pair or two people; it is a figure which resolves the antinomy of desire (“willing”) and delight (Thing, Nothingness) by articulating them both on the same thematic background. Thus the core of Nietzsche's theory of duality, is revealed, i.e. the truth and the real as a “montage” of two illusions. The latter is analyzed in the author's book, which includes also the published chapter conceived as a separate appendix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Jewish meontologies which are related to the philosophical studies towards non-being. It informs that Jewish meontological thinking is different from other Jewish doctrines such as messianism, libertarian utopianism, and avant-garde philosophy. According to the author, meontology can have three different versions which include utopianism, non-mystical meontology, and mystical meontology.

We set forth the hypothesis that the literature of exile is consistently represented in the modern novel, if we understand exile in its philosophical meaning, that of an interior attitude characterized by the irremediable incompatibility between spirit and the order of the world. Taking on the role of the outsider imposes an alternative defined by Karl Jaspers: ultimate situations are experiences that once assumed can show the individual the nothingness or the fullness of being. The first alternative is illustrated by the "literature of the absurd", with themes that derive from the "revelation of non-being" mentioned by Jaspers. Writers like Camus, Ionesco or Kafka are commented from this perspective. Mircea Eliade and Vintilă Horia are, on the other hand, writers that prove the second alternative, finding the path for knowledge in exile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article focuses on the discussion of God and the cult of nothingness in interreligious dialogue between Buddhists and Christians. It examines the concept of Absolute Nothingness in Buddhism doctrines and its impact on Christians' understanding of God. It explores the form of faith in Buddhist and Christian theology.

The essay discusses the philosophical debate over whether or not death is nothing, and whether we can experience misfortune in death, according to the description of death by ancient philosopher Epicurus in his short work "Letter to Meneoceus." The author cites philosophical views of death and misfortune from philosophers such as Jeff McMahan, George Pitcher, and Thomas Nagel. The author describes ideas such as unknown betrayal, desire, and intrinsic value versus extrinsic value.

The article analyzes the concept of flesh in the book "Being and Nothingness," by Jean-Paul Sartre. The author aims to understand the concept of flesh, explore its possibilities, and use it to understand desire and love. She cites that Sartre emphasized that flesh is born out of desire and stated that he makes himself flesh to appropriate the other's flesh.

This article re-examines the legacy of modernist aesthetics, with special focus on Samuel Beckett and his radical critique of subjectivity, language and ontology. The problem of language as a fundamental agent of difference pervades both the content and form of literary modernism. Beyond conventional semantic and aesthetic function, language acts in Beckett's works to construct a subject that is at once multiple in expression and voided at its core. Drawing on performance and philosophy to explore an ethical dimension of Beckett's praxis already sensed by Theodor Adorno and Alain Badiou, this study recalls the political implications of what are sometimes dismissed as ‘mere’ aesthetic questions, by looking deeper into the modernist attitude toward language, subjectivity, and void. This research suggests that the full radicality of the Beckettian subject has yet to be fully absorbed in philosophy and culture, devastating as it is to the postmodern focus on identity and difference. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented which attempts to present Buddhism as the origin of modernist nihilism that was popularized by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. It says that the theory of nihilism focuses on the secular humanist thought during the early years of the 20th century. It mentions that the idea of nothingness and nihilation were formulated by Sartre through the various critiques he had study. It adds that existential nihilism was originated during the period of Greek Skepticism.

