Special Issue on John D. Caputo's WHAT WOULD JESUS DECONSTRUCT? GLOBAL SPIRAL 8.11 (2008).

Caputo, John D. What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007.

Contents:

• In His Steps—A Postmodern Edition: An Excerpt from What Would Jesus Deconstruct?by John D. Caputo
• The Hermeneutics of the Kingdom of God: John Caputo and the Deconstruction of Christianityby Jeffrey Robbins
• An Ongoing Adventure with WWJD?: Review of What Would Jesus Deconstruct?by Thomas Jay Oord
• What Jesus Did: The Incarnation as a More Radical Hermeneutics by James K.A. Smith

Access the issue here: http://www.metanexus.net/Magazine/Home/tabid/66/Default.aspx.

CFP: "Specialisation, Semiosis, Semiotics," 33rd Annual Meeting, Semiotic Society of America, University of St. Thomas, October 16–19, 2008.

The non-restrictive theme of the meeting is “Specialization, Semiosis, Semiotics”, intended to underscore the fact that semiotics provides the only perspective that is inherently transdisciplinary, resulting from the universal dependence of experience and knowledge upon semiosis — that is, the action of signs. Papers on any aspect of the doctrine of signs, theoretical or applied, are welcome. Explicit tie-in to the theme is not required. Proposals should be made in the form of abstracts of approximately 150 words for evaluation by the Program Committee. Email address & full information concerning institutional affiliation, as applicable, should accompany the abstract submissions. Abstracts, together with index key-words and AV requirements (only if necessary: try to avoid) for individual papers and/or sessions should be submitted directly to both Professor Thomas F. Broden and John Deely . The abstracts are not to have special fonts or graphics, and are to be in the body of the email. Professor Broden will circulate the submissions to the Program Committee members, and communicate acceptance/rejection decisions. His office phone is 765-494-3857 or 765-494-3828. Read the full CFP here: http://www.uwf.edu/tprewitt/1008SSACall.pdf.

Jacoby, Russell. "Not to Complicate Matters, but . . ." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION February 29, 2008.

"I hope today to complicate our notion of cahiers — grievances — and the role they played in the States-General of 1789." The professors and graduate students at the symposium nod appreciatively. They have heard or read similar justifications untold times before. The author explains that he or she will "complicate" our understanding of some event or phenomenon. "In this article," writes an ethnic-studies professor, "I seek to complicate scholars' understanding of the 'modular' state by examining four forms of indigenous political space." Everyone seems pleased by this approach. Why? The world is complicated, but how did "complication" turn from an undeniable reality to a desirable goal? Shouldn't scholarship seek to clarify, illuminate, or — egad! — simplify, not complicate? How did the act of complicating become a virtue? The refashioning of "complicate" derives from many sources. One recipe calls for adding a half cup of poststructuralism to a pound of multiculturalism. Mix thoroughly. Bake. Season with Freudian, Hegelian, and post-Marxist thought. Serve at room temperature. The invitees will savor the meal and will begin to chat in a new academic tongue. They will prize efforts not only to complicate but also to "problematize," "contextualize," "relativize," "particularize," and "complexify." They will denounce anything that appears "binary." They will see "multiplicities" everywhere. They will add "s" to everything: trope, regime, truth. They will sprinkle their conversations with words like "pluralistic," "heterogenous," "elastic," and "hybridities." A call for "coherence" will arrest the discussion. Isn't that "reductionist"? . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=0d88916qty2kc0t0b0gn0bsz1fmdjp7k.

Dirda, Michael. "Michael Kazin." WASHINGTON POST February 24, 2008.

It is a sad truth that almost any poet or novelist has a shot at immortality, but a critic lives only as long as he keeps writing, keeps in the thick of the action. A decade after his (or her) death, a loyal publisher may bring out a "selected essays" that will prompt a few reminiscences and reconsiderations. After another decade, nothing. Kazin, however, is luckier than most. While he scratched out a living by writing book reviews, teaching at various colleges and universities, and snagging grants (four Guggenheims, numerous other fellowships and regular visits to the artist's retreat Yaddo), he also produced three wonderful works of autobiography, classics of the modern American experience . . . Read the rest here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/21/AR2008022102223.html.

"CADAAD 2008," Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines, University of Hertfordshire, July 10-12, 2008.

Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD) is an ongoing project which aims to foster and promote cross-disciplinary communication in critical discourse research. Following the success of the project’s first international conference hosted at the University of East Anglia in 2006, we are pleased to announce the second international conference CADAAD’08, to be hosted at the University of Hertfordshire, 10-12 July 2008. In line with the general aims of the project, we welcome papers both from CDA and neighbouring disciplines such as communication studies, media studies, narrative studies, sociology, philosophy and political science. Abstracts are invited which assess the state of the art and offer new directions for critical discourse research. By new directions we mean i) theoretical/methodological development and/or ii) analysis of contemporary discourses. Theoretical/methodological frameworks sourced from all areas of the social and cognitive sciences are welcome. Papers exploring the following frameworks in linguistics are particularly welcome:

• Cognitive Linguistics (Blending, Construction Grammars, Framing, Metaphor)
• Corpus Linguistics (Corpus Construction, Data Extraction, Semantic Prosody)
• Pragmatics (Presupposition, Relevance Theory, Speech Acts)
• Systemic Functional Linguistics (Cohesion and Coherence, Grammatical Metaphor)

Analyses of all contemporary discourses are welcome, including those within applied and professional areas such as business, education, environment, health, and law. Papers applying critical analysis to discourses used in the construction of 'minority' vs. 'normality' and other dichotomies are especially welcome. Areas of particular interest include:

• Discourse on gender
• Discourse of International Law
• Discourse on immigration
• Discourse of the war on terror
• European Union discourse
• United Nations and foreign aid discourse

Access the conference website here: http://cadaad.org/cadaad08.

CFP: "Cross-Cultural Conflicts and Communication: Rethinking Jaspers's Philosophy Today," Seoul, July 30–August 5, 2008.

The International Association of Jaspers Societies invites members of the international community of scholars to participate in the Sixth International Jaspers Conference. The Conference focuses, though not exclusively, on Jaspers's thoughts on communication and dialogue, and on his idea of philosophy as transcending cultural traditions. Persons prepared to contribute papers on some aspect of the conference theme should submit to one of the undersigned Organizers no later than July 31, 2007: 1.) the title, 2.) a brief statement regarding the chosen topic, 3.) an indication of the contributor’s previous relevant publications, if any. Finished papers should have a reading time of about 20 minutes, and be submitted no later than January 31, 2008. A committee of readers will be convened for this purpose. We are hoping that our negotiations with the Organizing Committee of the World Congress will result in ample space and time for the Jaspers Conference. While the Sixth International Jaspers Conference will be held in conjunction with the 22nd World Congress of Philosophy, it is being planned independently. Registered participants in the World Congress will be able to attend and participate in the Jaspers Conference without additional fees. The Sixth International Jaspers Conference is organized by the International Association of Jaspers Societies on behalf of its Member Societies, Jaspers Society of Japan and The Karl Jaspers Society of North America, and with the support of Karl Jaspers-Stiftung Basel und Österreichische Karl Jaspers-Gesellschaft. Further information on the conference may be found here: http://www.bu.edu/paideia/kjsna/papercall.html.

Karl Jaspers Forum

To access the Karl Jaspers Forum, please go here: http://www.kjf.ca.

May, Todd. "Review of Nick Hewlett's BADIOU, BALIBAR, RANCIERE: RE-THINKING EMANCIPATION." NDPR February 22, 2008.

Hewlett, Nick. Badiou, Balibar, Rancière: Re-thinking Emancipation. London: Continuum, 2007. Badiou, Balibar, Rancière is a critical overview of the political thought of three students of Althusser's, each of whom has moved away from his teacher in a direction different from the others. Hewlett argues that, in a France and indeed in a world that is increasingly neoliberal in both its thought and its practice, there is a need for a renewal of a left theoretical tradition. Each of these thinkers attempts to offer that renewal, with, in Hewlett's eyes, mixed success. The book can be read both as an overview of the work of these thinkers and as a critical engagement with them. However, since the discussions are brisk and often introductory, the critical questions raised to these thinkers do not (and, I believe, do not seek to) have much depth. I will argue that, at least in the case of Badiou, there are straightforward ways to answer the criticisms Hewlett raises. However, it should be said immediately that, aside from the criticisms, the overview he provides of each thinker is valuable, and in the cases of Badiou and Rancière, fairly accurate. As I am not a scholar of Balibar's thought, I cannot comfortably offer judgment of his efforts there. . . . Read the rest of the review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu:80/review.cfm?id=12443.

Foucault, Michel. THE BIRTH OF POLITICS: LECTURES AT THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE, 1978-1979. Trans. Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Michel Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France in 1979, The Birth of Biopolitics, pursue and develop further the themes of his lectures from the previous year, Security, Territory, Population. Having shown how Eighteenth century political economy marks the birth of a new governmental rationality – seeking maximum effectiveness by governing less and in accordance with the naturalness of the phenomena to be governed – Michel Foucault undertakes the detailed analysis of the forms of this liberal governmentality. This involves describing the political rationality within which the specific problems of life and population were posed: "Studying liberalism as the general framework of biopolitics". What are the specific features of the liberal art of government as they were outlined in the Eighteenth century? What crisis of governmentality characterises the present world and what revisions of liberal government has it given rise to? This is the diagnostic task addressed by Foucault's study of the two major twentieth century schools of neo-liberalism: German ordo-liberalism and the neo-liberalism of the Chicago School. In the years he taught at the Collège de France, this was Michel Foucault's sole foray into the field of contemporary history. This course thus raises questions of political philosophy and social policy that are at the heart of current debates about the role and status of neo-liberalism in twentieth century politics. A remarkable feature of these lectures is their discussion of contemporary economic theory and practice, culminating in an analysis of the model of homo oeconomicus. Foucault’s analysis also highlights the paradoxical role played by "society" in relation to government. "Society" is both that in the name of which government strives to limit itself, but it is also the target for permanent governmental intervention to produce, multiply, and guarantee the freedoms required by economic liberalism. Far from being opposed to the State, civil society is thus shown to be the correlate of a liberal technology of government. This is not yet published but will be shortly. For a sample of chapter one, please visit: http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?PID=295668.

