Jim Madden

Jim Madden is a professor of philosophy at Benedictine College. He completed his Ph.D. in philosophy at Purdue University. His research is concerned mainly with the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, the philosophy of religion, and psychoanalysis, and he is the author of Mind, Matter, and Nature, Thinking about Thinking, and Unidentified Flying Hyperobject.

“The UFO Doesn’t Exist, but It Insists”

I question the common use of the term “ontological shock” in typical discourse about the UFO. In most cases what is pointed to is not ontological shock in the strict Heideggerian sense in which this term was coined by Tillich (an abysmal awareness of all human attempts at ontology), but rather one ontical or imaginary re-identifications of phenomena. The point of this line of thought is to caution us against hurried identifications drawing on the ready resources of our well-worn imaginary registers, which might insulate us against facing more fundamental shocks to our ontological and symbolic systems.