This essay explores the relationship between psyche and outer world in some of Haruki Murakami's major novels. The settings in which Murakami's characters appear abound in sterile, bleak and/or murky spaces (vacant plots of land, a Mongolian desert, a walled town called the End of the World, the sewers and the tunnels of the Tokyo underground, forests, dry wells that force characters to confront their inner demons). These spaces characterized by emptiness and darkness are not mere landscapes. Examples suggest that the scenes described are almost external manifestations of the emotional lives of his characters, more or less direct projections of the interior states of the characters; there is a fundamental nexus between interiority and exteriority (landscape). These landscapes are places of retreat where characters (who often feel like empty shells and are haunted by a sense of loss) enclose themselves inwardly and try to make sense of the senseless. Even if they are empty, they are spaces in which something creative can occur - such as the capacity to encounter undiscovered aspects of the self. These projected versions of states of mind are dangerous, but full of potentialities, being favorable for revelations, epiphanies, experiences of the numinous. The majority of these landscapes function symbolically as realms of the subconscious, where the ultimate source of the self is rooted. It can be said that the subconscious is the natural habitat of Murakami's characters [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nothingness was a cultural movement in Colombia in the sixties and seventies to express a voice of opposition to the literary traditions, culture and politics of the moment. Its members had in common the desire to create a collective consciousness of both aesthetic and social character that was in line with the profound political and cultural changes of the time. Shape freely, think freely, speak freely was the radical legacy of the new spirit of nothingness and other Latin American avant-garde. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this paper, I dispute a position articulated by Jacek Bolewski that the conception of creation from nothingness does not constitute the essential diff erence between Christian and Indian understanding of being, contrary to popular belief. Bolewski argues that when reconsidered the meaning of this diff erence in the Biblical context it reveals the convergence of fundamental intuitions of both traditions. I refute this view and claim that the popular belief, wrongly rejected by Bolewski, is justified and well-grounded in the thought of the Church Fathers developed in opposition to the Greek way of conceptualizing being. Therefore, I maintain that Bolewski's arguments are based on the formal similarity only, not the content one, and, moreover, that this similarity is merely seeming and implied by the confusion of two orders - theologico-existential order, typical of the Bible, and logico-metaphysical one which is essential to the religious and philosophical tradition of India expressed in the Nasadiya Sukta. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Problems / Problemos is the property of Vilnius University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses the concept of nothingness based on Immanuel Kant and Daoism. It mentions that the concept of nothingness provides a promising point of departure if one wants to depict the difference between Western and Eastern philosophy. It also provides Kant's critique of dogmatic metaphysics and comparing the conception of nothingness in Daoism.

This paper explores the topic of 'haunted sound' and its overarching significance within minimalist thought, tracing the vast intricacies of this aerial intimation as a new and unforeseen existential horizon. To this end, the paper advances via the entangling concepts of nothingness and movement, including subthematic dimensions as far-reaching as: the zero-degree, disintegration, control/noncontrol, mood, catastrophe, indeterminacy, interruption, repetition, desertion, indifference, stillness, and exhaustion. It is through the formulation of this haunted soundscape, in turn, that the once absolute totalities of consciousness stray toward an increasingly apparitional province, turning percep- tion itself toward the paradoxical borderlands of presence and absence, materiality and immateriality, being and nonbeing. Ultimately, the intent of this project is to devise an innovative outlook on the singular potential of sound to eclipse past existential regimes, to lead the aesthetic toward a vanishing, phantasmatic sphere at once creative and destructive, ethereal yet incisive, and which thereby restores the artwork to its volatile capacity for engaging the chaos of a minimalist imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the fate of the Japanese people has been decided at the end of the war, the Japanese intellectuals cannot feign a naïve stance of innocence that would have mitigated pursed lips, silent pens and empty sheets of paper. And when some of them did take this recourse, or worse, tried to revise their earlier positions with regard to the Japanese' involvement in the World War by tampering on their published works, Hajime Tanabe took the road less traveled and confronted the issue of flawed scientific philosophical position head-on; his is a genuine attempt at self-criticism that would put to question every inveterate beliefs one has held at the expense of an openness to a reality that is neither pre-given nor statically perfect. This paper, then, will be a reflection on Tanabe's suggestion on what we should or could do if rationality has become pathological, if thinking can no longer contain the irrational, and if at the demise of philosophy, nothing remains but the haunting gossamer of injustice's debris crying for recognition, demanding for an apology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Cioranian universe, language and time, both inextricably bound, both chillingly perverse, constitute icons of what is, contextually, an inexorable vision of the human condition. The pairing progenerates specters, phantasms of the void, pernicious and vacuous. It is at the perilous, indeed, the perfidious nexus of enunciation and endlessness-each dreaded, yet each ineluctable-that the dyad adopts an onerous cast. To the extent that discourse configures a cipher of perpetuity, and in that, conversely, any trace of eternity conjures a ceaseless extension of the word, of that very word which begets and embodies postmodern aporia, there lurks in consequence of discourse emitted a palpable trepidation, a confrontation with the ultimate precipice, the unconscionable, inscrutable continuity of nothingness. The deconstructive imperative overtakes the text, from which there is neither scriptural nor metaphysical exit. A curious dynamic, a tangled skein of haunting refrain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the nature and value of Giorgio Agamben's negative thought, which revolves around the theme of nothingness. I begin by observing the validity of negative thinking, and thus oppose those affirmative philosophies that reject Agamnben's thought simply on the basis of its negativity. Indeed, the importance of negative thought is set forth by Agamnben's attention to the specific biopolitical logic that governs the present. If we are to understand the present, then we must begin by understanding the nothingness inherent in the logic of biopolitics. At the same time, I argue, it is important to distinguish two kinds of negative thought. The first, ultimately limited manner of negative thou gut follows a strictly Heideggerian path of contemplation. While Agamben shows a certain affinity with this style of thinking. I call for increased focus on a different manner of negative thought. one that turns on the power to think nothingness. I develop this second manner of negative thought by advancing the concepts of love and exile, which provide the means by which the potentiality of nothingness may inhabited in novel ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Late in his career. Sartre told us that "subjectivity (in Being and Nothingness) is not what it is for me now," but I do not think that this should be understood as simple rejection. Rather, I think that his notion of the "spiral" best expresses his meaning. The development of his thought progressed through levels of integrating new experience with the past and, in the process, refigured the past. Sartre was, all along, a philosopher protective of subjectivity and freedom, but these notions underwent transformation over time, preserved and modified in their surpassing. Sartre's philosophical itinerary follows the model of the spiral. and in that way, he is his own best commentator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