Cooper, Carol. "Chinua Achebe's THINGS FALL APART Turns 50 This Year [Interview]." VILLAGE VOICE February 19, 2008.

Although Achebe has been internationally famous since 1958, when his first novel, Things Fall Apart, was published by London's Heinemann Press, subsequent decades have only expanded his impressive résumé. Things Fall Apart wasn't the first African novel written in English, but it remains one of the most significant and best known. Two years before Britain granted Nigeria its independence, Achebe's fictionalized critique of cultural imperialism did for colonialism what Uncle Tom's Cabin did for American slavery. A commemorative edition arrives this month from Vintage/Anchor to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Achebe's debut and his winning of the 2007 Man Booker International Prize, which honored his entire body of published work—his novels, critical essays, poetry, short stories, children's books, and anthologies of African short fiction. . . . Read the rest of the interview here: http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/0808,302331,302331,27.html.

Timberg, Scott. "At 50, Achebe Novel Looks Immortal." LOS ANGELES TIMES February 24, 2008.

About a half-century ago, a shy young Nigerian man, who had grown up reading Dickens and Pilgrim's Progress, put his handwritten novel in the mail to a typing service in London. The manuscript sat untouched for months, until a colleague rescued it during a visit to Britain. These pages, after several rejections, later found their way to a sympathetic publisher.The book eventually released, Things Fall Apart, became a critical hit in Britain as well as the first African novel to break through to the English-speaking world. Not only did it sell -- nearly 10 million copies, in 50 languages -- this slim, understated volume became the one African novel to break, unambiguously, into the often impenetrable Western canon. The book continues to live: High school kids and college students read it for class, while African novelists read it to pursue its ideas and themes. To literary scholar John Marx of UC Davis, it's "the first novel of the African literary canon, to be sure, but also a key text in the body of writing one needs to know to be literate. I'd say that's the case not only in the English-speaking world but just about everywhere". . . . Read the rest here: http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-ca-things24feb24,0,2262817.story.

"The Invention of Philosophy: Hume," Université Pierre Mendès France - Grenoble 2, March 13-15, 2008.

The interest raised by Hume’s way of practising philosophy is now very high amongst the scientific community; hence the place currently occupied by the Essays or the History of England: as well as the now widely spread references to a variety of Hume’s arguments in various areas of philosophical investigation. The Grenoble symposium, centred on the most out of context as possible issues of philosophical language, will be an opportunity to define what Hume has brought to the practice of philosophy after his time : thus, the issues around the philosophical vocabulary, the way to organise it, the relationship between philosophy and literature, philosophy and ‘common life ‘, philosophy of human or social sciences, are likely to be linked to the questions Hume asked to the philosophical tradition. We ought to review the problems he would have been the first one to express and the new methods he offers to the philosophers ‘community. By linking both questions : ‘How Hume does it ?’ and ‘How does Hume question us ?’, we could contribute to the better understanding of philosophy’s place and future in a new world, ours, and which he has been undoubtly one of the first ones to understand. The contributions now sought may/ should be about the new shapes Hume brings to philosophy (vocabulary, rhetoric, thought experiences, examples and references, literary genres) or about the invention of arguments and their future in posterity (in philosophy of sciences, moral psychology, aesthetics, politics). The entirety of the symposium should help to define in which terms philosophy is influenced by Hume’s ‘philosophical invention’, and towards which future. For further information, please visit http://www.plc-grenoble2.fr:80/index.php?code=158.

May, Todd. "Review of Jeffrey T. Nealon's FOUCAULT BEYOND FOUCAULT." NDPR February 14, 2008.

