διανοιαDIANOIA
The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Spring 2020
ISSUE VII



διανοια Editor-in-Chief: Noah Valdez
Senior Managing Editor: Ethan Yates
Managing Editors: Nicholas Arozarena, Weitao Liu, Lauren White
General Editors: Nicholas Avallone, Kathryn Bryson, Jacob Browning, Carolyn Chang, Yang Cheng, 
Benjamin Dewhurst, Lucy Hanson, Emily Haverstick, Wenyu Huang, Qihui Liu, Yue Liu, Elizabeth 
LoPreiato, Alexandria Mullen, Jacob Schick, Drew Thorburn, Maxwell Vogliano
External Reviewers: Arabella Adams (Wellesley College), Nathan Evans (University of Northern 
Colorado), Tyler Hruby (Carleton College), Tristan St. Germain (Brown University) 
Graduate Advisor: Peter Klapes
Faculty Advisor: Ronald Tacelli, S.J.

Cover designs courtesy of Gregory Kacergis. 
Featuring: 
Nicolae Jon Grigorescu Andreescu à Barbizon 1879; obtained via Wikimedia Commons. 
Isaac Whitehead In Milford Sound, West Coast, New Zealand 1878; obtained via Wikimedia Commons.

The materials herein represent the personal opinions of the individual authors and do not necessarily 
represent the views of Dianoia or Boston College.

If you have questions regarding the Journal, would like to submit your work for review, or if you’d be 
interested in joining next year’s staff, please contact the Journal at dianoia@bc.edu or visit our website 
at dianoiabc.org.

Dianoia
The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College 
Spring 2020 Issue VII
Boston College
140 Commonwealth Avenue
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/mcas/departments/philosophy/undergraduate/dianoia.html
© 2020 The Trustees of Boston College



C
O

N
TE

N
TS  5 Acknowledgements  

 6 A Letter from the Editor 

 8  Interview with Dermot Moran     
The Joseph Chair in Catholic Philosophy

 15  Virtue, Silencing, and Perception
  Abhi Ruparelia, University of Richmond

 26  The Epistemic Injustice of Ex Contradictione Quodlibet
  Sherry Tseng, University of Pennsylvania

 36  Sound as Silence: Nothingness in the Music of Anton 
Webern and John Cage

  Chenyu Bu, University of Wisconsin-Madison

 46  Human (and) Nature: Using Arendt to Reconcile Models 
of Environmental Ethics

  Caroline Gillette, Boston College

 56  Art, Technology and Truth in the Thought of Martin 
Heidegger

  Felipe Daniel Montero, University of Buenos Aires

 65 Contributors 



5

The Editorial Staff of Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston 
College would like to extend our sincerest thanks to the following individuals for 

their assistance in making this issue of Dianoia possible:

Mary Crane, Institute for the Liberal Arts

Jacqueline Delgado, Center for Centers

Susan Dunn, Center for Centers

Gabriel Feldstein, BC Libraries

Stephen Jarjoura, Information Technology Services

Peter Marino, Center for Centers

Cherie McGill, Philosophy Department

Sarah Melton, BC Libraries

Dermot Moran, Philosophy Department

John O'Connor, BC Libraries

Paula Perry, Philosophy Department

Sarah Smith, Philosophy Department

We would also like to thank Dr. Ronald Tacelli, S.J., of the Boston College 
Philosophy Department, for his invaluable assistance as our advisor.



6

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Spring 2020
Dear Reader, 

It is with great honor and pride that I present to you Issue VII of Dianoia: The 
Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College! This year we received more than 
140 submissions from North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, Australia 
and Asia—testifying to Dianoia’s genuinely international appeal in attracting the 
finest undergraduate philosophical works from over sixty academic institutions. But 
before writing further about what makes this issue of Dianoia unique, I would be 
remiss if I did not first praise the tenacity and dedication of our editorial board in 
making the fruit of this year’s labor possible amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. 
Publishing a journal as committed to philosophical excellence, original scholarship 
and intercontinental collaboration poses no easy task, virus aside, so it is nothing short 
of a miracle that our team managed to carry on with Issue VII while simultaneously 
adjusting to the disruptiveness of a global pandemic; if anything, it demonstrates the 
astounding resiliency of Dianoia’s editors, and the following issue speaks for itself.

This year, our journal received the privilege to publish five wonderfully insightful and 
thoughtful essays on a wide range of original topics and ideas, some of which include: 
Aristotelian virtue ethics, epistemic injustice and artificial intelligence, Sartrean 
existentialism, Arendt and environmental ethics, and Heidegger on technology and 
the work of art. In the interest of philosophically engaging with COVID-19—a feat 
still quite rare in the early days of the virus—Dianoia is pleased to present an interview 
with the Joseph Chair in Catholic Philosophy and current Chair of the Department 
of Philosophy at Boston College, Dermot Moran, speaking on the pandemic and 
its assorted effects on everyday life. As a final note, you will find on the front cover 
Nicolae Grigorescu’s Andreescu à Barbizon (1879) and on the back cover Isaac 
Whitehead’s In Milford Sound, West Coast, New Zealand (1878). When combined, 
Grigorescu and Whitehead’s masterpieces illustrate a picture of the magnificence of 
crude nature and the necessity of reconsidering the ethics of consumption—a theme 
called to mind by one of this year’s essays entitled: “Human (and) Nature: Using 
Arendt to Reconcile Models of Environmental Ethics.”

In light of all of these new developments, Dianoia’s resolve in fostering intellectual 
debate and dialogue remains preserved once more; that being said, none of these 
accomplishments would have been possible without the extensive base that comprise 
the journal’s friends, patrons and advisors. First and foremost, I would like to thank 
my executive editorial board—who I am lucky to consider as much as friends as fellow 
collaborators—Ethan Yates, Weitao Liu, Lauren White and Nicholas Arozarena, and 
our phenomenally-resourceful and dedicated Graduate Advisor, Peter Klapes, who 
helped make my transition from managing-editor to Editor-in-Chief smooth and 

A 
LE

TT
ER

 F
RO

M
 T

H
E 

ED
IT

O
R



7Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

 

worry-free. I extend a heartfelt thanks to our faculty advisor, Fr. Ronald Tacelli, S.J., 
for his steadfast support and continual encouragement from the journal’s inception 
in 2011 to its current form. We also are greatly indebted to the Boston College 
Philosophy Department—particularly the efforts of its Chair, Dermot Moran, both 
for his sagacious advice and his resounding alacrity in agreeing to an interview with 
our journal—as well as the Institute for the Liberal Arts and its Director Mary Crane, 
for their financial and legal support. Department administrators Paula Perry and 
Sarah Smith deserve a great word of thanks for their help in scheduling meeting spaces 
for the journal, and also for their essential expertise and unwavering advocacy on 
the journal’s behalf. Lastly, I would like to thank the wonderful efforts of our multi-
talented graphic designer Gregory Kacergis, without whom the present work would 
be impossible; or at least, not nearly the aesthetical masterpiece that it is today (we 
wish him all the best professionally and cannot express how much his presence will be 
missed). We also thank here the countless others whose work have made Dianoia what 
it is over the years, and you the reader, for your invaluable support and patronage of 
our journal. We wish you, your families and friends, health and safety as we continue 
the fight against COVID-19, and look forward to seeing you again in Issue VIII.

All the best and happy reading!

Sincerely, 

Noah Valdez, Editor-in-Chief  



8

δι
αν

οι
α

INTERVIEW WITH DERMOT MORAN
The Joseph Chair in Catholic Philosophy



9Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Interview with Dermot Moran

Dianoia conducted an interview with Dermot Moran, the Joseph Chair in Catholic 
Philosophy and current Chair of the Department of Philosophy. Joining Boston College in 
2017 after serving as the Gadamer Visiting Professor in 2015, he is currently the President 
of the International Federation of Philosophical Studies/Fédération Internationale des 
Sociétés de Philosophie (FISP) and Founding Editor of ‘The International Journal of 
Philosophical Studies’ (1993). Moran’s research areas include medieval philosophy 
(especially Christian Platonism) and contemporary European philosophy (especially 
phenomenology), and he is the author of nine monographs, fifteen edited books, and 
hundreds of journal articles and book chapters. 

Dianoia: Could you describe what phenomenology is and say a little about its 
founder Edmund Husserl?

Moran: Well first of all, I always emphasize that phenomenology is an approach 
rather than a strict method. Edmund Husserl, who is the founder of phenomenology 
and the Logical Investigations (1900), really wanted a strict method and a method 
that would underline all the other sciences. It would be a scientific method to beat 
all scientific methods, that was his idea. And of course, his famous slogan was “back 
to the things themselves” since he wanted a descriptive science that describes how 
our consciousness encounters the world in the manner that it presents itself. It was 
meant to be a transparent description of our experience in its full richness, but his 
methodology was very much contested even by his own students (e.g. Heidegger, 
Merleau-Ponty, and others), so his bracketing method, his method of pure 
description evolved. So I rather see phenomenology as still having this attention to 
the rich detail of our experience, but there are many different methodologies within 
an overall approach. But the overall approach is anti-speculative, anti-theorizing 
and just staying with the experiences, or phenomena in the broadest sense. So for 
example, how we experience an art object, how we interrelate with others in the life-
world, these are all things that we need to describe in—as Husserl would put it—an 
unprejudiced manner.  

Dianoia: What’s the distinction between Husserl’s pure phenomenology and what 
came with his followers in developing existential phenomenology, and who are some 
of the figureheads of each group?

Moran: Husserl had a huge number of very loyal followers, especially in the early 
phase, and they’re often called the realist phenomenologists since they wanted to 
have phenomenology as a kind of realist description of the world; they really tried 
to overcome pre-judgment and prejudice. But once you have Heidegger coming 
along—the founder of existential phenomenology—he’s the thinker that says there’s 
no such thing as pure description, that all description is interpreted, and thereby 
gives a hermeneutical or interpretive phenomenology. But he also wanted to expand 
Husserl's interest in the body and consciousness, i.e. the body and the subject, to a 



10

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

much broader interest in concrete human existence. That’s really what inspires Sartre, 
Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir to take up this notion of existence. Dasein literally means 
existence. So Heidegger is saying phenomenology is an analysis of Dasein’s being-in-
the-world, that becomes translated by the French as a description of our concrete 
existence. So I would say that you could find a lot of that in Husserl, especially in 
the later Husserl. And yet, it’s very difficult to tell whether Heidegger’s influencing 
Husserl or if it’s the other way around since both were in daily contact for ten years. 
Heidegger didn’t publish much and Husserl didn’t publish much from 1917 to 1927 
so we only have their notes, and consequently, it’s hard to tell. But both of them 
start moving more and more to the idea of historically-invented being-in-the-world, 
which is also limited by time since it is finite—so we are finite beings located in 
a specific situation. Right now we are in the middle of the 21st century, so that 
alters our engagement in the world. So those factors, that being-in-the-world shapes 
our encounter in the world and means that there’s no pure and direct, unmediated 
experience. Experience is always mediated by our beliefs, customs, habits, practices 
and so on. That’s the big shift I think. 

Dianoia: You mention “philosophical bracketing” or the epoché—how might we 
apply this and other phenomenological tools to everyday or quotidian phenomena?

Moran: Well, I think Husserl himself picked it up from the ancient skeptics, and he 
sees it as an archetypal philosophical practice, and the practice is that of withholding 
assent. That’s how the skeptics saw it. When you have two propositions that both seem 
to be true, let’s say the Democrats are doing a good job in handling the environment, 
and on the other side is, the Republicans are doing a very good job in keeping the 
economy open. These are not exactly contradictory, but they are two opposing views. 
And when you are faced with that, the ancient skeptics thought that in the absence 
of confirming evidence for one or the other we should withhold assent. So Husserl 
thinks that broadly speaking the epoché is a bracketing, or withholding of assent or 
a withdrawal of commitment, and that means we can take a much more detached 
look at our own experience. So that’s the really key point—he thinks that we need 
to take the non-participating observer stance to our own experience, and I think 
we can all benefit from that. Standing back from our immediate engagement with 
things, and then trying to take a stance above our experience and look at it. This 
is the job of the transcendental spectator, and even though other philosophers like 
Heidegger rejected the idea of a transcendental ego, they still are engaged in that 
kind of ‘sideways look on at our own existence.' When Heidegger says that most of 
our existence is caught up in everydayness, how do you know that unless you kind of 
step out of that experience and are looking at it from another perspective? So I think 
yes, the phenomenological epoché is a practice of disengaging from our immediate 
tendencies, beliefs, affirmations, confirmations and of adopting a much more non-
engaged scrutiny of our experience with the hope that it will yield a lot more genuine 



11Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Interview with Dermot Moran

evidence. 

Dianoia: In light of the coronavirus outbreak, how does our perception of the virus 
shape its impact on the world in both a social and political sense, and how might the 
phenomenological reduction (or any other phenomenological concepts) bring clarity 
to public discourse?

Moran: I’ve been thinking about that a lot because I actually have spent time in 
Wuhan—I was a visiting professor there three years ago, and have very good friends 
there who have given me firsthand information about their lives and about the 
changes in their lives. I think initially people in the West thought about this as a local 
problem in China, and there was a lot of misinformation initially; for example, that 
COVID-19 was no worse than the common flu, or that some would build immunity 
to it, but in fact it’s ten times more deadly than the seasonal flu. Furthermore, for the 
flu there’s a vaccine, but for COVID-19 there’s none. And so the authorities were very 
slow in moving forward, it was like a tidal wave starting in China and Korea, and then 
showing up in Italy, Spain, France and then the UK and America. So each country 
had time to see what was happening, and quite honestly, they should have moved 
earlier. But what it does show, and I think this is really from the phenomenological 
point of view, is that first of all we live in one common technological world. I mean 
this was a virus that was spread by air travel, this was spread by people using airplanes, 
and so, this was highly mobile because our societies are highly mobile. Secondly, it’s 
been interesting to see that many of the things that we thought belonged to our 
everyday life we just took so much for granted (so this a good example of the epoché). 
So we just took all of normal life for granted, completely. In other words, we are 
living in the natural attitude and we just assume things like public transport and 
restaurants being open, being able to visit friends, all of those things we just took for 
granted. And our everyday life that we thought was so boring and uninteresting is 
really vital. And we’re all missing it now, and so this is a chance for us to realize that 
this supposedly  inauthentic everyday natural life that we had isn’t just always there, 
but is a fragile human construct that’s threatened by things like this global pandemic. 
So we have to be very careful to guard our social realities, and to make sure that they 
come back. There’s big debates about opening public parks because people that live 
in crowded conditions don’t have public spaces to exercise in. But you also don’t 
want the public parks to be crowded, so there’s a fine balance to be drawn. But the 
reason parks were brought in during the 19th century was to provide people who 
lived in cramped urban conditions with public spaces to get exercise, to get fresh air 
and all of these things. I’ve started teaching Camus’ The Plague, and I had forgotten 
until the virus came along how Camus had extraordinary foresight and described 
exactly the situation that we’re in currently. I’ll just read you a small passage from 
The Plague, “once plague had shut the gates of the town, they had settled down to a 
life of separation, debarred from the living warmth that gives forgetfulness of all. In 



12

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

different degrees in every part of the town, men and women had been yearning for a 
reunion, not of the same kind for all, but for all alike ruled on it. Most of them longed 
intensely for an absent one, or for the warmth of a body, for love, or merely for the 
life and habit that they had endured. Some, often without knowing it, suffered from 
being deprived of the company of friends and from their inability to get in touch 
with them through the usual channels of friendship (e.g. letters, trains, and boats).” 
That’s kind of a short description of the loss of the everyday social contact that this 
brings, that Camus describes extraordinary well, and that the only response—the 
response of the doctor—is to do your job, to face up to your responsibilities and to 
try and do your part in restoring this human life as best as we can. 

Dianoia: When we eventually do return to normalcy, what lasting effects do you 
think that the coronavirus and social distancing will have on society?

Moran: I’ve been reading Giogio Agamben’s book The State of Exception, and it was 
written after 9/11 in 2005, and it was about the various forms of political and social 
control brought in allegedly as emergency circumstances, which become part of the 
new normal. And I was also reading Slavoj Zizek’s new book Pandemic!, and it says 
a lot of the same things that as philosophers we have to be careful of. It’s certainly 
true that many things are introduced as emergency measures and then they never go 
away again. The classic example is income tax—introduced as an emergency measure 
during the civil war to pay for it, and it’s never gone away because this was a great 
way of extracting money from the people. And one of the things that worries me 
most, and it’s always a two-edged sword, is that modern technological means of social 
control, which are largely done by using your phone’s geolocation, are being used 
very widely in China to monitor people’s movements. And yet, the good part of 
this is that it stops people who are in contact with the virus from spreading it any 
further. Google and Amazon are posing a similar thing here, so that you could get a 
text in the morning saying that you had been in contact with someone who had the 
virus and then you should quarantine. But in China it’s gotten to the point where 
they have to scan codes when they go into different buildings or when they go into 
certain streets, and you could be locked out if you’re on the list of people that’s 
been exposed. So you suddenly go into a society of total control, and that’s terribly 
worrying from the point of view of social and political liberties. But again, we have 
to face that all this information is out there, and if they wanted, the people running 
the Zoom platform could tell that the three of us are on their app now, extract what 
exactly we’re talking about, and they could even locate us from our phones—all of 
that information builds up. But virus tracing efforts need that information, so this 
is that double-edged sword that Heidegger talks about concerning technology—it’s 
created the framework inside which we live. We just have to be very careful that we 
know the essence of this technological enframing, and until we know what it’s doing 
to us in the long-term, we won’t really be able to get the right attitude towards it. 



13Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Interview with Dermot Moran

Clearly we can’t just be Luddites, but we also can’t blend completely into the security 
state as Agamben calls it. The long term impact will be this idea of the security state 
and ‘the state of exception’ that Agamben discusses. On the other side, we have to be 
aware of the people that are protesting any kind of a lockdown and gathering with 
their second amendment rights and their guns to say “nobody’s going to tell me what 
to do” (that’s a pretty American phenomenon by the way). But it is an example that 
comes from a deep-seated suspicion of anything having to do with the state, whether 
it be anarchist or libertarian in nature. The state is always repressive for these groups, 
so I think that at the end of the day we have to go somewhere in-between these two 
ideologies. It does raise all kinds of issues about political phenomenology, and this 
will lead us as a final point, it makes us focus on the nature of the life-world and how 
the life world is being mediated and structured by technological infringement. And 
they’re surely the central issues that Husserl and Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty were 
talking about. From that point of view I think phenomenology is totally relevant to 
our discussions today. 

Dianoia: You’re an active member in mediating the dialogue between continental 
and analytic philosophy. Can you explain the difference between these two camps?

Moran: Well I wrote an article on it one time saying that “Our Germans Are Better 
Than Your Germans,” because the origins of analytic philosophy are german-speaking 
philosophers like Carnap or others in the Vienna Circle. I say German because they 
spoke in German, wrote in German, they were either in Germany or Austria. Carnap, 
Schlick and the Vienna Circle generally moved into America and influenced others like 
Quine and A.J. Ayer. Analytic philosophy then grew out from that breed of German 
scientific thought of the 20th century whereas Husserl and Heidegger influenced 
people like Gadamer, Arendt, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Kristeva and the more 
European thinkers that you tend to associate with continental philosophy. So I don't 
like the terms continental and analytic, but I do think there are different tendencies 
between thinkers of the 20th century, and what split them politically was the war—
this much is clear. Phenomenology became associated with Nazi Germany though 
Heidegger, and actually, a lot of the Vienna Circle people were Jews who had fled the 
Nazi regime, so they were very hostile not just to Nazism, but to anything that they 
thought was associated with it—and that included Heideggerian phenomenology in 
particular. But in the 21st century, we have to realize that both methods are really 
intersecting; in fact, cognitive science these days is a mixture of both continental 
and analytical methods. And also it’s a lot to do with people’s interests. If you go 
back to Aristotle and Plato, Plato wrote dialogues, which were very literary products, 
and Aristotle wrote these more textbook style lectures. And that’s interesting too, 
continental people tend to be more interested in the arts and literature, and analytic 
philosophers often want to be piggybacking on science, mathematics, logic and so 
on. So I don’t like it when people think that one is better than the other, and I do 



14

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

think they cover different aspects of the human experience. So I like to see room for 
both, but of course, as we know, because of the very complicated forms of technical 
language that have developed in the traditions, there’s very little genuine dialogue 
between them and I've been at it for a long time. In the end, I decided that what’s 
been going on are parallel conversations. So rather than people talking to each other, 
they’re talking about each other in parallel conversations, and that’s about as best as 
we can do. 

Dianoia: Another one of your areas of specialization is medieval philosophy—what 
initially attracted you to the subject and can you fathom a scenario wherein it would 
be in dialogue with phenomenology? 

Moran: I was really trying to write a dissertation on Heidegger for my PhD in 
1976 when he died, and everybody said that there was this massive Gesamtausgabe 
of collected works coming out, and that it was supposed to be the second part of 
Being and Time with all of these manuscripts making current Heidegger research 
impossible. So now we’ve had one-hundred volumes of Gasamtausgabe and I'm not 
really sure it’s changed all that much because people still read Being and Time! But 
at the time I wanted to work on Heidegger, and when he died, my supervisor said 
I shouldn't really work on him. I had a background from my undergraduate days 
in medieval philosophy, and I knew Heidegger had. So I said I want to work on a 
Heideggerian theme (viz. the forgetfulness of being in the history of philosophy in 
the medieval period) and that’s what led me to Meister Eckhart. I discovered that 
one of Eckhart’s sources was John Scottus Eriugena,  on whom I eventually wrote my 
PhD. So, in lots of ways, I was kind of emulating Heidegger (who wrote on Thomas 
of Erfurt for his Habilitation) and writing about a medieval scholar and trying to 
answer contemporary questions. Of course, it made me kind of an object of suspicion 
both by the Heideggerians and the Medievalists, so it was hard for me to keep these 
two different pathways of research open and in dialogue with each other. A lot of 
the medieval people were philologists and classicists who really didn’t want to talk 
about anything after the Middle Ages, or bring in any ideas from Hegel or Heidegger, 
or whoever. And similarly, phenomenologists wanted to talk about contemporary 
issues, and didn’t want to talk out the history of philosophy. But it’s changing, Jean-
Luc Marion is an example of someone who’s written on both as well, or Claude 
Romano who was here this past semester as our Visiting Gadamer Professor. ◆

Conducted on April 20th, 2020.



15Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

δι
αν

οι
α

VIRTUE, SILENCING, AND PERCEPTION1

 ABHI RUPARELIA

Over the course of several influential articles, philosopher John McDowell 
describes the practical reasoning of the virtuous agent using an appeal to his 

distinctive perceptual abilities.2 McDowell argues that when such an agent deliberates 
about a course of action, he never sees any conflict between the demands of virtue and 
other competing non-virtuous considerations, because for him, the requirements of 
virtue silence the other competing reasons for action. This conception of “silencing” 
greatly puzzles modern scholars and has in recent years generated a vast amount of 
literature on the subject.3 While the idea itself seems to be aimed at providing an 
understanding of Aristotle’s account of virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics (hereafter 
referred to as the Ethics), McDowell offers a novel characterization in that he takes 
virtue to be some sort of superior perceptual capacity. Therefore, the aim of this essay 
is to critically analyze the notion of “silencing” as a condition or requirement for 
attaining virtue. To achieve this, I begin by briefly laying out Aristotle’s description 
of virtue in the Ethics. Second, I reconstruct McDowell’s understanding of virtue and 

1 I would like to thank Nancy Schauber, Karin Boxer, Will Reckner, Geoff Goddu, Javier Hidalgo, and Jackson 
LeViness for their helpful comments and insights on earlier versions of this paper.

2 McDowell “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?” (1978), “Virtue and Reason” (1979), “The Role 
of Eudaimonia in Aristotle’s Ethics” (1980).

3 Kieran Setiya “Is Efficiency a Vice?” (2005), Susan Stark “Virtue and Emotion” (2001), Jeffrey Seidman “Two 
Sides of Silencing” (2005), Karen Stohr “Moral Cacophony: When Continence is a Virtue” (2003), Anne 
Margaret Baxley “The Price of Virtue” (2007), Denise Vigani “Virtuous Construal: In Defense of Silencing” 
(2019), Neil Sinhababu “Virtue, Desire, and Silencing Reasons” (2016), R Jay Wallace “Virtue, Reason, and 
Principle” (1991), Garrett Cullity “The Context-Undermining of Practical Reasons” (2013), Sarah Broadie 
“Ethics with Aristotle” (1993), Attila Tanyi “Silencing Desires” (2012), Simon Blackburn “Ruling Passions: A 
Theory of Practical Reasoning” (2001), and Charles Starkey “On the Category of Moral Perception” (2006), 
among others.



16

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

what he takes to be the virtuous agent’s decision-making process. Third, I provide 
two interpretations of this “silencing” ability that have gained popularity in recent 
literature. Finally, I argue that neither interpretation is satisfactory because they (i) 
leave gaps in understanding the virtuous agent’s decision-making process, and (ii) go 
against the nature and the description of virtue as laid out in the Ethics.

Aristotle on Virtue 

In Book VII of the Ethics, Aristotle begins by laying out the four following character 
types: continence, virtue, incontinence, and vice.4 Continence and virtue are generally 
regarded as good and praiseworthy, but the former is less admirable than the latter. 
Similarly, incontinence and vice are considered to be base and blameworthy, but the 
former is less so than the latter.  For our purposes, we are primarily concerned with 
virtue and continence. 

In the Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes between the virtues of thought and the virtues 
of character. He considers the virtue of character to be some type of disposition 
resulting from habituation. He thinks that such a virtue does not arise in us naturally; 
rather, we are, by nature, able to acquire it.5 He further claims that we, as humans, 
already possess the capacity to become virtuous; however, in order to actualize this 
capacity, we need to activate our virtues. He explains this process of “activation” using 
the example of crafts (e.g. in order to become a skilled painter, we need to activate this 
skill by practicing painting habitually). Similarly, in order to become brave or just, 
we need to start by performing brave or just actions.6 In Book II, Aristotle provides 
us with what appears to be a definition of virtue:

Virtue, then, is a state that decides, consisting in a mean, the mean relative 
to us, which is defined by reference to reason, that is to say, to the reason 
by reference to which the prudent person would define it.7

This definition points to two important characteristics about the nature of virtue: 
1) For Aristotle, virtue represents a mean between two extremes, one of excess and 
the other of deficiency. Take, for instance, the virtue of courage. This virtue straddles 
a middle ground between recklessness (excess) and cowardice (deficiency). 2) For 
Aristotle, there is an important connection between prudence and virtue. That is, 
he takes prudence to involve some sort of deliberation in accord with reason, and 
based on this, understands virtue as the state involving correct reasons where correct 
reasons are those in accordance with prudence.8 

4 Nicomachean Ethics Book VII, 1145a15-1145b20; in addition to these, Aristotle also considers heroic or divine 
virtue as a condition of character. However, such a virtue is primarily attributed to Gods. Hence, it is beyond the 
scope of this paper.

5 Ibid, Book II – 1103a15-1103b25.
6 Ibid, Book II – 1103a15-1103b25.
7 Ibid, Book II -1107a1-5.
8 Ibid, Book VI – 114b20-30.



17Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Virtue, Silencing, and Perception

The case of continence is slightly more complicated than virtue. The continent person 
is similar to the virtuous person in that he always chooses and performs the actions 
in accordance with rationality and reason. Nonetheless, such a person possesses 
base appetites and is often tempted by them (and pained by their deprivation), but 
chooses not to give in. In other words, the continent person is someone who performs 
virtuous actions, but who finds them difficult, or has to struggle with competing 
inclinations.9 In contrast, the virtuous person acts with ease and without a need to 
overcome competing inclinations. 

Furthermore, the continent person stands in opposition to the incontinent person, 
who, because of the weakness of his will, proceeds to give in to his base desires. Such 
a person’s will is overpowered by his desires, causing him to act against reason.10 

Again, it is important to remember here that while the continent person acts in the 
same manner as the virtuous agent, the fact that he allows himself to be tempted by 
competing considerations suggests that he is, in some sense, morally deficient. 

McDowell’s Conception of Virtue

McDowell is primarily concerned with what constitutes a virtuous agent and separates 
him from the incontinent or the merely continent person. Since these are also the 
questions that Aristotle mainly concerns himself with in the Ethics, McDowell follows 
in Aristotle’s footsteps by beginning with the Socratic thesis that equates virtue with 
knowledge and uses it as a base to develop a more sophisticated account of virtue. 
He first considers the case of the non-virtuous agent as the incontinent person, and 
then moves on to the non-virtuous agent as the continent person.11 For McDowell, 
virtue is a sort of perceptual capacity. He thinks that there is a fundamental difference 
between the perceptions of the virtuous agent and the merely continent/incontinent 
agent. This difference is primarily what separates the virtuous person from the other 
two, and largely accounts for his nature. 

McDowell’s discussion on virtue as a type of knowledge is dependent upon his 
characterization of the latter as an ability to “get things right.”12 What he means 
by this is the ability to anticipate the needs/expectations of the situation and to act 
accordingly, which he calls “reliable sensitivity.”13 He further introduces the concept 
of “deliverances” of the reliable sensitivity and says that “[deliverances of reliable 

9 Ibid, Book VII – 1151a30-115b20.
10 Ibid, Book VII – 1151b21-1152a5.
11 When referring to the “non-virtuous” agent, McDowell appears to be pointing solely at the incontinent and the 

continent agents. This goes against Aristotle, who takes the continent, the incontinent, and the vicious person 
to be non-virtuous. Hence, it is not entirely clear, based on his paper, why McDowell does not understand 
the vicious agent to be non-virtuous. Perhaps one possible explanation might be that he does not consider the 
vicious person a moral agent at all (which is consistent with Aristotle), and hence ineligible for his discussion on 
agency and virtue.

12 McDowell “Virtue and Reason,” Pg. 331. 
13 Ibid, Pg. 331-32.



18

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

sensitivity] are cases of knowledge; and there are idioms according to which the 
sensitivity itself can approximately be described as knowledge.”14 By these lines, 
McDowell appears to suggest that the virtuous agent subscribes to some version of 
moral particularism, in that he understands the needs of a situation as dependent 
upon his perception of it rather than his deductive application of codifiable moral 
principles.15 He uses the example of a kind person to explain this, who knows what it 
is like to face a situation that requires him to be kind, independent of any reasons or 
justification for acting kindly. In this sense, such a sensitivity is a type of perceptual 
capacity.16 

Yet, McDowell notes an apparent problem in equating this perceptual knowledge 
with virtue:17 a non-virtuous person’s perception of a situation appears to match 
precisely the perception of a virtuous agent, yet, the former does not act in the same 
way as the latter. As he rightly notes:18 

But if a perception which corresponds to the virtuous person’s does not call 
forth a virtuous action from this non-virtuous person, then the virtuous 
person’s matching perception – the deliverance of his sensitivity – cannot, 
after all, fully account for the virtuous action which it does elicit from 
him.19 

This problem leads McDowell to think that there is something that he seems to be 
missing in his analysis of the virtuous person.

Part of this gap left by the problem above is addressed by Aristotle, who argues that 
the reason why the non-virtuous incontinent agent does not act in the same manner 
as the virtuous agent is because the former is affected by akrasia, or ‘weakness of will’. 
While ideally the perception of a non-virtuous (incontinent, in this particular case) 
and a virtuous agent should be the same, in reality, the incontinent agent’s perception 
is “clouded” or “unfocussed” by a “desire to act otherwise.”20 To understand this 
notion better, compare an akratic agent with someone suffering from a cataract. A 
cataract patient’s vision will be clouded, in the literal sense of the word, causing 
difficulties in viewing everyday objects and situations that would otherwise be clearly 
visible to the normal eye. Similar to this, the akratic agent also suffers, metaphorically, 
from a type of moral cataract, preventing him from identifying or choosing the 
right choice in a given situation. This account of akrasia works well for McDowell 
because it fills the gap left in the previous paragraph by treating the perception of an 

14 Ibid, Pg. 332.
15 Nancy Sherman’s “Aristotle's Ethics: Critical Essays” (Pg. 11).
16 McDowell “Virtue and Reason,” Pg. 332. 
17 Ibid, Pg. 333.
18 Implicit within this problem is Aristotle’s view that perceptual sensitivity is motivation enough for an agent to act 

upon this sensitivity. See NE 1147a20-35.
19 McDowell “Virtue and Reason,” Pg. 333.
20 Ibid, Pg. 334. 



19Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Virtue, Silencing, and Perception

incontinent agent as different from the virtuous agent. This “difference” results from 
the incontinent person’s failure to act virtuously because of the “defectiveness” in his 
reliable sensitivity (where this defect is a direct outcome of his akratic nature).

Having discussed the case of the non-virtuous incontinent agent, McDowell moves 
on to the non-virtuous continent agent. He rightly notes that for Aristotle, continence 
is distinct from virtue, but just as problematic as incontinence. This problematic 
nature arises because if someone needs to deliberate and to overcome a temptation 
to act otherwise, in a situation that demands of him that he act according to, say, 
temperance or courage, then he is simply continent, and not virtuous. On its face, it 
seems like a trivial difference; after all, why should the fact that the agent deliberated 
about a decision (or that he was tempted by a non-virtuous consideration), before 
going on to choose the right consideration, make him any less virtuous? McDowell 
claims that this question stems from a misunderstanding of the nature of virtue. That 
is, if we are to understand that the virtuous agent arrives at his judgment as to what 
he should do by weighing the right and the wrong reasons for action, and ultimately 
favoring the right one, the difference between continence and virtue becomes non-
existent. Consequently, we should not understand the virtuous agent’s ability to make 
decisions as a weighing of reasons.21 But if that is true, how, then, are we supposed to 
make sense of the decision-making process of a virtuous agent? 

The truly virtuous agent, McDowell argues, does not override or outweigh the 
reasons to act contrary to his reliable sensitivity, but silences them.22 This notion of 
silencing, and its difference from overriding or outweighing, is of great importance to 
McDowell’s characterization of virtue.  What exactly does this idea of silencing mean 
is a topic to be discussed in detail in the next section. For now, we are left with an 
important question: “How can one have a view of a situation in which considerations 
which would otherwise appeal to one’s will are silenced, but nevertheless allow those 
considerations to make themselves heard by one’s will?”23 In response, McDowell 
resoundingly claims that one cannot view a situation in which non-virtuous 
considerations are silenced, and yet, are simultaneously heard by one’s will. This 
demonstrates that it is wrong to think of the continent person as fully sharing the 
virtuous person’s perception of a situation.

What is Silencing? 

We now come to the most important part of the paper, namely the act of silencing 
itself. There are two standard interpretations of the act of silencing in contemporary 
literature: rational silencing and motivational silencing.24 As far as rational silencing 

21 Ibid, Pg. 332.
22 Ibid, Pg. 332.
23 Ibid, Pg. 335. 
24 Note that this dual-aspect interpretation is not McDowell’s own. Rather, the interpretation is credited to Jeffrey 

Seidman (2005), who understands McDowell’s account as involving two different versions of the act of silencing.