God is Being, "esse est deus", and only God is, He is the one and only Being, claims Meister Eckhart. What does it mean for God to be? Eckhart writes that we call the One God "Being". Being is for him Being-One. It follows from this that everything is on the basis of God's being. Things exist by this Being and in this Being, so that outside of this Being nothing is. If God is entirely Being and if Being and One coincide, what is the status of the created being, that is, of what is multiple by nature? Eckhart replies that the creature is "pure nothingness". This article tries to find the right sense of this expression in the light of the relation between Being and One as it is understood by Eckhart. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of this essay is the thing itself, examined through the fantastic character of phenomenality, that is, through the coming into being or opening up of the world. The world of appearance emerges from a simple, absolute nothing: there is nothing behind or before the world. There are right away many things, a world: one thing implies others, since for one to be it must distinguish itself from another. Thus, if 'to be' means 'to distinguish,' Being begins with the parting of things that makes their connection possible. Thus the thing in itself is straightaway the undergoing of its own parting; being is a passion. The Imago, then, is not a picture or figure, but the arriving in presence, which imagination elicits or welcomes by advancing in response. Imagination, then, is not first of all open to an image, but to world. It opens itself to the Thing, to the possibility of something, to parting, and in so doing brings itself toward creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Logos: A Journal, of Religion, Philosophy Comparative Cultural Studies & Art (08687692) is the property of Logos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The analysis of Beckett's work offered here suggests that the Bergsonian spirit—his metaphysics, his anti-empirical emphasis on intuition, his critique of language and representation, his emphases on image and the act of perception and his exteriorization of memory, all of which infused much of modernism—nfused Beckett and his work as well. Writing to his confidant, Thomas McGreevy, on 31 January 1938, Beckett offers some faint praise of McGreevy's essay on Jack Yeats, telling him that he has provided a clue "to the kind of people who in the phrase of Bergson can't be happy till they have 'solidified the flowing.''' Krapp may be one of those people, one who struggles to arrest the flow of dureé with concepts or symbols. "Metaphysics is therefore the science which claims to dispense with symbols," Bergson tells us in "The Creative Mind," or as the narrator of Beckett's seminal, liminal "Watt" has noted, perhaps reluctantly disclosing something of an aesthetics, "No symbols where none intended." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes to show the initial steps of Martin Heidegger's thought, germany philosopher, which nourished the idea of constructing a new ontology founded under three important concepts: facticity, nothingness and temporality. Through those concepts Heidegger introduces something absolutely new into Philosophy's History, that is to think Being from your apophatic character. So the thinker deconstructs important notions of philosophical tradition as transcendence, ground, limit, truth, mystery, and presents expressive contributions to Philosophy and Sciences of Religion areas. Those contributions are presented at two levels: a) by lighting up the reinterpretation of the radical religious experience through new way to understand the question of nothing and emptiness, and b) by opening a dialogue more significant to phenomenon of apophatic mystic of west and far east. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the philosophical connection between negation and truth. It mentions Aristotle's principle of noncontradiction wherein nothing can be and cannot be at the same time and in the same way. It says that the equivalence of negation and nothing supports the Parmenidean concept that is being all that is without negation and that nothing cannot be the same as being. Furthermore, it says that confusions between being and determinate being stop the identity of being and nothing.