Nealon, Jeffrey T. Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensifications since 1984. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. There is a witless, though common, interpretation of Michel Foucault circulating these days. It is an interpretation that seeks to declaw Foucault’s political radicalism and bring him into the liberal fold. On this interpretation, Foucault abandoned the analysis of power constructed during his genealogical period (false) because it had a totalizing character that left no room for resistance (false) in favor of a sort of individual self-construction that he found in the ancient Greeks (false). If Jeffrey Nealon had done no more than recall to us the vapidity of this interpretation, he would have performed a service. However, he has done much more than this. In his slim volume on Foucault, he has offered a fascinating interpretation of Foucault’s work, one that brings to light previous neglected elements of his thought. Although the stated motivation for Nealon’s discussion is to counter the current interpretation of Foucault’s ethical works, the result is one of the most interesting interpretations of Foucault to emerge in many years. The lynchpin of Nealon's interpretation is the concept of intensification. Nealon argues that an understanding of that concept will enlighten us on the trajectory of Foucault's middle and late periods, from power to biopower and from genealogy to ethics. For Foucault, this charting of emergent modes of power is hardly a story of progress or Enlightenment, but a story of what he calls the increasing "intensity" (intensité) of power: which is to say its increasing "lightness" and concomitant "economic" viability, in the broadest sense of the word "economic." Power's intensity most specifically names its increasing efficiency within a system, coupled with increasing saturation. (p. 32) The history of power, in short, is a history of a force (applied against the force of resistance) that becomes more supple and more suffused. Foucault Beyond Foucault proceeds by way of a systematic development of this thought. . . . Read the rest of the review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=12364.

Prado, C. G. "Review of Timothy Rayner's FOUCAULT'S HEIDEGGER." NDPR February 20, 2008.

Rayner, Timothy. Foucault's Heidegger: Philosophy and Transformative Experience. London: Continuum, 2007. In this pricey book, Timothy Rayner hypothesizes that Foucault acknowledges a debt to Heidegger "at precisely the same time as he came to understand philosophy as a self-transformative activity of thought," and that "Foucault appropriated, modified and began to articulate a quasi-Heideggerian transformative philosophical practice." (5, 35) The thrust is that it was only as Foucault's thought evolved to understanding philosophical thinking as transformative that he appreciated how much he owed Heidegger, about whom he previously had said little. Rayner's treatment of Foucault puts him squarely among those I think of as Whiggish Foucauldians who read Foucault with two crucial presuppositions: that his thought was progressive throughout his career, and that Foucault's observations on the development of his own thought can be taken at face-value. (33-34, 35) I disagree with both presuppositions, thinking Foucault's "progress" was more a matter of shifts and changes, and finding the import of his comments on his own work as circumscribed by time, context, and especially mood. Rayner admits Foucault was "mercurial," but does not take seriously enough just how mercurial he was. (1) Rayner also quotes passages where Foucault extols the need to think differently, but reads them as aiming at advancement in thought. Against this, I think Foucault valued and sought difference in thought, not to progress intellectually in a way that could only be objective, but to escape intellectual normalization. With this card on the table, I will say what most struck me about the book. . . . Read the rest of the review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=12423.

"Aesthetics and Contemporary Art," Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, March 13-14, 2008.

The Drawing Room, Trent Park Campus, Middlesex University, London N14.

PROGRAMME

Day 1 9.30-10.30 Registration and Coffee 10.30-10.45 Introduction: Peter Osborne, CRMEP 10.45-12.30 Sensate Thinking: Aesthetics, Art, Ontology

• Christoph Menke, SfB/Institute for Philosophy, University of Potsdam "Not Yet – The Philosophical Significance of Aesthetics"
• Eric Alliez, CRMEP "Undoing the Image"

12.30-13.45 Lunch

13.45-16.00 The Dissolution of Artistic Limits: Objects, Events, Ideas

• Juliane Rebentisch, SfB/Institute for Philosophy, University of Potsdam "Aesthetic Autonomy and Contemporary Art"
• Sebastian Egenhofer, University of Basel "Aesthetic Materiality in Conceptualism"
• Peter Osborne, CRMEP "The Fiction of the Contemporary"

16.00-16.30 Coffee

16.30-17.45 Keynote lecture 1 Art & Language – artists and writers title tba (a three-hander)

18.00-19.00 Drinks reception

Day 2

09.30-10.00 Coffee

10.00–11.15 Keynote lecture 2 Luis Camnitzer, artist and writer "The Two Versions of Santa Anna's Leg and Other Things"

11.15-13.30 Aesthetics of Post-Autonomy: Institution, Collaboration, Participation

• Susanne Leeb, SfB "Human Rights as 'Compass' for Art"
• Stewart Martin, CRMEP "The Subsumption of Art by Capital"
• Brian Holmes, writer and critic "Rules of the Game: the Artistic Device and the Articulation of Public Speech"

13.30-14.30 Lunch

14.30-16.45 Exhibition-Value: Aesthetics of Curation in a Global Artworld

• Dorethea Von Hantelmann, SfB "The Rise of Exhibitions and the Exhibition as Art"
• Charles Merewether, curator "A Work in Progress"
• Pamela Lee, Stanford University "Not Politics as Usual: on the Political 'Problem' at the Venice Biennale"

16.45–17.15 Closing Discussion

Further details: http://www.mdx.ac.uk/www/crmep/EVENTS/AestheticsandContemporaryArt.htm.

Romano, Carlin. "Socrates in the 21st Century." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION February 15, 2008.