20

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

goes, it can largely be explained in cognitive terms, and deals with an agent’s beliefs 
about action in accordance with reason. Textual support in McDowell for this type 
of silencing is as follows:

[T]he relevant [ethical] reasons for acting, on occasions when they co-
exist with considerations that on their own would be reasons for acting 
otherwise, as, not overriding, but silencing those other considerations—as 
bringing it about that, in the circumstances, they are not reasons at all.25

I interpret these lines to mean that when a virtuous person is faced with the choice 
between different moral considerations, there are two possible ways in which he can 
perceive a situation: a) the non-virtuous considerations are silenced such that they 
stop being reasons for acting at all; therefore, such non-virtuous considerations stop 
being considerations (morally speaking, that is) at all and b) the competing non-
virtuous considerations are moral considerations, as far as the agent is concerned; 
nonetheless, they are so implausible, in that they go against the virtuous nature of the 
agent, that his will silences them and he never takes such considerations seriously—
let alone chooses them.

Under the type-a view of rational silencing, since the competing non-virtuous 
considerations are silenced, they stop being moral considerations. As a result, what 
the agent sees before him are some sort of non-moral considerations that exclude 
the need for application of normative principles. Hence, they will be irrelevant or 
meaningless to the agent, at least insofar as the situation at hand requires of him to 
make a moral judgement. 

 To understand the latter view of rational silencing, it might be helpful to compare 
silencing with Gary Watson’s distinction between mere desires and the desires that we 
value.26 Take, for instance, Watson’s example of the mother who has a sudden urge to 
drown her bawling child in the bath. This is a mere desire that the mother does not 
value. Hence, such a desire is not even taken seriously by the mother. Take, on the 
other hand, my desire to excel in my classes in order to become a better philosopher. 
This is an end that I truly and sincerely value. Hence, if we approach the type-b 
version of rational silencing from the lens of desiring and valuing, it becomes clear 
that the virtuous agent’s will silences the non-virtuous considerations such that the 
agent does not really value a consideration that goes against his virtuous nature.27 

All in all, the virtuous agent acting under both types of rational silencing will take 
himself to suffer no genuine losses in foregoing non-virtuous considerations.28 

25 McDowell, “The Role of Eudaimonia in Aristotle’s Ethics,” p. 102.
26 Watson (1975), “Free Agency.”
27 Ibid. 
28 There is, however, an exception to this – the so-called “tragic cases,” where the agent has no other acceptable 

course of action available; Seidman Pg. 70.



21Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Virtue, Silencing, and Perception

The second type of silencing, known as motivational silencing, entails that if a non-
virtuous consideration is motivationally silenced by an agent’s will, the agent will 
not be tempted to perform the wrong action. It is, however, not the case that the 
virtuous person would not like or obtain pleasure from the considerations that he 
does not choose. To explain this further, McDowell uses the example of a man who 
is faced with the dilemma of whether or not to sleep with his friend’s wife.29 Here, it 
is not the case that the virtuous person’s libido will be undemanding or that he will 
not enjoy the act of sleeping with someone. On the contrary, the virtuous agent is 
just as human as the next person. In fact, under the right circumstances, he would 
happily indulge in an act of sexual gratification available to him. However, in the 
current situation, “his clear perception of the requirement [of virtue] insulates the 
prospective enjoyment… Here and now, it [prospective enjoyment] does not count 
for him as any reason for acting in that way.”30

Both types of silencing, according to Seidman, go hand-in-hand for McDowell. That 
is, owing to the fact that there are no genuine losses on the part of the virtuous 
agent in failing to choose the non-virtuous reasons under rational silencing, none of 
the agent’s motivational energies are enticed in favor of non-virtuous considerations 
under motivational silencing. 

Objections and Responses

My first objection to McDowell’s argument (and Seidman’s interpretation in turn) 
is concerned with the way in which the two types of rational silencing function in 
relation to the virtuous agent’s perception. I shall address the type-b rational silencing 
first: if we are to understand the type-b rational silencing as the difference between 
merely desiring an end, and valuing that end, we run into conceptual problems about 
the notion of silencing in general. That is, the very process of valuing an end over 
merely desiring it involves the process of deliberation on the part of the virtuous agent, 
such that he assigns a higher degree of importance to the end he values, compared to 
the end he desires. If we are to understand this practice as “silencing,” such a practice 
turns out to be pretty similar to the act of overriding or outweighing reasons. Hence, 
under the value versus desire model, the difference between silencing and overriding 
is not entirely clear. Therefore, the type-b rational silencing is unsatisfactory.

Under the first type (i.e. competing non-virtuous considerations stop being moral 
considerations), if we are to accept rational silencing as construed, then we cannot 
praise the virtuous person for making the right choice competing non-virtuous 
considerations will not appear to the agent of type-a rational silencing as considerations 
at all (but even if they do, they will be meaningless to him). Hence, the only “choice” 
that the agent’s perception comes across, is the virtuous one. Strictly speaking, then, 

29 McDowell, “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?” Pg. 27.
30 Ibid, Pg. 27.



22

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

the agent does not actually perform the act of choosing. In making such a claim, I 
take it for granted that choice, or being able to choose, requires there to be more than 
one consideration available to the agent. Indeed, the way that choice is intuitively 
understood, it involves some sort of decision-making on the part of the agent. And 
for the process of decision-making to work, competing options must exist so as to 
account for such a process. As a result, if the virtuous agent’s perception views only 
one option as the potential course of action, he does not actually choose – rather, he 
accepts the given state of affairs as they manifest before him. Additionally, it is also not 
as if the agent could refrain from acting, insofar as refraining constitutes a “choice” 
for the agent, because both Aristotle and McDowell take the perceptual sensitivity of 
a virtuous person to be motivational. Hence, there can be no situation, barring any 
physical constraints, where the agent fails to act on the deliverances of his perceptual 
sensitivity. Thus, the agent does not really have a choice other than acting virtuously.

To understand my objection better, consider the following analogy: Imagine that 
there are four courses of action available to a virtuous person in making a decision. 
Behind option one, the person sees the action that appears right (virtuous) to him 
under the particular circumstances; the other three options, however, lead to different 
(non-virtuous) actions, but cannot seem to be chosen by the virtuous person because 
those three options cease to exist as potential courses of action.  Hence, while the 
person’s will can still acknowledge the presence of these non-virtuous paths, so to 
speak, his will would not register them as paths.31 Consequently, the agent does not 
even consider them as options because they cannot be acted upon in that particular 
situation. Thus, if the agent is successful in choosing the right option in this manner, 
it would hardly make sense to attribute to him the highest level of praise, that Aristotle 
and McDowell confer upon him, for his choice. This is because the right option was 
not chosen by the agent; rather it was taken for granted by him, as the only manner in 
which he could act - there was literally no other way he could have acted. The situation 
turns out to be different in case of the continent agent, in that he has a choice – 
namely the other competing non-virtuous options that he is tempted by, but chooses 
not to act upon them. As a result, the continent person is considered praiseworthy to 
the extent that he manages to overcome his inclinations to act otherwise and chooses 
the virtuous action.

Now, based on the analogy above, if we are to accept that a virtuous agent making 
a choice in this manner deserves some, but not such a high degree of, praise, and 
if one of the primary differences between a virtuous agent and a merely continent 

31 The difference between acknowledging something and registering it is slight, but important, nonetheless. I can 
acknowledge the presence of a human figure walking towards me from a mile away, but it is only after it comes 
closer that my brain can register it as John. Analogously, the virtuous agent may perhaps acknowledge the 
existence of non-virtuous considerations – he might know that they exist – but he surely does not know what 
they are. And in the absence of such crucial information, he may lack the appropriate resources to act upon 
them.



23Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Virtue, Silencing, and Perception

agent is the level of admiration that each receives then, it follows that there is no real 
difference between the virtuous and the continent agent as far as praise goes.

A potential counter-argument to my objection stems from the view that it is not the 
act of choosing one of the four options that one praises in a virtuous agent; instead, it 
is the ability of his perception to create a situation where non-virtuous options cease 
to be options at all. Furthermore, since this ability is achieved through the process of 
rigorous training, habituation, and transforming oneself from being merely continent 
to virtuous, it follows that this training is what turns out to be actually praiseworthy. 
In response, I argue that if we are to praise the agent for his disposition – the hard 
work he put into becoming virtuous – we are latching on to his past achievements. 
These achievements, while significant, are nonetheless irrelevant to the situation in 
question. Indeed, would it not seem counterintuitive to hold on to the one (and 
potentially the only) achievement someone has ever had (in this case, training), and 
to keep on praising them for a lifetime for simply acting in accordance with their 
training? 

Perhaps one may respond here that it does not seem so counterintuitive; after all, we 
regularly praise Olympic swimmers and chess grandmasters for their training, and 
regard it perfectly appropriate to do so. But such a response misses its mark because 
the training involved here is not in the right sense—being able to act morally is not 
akin to being able to hold one’s breath underwater for several minutes. Perhaps my 
point about the counter-intuitiveness of the scenario can be better understood with 
an example: if you witnessed our virtuous agent saving a child from drowning, would 
you rather praise him for his present actions, or for the hundreds of hours he spent in 
studying Aristotle and learning to become virtuous (not to mention his upbringing), 
that eventually led him to save the child? The former seems far more likely. Owing 
to these concerns, I find McDowell’s conception of rational silencing unsatisfactory.

My second objection, directed at motivational silencing, is concerned with how 
McDowell and Seidman characterize the virtuous agent: McDowell’s standards for 
virtue—the ability to not get tempted by competing considerations and to silence 
them—are too high and too stringent for ordinary human beings to uphold. As 
mentioned earlier, McDowell’s account of the virtuous agent is mainly inspired 
by Aristotle’s account in the Ethics. There, however, Aristotle advertises virtue 
as something that can be acquired by a normal moral agent though habituation. 
McDowell’s agent, on the other hand, appears to be some sort of super-human 
because his ability to silence is truly incredible. As Seidman rightly notes, it is one 
thing to argue that a virtuous agent does not take himself to have a good reason to 
sleep with a friend’s wife; however, it is another thing to claim that such a person does 
not even think of such a possibility.32 

32 Seidman, Pg. 76.



24

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Returning to our discussion of the virtuous person as a type of ‘superhuman,’ take, 
for instance, the slightly more obvious case of facing the enemy in a war. Seeing as the 
enemy is at the gates, you, the courageous soldier, march forward to the battlefield 
despite knowing that you are heavily outnumbered and unlikely to succeed. In this 
case, going by McDowell’s characterization, the idea of fleeing from the battle would 
not even occur to you. In fact, the thought of not seeing your family or loved ones 
ever again does not bother you, even for a second, in the face of duty. Is the virtuous 
agent, then, so righteous and perfect that the idea of performing a non-virtuous 
action never occurs to him? Does such a man only dream chaste dreams? As it 
stands, only full-fledged asceticism seems to fulfill the requirements of such a virtue. 
How can we then expect a normal individual to attain such a high level of moral 
piousness? Simon Blackburn rightly echoes these claims in Ruling Passions. He says:

The elements of the virtue tradition that ... [should] be jettisoned are 
those that rhapsodize over the special nature supposedly belonging to 
virtuous persons, such as their special immunity to temptation, or the way 
in which their virtue 'silences' all their other dispositions. For it seems to 
turn out that this god-like nature belongs to nobody, and represents an 
ideal to which nobody can approximate.33

Quite plausibly, then, McDowell’s standards for virtue are unreasonably high. This, 
however, is not to say that it is impossible for a normal individual to possess the 
ability of motivational silencing. In some, albeit very narrow cases, individuals do 
exhibit such a capacity. Take a politician campaigning for an office. If this person 
is reasonably sane, the idea of having his opponents killed does not even occur 
to him. Similarly, in my desperate attempt to win the cricket match, the idea of 
smashing the head of the opposite team’s bowler does not even occur to me. In this 
sense, the politician and I exhibit motivational silencing and are not tempted by 
the competing considerations of murder and assault. Nonetheless, there is a very 
narrow spectrum of cases where individuals exhibit such a behavior. To expect them 
to exhibit such a capacity in all their decisions, throughout their lives, would surely 
be asking too much of them. It is simply not how normal individuals think. Hence, 
McDowell’s conception of motivational silencing also turns out to be unsatisfactory. 
Neither interpretation of silencing turns out to be satisfactory because both of them 
leave several gaps in our understanding of virtue and go against the description of 
virtue as propounded by Aristotle in the Ethics. ◆

33 S Blackburn, Ruling Passions, Pg. 37.



25Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Virtue, Silencing, and Perception

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. 2nd ed. Indianapolis, IN: 
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2019.

Blackburn, Simon. Ruling Passions: a Theory of Practical Reasoning. Oxford: Clarendon 
Press, 2009.

McDowell, John, and I. G. McFetridge. “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical 
Imperatives?” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 52, no. 1 (September 
1978): 13–42.

McDowell, John. “Virtue and Reason.” Monist 62, no. 3 (1979): 331–50.

 McDowell, John. "The Role of Eudaimonia in Aristotle's Ethics." In Essays on 
Aristotle's Ethics, edited by Amélie Rorty, 359-76. Oakland, CA: University of 
California Press, 1980.

Seidman, Jeffrey. “Two Sides of Silencing.” The Philosophical Quarterly 55, no. 218 
(2005): 68–77.

Sherman, Nancy, ed. Aristotle’s Ethics: Critical Essays. Lanham, MD: Rowman & 
Littlefield, 1999.

Watson, Gary. "Free Agency." In Agency and Answerability: Selected Essays, 13-32. 
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004.



26

δι
αν

οι
α

THE EPISTEMIC INJUSTICE OF 
EX CONTRADICTIONE QUODLIBET

SHERRY TSENG

The principle of ex contradictione quodlibete stipulates that from contradiction, 
all propositions follow. From this, all explode into triviality; hence, the aversion 

towards contradiction. However, our social selves are mired with inconsistency and 
contradictions and identities built on a spectrum. The assumption of triviality from 
contradiction in formal logic makes it such that the contradictions found within 
natural language on our social identities equally trivializes those contradictory 
aspects, and thereby, inflicts an epistemic injustice. 

I argue that if natural language is to be formalized, then there exists a moral imperative 
to defer to paraconsistent logic, specifically in cases of linguistic inconsistency relevant 
to aspects of social identity. The conditionality of the claim proves important: I do not 
defend the assertion that natural language can be formalized—that is a philosophical 
and technical anthology in its own right. Rather, I would like to undertake the 
normative project of highlighting what I take to be a necessary condition for the 
formalization of natural language. The argument is as follows: the rejection of 
inconsistency denies the expression of social experiences lying outside the binary. It 
presupposes a singularity of social experience, and in assuming this, inflicts epistemic 
injustice. To a further extent, this jeopardizes social justice and political freedom via 
its hindrance to the dialogical basis of democracy. In its acceptance of inconsistency 
without triviality, we ought to accept paraconsistent logic, understood under a larger 
framework of logical pluralism, as a strong antidote to the harms outlined above. 



27Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Ex Contradictione Quodlibet

The urgency of this demand emerges from the significant overlap between formal 
and Boolean logic with the implications of the former largely carrying over to the 
latter. The premises of big data and artificial intelligence, grounded in Boolean logic, 
have their linguistics subsumed under natural language processing (and thereby 
formal logic). This trend persists even as developments in the field have shifted from 
rule-based algorithms to statistical models and vector representations. Through its 
adoption of formal logic’s views on inconsistency, the future of technology has then 
rendered itself vulnerable to these aforementioned harms, and by way of algorithmic 
learning, will only experience its problems perpetuated and compounded further. 

The essay begins in §I with an introduction of epistemic injustice and its associated 
harms, of which I specifically focus on illocutionary silencing. With these conceptual 
resources, §II demonstrates how the assumption of triviality as a consequence of 
contradiction inflicts epistemic injustice in the form of illocutionary silencing. §III 
continues by offering a positive solution in the form of paraconsistent logic, and 
though accounts of this form of logic are wildly disparate—tied only by the common 
thread of non-explosion—I believe that this one thread is a moral commitment 
necessary to make. 

§I Epistemic Injustice

Introduced by Miranda Fricker (2007), epistemic injustice is an injustice arising from 
dissimilarities in individual and collective epistemic resources. Fricker then proceeds 
to divide this into two camps: testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. 

1. Testimonial Injustice: “wherein a speaker receives an unfair deficit or credibility 
from a hearer owing to prejudice on the hearer’s part.” (Fricker 2007, 9)

Patricia Williams, a professor at Columbia University Law School, demonstrates a 
paradigmatic case of this in her book The Alchemy of Right and Race, wherein she 
recounts a personal, anti-black, racist experience.  Yet, upon retelling this event, she 
would often disbelieve herself—a consequence perhaps in no small part attributable to 
the prejudicial stereotypes of African Americans as “liars” or “paranoid,” consequently 
leading Fricker to discern that she has suffered an instance of testimonial injustice. 

2. Hermeneutical Injustice: “wherein someone has a significant area of their social 
experience obscured from understanding owing to prejudicial flaws in shared 
resources for social interpretation.” (Fricker 2007, 148)

Sexual harassment is a common example of this second form of epistemic injustice. 
Prior to its conceptualization, many of those victimized lacked the epistemic resources 



28

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

to articulate their experiences, which were then previously rendered unintelligible. 
Instead, their discomfort would be ‘interpreted’ as overly prudish or lacking in sense 
of humor, henceforth exemplifying a hermeneutical injustice. 