Medical humanities purchases its presence on the medical side of university campuses by adopting as its own the ends of medicine and medical ethics. It even justifies its presence by asserting promotion of those ends as an ethical imperative, most of all to improve the caring in medical care. As unobjectionable, even praiseworthy, as this imperative appears, it actually constrains the possibilities for interpersonal relationship in the context of medical practice. Development of those possibilities requires openness of self to the existentially challenging ethical imperative to care also literally for nothing at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the philosophy of self-annihilation of God. It discusses the ideology of William Blake which pertains to the death of God from Spirit negativity and alienation, naming the Alien God as Satan. It mentions the role of nihilism in addressing God's self-saving, absolute nothingness, and life illusions manifested by absent prophetic voice in religious bodies. It relates that Hegelian philosophers such as Soren Kierkegaard and Karl Marx believes on the absolute reversal and ultimate transfiguration of God and Satan. The author argues that Satan is the only one who undergoes self-annihilation of God.

This article tries to compare Cioran's and Noica's ontology of the nothingness, from their failed project to study together the Kantian categories of the nothing. It is a question of bringing to light how this Kantian pretext allowed them to resort, each in his way, to an investigation of the reality of the nothingness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just as nothingness is a fundamental concept in Daoist philosophy, it is also a fundamental concept in Chinese aesthetics, where it has multiple meanings: First, nothingness, as a reaction against unaesthetic psychical activity, is a primary precondition of aesthetic and artistic activity. Second, as the void or intangible 'stuff' juxtaposed to 'substance,' it is an indispensable compositional property of artworks as well as an essential condition for the manifestation of an artistic form. Finally, as a reaction against the unaesthetic world of daily life-the experiential world-nothingness is the fundamental basis and essential provision for establishing an artistic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much ink has been spilled over how Lu Xun's (1881-1936) political views inform his creative writing and how politics and literature are mutually implicated, but the aesthetics of his tragic narratives remains marginal in literary studies. Often lauded as the father of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun has not only made major contributions to the formation of literary realism but also put his unique vision of tragedy into practice. At the core of his tragic poems and narratives lie the tropes of solitude. The tragic is characterized, not by tragic incident, but by void thereof, by a state of speech-less solitude and nothingness ( xuwu). The aesthetic implications of such a tragic vision are twofold. The creation and consumption of literature in China during the first half of the twentieth century focused on questions of the nation and society, but Lu Xun's solitary characters in The Weeds ask fundamental existential questions while carving a space for a new genre of writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the two representative philosophers of the Kyoto School, Kitaro Nishida and Hajime Tanabe from the perspective of process theology and the Buddhist-Christian dialogue in Japan. The first chapter explicates Nishida’s concept of “pure experience” in comparison with William James’ radical empiricism and with Kant’s dualism of sense and reason. Pure experience in Nishida’s sense is neither a passive reception of objective sense-data given before subjective mental operations, nor the raw material of experience which must be given “form” by experiencing subject. It is nothing but metaphysically ultimate activity from which both the experiencing subject and the whole range of the experienced objects from sense-perception to intellectual intuition emerge as its self-unfolding. The second and third chapters discuss the two key concepts of process theology, “concrescence” and “the extensive continuum” with a special reference to the Mahayana Buddhist concept of “emptiness (sunyata)” and “dependent arising (pratityasamutpada)”. Nishida’s tripartite concept of topos, i.e. a topos of relative being, a topos of relative nothingness, and the topos of absolute nothingness will be applied to process theology in order to explicate the relation of two ultimates in Whitehead’s metaphysics, i.e. the relation of God as the religious ultimate to creativity as the metaphysical ultimate. The fourth and fifth chapters discuss Hajime Tanabe as a critical successor of Nishida’s philosophy of Nothingness. Tanabe is more akin to Whitehead than to Nishida in that Tanabe reformulates Nishida’s concept of Nothingness from the temporal perspective of a finite human existence related essentially to “species” or “society” in the historical world. Tanabe transforms the unity of contradictories in the logic of topos into the contrasted opposites in the historical process of becoming, which involves novelty and discontinuous leaps at points of historical crisis. For him history has become “the overall Koan” in which the metaphysical topology of static being is to be superseded by the innovative principle of nothingness in the historical world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarô and his work on identity, nothingness, values, and science in Japanese culture. It examines the historical context in Japan during this time period, in which the government limited academic study and research. The author analyzes Kitarô's ideas on the uniqueness of the Japanese approach to science and cultural nationalism. The relationship between Japanese culture and ethnicity proposed by Kitarô, as well as his influence on philosophy as a whole, is also considered.