Perhaps the most disappointing part of Wilson's book is her lack of attention to the wealth of scholarship re-examining the ancient public-relations triumph by which Plato identified 'philosophy' with his teacher's supposed essentialist attraction to absolutist definitions of concepts. To do so, Plato delegitimized the more pragmatic vision of philosophy, and claim to that word, of the great rhetorician and philosopher Isocrates (436-338 BC), Socrates' younger contemporary, who astonishingly doesn't get a single mention in Wilson's book. (Navia notes the mutual respect expressed between Socrates and Isocrates.) Groundbreaking research by scholars like Yun Lee Too, John and Takis Poulakos, Edward Schiappa, and others has established that our modern-day conception of philosophy as what the Platonic Socrates did, as opposed to what Isocrates did (think of him as an Athenian John Dewey), relies on a simplistic adoption of the Platonic Socrates as the criterion of true philosophy. Wilson indeed alludes to a truth on which this scholarship has shone fresh light. She writes that "in the fifth century B.C. nobody could have known that Socrates' limited set of interests would be identified with all true wisdom or 'philosophy' ('the love of wisdom')". . . .

Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=3wkbtnnvrbgh425ftgz9z9hxtwg6j9bn.

"Alain Robbe-Grillet [Obituary]." DAILY TELEGRAPH February 19, 2008.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, who died on Monday aged 85 was the leading light of the 'new novel' in post-war France, as well as a film director and avant-garde critic whose theories were as influential as his novels. The mere mention of the author's name was enough to suggest hyper-modernity. When John Fowles's narrator in The French Lieutenant's Woman announces, "I live in the age of Robbe-Grillet," he is indicating that the book will be unconventional. The world of the Robbe-Grillet novel is anxious and unheroic. There is usually a dark plot, a mystery, an obsessive chase or detective quest, but resolutions are shrouded in ambiguity and the reader is left to piece things together as best he can. The novels are freighted with a sense of trauma which is left unexplained, flickering at the edges of consciousness. . . .

Read more here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/19/db1901.xml.

See also:

• http://www.lemonde.fr/carnet/article/2008/02/18/l-ecrivain-alain-robbe-grillet-est-mort_1012928_3382.html;
• http://www.lefigaro.fr/livres/2008/02/19/03005-20080219ARTFIG00371-robbe-grillet-le-provocateur-institutionnel-.php;
• http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/books/19robbe-grillet.html?_r=1&oref=slogin;
• http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article3392633.ece;
• http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/alain-robbegrillet-leading-new-novelist-and-filmmaker-who-through-his-work-sought-to-undo-the-conventions-of-fiction-783983.html.

"Bishop Berkeley's Ideas and Idealism," Edinburgh University Philosophy Society, University of Edinburgh, March 7-8, 2008.

Sponsored by The International Berkeley Society and Scots Philosophical Club Programme: Friday 7th March 6.30-8.30 Dr. Alasdair Richmond (Edinburgh) "Into Space With Bishop Berkeley" Saturday 8th March 10.00 -11.30 Prof. David Berman (Trinity College Dublin) "From Scepticism to Immaterialism and Descriptive Psychology then back to Siris" 11.45 - 1.15 Prof. Catherine Wilson (CUNY) "Berkeley and the Corpuscularian Philosophy" 2.45 - 4.15 Dr. Tom Stoneham (York) "Imagination and Representation in Berkeley and Collier" 4.30 - 6.00 Dr. Peter Baumann (Aberdeen) "Molyneux and Berkeley" Conference Fees: £15 (£12.50 Student / £10 Edinburgh PhilSoc Members) 

For more information contact: thephilosophysociety@gmail.com.

Annual Conference, International Berkeley Society, Salve Regina University, June 26-28, 2008.

On June 26-28, 2008, the Redwood Library in Newport, Rhode Island (http://www.redwoodlibrary.org/) will be the site of a major conference devoted to the study of the Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753). The event, which is sponsored by the International Berkeley Society, will include three days of presentations on Berkeley’s life and thought as well as visits to his home (Whitehall) and other sites associated with his 1729-31 stay in Rhode Island. For updated information, go to the conference website: http://philosophy.tamu.edu/~sdaniel/newport.html.

PUB: Grech, John, ed. "Walter Benjamin and the Virtual: Politics, Art, and Mediation in the Age of Global Culture." TRANSFORMATIONS 15 (2007).

Two things prevail in the essays presented in this collection. The first is the intense interest in the work of Benjamin coupled with a desire to re-invest it meaningfully into theories concerning the living relations of each author’s world. The second is the diversity of positions, terms of engagement, and interpretations of Benjamin’s work the authors herein adopt. Perhaps this second feature ought to have been expected, for just as the virtual dispersion through the media has diluted the power of the producer to determine the meaning of the artifact, so too, a diversity of approaches, interpretations, and applications can be expected to be taken in relation to Benjamin. . . . Read the entire issue here: http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_15/editorial.shtml.

Conrad, Peter. "The Scrap Merchant Supreme [on Walter Benjamin]." GUARDIAN January 27, 2008.