Of note here is the distinction between hermeneutical and testimonial injustice 
in the collectivity of epistemology. In the hermeneutical form, the injustice arises 
from a deficit in the shared pool of knowledge, whereas in testimonial form, the 
injustice may be rooted in a singular repository of it. In the example given for the 
hermeneutical, society lacks the conceptual resource of sexual harassment itself—an 
absence that points to a structural and collective inequity in epistemology. Conversely, 
in the case of testimonial injustice, Williams’s example does not causally trace (at 
least necessarily) to a flaw in a shared resource, but instead, may be attributable to 
one individual’s racist beliefs and attitudes. And still, the two forms are nonetheless 
deeply intertwined: the hermeneutical may lead to the testimonial and the testimonial 
may be a manifestation of the hermeneutical. What follows from these injustices are 
harms of both an epistemic and pragmatic nature. The excerpt below focuses on one 
harm of illocutionary silencing, as proffered by Rae Langston: 

“If you are powerful, you sometimes have the ability to silence the speech of the powerless. 
One way might be to stop the powerless from speaking at all. Gag them, threaten them, 
condemn them to solitary confinement. But there is another, less dramatic but equally 
effective way. Let them speak. Let them say whatever they like to whomever they like, but 
stop that speech from counting as an action…” (Langton 1993, 299)

Illocutionary silencing is the refusal to admit a proposition’s illocutionary force, 
or that which is constituted by the words themselves.1 It nullifies the performative 
force of the words, disallowing the utterances from passing on their intended 
meaning, thus following from epistemic injustice’s emerging inequities. In the case 
of Williams, her attempt to describe this racist encounter was negated—her words 
stripped of their force in invoking a case of discrimination. Similarly, the inability to 
articulate a grammar for sexual harassment may count as a form of silencing insofar 
its conceptual deficit precludes the description of the experience. Furthermore, the 
reactions to circumlocutionary attempts to do so effectively impedes the victims’ 
ability to promulgate those experiences, and resultingly, commits the injustice 
(whether testimonial or hermeneutical) all the same.    

To conclude, epistemic injustice is the sort of injustice that emerges from differences 
in epistemic stature. For the remainder of this paper, I use this as the pedagogical 
framework to make sense of the injustice enacted by classical formal logic and its 
insistence on consistency. 

1 For more on this, see Austin’s How to Do Things With Words (1962)



29Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Ex Contradictione Quodlibet

§II Ex Contradictione Quodlibet’s Epistemic Injustice 

In a keynote lecture delivered at the 8th Annual Philadelphia Trans-Health 
Conference in 2009, writer and trans-bi activist Julia Serano stated, “[t]here is simply 
no more effective way of hurting me than trans-invalidating me.” In what follows, 
I argue that the consequence of triviality from contradiction clears the path to such 
harms of invalidation through its enactment of epistemic injustice. 

But first, a brief note on the specifics of ex contradictione quodlibet. While the path 
from contradiction to triviality may differ, one such form famously derived by David 
Lewis takes the following structure: 

“Suppose  P and not-P

Then  P  by Simplification,

whence   P or Q  by Addition,

  not-P  by Simplification again,

and finally Q  by Disjunctive Syllogism.”

According to this argument, any statement Q follows from the premise of P and not 
P. Some may object to this proof in that entailment needs to do more work than 
simply truth-preservation: it also needs to retain some meaningful connection or 
relevance between the two propositional statements. Regardless of how one argues 
ex contradictione quodlibet, the central point remains: contradiction explodes into 
triviality. 

It is important to take note of what the definition and consequences of what it 
means to be trivial, the first of which being that triviality could be taken as entailing 
everything. This, however, draws from the principle of ex contradiction quodlibet, 
proving to be circular reasoning at best, and because of this, cannot be taken freely 
as the definition. Second, triviality is that which is uninteresting or insignificant. 
Essential to this definition is the assumed goal of logic and epistemology to uncover 
truths, or, at the very least, proximate truths about the world. There are certain 
propositions more interesting than others and the rejection of contradiction from ex 
contradictione quodlibet implies the undesirability of triviality. For the remainder of 
this paper, I adopt this latter definition. 



30

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Having adopted this understanding of triviality as ‘that which is uninteresting or 
insignificant,’ it is now possible to move on to the discussion of inconsistency’s 
intertwinement with epistemic injustice—beginning with an example of gender 
queerness. Consider the following statement: 

(A) I am a girl. 

(B) I am not a girl. 

Let’s say that Alex utters these two statements in response to a question asking them 
to identify their gender. Alex identifies as genderqueer.2 To them, both (A) and (B) 
are true.3 Given how they identify, Alex is both a girl and not a girl.  

By formal logic’s adoption of ex contradictione quodlibet, however, Alex’s utterances 
make it such that each and every statement can follow. They are all trivial, and thus, 
devoid of importance. From this, epistemic injustice then enters into the picture. 
With their speech now made trivial, Alex’s credibility as a knower and their ability 
to make significant contributions to the conversation on genderqueerness is cast out, 
thereby constituting a case of testimonial injustice. It is also arguable that Alex also 
experiences hermeneutical injustice since the mutually exclusive gender binary does 
not provide the conceptual resource to capture Alex’s experience of gender, and on 
this count, their social experiences are effectively obscured. 

The path to illocutionary silencing is not far off. In this case, Alex’s illocutionary act is 
the very proclamation of their gender identity as a girl and not a girl. In keeping with 
ex contradictione quodlibet and its aversion towards triviality, only one of these two 
statements can be true, which of course has the negative consequence of disallowing 
their entire illocutionary force. By having their proclamation fall upon deaf ears, 
Alex experiences both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, and thus, becomes 
silenced. 

Despite however much the act of silencing in itself is negative, the scope of these 
harms extends even further with repercussions for both social justice and political 
freedom. Concerning social justice, when one silences the speech of the powerless, 
they favor a specific form of discourse—that of the powerful. This perpetuates 
the further marginalization of the powerless through the determination of what 
sort of gender proves significant, which nullifies Alex’s own words as unimportant 
given their contradiction. On this account, epistemic injustice is a manifestation 

2 This is understood in the sense that their gender identities are maintained by some combination of masculinity 
and femininity, or neither.

3 For the remainder of this paper, I will assume Alex identifies themselves using the pronouns “they/them/theirs.” 
It may change, of course, and this is by no means an assumption that all genderqueer people need use such 
pronouns.



31Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Ex Contradictione Quodlibet

of social injustice stemming from the rendering of the powerless as the speechless.  
Furthermore, taken as a collective, the experiences of all those who identify as 
genderqueer are similarly silenced, paving the way for injustice to affect an entire 
social class of people like Alex. 

Concerning political freedom, Fricker makes this a point in referencing Phillip Petit’s 
contestability criterion. He states that a functioning deliberative democracy needs 
to meet the three conditions for contestation, which include: a “potential basis for 
contestation,” a “channel or void available by which decisions may be contested,” 
and a “suitable forum in existence for hearing contestations.”4 Being illocutionary 
silenced, however, disables speakers from contestation. Because Alex’s identity was 
not taken as it was intended in meaning, the immediate jump to the consequence 
of triviality as stipulated by ex contradictione quodlibet strips Alex of their ability 
to contest this conclusion. From this, they are excluded from securing a certain 
threshold of political freedom, which Petit stipulates as necessary for a deliberative 
democracy. 

What does this mean for technology?

Returning to my original motivation, the basis of this paper resides in the substantial 
overlap between formal logic and the logic underlying computer science and artificial 
intelligence. It is this overlap and the permeation of technology into nearly every 
crevice of our lives that lends an urgency to my demand to attempt a rectification, 
or at the very least, acknowledgment of the inflicted epistemic injustice of ex 
contradictione quodlibet. In particular, by accepting formal logic as prior to other 
epistemic sources, as technology so often does, its stance on contradiction—that 
triviality necessarily follows—then holds the power to dictate our understanding of 
the world. By taking the principle as an authority on truth, the ontological may end 
up following the logical. Our social constructions of the world would be determined 
by a framework strictly adhering to a dichotomous binary, such that it creates a world 
where genderqueerness would not exist a priori. 

In taking into account how the field makes sense of this, it is important to note that 
recent developments in the field have increasingly shifted from rule-based algorithms 
to statistical models; in particular, vector semantics have exploded in popularity 
in building computational models of language.5 This largely consists in word 
association: for example, the definition of the word “bank” is determined depending 
upon whether the sentence contains words alluding to the likes of “money” or “river.” 
Following this, that the bulk of the two formalized propositions of (A) and (B) are 

4 Pettit, 186-187. 
5 For a brief overview on how vector semantics works, see the following: https://medium.com/@ram.analytics1/an-

introductory-notes-on-vector-semantics-tf-idf-model-and-a-toy-implementation-9046198bf7d and https://web.
stanford.edu/~jurafsky/li15/lec3.vector.pdf



32

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

identical indicates that they are on the same broad topic of someone being something. 
Much like the case with many other prepositions and conjunctions, the “not” is not 
always captured in building the meaning of the proposition.6 

While negation systems have not become all-around powerful enough to build the 
meaning of the proposition on their own, the scope of this paper applies to cases on 
the margins of error where the negation of “not” is able to be captured (the choice of 
which made on account of the fact that the field is headed in that direction). Yet, as 
I have argued, accommodation of negation in a formal setting leads to instances of 
epistemic injustice.   

§III The Solution: Paraconsistent Logic 

To the above, I believe that paraconsistent logic is a strong contestant as a positive 
solution to the formal infliction of epistemic injustice, its defining characteristic being 
its rejection of ex contradictione quodlibet. Since its inception, a number of influential 
strands have emerged. For example, among the first was Stanislaw Jaśkowski’s 
discussive logic, where truthfulness is determined by the totality of assertions posited 
by a single subject. Graham Priest’s “Logic of Paradox” introduced a three-valued 
logic, the third being both true and false, and Newton Da Costa presented logics of 
formal inconsistency (isolating the instances of inconsistency), which has since been 
expanded upon by many others, such as Walter Carnielli and Marcelo Coniglio. For 
the remainder of this section, despite citing several of these logics as solutions to the 
problems of epistemic injustice, I would like to remain indifferent on which of these 
specifically proves most favorable. 

To reiterate, the problem with ex contradictione quodlibet is that it assumes Alex’s 
utterances, technically contradictions in formal logic, do not matter. Priest, however, 
maintained that inconsistent theories did not necessarily lead to triviality, citing 
Bohr’s theory of the atom. Alex’s utterances of (A) and (B) are not inconsistent, but 
from the standpoint of the listener, it would absurd to argue that this then makes 
their statements insignificant—if anything, it is the conjunction of the two that 
makes their speech especially relevant.  

One might object here, pointing to the goal of logic to approximate the truth. 
What I have presented may appear as circular in that Alex’s gender identification 
indicates a non-trivial, but inconsistent theory. Yet, the existence of a non-trivial, but 
inconsistent theory is also what allows Alex to identify the way that they do. To this, 

6 For applied progress in the field, see: Mehrabi, Saeed et al. “DEEPEN: A negation detection system for clinical 
text incorporating dependency relation into NegEx,” Journal of Biomedical Informatics 54 (2015): 213-219 and 
Wu, Stephen et al. “Negation’s Not Solved: Generalizability Versus Optimizability in Clinical Natuarl Language 
Processing,” PLOS One (2014), accessed from https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.
pone.0112774



33Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Ex Contradictione Quodlibet

I take on the assumption that gender identity is something that is self-promulgated 
rather than externally imposed, well within the right of an individual to proclaim 
as theirs as it fosters a knowing self-consciousness capable of validating their own 
experience.7 

Counter to classical first-order logic, paraconsistent logic can accommodate the 
contradiction to uphold the significance of Alex’s words. For example, the many-
valued logics Priest proposed gives space to inconsistent and non-trivial theories. The 
truth-value of “both true and false” creates a third dimension of truth-evaluation 
that keeps the relation from exploding into triviality. The consequences of this for 
Alex are substantial: by not having their words trivialized, their words are therefore 
legitimized. The admission of inconsistency erases the inherent bias within the 
traditionally binary logical system that obscures their social experience. This, in turn, 
deflects the harms of illocutionary silencing and the formal inflictions of testimonial 
and hermeneutical injustice. 

Still, one might consider another potential interpretation of the apparent paradox 
posed by Alex’s utterances of (A) and (B)—namely, what if this is just a matter of 
language? The epistemic injustice would not be located in the words themselves, but 
in linguistic conflation. In the case of Alex, one might argue that their utterances of 
(A) and (B) reflect a variation in the sense of the term “girl” itself, with one being 
biological and the other social. 

While this may be so, the concern assumes a direct causality where thought is prior 
to language, and hence, the knowledge of two distinguishable senses proves sufficient 
enough to cast aside this juxtaposition, This, however much it would reconcile the 
problem, cannot be freely granted. Work in philosophy, linguistics and psychology 
demonstrates the profound influence of language on thought, whereby some like 
Donald Davidson, for example, claimed that belief states emerged from public 
linguistic interaction such that thought and language work in tandem. Psychologist 
Lera Boroditsky argues further that grammatical gender strongly sways the descriptive 
attributes of an object,8 which when taken with Davidson’s thesis, strongly suggests 
that linguistic resources may affect our cognitive understandings. The same can be 
said of formal resources: as mentioned earlier, the priority of formal logic may lead to 
an embedding of the binary into our cognitive framework. 

In fact, the linguistic aspect might compound the problem of epistemic injustice 
in formalized language, not even admitting a difference in the biological and the 
social senses. By way of the formal properties of the term “girl,” the biological sense 

7 This derives from strands of the Kantian tradition emphasizing self-knowledge and self-conception.
8 See: Boroditsky, Lera, “How Does our Language Shape the Way We Think?” accessed from https://www.edge.org/

conversation/how-does-our-language-shape-the-way-we-think



34

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

is inherently conflated with the social, which may result in further iterations of the 
harm (if not also a further narrowing of the hermeneutical resources). 

To this, paraconsistent logic may again play the role of a remedy. Admission of (A) 
and (B) as contradictory, but non-trivial, allows for both the biological and social 
senses to hold true. The use of adaptive logics, for example, which offers severance 
to contact, accounts for internal inconsistency within a single subject. By adapting 
to different situations, the word “girl” takes on different meanings according to 
contextual clues and background knowledge, such as Alex’s intentions and the very 
idea of gender queerness. By this, it allows for both senses to be true, but also admits 
the term in the same sense with respect to the context of an expanded knowledge of 
genderqueerness. 

I have made the claim that paraconsistent logic offers a fruitful response to the 
challenges posed to formal logic by inconsistent, but non-trivial theories and 
linguistics. But it is possible to take the argument even further: not only does 
paraconsistent logic do such work, but it also proves necessary in order to properly 
convey meaning in formalized language. All of this is to say that the logic itself must 
not dictate meaning, but rather that, meaning must lead to its formalization. The 
fact that inconsistency permeates our world must be reflected in formalized language. 
Applications of paraconsistent logic are growing in data and knowledge bases (Grant 
2000), isolating inconsistent material so as to simultaneously admit the two nodes 
of inconsistency. However, interest in such must be acted upon for the purpose of 
retaining meaning and preventing epistemic injustice. 

One last point to be made on my argument: formal logic as it applies to natural 
language fails normatively, but not necessarily, formally. From the standpoint of 
logical argumentation, classical first-order logic does indeed succeed. Furthermore, it 
must also be noted that it does not inflict epistemic injustice in all cases: when I utter 
(A) and (B), one is necessarily true and the other necessarily false on the basis of how 
I identify my gender identity. Classical formal logic succeeds in my case. However, its 
failure to represent Alex’s social experience according to that by which they identity 
indicates that we ought not to take it as an omniscient authority over truth.

The argument I have set forth here is not meant to discredit the standing of formal 
logic in its entirety, but rather, to elucidate its futility under certain contexts. The 
claim is meant to provide a normative approach to opening the door to logical 
pluralism. First-order logic need not be discredited in its totality, but its scope should 
be limited in its application and its position ceded to other logical systems (viz. as 
paraconsistent logic). 



35Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Ex Contradictione Quodlibet

Concluding Remarks

In this essay, I have shown that paraconsistent logic serves as a positive solution to 
the epistemic injustice and associated harms inflicted by classical formal logic in its 
insistence on ex contradictione quodlibet. In particular, because formal logic stipulates 
a mutually exclusive true-false dichotomy, application of it effectively invalidates 
speech and information. In cases of genderqueerness, this leads to serious threats in 
our abilities as epistemic agents as well as in the broader picture of social justice and 
political freedom. That paraconsistent logic may be a promising logic proves so on 
account of its acceptance of inconsistency without the consequence of triviality, and 
its ability to represent the actual character of propositional meaning in a formalized 
language. As the future of AI is intrinsically bound to formal logic, the consequences 
of epistemic injustice will only become more evident and tangible lest we adopt 
some form of paraconsistent logic and adhere to logical pluralism. Accordingly, our 
fundamental view of formal logic must be tweaked and reevaluated in light of the 
normative and moral concerns presented previously. ◆

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Austin, John L. How to Do Things with Words, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. 

Dotson, Kristie, “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing,” 
Hypatia 26, no. 2 (2011): 236-257. 

Fricker, Miranda, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford: Oxford 
University Press, 2007. 

-- “Epistemic justice as a condition of political freedom?” Synthese 190, no. 7 (2013): 
1317-1332. 

Hornsby, Jennifer and Langton, Rae, “Free Speech and Illocution,” Legal Theory 4 
(1998): 21-37. 

Langton, Rae, “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 4, 
no. 22 (1993): 293-330. 

Mizraji, Educardo, “Vector Logic: A Natural Algebraic Representation of the 
Fundamental Logical Gates,” Journal of Logic and Computation 18, no. 1 (2008): 
97-121. 

Norvig, Peter and Russell, Stuart J., Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Upper 
Saddle River: Pearson Inc., 2009.



36

δι
αν

οι
α

SOUND AS SILENCE:
Nothingness in the Music of Anton Webern and 

John Cage

CHENYU BU

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity 
before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity 
of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am 
terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.1

—Blaise Pascal, Pensées

1. INTRODUCTION

Ever since the rise of modern science, the world has no longer been experienced 
as an ‘enchanted garden,’ where nature was meaningful and governed by intrinsic 
value-filled orders. Evoked by this disenchantment with the world, the senses of 
loneliness and homelessness are well-captured in French philosopher Blaise Pascal’s 
writings, which—centuries later—are escalated further by existential ideology’s 
disenchantment with being. In Being and Nothingness, inspired by the question 
concerning being raised in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, Sartre presents 
nothingness as the foundation for being and the origin of its nihilation, i.e. the 
non-being. The experience of nothingness makes possible being’s encounter with 
its non-being through the consciousness of freedom. The realization that there is 
nothing other than the nothingness separating being from non-being is the source of 
forlornness—anguish2 in Sartre’s terminology—inherent to being itself.

