The Third Man

After the Second World War, using culture – such as theater, film, and writing – to promote Austria as a separate nation became a helpful strategy for Austrians and the Allied Forces alike. In this context, the role of Jews and Jewish difference in revising Austrian self-definitions was particularly fraught. Antisemitic prejudices persisted after the Holocaust, even though Austrian Jews were now largely absent. However, in the early postwar years, antisemitism was more likely to rear its head via code words or backhandedly, in efforts to deny its very existence. This article investigates the presence and consequences of this 'invisible' antisemitism in postwar Vienna by juxtaposing two films made at roughly the same time: Der Prozeß (1948), a film about antisemitism that takes place in a nineteenth-century village over 300 miles away and features only innocent rural Jews and diabolical antisemites, while The Third Man (1949) features an urban tale of the black market and poisoned children set in post-1945 Vienna that does not mention either Jews or the reasons for their absence. This comparison suggests that the simultaneous repression and evocation of Jewish difference that characterized the creation of culture in Vienna before the Holocaust persisted in the immediate postwar era.

I have presented the case for radical scepticism with regards to the Abramovich poisoning story, doubting even that "something happened." Here I shall consider an objection to such radical scepticism based on the "environmental factors" theory. This is the idea that, according to an unnamed US official, the symptoms suffered by Abramovich and others could be attributed to environmental factors rather than poisoning. This may be described as "qualified scepticism," the point being that the American at least believed that something had happened, regardless of whether or not it was a poisoning. On the face of it the idea is plausible, but I will suggest that things may not be as they appear.

You know the purpose of the actions you perform in your life. You eat because you’re hungry, sleep because you’re tired, and read the news because you want to know what’s going on in the world. But what’s the purpose of your life as a whole, of life as such? The answer to that question isn’t obvious.

In this course, we’ll analyze and evaluate theories of the meaning of life. Although this might seem like a vague or frivolous topic, it’s actually one of the most important. People have wondered about it ever since we began to think seriously, and a great many approaches to the problem have been developed. We’ll encounter a variety of fascinating themes:

• What do we mean when we ask “What is the meaning of life?” What sort of question is it, and what sorts of replies count as plausible candidates for an answer?

• Is there a meaning of life? Maybe life is pointless, absurd, or evil.

• What is the significance of mortality? How should we think about living with death?

• What can usefully be said about how best to live or what makes life worth living?

• Why is there something rather than nothing? And given that there is something, why is it as it is, given that it might have been otherwise? Why anything? Why this?

Most of the authors we’ll read are philosophers (Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Nagel, and Susan Wolf, among others), and we’ll use the philosophical method to study our topic: breaking the problem down into its elementary parts, carefully defining terms and concepts, and evaluating the validity of arguments and evidence for and against the various claims on offer. In addition to philosophers, however, we’ll also consult a psychologist (Jonathan Haidt), a couple of poets (Wallace Stevens, Philip Larkin), some painters and sculptors (Böcklin, Michelangelo, Rodin), a composer or two (Rachmaninoff and perhaps R. Strauss, Wagner, or Berlioz), and three films (Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima mon amour, Carol Reed’s The Third Man, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless).

This course won’t provide you with any easy answers to the question of the meaning of life. But it will enable you to learn your way around the neighborhood of the question and improve your ability to ask and answer it for yourself.

Movie Review-  The Third Man is a 1949 British film noir directed by Carol Reed, written by Graham Greene, and starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, and Trevor Howard.

Link: https://www.thestatesman.com/supplements/torn-between-heaven-and-hell-147298.html

Este artículo estudia una de las facetas menos conocidas de la obra del novelista, guionista y crítico Graham Greene: la crítica de cine. El medio cinematográfico le había apasionado al escritor británico -autor de títulos como The Power and the Glory (1940), The Third Man (1950), The Quiet American (1955), Our Man in Havana (1958), o Monsignor Quixote (1982)- desde su infancia, lo que le llevó a la crítica a partir de su época universitaria hasta principios de los cuarenta. Pese a concebirlo como un entrenamiento, realizó más de cuatrocientas reseñas que fueron una extensión de su propia filosofía literaria y personal, labor en la que se preocupó por las posibilidades narrativas que ofrecía el nuevo medio, la elaboración de obras que trascendieran el entrenamiento e incluso, la trascendencia de la labor del crítico. En este artículo se pretende demostrar que sus reseñas, nunca exentas de polémica, supusieron los primeros encontronazos con la industria del entretenimiento, que se prolongaron hasta el final de su vida a partir de su labor de guionista y autor adaptado a la gran pantalla.