'These fragments I have shored against my ruin,' says a nameless voice in TS Eliot's The Waste Land. The fragments are a collage of quotations, jumbled mementos of a lost world. For Walter Benjamin, this might have been the motive of cultural history: he, too, salvaged scraps from the wreckage of culture, anthologising quotes in the hope of reconstructing a past that he knew to be irretrievable. Having fled from Germany after the Nazi putsch, he tenderly reassembled memories of his Berlin childhood in a short, episodic autobiography that is also a tour of the city during the days of the Weimar Republic. In his Parisian exile, he conjured up the vanished Paris of the 19th century. . . . Read the rest here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,,2247445,00.html.

Reno, R. R. "Nietzsche's Deeper Truth." FIRST THINGS (January 2008).

At the outset of On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche reports that his polemical book of pseudo-history, pseudo-anthropology, and pseudo-psychology is an exercise in knowing ourselves. We cannot simply investigate morality and Christianity, as if these were topics we could entertain with dispassionate detachment as we do biological specimens or mathematical equations. No, according to Nietzsche, our commitment to a moral frame of reference penetrates to the depths of our soul. We are invested in the value of values, the moral significance of morality, and, as we are participants in a culture profoundly shaped by Christian ideals of self-denial and self-sacrifice, what we think about these ideals entails a judgment about ourselves. To inquire into the origin and value of morality is to peer into the hidden recesses of our ambitions and fears, our longings and loathings—to know ourselves. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6103.

CFP: "Corporeity and Affectivity: in Celebration of Merleau-Ponty's 100th Birthday," Charles University, Prague, September 28-October 2, 2008.

In an article written in 1959, in commemoration of Husserl’s 100th anniversary, Merleau-Ponty writes that “with regard to a philosopher whose venture has awakened so many echoes, and at such an apparent distance from the point where he himself stood, any commemoration is also a betrayal” (“The Philosopher and His Shadow”). These words, however, are not meant to prevent us from commemorating a philosopher and his work. Quite the contrary, for Merleau-Ponty this “betrayal” seems to have a positive meaning. In fact it means that, in order to do justice to a philosopher’s work we should not – or perhaps, we could not – merely repeat it. To keep the work of thought alive we should trace and conjure up its “unthoughts”, and the greater the work of a philosopher, the richer the unthought elements in that work. Commemorating Merleau-Ponty’s 100th day of birth in 2008, nearly 50 years after his dead, his work is still alive. Not because his work was unfinished by his sudden death, but because his work was meant to be open and interrogative and thus not to be closed off, it left us with many elements yet to think. This conference aims at bringing into play the topicality of this work with respect to various debates in contemporary philosophy. . . . The rest of the CFP is here: http://www.phenomenology.ro/newsletter/pages/corporeity&affectivity.html.

Dews, Peter. "Review of Alain Badiou's BEING AND EVENT." NDPR February 18, 2008.

Being and Event consists of thirty-seven interlaced 'meditations', some more mathematical, some more philosophical, and some interpretations of major figures in the canon of Western thought. Through these discussions, Badiou develops his conception of a dimension of existence which escapes the purview of constructive knowledge, or 'the encyclopedia' as he calls it, and which can perhaps best be regarded as the dimension of revelation or the donation of meaning. It is here that he locates what he calls the 'event'. Fidelity to an event (or rather, fidelity as the process through which an event is recognized and sustained) is what constitutes us as 'subjects': as more than merely natural beings intent on satisfying our needs and reproducing our kind. Badiou is not the only French philosopher of recent times to have set the notion of fidelity at the heart of his thinking, as we shall find. But what makes Badiou's work unusual, given these preoccupations, is the crucial role which he allots to mathematics, both in specifying his complex general ontology, and in providing the basic modelling of human situations. Badiou's whole philosophy, we could say, is generated by the tension between his basic claim that mathematics is ontology, and his equally fundamental claim that, as he puts it, 'ontology is a situation' (p. 25). For this means that, although ontology exhausts what there is, it cannot capture everything which occurs: there can be other situations, regardless of how difficult it may be to portray them theoretically. So despite his hostility to the 'anti-philosophical' tradition in post-Hegelian thought, Badiou himself plays his own version of that tradition's typical game. What cannot be known is what it is most urgent to know, what really matters, politically and existentially. Badiou -- and here he differs from his post-structuralist contemporaries -- is inclined to call it 'truth'. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu:80/review.cfm?id=12406.

"The Classical Sublime," Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, March 14-15, 2008.

What is the sublime? Influentially theorised by Burke and Kant in the 18th century, the concept has recently attracted postmodern and Lacanian analysis from philosophers such as Derrida, Lyotard and Zizek. An aesthetic once exploited by Coleridge, Turner and the Romantics, the sublime today finds a home in the paintings of Barnett Newman and the films of David Lynch. The sublime’s classical roots, however, have been largely neglected and this conference aims to redress the balance, with discussion focusing on classical theorisations of the sublime (most notably Ps.-Longinus’s seminal treatise Peri Hypsous), on representations of the sublime in classical literature, and on the influence of these classical formulations on later understandings of the sublime. By establishing a cultural frame for the sublime different to those usually adopted, the conference aims to suggest new ways of understanding the concept. Conversely, consideration of ancient texts in terms of the long tradition of literature on and of the sublime will hopefully prompt fresh perspectives on these texts, their particular aesthetic modes, and these modes’ wider cultural implications.