1 Blaise Pascal, and Thomas Stearns Eliot, Pascal's Pensées; Introduction by TS Eliot, (EP Dutton), 1958.
2 Charles B. Guignon, and Derk Pereboom, Existentialism: Basic Writings, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 325.



37Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Sound as Silence

The notion of the silence of the infinite space invoked by Pascal, however, sheds light 
upon a broader interpretation of Sartrean nothingness beyond the paradigm of being; 
namely, to the world of sound. In this essay, I extend the notion of nothingness to 
silence in contrast with sound and discuss silence as an act of expression and artistic 
interrogation in contemporary classical music. I propose beginning our discussion 
with a reconstruction of Sartre’s deduction for nothingness through a regressive 
course of arguments that traces back to being’s relation to the world. From there, I 
provide an exposition of sound based on the concept of a total sound-space3—bound 
by our pure auditory experience while silence as the non-being of sound originates 
from Sartrean nothingness. I then distinguish between absolute and relative silence, 
being primarily concerned with the latter, and further explicate the relation of sound 
to silence as analogous to that of being to non-being. Observing, of course, that 
varying techniques in music approach silence differently, I focus specifically on 
contemporary repertoires and analyze the role of silence in the third movement of 
Five Pieces for Orchestra by Anton Webern and 4’33” by John Cage as an embodiment 
of nothingness in the sound-space.

2. NON-BEING AND THE ORIGIN OF NOTHINGNESS

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre introduces his discussion of being with the 
recognition that being—as the totality “man-in-the-world”4—is a synthetic relation 
between man and world.5 This relation can only be established in the being by a 
self-interrogating question,6 but even the question presupposes both “a being who 
questions and a being [that] is questioned,”7 and an expected reply from the being 
in question of either an affirmation of yes or a negation of no (hence, the question 
itself permits the possibility of a negative reply).8 In the case of being, such a negation 
would imply the objective existence of a non-being, that is, an absence of a synthetic 
self-relation between being and the being-in-the-world, be it non-knowing with the 
interrogative attitude, non-existence of a transcendent being, or the non-being of 
limitation.9 The permanent possibility of non-being conditions the inquiry about 
being by limiting its reply (i.e. being is but nothing outside of being, and is, therefore, 
encompassed with non-being). 

The negation is not merely a quality of judgement following a pre-judicative attitude, 
but rather, a consequence of the apprehension of nothingness that always appears 
3 The phrase “total sound-space” refers to John Cage’s discussion of sound: John Cage, Silence: lectures and writings, 

(Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 9.
4 Charles B. Guignon, and Derk Pereboom, Existentialism: Basic Writings, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 310.
5 Ibid, Pg. 310.
6 The term “being” here refers to Heidegger’s Dasein in Being and Time, i.e. the being to whom the meaning of 

being is concerned: Charles B. Guignon, and Derk Pereboom, Existentialism: Basic Writings, (Indianapolis: 
Hackett, 2001), 216-217.

7 Guignon and Pereboom, Existentialism: Basic Writings, 310.
8 Ibid, Pg. 310.
9 Ibid, Pg. 311. 



38

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

within the limits of expectation.10 For instance, a café is full positivity by itself, but 
when Sartre enters it with the expectation of meeting Pierre there only not to find 
him, the café recedes into nothingness as the undifferentiated ground in his search 
for Pierre.11 In seeking Pierre out, Sartre adopts the attitude of interrogation in 
expectation of one reply of two possibilities; that is, the presence or the absence of 
Pierre such that nothingness is not subjective, but rather, a “real event” objectively 
grounding the negation. Therefore, nothingness is the origin and foundation for the 
negation.

The negation presupposed by the question concerning being necessitates the objective 
existence of nothingness. Nothingness, however, is neither causa sui—since it does 
not nihilate itself—nor derived from being (which in its own right possesses full 
positivity and lacks structure, thereby making it non-relational to nothingness). From 
this deduction it follows that nothingness originates only from the being for whom 
the nothingness of being remains in question.12 In the state of self-detachment, the 
being whose questions could nihilate nothingness in relation to himself disassociates 
from the causal series, and then nihilates himself from nothingness anticipating the 
possibility of non-being from its own being.13 In other words, nothingness comes to 
things through their own being, which then, logically, means that their nothingness 
must belong to them.

3. SILENCE AS NON-BEING OF SOUND

Given that being is such that nothingness comes to the world as the origin of its 
own non-being, a parallel relation can be reasoned to the auditory world, wherein 
nothingness can be elicited from sound as the origin of silence. To begin with, sound 
exists as a particular relation to the total sound-space, bound by our pure auditory 
experience. The relation of a particular sound to the sound-space is defined by five 
specific determinants: frequency (pitch), amplitude (loudness), overtone structure 
(timbre), duration, and morphology (how the sound begins, goes on, and dies 
away).14 Since even one alteration of at least one of the five determinants changes 
how sound is perceived, the relation of sound to the sound-space must be fluid. 
Therefore, sound could be regarded as a continuum within the total sound-space for 
which the five determinants are limited by our own sense of audibility. 

Now that sound has been presented as a relation to the sound-space, a question 
concerning sound—corresponding to the question concerning being—could be 
formulated as follows: is there any five-determinant combination that can determine 

10 Ibid, Pg. 313. 
11 Guignon and Pereboom, Existentialism: Basic Writings, 316.
12 Ibid, Pg. 319.
13 Ibid, Pg. 320.
14 John Cage, Silence: lectures and writings, 9.



39Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Sound as Silence

a particular sound in relation to the sound-space? Following the deduction, the 
question itself permits a reply that entails the possibility of a negation: no, such a 
relation does not exist. What gives rise to such a negation is silence, i.e. the sound 
lacking the five-determinant relation to the sound-space. In the auditory world, 
this negation implies the objective existence of silence, and it thus follows that 
sound encompassed with silence in that sound—as a continuum— is defined by its 
(changing) relation to the sound-space (but nothing outside of it). Hence, silence 
is the non-being of sound with three possible forms: the non-being of knowing if a 
relation exists, the possibility of non-being of the sound in question, and the non-
being of limitation.15 As previously discussed, a negation is not simply a quality of 
judgement, but a consequence of the apprehension of nothingness due to the limits 
of expectation.16 Therefore, silence, as the negative reply to the question concerning 
sound has its origin and foundation in Sartrean nothingness.

From here, I would like to pause the regressive deduction to distinguish between two 
types of silence: absolute silence and relative silence. Silence characterized by the lack 
of relation seems to imply an absence, or the non-existence of the five-determinant 
combination, which is the clearly defined opposite of the presence or the existence 
of such without any quantifiable parameter, which in turn, could scale the “level 
of existence”. Therefore, silence as the lack of relation to the sound-space seems to 
be dialectically absolute. In reality, however, we cannot perceive any such sound as 
absolute silence. Even if one enters into a sound-proof or anechoic chamber, he can 
still hear at least two kinds of sound produced by himself: his nerve’s systematic 
operation and his blood’s circulation,17 which both have their own relations to the 
sound-space—“[t]here is always something to listen to.”18 However, we do perceive 
silence, or the absence of perceivable sound on various occasions; for example, at a 
concert between two movements of a symphony, or simply when we enter a quiet 
library from a busy street. At those moments, no sound from the five-determinant 
relation comes into the presence of our auditory experience (at least temporarily) 
because the sounds presented to, and expected by, us—the orchestra or the street 
sound—disappear, and the sounds outside of our expectation have not yet come 
into our awareness. It is not difficult to notice that the brief pause of the orchestral 
sound between movements is filled with the audience’s breathing, or perhaps the 
rustling of clothes, and even a quiet library might be filled with the sound of air flow 
produced by the ventilation system. Just as the room tone in a movie scene, these 
sounds normally fall into the background of our unconsciousness where we fail to 
map them into the sound-space by the five-determinant relations and take them as 
the silence—the lack of relation to the sound-space. The notion of relative silence, 

15 I made a reference to Sartre’s characterization of three types of non-being: Guignon and Pereboom, Existentialism: 
Basic Writings, 311.

16 See note 10 above.
17 John Cage, Silence: lectures and writings, 13.
18 Samuel Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing, (New York: Grove P, 1967), 35/155.



40

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

therefore, describes sounds that we are unaware of, all of which characterized by the 
absence of a perceivable relation to the sound-space whereby they manifest themselves 
as silence in our auditory experience. Note that any sound categorized as relative 
silence always has the potential, given that we are able to adjust our expectation and 
actively hear it, to become sound to our ears with its own relation to the total sound-
space. Since it is the relative silence that we hear as silence, the rest of this paper only 
concerns itself with relative silence. 

Given that silence has its origin and foundation in nothingness, nothingness must 
objectively exist in order to make our apprehension of silence possible. Similar to the 
case of being, I argue that nothingness comes into the sound-space as the origin of 
silence, or of the non-being of sound, precisely through sound itself. On one hand, 
silence cannot be derived from sound. It would be inconceivable that a particular 
sound of full positivity in its five-determinant relation at the same time maintains in 
our awareness a representation of silence as its non-being.19 The notion of (relative) 
silence asserts that silence by nature has the potential to possess a relation to sound-
space as a continuum. As a result, every heard sound becomes based on a subjective 
situation constructed essentially by the relationship between sound and another 
sound (i.e. the sound of relative silence, rather than an objective situation where 
sounds are the negative of silence or vice versa20). One should be able to think of 
sound “without considering it negatively,”21 that is to say, sound is not conceived 
as an absence or nihilation of silence. Rather, a particular sound is heard against its 
(relative) silence in that our perception distinguishes it with the full positivity by our 
awareness of it. This distinction asserts that we cannot both perceive and be unaware 
of a particular sound; ergo, it is non-relational to silence, or to its non-being. 

On the other hand, silence is not causa sui. The property of “nihilating itself ”22 cannot 
be granted to silence because silence cannot be perceived alone—we always listen to 
something whose existence as a continuum establishes our expectation, such as the 
sound of our nerve’s system operation and the blood’s circulation in an anechoic 
chamber. Even when all sounds actively heard by us suddenly disappear, what has 
blended into the background of silence immediately emerges in our awareness as 
the new continuum in the sound-space. Therefore, a sound that recedes to silence, 
as soon as it is left by itself, will be heard as the sound of full positivity with a 
specific relation to the sound-space. The interrelation of sound and silence can be 
considered bi-directional, where silence allows sounds to appear, yet, at the same 
time depends on the presence of sound to remain its non-existence to our perception. 

19 I made a reference to Sartre’s argument that non-being is not derived from being: see note 12 above.
20 “Subjective situation” and “objective situation” are the phrases used by John Cage in the discussion of silence: 

John Cage, Silence: lectures and writings, 14.
21 Eric De Visscher, "'There's no such thing as silence...': John Cage's Poetics of Silence", in Interface 18.4 (1989), 

259.
22 Guignon and Pereboom, Existentialism: Basic Writings, 318.



41Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Sound as Silence

This “symbiosis of opposites”23 can be simplified to the fact that something requires 
nothingness in order to appear and that nothingness requires something in order to 
maintain its nothingness. The deduction reveals that silence is neither derived from 
sound nor self-caused, and it follows that nothingness as the origin of silence must 
be embodied in sound itself as a potential or possibility of becoming its non-being 
(i.e. the silence). 

4. SILENCE IN WEBERN, FIVE PIECES FOR ORCHESTRA, III 
AND CAGE, 4’33”

In modernist music repertoires, silence is considered to be state of “a sonic and/
or conceptual ideal”24 to which a work aspires. The purity, complexity and 
fragmentary in the sonic state of silence becomes a new compositional focus. Drawn 
by the perishability of sound and the proximity to nothingness that is feared and 
simultaneously aspired to, in silence, modernist composers aim to achieve such a state 
through musical languages. Now given that silence as the non-being of sound has its 
origin and foundation in Sartrean nothingness, in this section, I discuss the approach 
to silence in contemporary classical music; specifically, in the third movement of Five 
Pieces for Orchestra by Anton Webern25 and 4’33” by John Cage26 as a way of evoking 
an experience of Sartrean nothingness.

In his works, Anton Webern appeals to nothingness not by patches of quietness 
gapped in rests and pauses as the Classic and the early Romantic composers do, 
but rather, in relying on musical means to evoke the sense of silence as in the third 
movement of Five Pieces for Orchestra (which depicts a mountain vista). With the 
dynamic marking pianississimo,27 the opening Campanella28 creates a sense of stillness, 
which swells with the shimmering sound made by mandolin, guitar, harp, and celesta. 
Each individual tone in the opening sound’s chromatic cluster29 is struck repeatedly 
or rolled on strings, and creates in effect a sustained, yet vibrating sonority.30 Since 
all but one of the tones of the cluster are a semitone apart from each other, the sound 
creates a seemingly chaotic silence, but accurately conveys the sound of nature and 
the serenity residing in the mountain. The violin enters later with a slightly louder 
dynamic playing a fragmented four-note melody, which is then echoed by a muted 

23 “Symbiosis of opposites” is a phrase Deborah Weagel uses in the discussion of Cage’s notion of silence: Deborah 
Weagel, and John Cage. "Silence in John Cage and Samuel Beckett: 4' 33" and "Waiting for Godot"." Samuel 
Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui 12 (2002), 6.

24 David Metzer, "Modern Silence," The Journal of Musicology, vol. 23, no. 3 (2006): 333.
25 Anton Webern, “Sehr langsam und ausserst zart”, track 15 on Webern: Passacaglia / Symphony / Five Pieces, Ulster 

Orchestra, Takuo Yuasa, Naxos 8.554841, 2001, compact disc.
26 John Cage, “4’33””, track 14 on CAGE, J.: Primitive / In a Landscape / A Room / Variations I / Waiting / 4' 33'' / 

Dream / Suite for Toy Piano (Happy Birthday John!) (Cage, Sacchi). John Cage. Floraleda Sacchi. Amadeus Arte 
AAP12001, 2012, compact disc.

27 Musical term, meaning “very very softly”.
28 A percussion instrument, meaning “little bell”.
29 Musical term, referring to a chord made of several tones in a pitch class.
30 David Metzer, "Modern Silence," The Journal of Musicology, vol. 23, no. 3 (2006): 340.



42

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

horn. As the echo fades away, the previous sonority of stillness gradually converges to 
silence. The rest of the movement is a continuation of the dwindling of soft sonority 
with the nothingness. Webern creates the sounds that appear to be fragile in the 
beginning—with their softness and extreme instability due to the semitones—but 
as they keep vibrating as the only sound in the piece, we hear them struggling to 
escape from silence before finally give in. In this piece, the silence is heard with sonic 
density. The musical means used by Webern to capture the quality of silence become 
interpreted as stillness, softness, hush, and fragmentation.31 When something elicits 
nothing, silences itself becomes the act of expression itself.32 Webern’s piece (1913) 
premiered much earlier than the publication of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943), 
but it demonstrates at the very least that the once clear distinction between sound and 
silence had already been blurred well before the French philosopher’s investigation 
of the phenomenon. Retrospectively, Webern’s approach to silence through sound 
could be regarded as a way to evoke the nothingness that Sartre later systematically 
derives from his notion of being. As a proximity to nothingness, the dwindling soft 
sonority in the music can easily fall out of our awareness along with silence, but 
they could always be dissected from silence by its constantly vibrating and changing 
texture. However, whether it is heard as sound or silence, the nature of the sound 
itself does not change, since it either possesses or has the potential to possess the 
definite five-determinant relation to the total sound-space. Therefore, this particular 
piece by Webern alludes to the later recognition that nothingness as the origin of 
silence comes from nowhere else but sound itself. 

Silence, as realized in later modernist styles, transcends from an act of expression to 
an attitude of interrogation. John Cage, for example, was the first composer who 
sought the state of pure silence in his works, and his legendary piece 4’33” (1952)33 
does not contain even a single note—ushering in four minutes and thirty-three 
seconds of essential silence as its title indicates. In the text Silence, Cage makes a 
distinction between the intentional and unintentional sound.34 For a listener, what 
we traditionally regard as intentional is the sound heard with a particular relation 
to the sound-space, while what regarded as unintentional we are unaware of (and 
it consequently recedes into silence). The sound made by the orchestra at a concert 
according to the notes on music sheets is the intentional making, while the other 
sounds, for instance, breathing and clothes rustling, are the unintentional. In 4’33”, 
by excluding the instrumental sounds that are normally conceived as intentional, 
Cage alters the audience’s expectation by switching the unintentional sound in the 
surrounding environment to the intentional—he invites the silence into our auditory 
31 Ibid, Pg. 334.
32 Ibid, Pg. 336.
33 The title of this work is the total length in minutes and seconds of the performance. At Woodstock, N.Y., August 

29, 1952, the title was 4’33” and the three parts ware 33”, 2’40”, and 1’20”. It was performed by David Tudor, 
pianist, who indicated the beginnings of parts by closing, the endings by opening, the keyboard lid. However, the 
work may be performed by any instrumentalist, or combination of instrumentalists and last any length of time.

34 John Cage, Silence: lectures and writings, 14.



43Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Sound as Silence

experience as sounds. Since silence cannot be perceived by itself, the audience are 
encouraged to listen actively to those sounds that might otherwise be silence for 
them. Here, standing on the borderland between sound and silence, Cage captures 
their structural alteration by being conscious of their intimate relationship, thereby 
demonstrating the relation between being and non-being. Just like the consciousness 
of being, the consciousness of sound in this piece suspends the presupposed distinction 
between the intentional and unintentional sound, and in that act, the supposedly 
unintentional sounds that once were the non-being of sound are now made aware by 
us and determined by their specific relation to the sound-space as the new continuum 
in our auditory experience. Since there is nothing that separates sound from silence, 
as illustrated in this piece by Cage, nothingness slips into the cleavage introduced 
by the suspension of consciousness. The notion of nothingness, then, elucidates the 
(non-)identity of silence with sound: silence is the being of sound, in the mode of 
not being it.