In my exposition, I shall analyse aspects of those ontological dispositions which I define as the bearing structures of Aristotle’s ontology. Examples of bearing structures of Aristotle’s ontology are, in my opinion, the categories and their own features, the relations holding between the different categories, the realm of particulars/individuals and the realm of universals, the principle of contradiction, the notions of essence, form, matter, potentiality, actuality, completion, the status represented by “being this something” or by “being this such”, the status represented by ”quality/such”, the connections, the implications, the compatibilities and the incompatibilities holding between the bearing structures of the ontology, and so on.
The complex of the bearing structures of ontology corresponds to the whole feature system of Aristotle’s ontology, since it constitutes foundations, rules, and prohibitions governing Aristotle’s ontology; it is the very framework of Aristotle’s ontology. The framework of ontology precedes the actual appearance of the concrete entities of the average reality like men, colours, lengths and so forth. At the level of the framework, it does not matter which (kinds of) entities concretely exist; it does matter, though, which structures exist before the actual appearance of these entities, since these structures constitute the whole texture pre-existing to the appearance of the concrete entities. In this framework, the concrete entities find their own place. The concrete entities follow the rules determining this framework space.
The correct determination of the framework and of the features belonging to the elements of the framework is vital for the ontology. Any transgression whatsoever perpetrated against the rules of the framework ontology immediately has irremediable consequences for the ontology itself: for example, an interpretation of the entities which belong universally as though they were substances, and of the entities which are predicated in common as though they had the status of this something (tóde ti), directly leads to the Third Man regress and, therewith, to the collapse of the whole ontology. Hence, ontological prudence, circumspection, and caution are indispensable attitudes in the determination of the features of the bearing structures of ontology. Aristotle’s very watchful way of investigation witnesses his own being completely aware that one false step within this kind of analysis is, always – unfortunately – a false step too much.
In the present work, I shall concentrate my attention on features which, in my opinion, Aristotle is pointing out as constitutive for the status of particulars/individuals, of substances, and of universals. The cardinal feature of this section of Aristotle’s ontology consists, in my opinion, in the fact that Aristotle considers every concretised entity as an instance of a property or, put differently, as an instantiated property: universal properties are individualised in their instances. No individual entity has only the status of being individual; it is always an individual “such”, an individual “something”. Through this interpretation of the individual entities, Aristotle finds, in my opinion, the way of relation, that is, he finds a kind of mediation between particular/individual and universal in the reality. I shall then illustrate Aristotle’s process of differentiation between the realms of reality consisting, respectively, of entities having the status of this something (tóde ti, i.e. numerically one entities), and entities having the status of quality (poión, i.e. not numerically one entities). The next subject of analysis will be the incompatibility holding between entities that belong universally and entities that are predicated in common, on the one hand, and entities having the status of substance and of tóde ti, on the other hand: this incompatibility will bring about, as immediate consequence for all the positions which do not respect this incompatibility, the Third Man regress. Besides, I shall expose aspects of the ontological rules and ontological prohibitions originating from the distinctions between realms of reality.

In 2003, biophysicist and Nobel Laureate Maurice Wilkins published his autobiography entitled The Third Man. In the preface, he diffidently points out that the title (which presents him as the ‘third’ man credited with the co-discovery of the structure of DNA, besides Watson and Crick) was chosen by his publisher, as a reference to the famous 1949 movie no doubt, featuring Orson Welles in his classical role as penicillin racketeer Harry Lime. In this paper I intend to show that there is much more to this title than merely its familiar ring. If subjected to a (psychoanalytically inspired) comparative analysis, multiple correspondences between movie and memoirs can be brought to the fore. Taken together, these documents shed an intriguing light on the vicissitudes of budding life sciences research during the post-war era. I will focus my comparative analysis on issues still relevant today, such as dual use, the handling of sensitive scientific information (in a moral setting defined by the tension between collaboration and competition) and, finally, on the interwovenness of science and warfare (i.e. the ‘militarisation’ of research and the relationship between beauty and destruction). Thus, I will explain how science autobiographies on the one hand and genres of the imagination (such as novels and movies) on the other may deepen our comprehension of tensions and dilemmas of life sciences research then and now. For that reason, science autobiographies can provide valuable input (case material) for teaching philosophy and history of science to science students.