Read the rest of the conference description here: http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/news/events/pg/view==month/date==01-03-2008/article==91.

CFP: "Imagination in the Human Sciences," Human Science Research Conference 2008, Ramapo College of New Jersey, June 11-14, 2008.

The International Human Science Research Association is the premier venue for scholars seeking to establish a rigorous paradigm for conducting empirical qualitative research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Moreover, HSR is also a research community that includes many human service professions - especially psychotherapists, nurses, teachers and business researchers. While HSR encourages dialogue between qualitative and quantitative methods, its main focus is the promotion of qualitative methodologies. What distinguishes the Human Science approach to qualitative methodology from that of many other approaches to qualitative methodology is HSR's emphasis on appropriate epistemological foundations for qualitative research. Through coherent philosophical foundations appropriate to its subject matter of human experiences, Human Science researchers avoid defaulting back onto the epistemologies of the physical sciences. Instead, Human Science researchers are perpetually engaged in the articulation of appropriate non-naturalistic conceptual frameworks for conducting empirical research. It is for this reason that Human Science qualitative researchers will often have an expertise in continental phenomenological perspectives that offer alternatives to logical positivism and a sole reliance on materialist metaphysics. To this end, continental thinkers such as Dithey, Weber, Husserl, Heiddeger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Derrida, Ricouer, Foucoult and Amedeo Giorgi, are often applied to theory construction as well as research methodology, interpretation and analysis. This scholarly community has been meeting since the early eighties and has developed into an ongoing international multi-disciplinary research community that convenes annually in Europe and North America. While not exclusive to other topics, the conference theme of "Imagination in the Human Sciences" is profoundly interdisciplinary and inclusive of several disciplines and professions. Imagination is an important and under-researched issue in qualitative research - both as subject matter and methodology - and should serve as a constructive and productive focus for this year's conference. Further information is here: http://phobos.ramapo.edu/~hsr08ram/index.html.

CFP: Annual Meeting, Society for Phenomenology and Existential Phenomenology, Duquesne University, October 16-18, 2008.

Papers and panels from diverse philosophical perspectives in all areas of Continental Philosophy are welcome for SPEP's 47th Annual Conference. The Executive Committee invites: 1. Completed Papers (3,000 words) with Abstracts (100 words) 2. Panel Proposals (Topics for Sessions and Abstracts of EachPresentation), 3. Current Research Session Proposals (Book Nominations) For further information, please contact either of the Executive Co-Directors: Peg Birmingham Department of Philosophy DePaul University 2352 N. Clifton Ave. Chicago, IL 60614 E-mail: pbirming@depaul.edu or Leonard Lawlor Department of Philosophy University of Memphis Memphis, TN 38152 E-mail: lrlawlor@memphis.edu Further details are here: http://www.spep.org/Call%20for%20Papers-SPEP.html.

PUB: Palmer, John. "Parmenides." (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Parmenides of Elea, active in the earlier part of the 5th c. BCE., authored a difficult metaphysical poem that has earned him a reputation as early Greek philosophy's most profound and challenging thinker. His philosophical stance has typically been understood as at once extremely paradoxical and yet crucial for the broader development of Greek natural philosophy and metaphysics. He has been seen as a metaphysical monist (of one stripe or another) who so challenged the naïve cosmological theories of his predecessors that his major successors among the Presocratics were all driven to develop more sophisticated physical theories in response to his arguments. The difficulties involved in the interpretation of his poem have resulted in disagreement about many fundamental questions concerning his philosophical views, such as: whether he actually was a monist and, if so, what kind of monist he was; whether his system reflects a critical attitude toward earlier thinkers such as the Milesians, Pythagoreans, and Heraclitus, or whether he was motivated simply by more strictly logical concerns, such as the paradox of negative existentials that Bertrand Russell detected at the heart of his thought; whether he considered the world of our everyday awareness, with its vast population of entities changing and affecting one another in all manner of ways, to be simply an illusion, and thus whether the lengthy cosmological portion of his poem represented a genuine attempt to understand this world at all. This entry aims to provide an overview of Parmenides' work and of some of the major interpretive approaches advanced over the past few decades. It concludes by suggesting that understanding his thought and his place in the development of early Greek philosophy requires taking due account of the fundamental modal distinctions that he was the first to articulate and explore with any precision. . . . Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/parmenides/.

Nealon, Jeffrey T. "The Swerve around P: Literary Theory after Interpretation." POSTMODERN CULTURE 17.3 (2007).