5. IMPLICATION

What are the implications of the abstract dialectic of nothingness in the world of 
sound to our auditory experience in daily life? Can the interplay between sound and 
nothingness go beyond the notion of silence? I would like to offer some preliminary 
sketches to answer these questions in this final section.

In the history of western music, silence has never been equal to sound until the 
rise of modernism in the early twentieth century. The moments of silence in music 
had been generally considered as “supposed non-sound”, which inevitably served as 
the backdrop against which ‘real sound’ could be presented and dissected.35 Those 
silent moments in music tend to be experienced as expressive quietness; for example, 
the tense pauses in the opening measure in Haydn’s String Quartet, Op. 76, No. 5 
“Finale,” or the quiet stillness in Introit of Berlioz’s Requiem. Later, as composers 
gradually shifted away from the conventional musical elements—such as harmony, 
melody, or texture—that the classical and romantic period exploited, music was 
taken to a broader sonic aspect, where silence as the previously supposed absence 
of expressive utterances became an act of expression itself. With the realization that 
sound is inseparable from silence, modern composers began to welcome silence 
in their works. As the boundary between sound and silence is blurred, so does the 
boundary between what is music and what is not—from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring 
to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone theory to the later serialism led by Boulez. Composers 
constantly challenged these originally absolute binary distinctions, all of which 
arguably relate to the existential notion of nothingness, which derived an even broader 
implication: there is nothing separating something from nothing. As a result, in terms 

35 David Metzer, "Modern Silence," The Journal of Musicology, vol. 23, no. 3 (2006): 336.



44

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

of our own auditory experience, music seems to become an arbitrary limitation to 
how we perceive the sound in the world. Cage describes music as “an organization 
of sound,”36 but what is organization? When we contemplate the question, it seems 
that everything could be an organization; for example, nature, industry, society, and 
therefore, anything could be heard as music—as Cage writes himself:

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it 
disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a 
truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to 
capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as 
musical instruments.37

All sounds, including “noise,” are music. The notion of noise, however, has not been 
mentioned or discussed in this paper. It is not normally active in our perception 
because it is too disturbing to be aware of constantly, so it lacks a definite relation to 
the sound-space, (at least for most of us). At the same time, it is not part of relative 
silence either because we might find it disturbing even if we are not completely 
aware of it. Thus, “[n]oise is the last thing that separates us from silence.”38 Given 
the analogy between the dialectic of being and nothingness and that of sound and 
silence, an interesting topic left for future discussion might be centered around the 
notion of noise (an unescapable element from our normal auditory experience) and 
how it fits into this essay’s conceptual scheme of sound and silence, relates to Sartre’s 
understanding of nothingness, and whether or not there is a defining quality to noise 
such that it does not fall into pure value judgement. ◆

36 John Cage, Silence: lectures and writings, 3.
37 Ibid.
38 David Metzer, "Modern Silence," The Journal of Musicology, vol. 23, no. 3 (2006): 369.



45Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Sound as Silence

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beckett, Samuel. Nouvelles et Textes pour rien. Paris: Minuit, 1955.

Beckett, Samuel. Stories and Texts for Nothing. New York: Grove P, 1967.

Cage, John. “4’33””, track 14 on CAGE, J.: Primitive / In a Landscape / A Room / 
Variations I / Waiting / 4' 33'' / Dream / Suite for Toy Piano (Happy Birthday John!) 
(Cage, Sacchi). John Cage. Floraleda Sacchi. Amadeus Arte AAP12001, 2012, 
compact disc.

Cage, John. 4’33”. Second Tacet Edition EP6777. Edition Peters No. 6777, 1953.

Cage, John. Silence: lectures and writings. Wesleyan University Press, 1961.

De Visscher, Eric, "'There's no such thing as silence...': John Cage's Poetics of 
Silence", in Interface 18.4 (1989), 257-268. 

Guignon, Charles B, and Derk Pereboom. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: 
Hackett, 2001.

Link, Stan. "Much Ado about Nothing." Perspectives of New Music, vol. 33, no. 1/2 
(1995): 216-72. www.jstor.org/stable/833707.

Metzer, David. "Modern Silence." The Journal of Musicology, vol. 23, no. 3 (2006): 
331-74. doi:10.1525/jm.2006.23.3.331. 

Pascal, Blaise, and Thomas Stearns Eliot. Pascal's Pensées; Introduction by TS Eliot. EP 
Dutton, 1958.

Sartre, Jean-Paul, and Hazel Estella Barnes. Being and Nothingness. London: Methuen, 
1966.

Weagel, Deborah, and John Cage. "Silence in John Cage and Samuel Beckett: 4' 33" 
and "Waiting for Godot"." Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui 12 (2002): 249-62. 
www.jstor.org/stable/25781422. 

Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New 
York: Oxford University Press, 1919/1946.

Webern, Anton. “Sehr langsam und ausserst zart”, track 15 on Webern: Passacaglia / 
Symphony / Five Pieces. Ulster Orchestra. Yuasa, Takuo. Naxos 8.554841, 2001, 
compact disc.



46

δι
αν

οι
α

HUMAN (AND) NATURE:
Using Arendt to Reconcile Models of 

Environmental Ethics

CAROLINE GILLETTE

INTRODUCTION

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt implicitly oscillates between two paradigms 
that relate the human to nature. Though she neither acknowledges the presence of 
multiple paradigms nor their apparent contradiction, she alternatively depicts man 
as part of, and separate from, nature. While these two depictions seem necessarily 
to conflict, Arendt finds both equally viable and essential to her project. This paper 
attempts to use the coexistence of these two man-nature paradigms in The Human 
Condition as a model to reconcile a similar tension between two useful—but equally 
contradictory—man-nature paradigms in Christian environmental ethics. 

BACKGROUND

Many scholars of environmental philosophy have previously written on the unique 
manner in which Arendt understands the relationship between man and nature. 
Paul Ott holds that Arendt subscribes to a nature-culture dualism, which, he argues, 
allows humans to honestly acknowledge the inherent opposition between man and 
nature and to begin to seek a balance between the two (though this author argues 
that he underestimates the moments of nature-culture monism in Arendt’s work).1 
Anne Chapman takes Arendt’s earth-world and natural-human dichotomies at face 

1 Paul Ott, "World and Earth: Hannah Arendt and the Human Relationship to Nature," Ethics, Place & 
Environment 12.1 (2009): 1-16.



47Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Human (and) Nature

value and derives an ethics of environmentalism from them.2 Peter Cannavò, noting 
moments where Arendt imbues nature with dignity and meaning, extends her wish 
for the durability of different environments to include the most natural aspects of 
the human artifice.3 Maurizio Passerin d'Entrèves identifies similar tension between 
the role of nature in Arendt's critiques of modernity, though he does not extend the 
tension to her conception of humans in general.4 Yet, despite all of these examples 
and the knowledge of this author, Arendt has never been used specifically to analyze 
theological models of environmental protection.

ARENDT’S NATURE-MAN PARADIGM

In one paradigm in The Human Condition, Arendt portrays man as inherently part of 
nature. She calls the earth “the very quintessence of the human condition” and men 
“the children of nature.”5 The status of man as natural is neither an unhappy accident 
nor something to overcome, since Arendt bemoans the idea of humans forgetting or 
leaving nature all together. Her anxiety over modern man’s growing alienation from 
nature frames the book, which in turn, also frames this essay insofar as it uses her 
understanding of man’s relationship with nature as the natural man paradigm.

While adhering to the natural man paradigm, Arendt cites several ways in which 
modern man has erroneously convinced himself that he is a distinct and separate 
entity from nature. For instance, with the development of more abstract fields of 
mathematics, man prefers to think of natural concepts in the theoretical plane—as 
if they are something man can only grasp with his mind. As a result, man sees the 
earth as a third party observer, “from a universal, astrophysical viewpoint, a cosmic 
standpoint outside nature itself.”6 He believes he holds the same relationship to the 
earth as anything else in the cosmos, never acknowledging the special relationship 
that he possesses with it as a species—amongst many—that depends on the earth 
for its existence. She has similar concerns about the development of modern science, 
of which “earth alienation became and has remained [its] hallmark” as it became 
more mathematically-based.7 She worries that “the modern reductio scientiae ad 
mathematicam has overruled the testimony of nature as witnessed at close range by 
human senses.”8 That is, science has the same problem as math: it ceased to be a 
tool to understand what we learn about nature sensually, and has instead become 
more authoritative about reality than actual nature. Not only does Arendt reject this 

2 Anne Chapman, "The Ways That Nature Matters: The World and the Earth in the Thought of Hannah Arendt," 
Environmental Values 16, no. 4 (2007): 433-445.

3 Peter F. Cannavò, “Hannah Arendt: Place, World, and Earthly Nature,” In Engaging Nature: Environmentalism and 
the Political Theory Canon, ed. Peter F. Cannavò, (Cambridge: MIT, 2014), 253-269. 

4 Maurizio Passerin d'Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt, London; New York: 
Routledge,1994. 

5 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2018), 2.
6 Arendt, The Human Condition, 265, emphasis mine.
7 Ibid, Pg. 264.
8 Ibid, Pg. 267.



48

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

view since man can “observ[e] natural phenomena as they were given to him,”9 but 
she also concludes that man sees nature firsthand through his senses because he is 
inextricably in and of it. 

The legacy of the Age of Exploration merely compounded these effects further, since 
mapping the earth made it seem smaller—literally removed man from it—since 
much of cartography’s poetic propriety takes place in the air. 

 “The fact that the decisive shrinkage of the earth was the consequence of 
the invention of the airplane, that is, of leaving the surface of the earth 
altogether, is like a symbol for the general phenomenon that any decrease 
of terrestrial distance can be won only at the price of putting a decisive 
distance between man and earth, of alienating man from his immediate 
earthly surroundings.”10

By mapping the corners of the globe, man set up a dichotomous relationship wherein 
he was the actor and the earth the acted-upon. Moreover, once he finished, rather 
than realizing how dwarfed he was by its stature, the earth instead became small to 
him since by man’s own hand he could now see the whole structure at once. It no 
longer seemed like all-encompassing environment; thereby, leading humans to once 
again think of the earth from a third-person perspective.

Arendt cites a few examples to demonstrate that this earthly alienation has generally 
saturated modern humans’—not just scientists’ and explorers’—view of their nature, 
referring to two particular ways in which these “earth-bound creatures … have begun 
to act as though [they] were dwellers of the universe.”11 First, one can see the results 
of man no longer believing he is of the earth through what he says about space travel. 
Humans reacted to the successful launch of Sputnik as if it were the first step toward 
a jailbreak, referring to their continued existence on the earth as “imprisonment.”12 
The sentiment that mankind is somehow temporarily “bound to the earth” until it 
can happily free itself reveals man’s entirely new understanding of his place in the 
universe.13

The second piece of evidence that Arendt cites alludes to man’s desire to make 
humans ‘not of nature’ in the literal sense, referring to the role of bioengineering 
in order to create life through eugenics, in vitro fertilization and gene editing. Man 
would not want to do this if he did not already believe that he was not of nature; 
he is simply making it literal. She specifically states that the “desire to escape from 
imprisonment to the earth” shares a motivation with the desire to mix ‘frozen germ 
plasm from people of demonstrated ability under the microscope to produce superior 

9 Ibid, Pg. 265.
10 Ibid, Pg. 251.
11 Arendt, The Human Condition, 3.
12 Ibid, Pg. 1.
13 Ibid, Pg. 2.



49Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Human (and) Nature

human beings,’ and ‘to alter [their] size shape and function.’”14 Yet, it is important 
to take note that Arendt objects to any form of man playing God when it comes to 
the process of humans ‘entering the world’ because she believes it essential that man 
remain a part of nature. 

Arendt’s reason for periodically championing an understanding of man as a part 
of nature and at other times lamenting his loss of that understanding—remains in 
her view of humankind—as ultimately inseparable from the earth. She writes that, 
“earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human 
beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without 
artifice.”15 Despite what they might believe, humans are not dwellers of the universe, 
and the fact remains that they need the earth to survive. It is not clear whether 
maintaining earthly nature would remain important if, for example, another planet 
was found with an environment similar to earth’s, but as for now, this planet remains 
irreplaceable. 

THE OPPOSITIONAL MAN PARADIGM

And yet, the idea that the earth’s environment is irreplaceable appears to be 
contradicted elsewhere in the text. In another passage, Arendt states that artificial 
environments are just as good, if not better. When discussing the creation of the 
artificial human realm, she says:

“In addition to the conditions under which life is given to man on earth, and 
partly out of them, men constantly create their own, self-made conditions, 
which, their human origin and their variability notwithstanding, possess 
the same conditioning power as natural things”16

If that is the case, it begs the question of what would be the problem with living in 
an entirely artificial environment? If humans could survive in a biodome on another 
planet, it would not just have the capacity to shape the human condition, it would 
have the exact same conditioning power as the earth does now. Man, then, should be 
able to exist independently of nature and should be understood as such.

In fact, there are many passages in The Human Condition that imply a man-nature 
dichotomy. In this second Arendtian paradigm, man is inherently separate from, in 
opposition with—and most importantly—dominant over nature. The problem with 
modernity in this paradigm is not that humans are too artificial, but that they are 
too natural. Especially in Arendt’s labor-work-action model, the very definition of 
‘human’ depends upon distinguishing it from ‘natural.’ The remainder of this essay 

14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Arendt, The Human Condition, 9, emphasis mine.



50

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

will refer to this understanding of man’s relationship with nature as the oppositional 
man paradigm. 

While subscribing to the oppositional man paradigm, a ‘natural man’ becomes a 
contradiction in terms throughout her discussion of labor since Arendt defines it 
as the “the most natural and least worldly17 of man’s activities” because it does not 
lastingly convert nature into anything.18 Its products are consumed and disposed 
of, but nature’s metabolic process remains unaltered. Meanwhile, a person primarily 
occupied with labor she terms an animal laborans, which means “only one, at best 
the highest, of the animal species which populate the earth.”19 Putting these facts 
together, if one is primarily engaged in a natural activity as opposed to worldly 
activities, one does not even fit the definition of human—one is an animal.

Humans, by contrast, are engaged in work and action, both of which imply some 
degree of artificiality. Work “provides an ‘artificial’ world of things, distinctly different 
from all-natural surroundings,”20 as it is the process of converting nature into 
something durably useful to humans. It is particularly concerned with creating the 
public realm, which Arendt specifically says “is not identical with the earth or with 
nature.”21 It is only in the public realm—not in nature—that action can take place, 
and only outside nature, then, that man can exist qua man since a life without speech 
or action “has ceased to be a human life.”22 Bearing this in mind, the ‘human’ cannot 
be fully defined with reference only to nature as there must be some reference to the 
artificial in order to fill out properly the requirements. In a mock Venn diagram, the 
circle labeled ‘humans’ is not contained within the circle labeled ‘nature’ as would be 
the case in the natural man paradigm.

Moreover, the language Arendt uses to depict the relationship between man and 
nature at times implies not just separation, but also open antagonism. Arendt 
describes the process of converting nature into something artificial as always having 
an element of “violation and violence.”23 Homo faber, a human employed with work 
or action,24 apparently does not just act in a realm separate from nature, but “conducts 
himself as lord and master of the whole earth,” unlike the not-fully-human animal 
laborans who is a servant to it.25 Moreover, homo faber “has always been a destroyer of 
nature,”26 since to be fully human, man cannot simply be in charge of nature—which 
he could do as part of nature—he must ‘attack’ it. But nature does not remain passive 

17 Note that ‘worldly’ to Arendt, is the opposite of ‘earthly,’ parallel to the dichotomy of ‘artificial’ and ‘natural.’ It 
generally means ‘pertaining to the human artifice created by work.

18 Ibid, Pg. 101.
19 Ibid, Pg. 84.
20 Arendt, The Human Condition, 7.
21 Ibid, Pg. 52.
22 Ibid, Pg. 176.
23 Ibid, Pg. 139.
24 Ibid, Pg. 136.
25 Ibid, Pg. 139.
26 Ibid.



51Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Human (and) Nature

in the face of this ‘attack,’ for it “forever invades the human artifice, threatening the 
durability of the world and its fitness for human use.”27 

Rather than simply relieve humans of the above-described problems modernity poses 
in the natural man paradigm, while adhering to the oppositional man paradigm, 
Arendt identifies a completely different problem with the modern period. Seemingly 
contradicting her initial concerns with modern science and its ilk, in the oppositional 
man paradigm modern humans have almost become too natural. They are not 
distinct enough from nature since everyone is an animal laborans who “acquiesce[s] 
in a dazed, ‘tranquilized,’ functional type of behavior.”28 These jobholders do not ‘act’ 
in the Arendtian sense, and they—like animals—do not use action to distinguish 
themselves from each other, but rather, to “abandon [their] individuality.”29 Modern 
human society, then, is a society of animals based upon this framework. 

THE STEWARDSHIP MODEL AND OPPOSITIONAL MAN

The above-described contradictions between the two modes of thought contained 
in The Human Condition mirror the conflict between two theological models of 
ecological responsibility vying for dominance. It might seem inappropriate to draw 
from Arendt to attempt to solve a theological debate, yet The Human Condition does 
not reject theism, but only insists that it address questions whose answers would 
not be affected by the existence of a god. Arendt distinguishes between ‘the human 
condition’ and ‘human nature’ as the latter would presuppose a human purpose, and 
therefore, a creator. She only makes claims about the former, which concerns the 
condition in which humans happen to find themselves, given that they do exist.30 
Nonetheless, while the discussion that follows concerns models that are theologically 
derived, the academic debate over them concerns which one is the more practically 
effective in addressing the ongoing ecological crisis (the theological justification of 
each is not typically challenged). Taking aside the question of whether each model 
is valid from a theological standpoint and considering only their relative efficacies, 
Arendt’s work is as appropriate as anyone else’s in considering what to do with these 
two seemingly contradictory positions.