Articulating together Jean Paulhan's texts on language, painting and the experience of the Resistance during the Nazi Occupation of France, this article distinguishes between the nothingness or silence that is one face of a totalising opposition - between signs and things - and the 'small nothings' that recur throughout Paulhan's texts. It argues that these 'nothings,' odd snippets and scraps of a culture that are overlooked or dismissed rather than reduced to nothing by the priorities of power, offer the possibility of restoring a sense of community when a polity ceases to speak a common language, as arguably occurred in France during the Occupation. Thus it dismisses the claim that Paulhan's work was essentially apolitical, and challenges the deconstructive approach that concludes on its aporetic nature. In contrast, it concludes that Paulhan offers a vital reflection on the power of words to ground a common purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among theories of personal identity over time, the simple view has not been popular among philosophers, but it nevertheless remains the default view among non-philosophers. It may be construed either as the view that nothing grounds a claim of personal identity over time, or that something quite simple (a soul perhaps) is the ground. If the former construal is accepted, a conspicuous difficulty is that the condition of causal dependence between person-stages is absent. But this leaves such a view open to an objection from the failure to provide a condition of individuation. If, on the other hand something like a soul is said to ground personal identity over time, such an account turns out to be more suited to a kind of continuity view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on design philosophy and the outlook for the field of design to become undisciplined. The influence of design thinking, cybernetics, the corporate merger process, and systems thinking on the author's worldview is discussed. The idea that real problems should be considered in the design process is mentioned. The transformative nature of access to open-source materials, the term "basho" meaning nothingness, activity theory, sustainability, and the duality of mind and body are noted. Cape Peninsula University of Technology's Faculty of Informatics and Design is mentioned.

The article examines the influence of German philosopher Abraham Calov on fellow German philosopher Immanuel Kant's evaluations of Aristotelian and Scholastic teachings. More specifically, the author investigates Calov's role in shaping Kant's philosophical understandings of metaphysics and transcendental philosophy. Kant's ontological thought on the notions of being and nothingness are also outlined, as well as his epistemological system of architectonics. In order to account for this alleged influence, the author explains the teaching of Calov's work in German universities.

The study entitled Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country. On mono no aware or the beauty of simple and ephemeral things tries to explore the famous Japanese novel from the perspective of the beautiful as equivalent to the nothingness, the void, sublimed towards transcendence, revealed within the world for the human being under the shape of beautiful passing or ephemeral things. Japanese aesthetics defines this "movement of soul" as mono no aware. Yasunari Kawabata's novel offers the contemporary man, sometimes angered at his absurd existence, such a subtle suggestion. The whole universe is filled with a certain sadness of things, a melancholy feeling, a hint of resigned solitude, which art is meant to reveal vaguely and unravel partially. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theme of all existence as created out of 'absolute nothingness' is the guiding thread of Augustine's biographical-introspective masterpiece The Confessions. In it anthropological insight and metaphysical speculation are coherently consistently joined together. In fact the ontological and metaphysical analisis of the last three books of The Confessions is the key to fully understand in a unifying view the phenomenological and existencial inquiry brought about by Augustine in the first part of his work, following his own autobiographical memories. The original 'nothingness' of creation does not belong solely to the event the foundations which laid of all existence but persists as 'meontological' underlying dimension for all created beings. In Augustine's view man not only came into existence ex nihilo, but in him 'nothingness' perpetuates its sinister depriving power, leaving its mark on all his existential activities. Being intrinsecally nullifying they reveal the scarring sign of man's origin: his birth de nihilo, as if 'nothingness' itself is the 'matter' out of which the human being is moulded, 'Nothingness' - in its quality of «deficient caused» - in fundamentally inherent in the human being, because of his condition as 'creature'. Only the intervention of the Divine Grace has the power of contrasting its sinister force of depletion, of reabsorbing its power of entropy and giving ontological stability to the disquiet of the human heart. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]