The first and more traditional theological model is less antagonistic than Arendt’s 
oppositional man paradigm, but shares with it a view of man as a third-party dominant 
over nature. Based in The Book of Genesis, the stewardship model holds that humans 
should protect nature because it was given as a service to them by God. It is in their 
best interest for nature to thrive, and as a check to humanity’s shortsightedness, the 
model holds that humans have dominion over nature but not over God since their 
wills are subordinate to His for the earth. 

27 Ibid, Pg. 100.
28 Arendt, The Human Condition, 322.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid, Pg. 10-11.



52

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Pope John Paul II articulates the stewardship model best, as it pertains to environmental 
protection, in the papal encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis. He affirms man’s reign over 
nature, claiming that man is “superior to the other creatures placed by God under 
his dominion,” but reminds his church that “man must remain subject to the will of 
God.”31 That is, having dominion over the earth does not mean that humans can do 
whatever they please. They must consider the divine will, which, presumably, desires 
the preservation of nature so that it may continue to benefit the future generations 
to come. Accordingly, “development cannot consist only in the use, dominion over 
and indiscriminate possession of created things and the products of human industry” 
but rather man must remember that he is created in God’s likeness.32 He must have 
the same concern for what is in his dominion as God has for what is in God’s—
humankind. 

Many have criticized this model because the human obligation to protect the 
environment is derived from humankind’s role as nature’s divinely appointed (yet 
anthropocentric and paternalistic) caretakers, but not due to any special dignity that 
nature has in and of itself.33 Even if humans were the perfect stewards—and they 
certainly are not—some argue that viewing nature as subordinate to and in service of 
humanity inevitably leads humans to exploit it.34 There is no obligation in this model 
to protect nature in ways that are not eventually useful to man, because nature’s value 
is a consequence of its service to man, leading many environmentalists to prefer a 
model that views nature as valuable in its own right.

COMPANIONSHIP MODEL AND NATURAL MAN

Another theological model that satisfies this desire—the companionship model—
echoes Arendt’s natural man paradigm in that it takes man as existing within nature 
as one part of it. Pope Francis can be understood to be speaking from this viewpoint 
in the encyclical Laudato Si’, wherein he criticizes human development of technology 
“according to an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm.”35 He states that,

“This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and 
rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an 
external object. This subject makes every effort to establish the scientific 
and experimental method, which in itself is already a technique of 
possession, mastery and transformation.”36

31 John Paul II, Encyclical on the Social Concern Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (30 Dec. 1987) §29, at The Holy See, 
http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_30121987_

32 Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, §29
33 Robin Attfield, “Environmental Sensitivity and Critiques of Stewardship,” in Environmental Stewardship: Critical 

Perspectives, Past and Present, ed. Berry, R. J. (London: T&T Clark, 2006). 76.
34 Michael J. Himes and Kenneth R. Himes, Fullness of Faith: The Public Significance of Theology (New York: Paulist 

Press, 1993). 107.
35 Francis I, Encyclical on Care for Our Common Home Laudato Si’ (24 May 2015) §106, at The Holy See, http://

w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_Enciclica-laudato-si.ht
36 Laudato Si’, §106.



53Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Human (and) Nature

This argument is strikingly similar to Arendt’s. Pope Francis also worries that modern 
science makes one falsely believe that nature is something one can grasp and act 
upon as a third party, expressing concern at believing “empirical science provides a 
complete explanation of life, the interplay of all creatures and the whole of reality,” 
rather than bypassing nature in its quest for the truth about reality.37 He would have 
mankind remember that it exists within nature.

Michael and Kenneth Himes articulate their version of this model—which they call 
a companionship model—in their book Fullness of Faith. They also reference Genesis 
as their biblical source but point instead to the creation of Eve as evidence that man 
was created to exist in relationality to nature; that is to say, not in complete isolation. 
Seeing as how God loves all of creation, it is not just other humans that are worthy 
of being related to; nature is an end in and of itself that is loved by God. Therefore, 
humans should not consider nature as an ‘it’ to be acted upon, but rather, they 
should consider themselves as a part of nature and in mutual companionship with 
all of its creatures.38 Humans should protect the environment not out of self-interest, 
but out of love for creatures as ends within themselves. 

Though this model avoids depicting nature as a tool, the problem with this model 
is its practicality as universal empathy is difficult for most people to conceptualize 
and consequently to actualize. The stewardship model has problems, but self-interest 
remains far more efficient. The environmental crisis will have disastrous, lasting 
effects if drastic policy changes are not made in the coming months and years, and 
now there is not enough time to rely solely on the hope that humans will realize and 
become committed to all beings in nature. 

BUILDING A SYNCRETIC MODEL AND CONCLUSION

Fortunately, using The Human Condition as a model, one can hold these two 
paradigms simultaneously, without interpreting one as rendering the other invalid 
when they contradict. Arendt neither acknowledges the apparent tension between 
her two models, nor does she dwell at length on how they coexist. The best textual 
resource available for parsing out the relationship between the two paradigms, 
however, can be found in the prologue when Arendt states that, “[t]he human artifice 
of the world separates human existence from all mere animal environment, but life 
itself is outside this artificial world, and through life man remains related to all other 
living organisms.”39 That is, Arendt does not take the human as one self-contained 
concept that must fit into a single relational structure with nature. 

This possibility becomes more vivid when one considers that homo faber, at times, 
labors. Although animal laborans is not human because of his natural activity, his lack 

37 Laudato Si’, §199.
38 Himes and Himes, Fullness of Faith, 109-110.
39 Arendt, The Human Condition, 2, emphasis mine.



54

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

of humanity remains so because he is primarily engaged in labor—not that he labors 
at all. As such, homo faber does not cease to be fully human when he stops acting for 
a moment to eat a meal—he is alive, he sleeps and he does many natural things, but 
he is still homo faber and is still fully human. Accordingly, man straddles the natural 
and artificial—he is of nature in some aspects, but separate from it in others. We can 
simultaneously know by virtue of the fact that we are alive, that we are of nature, and 
that we have the capacity to create and to act in the world that we are not natural. 

Similarly, using tools provided by Arendt, one does not have to choose between 
the stewardship and companionship models of justification for preserving the 
environment, but rather, one can understand the relationship between man and 
nature to be twofold or piecemeal. Man can exist in relationality to, and be of, nature 
while still being its steward. In believing both to be true, man is forced to find a 
balance between self-interest and empathy, wherein the drawbacks of each model are 
balanced out by the presence of the other. More can be done quickly in the realm 
of environmental protection if humans can be motivated simultaneously by a belief 
that a healthy environment is beneficial to them and by another belief that all the 
creatures within nature are humanity’s companions. ◆



55Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Human (and) Nature

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Attfield, Robin. “Environmental Sensitivity and Critiques of Stewardship.” In 
Environmental Stewardship: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present, edited by R.J. 
Berry, 76-91. London: T&T Clark, 2006.

Cannavò, Peter F. "Hannah Arendt: Place, World, and Earthly Nature." In Engaging 
Nature: Environmentalism and the Political Theory Canon, edited by Peter F. 
Cannavò, 253-269. Cambridge: MIT, 2015.

Chapman, Anne. “The Ways That Nature Matters: The World and the Earth in 
the Thought of Hannah Arendt.” Environmental Values, vol. 16, no. 4, (2007): 
433–445. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30302380.

Francis I. Encyclical on Care for Our Common Home Laudato Si’ (24 May 2015) at 
The Holy See, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/
papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html

Himes, Michael J., and Kenneth R. Himes. Fullness of Faith: The Public Significance of 
Theology. New York: Paulist Press, 1993. 

John Paul II. Encyclical on the Social Concern Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (30 Dec. 
1987) at The Holy See, http://www.vatican.va/content/johnpaulii/en/encyclicals/
documents/hf_jpii_enc_30121987_sollicitudo-rei-socialis.html

Maurizio Passerin d'Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt, London; 
New York: Routledge,1994.

Ott, Paul. "World and Earth: Hannah Arendt and the Human Relationship to 
Nature." Ethics, Place & Environment 12.1 (2009): 1-16.

Passerin d'Entrèves, Maurizio. The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt. London ; 
New York: Routledge,1994.



δι
αν

οι
α

56

ART, TECHNOLOGY, AND TRUTH 
in the Thought of Martin Heidegger

FELIPE DANIEL MONTERO

In mythology, autochthones (from the Ancient Greek αὐτός "self," and χθών 
"soil"; i.e. "people sprung from earth itself") are those mortals who have sprung 
from the soil, rocks and trees. They are rooted and belong to the land eternally.1

I. INTRODUCTION

In his “Deromanticizing Heidegger,” American philosopher Don Ihde attempts to 
denounce some arbitrary stances in Martin Heidegger’s thought in order to propose 
a philosophy of technology purged of what he deems the philosopher’s romantic, 
and implicitly Nazi, preferences. Ihde begins in stating: “A century after his birth, 
two very contrary statements can be made concerning Martin Heidegger: First, in a 
significant sense, he is surely one of the most important founders of the philosophy 
of technology […] Second, we all also know that he joined the National Socialist 
German Workers' Party and remained with it through the war […] My question is 
this: Is there something at the very heart of Heidegger's thought that makes both of 
these contraries possible?”2 The aim of this present work attempts to answer Ihde’s 
question following a close reading of Heidegger’s public speech “Memorial Address” 

1 Josine H Blok. “Gentrifying Genealogy: On the Genesis of the Athenian Autochthony Myth.” In Ancient Myth. 
Media, Transformations and Sense-Constructions, 251–75. Edited by Ueli Dill and Christine Walde. (Berlin: De 
Gruyter, 2009), 261.

2 Don Ihde, Heidegger’s technologies: postphenomenological perspectives, (New York, Fordham University Press, 2010), 
74.



57Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Art, Technology, and Truth

(Gelassenheit).3 If we assess the rest of Heidegger’s works in light of this speech, then it 
is possible to reach a systematic understanding of the relationships that exist between 
art, technology and truth in Heidegger’s thought. In turn, this analysis specifically 
allows us to appreciate what aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy lead him to his so-
called romanticism and the consequent error of subscribing to Nazism. Finally, this 
essay also explains how, in the words uttered ten years after the end of the war, 
Heidegger himself managed to offer an alternative to fascism so as to confront the 
threats of modern technology.

II. THE CONCEPT OF EARTH: PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON 
HEIDEGGER’S ROMANTICISM

Many of Martin Heidegger’s works, such works as “The Origin of the Work of Art,” or 
“The Question Concerning Technology,” are filled with a romanticization of German 
country life that remains implicitly related (at least it is hard to argue otherwise) 
to Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism. And yet, this supposed romanticization 
does not result from a mere ideological preference, but rather, is grounded in the 
very concept of a homeland (Heimat) or a home ground (heimatlicher Boden) 
consequently employed in Heidegger’s “Gelassenheit” (n.b. both of these concepts 
approximately correspond to what in “The Origin of the Work of Art” he refers to 
as ‘the earth’).4 Heidegger concludes through his phenomenological explication of 
the work of art that the essence of the work is the strife between earth and world, 
and that “[w]hat thus happens in the strife […is] the inauguration of the open in 
the struggle between the unconcealed and the concealed, the coming-out of hiding 
and deception—this self-contained event is the happening of what we call truth.”5 
The making of a work of art produces the earth, comparable to the sound in music, 
the words in literature or color in the visual arts. Nonetheless, we cannot reduce the 
earth to such isolated concepts as ‘matter’ or ‘the sensuous’ since Heidegger conceives 
of it as the opaque aspect of beings, which resists being brought to the clearing of 
intelligibility. In opposition to the earth, the world is that which is opened by the 
work. Earth and world, then, describe two different dimensions of intelligibility: 
the opaque, or that which resists interpretation (concealment), and the world as 
“revealing,” or the transparent aspect of entities. Art as “the becoming and happening 
of truth”6 manifests then when the earth—as that which closes upon itself—becomes 
brought to the open of the world in the strife instigated by the work; that is, in the 
tensional relationship established between what there already is and the elusive aspect 
of the receding earth. 

3 Martin Heidegger, Discourse on thinking.: a translation of Gelassenheit, (New York, Harper & Row, 1959)
4 Iain D. Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 110
5 Martin Heidegger, “Vom Ursprung des Kunstwerks: Erste Ausarbeitung” Heidegger Studies Vol. 5 (1989): 5-22. 
 The original text reads: “Was so in der Bestreitung geschieht: die Eröffnung der Offenheit des Widerstreits von 

Unverborgenem und Verborgenem, das Herauskommen von Verdeckung und Verstellung, — dieses in sich 
gefügte Geschehen ist das Geschehen dessen, was wir Wahrheit nennen.”

6 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought. (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 71.



58

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Despite the alleged ontological complexity of Heidegger’s concept of ‘earth,’ he still 
can claim that, “[w]e notice that a work of art has flowered in the ground of our 
homeland. As we hold this simple fact in mind, we cannot help [but remember 
that] at once […] during the last two centuries great poets and thinkers have been 
brought forth from the Swabian land. Thinking about it further makes clear at once 
that Central Germany is likewise such a land, and so are East Prussia, Silesia, and 
Bohemia.”7 Given these statements, it seems like we must concede to Ihde that 
Heidegger’s romantic tastes are intrinsically linked to his nationalist ideology and 
represent a great obstacle not only for the philosophy of technology, but also for 
his aesthetics (including his concept of truth). Nonetheless, this pivot too hurriedly 
dismisses Heidegger’s thought, which can be corrected if we approach his critique of 
modern technology from the horizon of his remaining corpus. 

As stated earlier, Heidegger claims that the essence of the work of art takes place 
in strife, which itself hosts the occurrence of truth as unconcealment. In “The 
Question Concerning Technology,” the essence of technology as enframing (Gestell) 
is characterized as modernity’s hegemonic mode of unconcealing. In this way, art 
and technology are revealed as diametrically opposed modes of unconcealment or 
truth, and as Ihde points out—concerning the latter—Heidegger has the tendency to 
oppose a ‘good’ technology to a ‘bad’ one. What characterizes the good technology is 
its artistic dimension as a result from art not yet being distinguished in its particularity 
from the rest of technology, as is the case in Greek philosophy—where the concept 
of techné is understood as encompassing the poiesis of fine arts since the artist is not 
distinguished from the artisan. Yet, Ihde understands that Heidegger’s distinction 
has its grounds in subjective preferences; in particular, a nostalgia for traditional 
modes of production and an ecological awareness that rejects those technologies that 
“provoke” (herausfordern) nature. In “Gelassenheit”, Heidegger claims that in order 
to face the threats that modern technology poses, “[w]e can use technical devices 
as they ought to be used.”8 Phenomenology (methodologically speaking) precludes 
this type of normative claims because it must be descriptive. Although we might 
conclude that in this speech Heidegger betrays his arbitrariness by uttering explicitly 
normative claims, there are still, nonetheless, many sufficient arguments to doubt this 
deduction. In the next section, I initially expound Heidegger’s characterization of the 
provocative mode of unconcealing as derived from a more original one, and secondly, 
offer an interpretation of Heidegger’s project in “Gelassenheit” that emphasizes the 
non-normative grounds of his statements. In both of these cases, the original/derived 
distinction grounds Heidegger’s preferences. These must be understood as stemming 
from a purely phenomenological basis that does not allow itself to be tainted by 
subjective tastes or a normativity incompatible with the phenomenological method.

7 Martin Heidegger, Discourse on thinking.: a translation of Gelassenheit, (New York, Harper & Row, 1959), 47.
8 Ibid, 54.



59Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Art, Technology, and Truth

III. BEYOND ROMANTICISM: THE TRANSCENDENTAL 
ARTWORK 

In the “Question Concerning Technology,” after a brief detour through the traditional 
conception of technology as a means to an end, and a reinterpretation of Aristotle’s 
concept of causality, Heidegger formulates the essence of technology as the Gestell, 
or “enframing”. The Gestell marks one of the epochs in Heidegger’s depiction of the 
history of western metaphysics, which just as the Idea was for Plato, is the way in 
which being announces itself to us in our times. What characterizes our epoch is that 
the Gestell interpellates us to unconceal the totality of beings as “stock” (Bestand) 
in the manner of a provocative order or solicitation (herausfondernde Bestellen).9 
Discerning what exactly Heidegger considers to be the particular characteristics and 
limits that enable us to distinguish the provocative mode of unconcealment from 
non-provocative ones represents a tough exegetical challenge. Why exactly does the 
hydroelectrical dam on the Rhine provoke Nature whereas the temple does not?  In 
this respect, Ihde opposes Heidegger’s description of the Greek temple in the “Origin 
of the Work of Art” to that which J. Donald Hughes offers in his Ecology in ancient 
civilizations. While Heidegger offers a highly romanticized depiction of the temple, 
Hughes emphasizes the environmental impact that one can see around the Acropolis. 
Hughes also mentions how even Plato witnessed these concerning ecological 
transformations when he visited various temples devoted to the guardian spirits of 
streams, which had already dried out by his time. Nonetheless, these counterexamples 
suffer from two defects. First, the contrast between these examples results from 
Heidegger’s stance that we must understand the work of art in the context of the 
world that is opened up by it. It is then justified to offer a romanticized depiction of 
the temple since only in this way can we offer an account of its original situation in 
which the temple properly functions as a work of art. The two examples offered by 
Hughes depict works whose worlds have already closed. Second, we must concede 
to Ihde that Hughes’ examples demonstrate how the damage done to nature is not 
something exclusive to modern technology. However, this does not mean that Greek 
technology provoked nature in a Heideggerian sense.  What concerns Heidegger is 
the complete hegemony of a certain way of approaching beings that threatens to take 
over all other possible modes of unconcealment.  We must take into account that 
even if the ancient Greeks could be said to have damaged nature just as much as the 
English did in the times of Francis Bacon, the difference between the two of them—
and of unique interest to Heidegger—is how from a certain historical horizon nature 
can be seen as something to be dominated, which is clearly incompatible with the 
Greek conception of physis.10 

9 Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 17.
10 In more analytical terms, the distinction is not quantitative but qualitative. It does not refer to a measurable 

difference in ecological damage but rather to a change in humanity’s relation to nature. The type of comparison 
that Ihde makes rests in the type of thinking that Heidegger is criticizing, that is, the calculative mode of thought 
that hopes to settle all questions by way of empirical obervations and measurements.



60

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

The ultimate danger that the Gestell represents is that all modes of unconcealment 
would be redirected to that of provocation. This would signify the end of meditative 
thinking and the total hegemony of what Heidegger terms the calculative mode of 
thought. Heidegger claims that the Gestell, which becomes pervasively evident in our 
times with the advent of such technologies as the nuclear bomb, began operating 
and developing itself long ago—being the root of modern science’s instrumental 
character and understanding of nature in terms of measurable extension. In this way, 
Heidegger worries that the only possibility that would remain for man would be “of 
pursuing and pushing forward nothing but what is revealed in ordering (Bestellen), 
and of deriving all his standards on this basis. Through this the other possibility is 
blocked, that man might be admitted more and sooner and ever more primally to 
the essence of that which is unconcealed and to its unconcealment, in order that he 
might experience as his essence his needed belonging to revealing.”11 In the language 
of Being and Time, man would fall into an improper mode of existence in which he 
would no longer understand himself from himself, and, remain oblivious to his own 
essence as a consequence of understanding both nature and himself in terms of stock 
(Bestand). Ihde admits that “Heidegger does not simply outright condemn modern 
technology—its essence, enframing, is simultaneously a revealing of the world and 
an openness.” In spite of this, Ihde dismisses the danger that Heidegger warms us of 
by introducing the following question: “In short, all of nature, including the human 
being, will be seen as reduced to a vast resource well (Bestand) – but the question 
then is: for who, or for what end?”12 However, if we properly understand Heidegger’s 
stance that the Gestell grounds an epoch of our understanding of beings, then it does 
not result from any human will or in favor of any human interests. In this respect, 
Heidegger’s stance regarding the hegemony of the Gestell can be compared to Michel 
Foucault’s description of power relations. Instead of the traditional models of power 
vested in a source of authority, an individual figure or within a particular group, the 
microphysics of power do not respond to any such central source; instead, oppressed 
individuals reproduce within themselves these same structures biopolitically.13 
The following quote from Heidegger’s “Gelassenheit,” thus, takes on the following 
relevance: “these forces, since man has not made them, have moved long since beyond 
his will and have outgrown his capacity for decision[s].”14

Another aspect of Heidegger’s romanticism remains in his nationalism as a form 
of the concept of ‘home ground,’ which specifically protrudes in “Gelassenheit.” In 
relation to art, Heidegger asks “does not the flourishing of any genuine work depend 
upon its roots in a native soil? […] does man still dwell calmly between heaven and 
earth? […] is there still a life-giving home-land in whose ground man may stand 

11 Martin Heidegger, The question concerning technology, and other essays, (New York, Harper Perennial, 2013): 26.
12 Don Ihde, Heidegger’s technologies: postphenomenological perspectives. (New York, Fordham University Press, 2010), 

81.
13 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 26.
14 Martin Heidegger, Discourse on thinking.: a translation of Gelassenheit, (New York, Harper & Row, 1959), 51.



61Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Art, Technology, and Truth

rooted, that is, be autochthonic?”15 These concepts lend themselves easily to an 
interpretation that relates Heidegger’s thought immediately back to his involvement 
with Nazism, but this issue is far more complex. The concept of earth is the result of 
a phenomenology of the work of art and his phenomenology—as is the case for the 
phenomenology of “equipment” towards the beginning of Being and Time, which 
focuses exclusively on the artisanal mode of production—takes the thematic entity 
under description from the perspective of a primitive experience. In this way, we can 
say that Heidegger’s phenomenology of art, although seeking to arrive at the essence 
of art as such, focuses on a model of art in which the production of beautiful objects 
is not yet distinguished in its particularity from the rest of technological production. 
In this manner, there seems to be a radical difference between the Greek temple as 
studied in the “Origin of the Work of Art” and the example of Van Gogh’s painting 
“A Pair of Shoes” offered in that very same text. While the essence of the work of 
art as strife must be descriptive of all forms of art, it seems that the Greek temple 
is limited to the world of the Greeks, whereas Van Gogh’s painting properly reveals 
to Heidegger the essence of art as such. Iain Thomson claims that “in Van Gogh’s 
painting—the strange space which surrounds these shoes like an underlying and yet 
also enveloping atmosphere—one can notice that inchoate forms begin to emerge 
from the background but never quite take a firm shape; in fact, these shapes tend to 
disappear when one tries to pin them down.”16 In this manner, Van Gogh’s painting 
can be said to reflect the structure of the type of strife that Heidegger deems the 
essence of the work of art.

Meyer Schapiro famously objected to Heidegger’s interpretation of Van Gogh’s 
painting as nothing but a subjective projection of his own romantic preferences, 
since the shoes that the painting depicted were Van Gogh’s own—those of a city 
man, and not, as he states, those of a countrywoman. Most Heideggerians would 
claim that Schapiro misses the important aspects of Heidegger’s example; namely, 
the ontological depth sought in the phenomenological description of the work. 
While I partially agree with this rebuke, the fact that Van Gogh painted his own 
shoes17 acquires utmost importance precisely because it means that we are facing an 
ontological work that reflects on its own being—a transcendental art18 that reveals 

15 Martin Heidegger, Discourse on thinking.: a translation of Gelassenheit, (New York, Harper & Row, 1959), 47-48.
16 Thomson, Iain D., "Heidegger’s Aesthetics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), 

Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/heidegger-aesthetics/>.
17 Van Gogh’s painting then doesn’t reveal the world of the country woman but the world of the artist. Here we 

have an opposition between the two modes of reading the concept of earth. If we take the shoes to be those 
of the German country woman, we read the earth as soil (in a way reminiscent of the Nazi slogan “blood and 
soil”) whereas if we take them to be the artist’s, we are confronted with the concept of earth as that dimension 
of inteligibility that resists totalitarian closure. I’d venture to claim that Van Gogh’s painting could only reveal 
art’s essence to Heidegger in so far as it expresses the artist’s relationship to the earth which involves a constantly 
renewed attempt to seize those fleeting instants that are worthy of being immortalized in the artwork. Derrida 
seems to be pointing in this direction on Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question and also on The Truth in Painting.

18 There is much to develop and further enquire in regard to this concept since the reflexive character of modern 
art is an extensive phenomenon. I recently came upon a book by literary critic Robert Alter named “Partial 
Magic: The Novel as a Self-conscious Genre,” which sees in the Quixote not only the birth of the novel, but also 
the archetype that contains all the self-reflexive exercises that later novelists will explore and exploit (with the 



62

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

the conditions of its own possibility. This kind of art differs altogether from what 
one could deem pre-transcendental art, such as the Greek temple, or any other work 
of art previous to Cervantes’ revolution in putting forth his highly reflective Don 
Quixote—comparable to that started in philosophy twenty years later by Descartes 
in his Rules for the Direction of the Mind.19 We can say, without departing too much 
from Heidegger, that a work of pre-transcendental art is a sensible manifestation of 
the spirit of a community or, in less Hegelian terms, that it consolidates its ethno-
political identity by providing a tangible foundation for its political organization. 
Nonetheless, we can only claim that this is art’s function because of Heidegger’s 
radical claim that the temple founds the Greek world in the sense of a cosmovision, 
opening the historical horizon of intelligibility for their understanding of beings. 
As Heidegger says, “Standing there, the temple first gives to things their look, and 
to men their outlook on themselves.”20 While the temple’s essence is the strife in 
which the earth is brought to the clearing of human intelligibility, Van Gogh’s 
painting reflects the strife itself, as his broad brushstrokes abandon the defined lines 
of realism and evoke the elusive and receding aspect of the earth. In this way, we can 
appreciate the link between Heidegger’s aesthetics and nationalism, since as long as 
an explicit distinction between transcendental and pre-transcendental art does not 
arise, the concept of ‘earth’ remains tied to that of a ‘home ground’ and autochthony. 
Heidegger’s “Gelassenheit” functions as an exhortation for thinking about a new 
autochthony that would allow us to dwell properly in the midst of the irreversible 
changes brought through modern technology. 

Releasement (Gellasenheit) is the attitude that Heidegger proposes as that which 
we need to assume in order to face the threats of modern technology. In “The 
Experience of Technology: Human-Machine Relations,” Ihde states that “there 
is a 'technosphere' within which we do a good deal of our living, surrounding 
us in part the way technological artifacts do literally for astronauts and deep sea 
investigators.”21 Despite his romanticism, Heidegger similarly observes that, “[f ]or 
all of us, the arrangements, devices, and machinery of technology are to a greater or 
lesser extent indispensable. It would be foolish to attack technology blindly. It would 
be shortsighted to condemn it as the work of the devil. We depend on technical 
devices.”22 Given that we depend on the world of technology or the technosphere, 
releasement means saying “yes” to modern technology, remembering, however, that 

exception of those who subscribe to literary realism). Furthermore, an interesting dialogue can be opened with 
Danto’s philosophy of art since his periodization of the history of art responds to the degree of self-consciousness 
evidenced by artists. Danto distinguishes between pre-art and Art, the latter corresponding to the epoch in which 
artists as the makers of beautiful objects are distinguished from artisans. The infamous claim of the end of art 
precisely refers to the epoch in history, the 20th century, where art itself becomes philosophical as it explicitly 
poses the question, “What is art?"

19 We could also mention here another exponent of the Spanish renaissance: the painter Velazquez, known for his 
self-portrait Las Meninas and his extensive depiction of mirrors.

20 Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track,  (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), 21.
21 Ihde, D. Technics and praxis, (Dordrecht, D. Reidel Pub. Co., 1979), 14.
22 Martin Heidegger, Discourse on thinking.: a translation of Gelassenheit, (New York, Harper & Row, 1959), 53.



63Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Art, Technology, and Truth

the essence of modern technology insofar as it compels us to understand nature 
merely as a quantitatively measurable reserve of resources (including what we deem 
the “human resources”) threatens to redirect all modes of unconcealment to that of 
provocation. Since this would signify a fall into an improper mode of existence as 
we stop reflecting upon ourselves to understand humanity merely in terms of stock, 
releasement simultaneously has to say “no” to the pervasiveness of the Gestell: “We 
can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to 
dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature.”23 This saying yes 
to the unavoidable character of technology acknowledges that “a profound change is 
taking place in man's relation to nature and to the world. But the meaning that reigns 
in this change remains obscure.”24 Given this opacity in modern technology’s essence, 
the openness to mystery becomes the other part to Heidegger’s solution to face the 
dangers of the Gestell. With this openness, Heidegger simultaneously recognizes the 
imperative to accept the inevitable while humbly admitting that his limitations as a 
man of a past generation preclude him from imagining how man can dwell properly 
in the time of the Gestell. Insofar as “mystery” is defined by Heidegger as that which 
shows itself at the same time as it conceals itself, the openness to mystery is the 
way in which we keep meditative or self-reflexive thought alive by staying in the 
realm of truth as unconcealment.  It is worth noting how the mystery to which we 
remain open evokes the concept of earth, for one of Heidegger’s main contributions 
to philosophy is his stance that humans first and foremost understand the world 
through the manipulation of tools and the production of works. Thus, thought as 
openness to mystery and art are identified—as in Nietzsche’s stance that art is the 
properly metaphysical activity of man or Danto’s claim that the defining trait of 20th 
century art remains its philosophical character since it explicitly poses the question 
“What is art?”

V. CONCLUSION

Releasement and openness to mystery “grant us the possibility of dwelling in the 
world in a totally different way. They promise us a new ground and foundation 
upon which we can stand and endure in the world of technology without being 
imperiled by it. Releasement toward things and openness to the mystery grants us a 
vision of a new autochthony, which someday even might be fit to recapture the old 
and now rapidly disappearing autochthony in a changed form.”25 The lost rooting 
that Heidegger denounces is not simply the subordination of meditative thinking 
to calculative thought: the hegemony of modern technology brings about the 
shortening of all distances in space and time, the erasure of all localisms as a result of 
globalization. As Ihde claims, “[t]he dramatic space shots of Earth from the moon or 
a satellite are very un-Heideggerian precisely because they place Earth at a distance 

23 Martin Heidegger, Discourse on thinking: a translation of Gelassenheit, (New York, Harper & Row, 1959), 54..
24 Ibid, Pg. 55.
25 Ibid.



64

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

from Earth-as-ground. But they are also irreversibly part of the postmodern view of 
Earth-as-globe, with a very different sense of what constitutes our ‘home’.”26 As this 
essay demonstrated, Heidegger recognizes this irreversible aspect of the profound 
changes in humanity’s relation to nature and the world and exhorts us to think so that 
we can build a “home” in the technical world. In this regard, Heidegger’s thought is 
closer than ever to the spirit of Kant’s philosophy: not only does he offer a critique 
of the illegitimate claims of the science of his time that threaten to warp and destroy 
human freedom, but he also calls upon us to understand our dwelling within the 
world in cosmopolitan terms. ◆

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blok, Josine H. “Gentrifying Genealogy: On the Genesis of the Athenian 
Autochthony Myth.” In Ancient Myth. Media, Transformations and Sense-
Constructions, 251–75. Edited by Ueli Dill and Christine Walde. Berlin: De 
Gruyter, 2009.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

Ihde, D. Heidegger’s technologies: postphenomenological perspectives. New York: Fordham 
University Press, 2010.

Ihde, D. Technics and praxis. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Pub. Co., 1979.

Heidegger, M. Discourse on thinking.: a translation of Gelassenheit. John M. Anderson 
and E. Hans Freund, trans. New York: Harper & Row, 1959.

Heidegger, M. Off the Beaten Track.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002

Heidegger, M. Poetry, Language, Thought. A. Hofstadter, trans. New York: Harper & 
Row, 1971.

Heidegger, M.  “Vom Ursprung des Kunstwerks: Erste Ausarbeitung”. Heidegger 
Studies Vol. 5 (1989); 5-22

Heidegger, M. Vorträge und Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 
2000.

Heidegger, M. The question concerning technology, and other essays. New York: Harper 
Perennial, 2013.

Thomas, Iain D., “Heidegger’s Aesthetics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 
(Fall 2019 Edition). Edward N. Zalta (e.d.), URL=<https://plato.stanford.edu/
archives/fall2019/entries/heidegger-aesthetics>.

Thomson, Iain D. Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity. Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 2012.

26 Don Ihde. Heidegger’s technologies: postphenomenological perspectives, (New York, Fordham University Press, 2010): 
85.



65

C
O

N
TR

IB
U

TO
RS ABHI RUPARELIA

University of Richmond
Abhi Ruparelia is a rising senior at the University of Richmond, where he is majoring 
in philosophy and leadership studies. While his philosophical interests remain diverse, 
he is particularly fascinated by questions in meta-ethics and moral philosophy, 
especially on normativity, moral responsibility, blame, and free will. On the side, 
he also likes to dabble in political philosophy and has recently started to become 
interested in mathematical logic. For his senior thesis, he is working on a version of 
the paper published in this journal, which he aims to explore and refine in greater 
detail. After graduation, he plans on applying to graduate schools in philosophy.

SHERRY TSENG
University of Pennsylvania
Sherry Tseng is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania studying philosophy, with an 
interest in the philosophy of language and how it intersects with justice, epistemology, 
and aesthetics. Using her philosophical background, she is particularly excited to see 
how it may apply to practical and real-world settings. In her spare time, she’s either 
making playlists on Spotify, exploring the city, or trying to convince her friends to go 
to karaoke with her. 

CHENYU BU
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Chenyu Bu is a junior studying Philosophy, Music Composition, and Math at the 
University of Wisconsin-Madison with honors in the liberal arts. Over the course of 
her studies she has developed a strong interest in the intersection of philosophy and 
music—especially in how modernist ideologies in philosophy such as German Idealism 
and Existentialism are reflected and expressed in musical art. She is particularly 
interested in the music of J. S. Bach, Arnold Schoenberg, Claude Debussy, and Olivier 
Messiaen, and finds Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Sartre captivating and resonant with 
these composers. Apart from composing music and studying philosophy, she is also an 
active ballroom dancer and enjoys choreographing. After college, she plans to pursue 
a Ph. D. in Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry as an artist-scholar.



66

CAROLINE GILLETTE
Boston College
Caroline Gillette is a rising senior pursuing her Bachelor of Arts at Boston College. 
She is double majoring in Philosophy (in the Pre-Law/International Studies/Public 
Policy Track) and Economics. Her academic interests include political philosophy, 
particularly the philosophy of law and legal authority. She is also interested in Hegel, 
especially dialectical phenomenology. She intends to study law after completing her 
undergraduate studies.

FELIPE DANIEL MONTERO
University of Buenos Aires
Felipe Daniel Montero is currently a student of philosophy at the University of Buenos 
Aires. His primary focus is the philosophy of art, and he is especially interested in 
the relationship between the artistic phenomenon and other essential aspects of 
human existence such as politics, science and religion. With this in mind, he finds 
the traditions of German idealism, Heidegger’s existentialism, and the writings of the 
Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges especially revealing.



Dianoia fosters open philosophical discussion and writing 
among undergraduate students. The journal is committed to 

providing the opportunity for intellectual reflection that bridges 
the academic disciplines in pursuit of holistic understanding.

The ancient Greek word ‘διάνοια’ translates as ‘thought’ but 
connotes a discursive direction or search for a higher form of 
knowledge. We thus hope to direct philosophical discourse toward 

an intellectually rigorous level of thinking.

Dianoia is sponsored by

The Institute for the Liberal Arts and the
Philosophy Department of Boston College