When I was in grad school--not that long ago--just about everything I needed to know was in the P section. I knew those shelves like the back of my hand. But I guess it is true that, in Library of Congress terms, for my work in recent years it's been all B's, H's, and J's (Philosophy, Social Science, and Politics), hardly any P's--both in terms of the theory and criticism that I read, and in terms of the work that I publish. At first I thought that this was simply an anomaly of my research agendas; but an overwhelming number of colleagues I've since talked to about this experience have similar tales of the swerve around P. Others of course have different preferred Library of Congress designations for their research: the vast D through F shelves for the department historians, Q and R for science studies, more H and J for the queer theorists and cultural studies people, as well as a healthy smattering of G and T (geography and technology). And even those whose work remains firmly on the language and literature shelves admit that much of what goes into their books on literature requires research from other places: history, sociology, social science, not to mention the unclassifiable archival research that informs so much of the work on the P shelves. In short, even the scholarship on the language and literature shelves isn't "literary" in quite the same way it was even a decade ago. There's plenty of superb "theory" and "criticism" being produced in and around English departments, but the adjective "literary" seems oddly out of place when it comes to describing it--inapplicable as much to the work of historians ("don't call us literary historians," a colleague warns) as to theorists (editors at Rowman and Littlefield quickly wrenched the word "literary" out of the title of my co-authored textbook, The Theory Toolbox--marketing death, they said). . . . Read the whole article here: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/17.3nealon.html.

Judt, Tony. "The 'Problem of Evil' in Postwar Europe [on Hannah Arendt]." NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS February 14, 2008.

The first work by Hannah Arendt that I read, at the age of sixteen, was Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. It remains, for me, the emblematic Arendt text. It is not her most philosophical book. It is not always right; and it is decidedly not her most popular piece of writing. I did not even like the book myself when I first read it—I was an ardent young Socialist-Zionist and Arendt's conclusions profoundly disturbed me. But in the years since then I have come to understand that Eichmann in Jerusalem represents Hannah Arendt at her best: attacking head-on a painful topic; dissenting from official wisdom; provoking argument not just among her critics but also and especially among her friends; and above all, disturbing the easy peace of received opinion. It is in memory of Arendt the "disturber of the peace" that I want to offer a few thoughts on a subject which, more than any other, preoccupied her political writings. . . . Read the whole article here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21031.

McWhorter, John. "Blackness: a Quick and Dirty Primer." THE ROOT February 13, 2008.

Especially over the past forty years, the number of black Americans growing up in all-black circumstances has decreased. The diversity of black experience is vaster than ever. For this reason, just as we will not view culturally "blacker" people as lesser, we will not view culturally less black people as suspicious. But most importantly, we cannot evade the issue by treating black culture as something so ambiguous and profound that we aren't really talking about anything at all. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.theroot.com/id/44794.

Shafer, Jack. "How Obama Does that Thing he Does." SLATE February 14, 2008.

Barack Obama bringeth rapture to his audience. They swoon and wobble, regardless of race, gender, or political affiliation, although few understand exactly why he has this effect on them. No less an intellect than The New Yorker's George Packer confesses that moments after a 25-minute campaign speech by Obama in New Hampshire concluded, he couldn't remember exactly what the candidate said. Yet "the speech dissolved into pure feeling, which stayed with me for days," he writes. Given that many of his speeches are criminally short on specifics, as Leon Wieseltier writes this week, how does Obama do that thing he does? A 2005 paper (abstract) by University of Oregon professor of rhetoric David A. Frank unpeels Obama's momentous 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address (video and text here) for clues to his method. Obama's spellbinding oration earned near-universal raves, including one from establishment conservative Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, and its echoes can be heard in every speech he's given as a candidate for president. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.slate.com/id/2184480/.

Benson, Bruce Ellis. "You Have Heard It Said [on John Caputo's Latest]." CHRISTIANITY TODAY February 11, 2008.

Caputo takes particular aim at the ecclesiastical establishment, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, arguing that their claims of following Jesus have been all too easily assumed. Jesus constantly rebuked the religious establishment of his own day. For example, Jesus' stinging rebuke of the Pharisees was that they burdened the people by substituting their own laws for those of God: Jesus says, "For the sake of your tradition, you make void the word of God. You hypocrites!" (Matt. 15:6 – 7). These are strong words of deconstruction. And Matthew's Sermon on the Mount is full of Jesus' refrain, "You have heard that it was said … but I say to you." So Jesus was constantly deconstructing prevailing views regarding the law, as well as expectations about what the Messiah was to accomplish. But wait: Isn't deconstruction the problem? I remember a chapel speaker at my institution who proclaimed that "deconstruction is the theory that says you can make texts mean anything you want them to mean." I admit that's a fairly standard definition of deconstruction, a French term resurrected and redefined by Jacques Derrida. Notoriously difficult to define, deconstruction is not a method or technique. Instead, insisted Derrida, it is the movement of truth coming to the surface. The movement itself is neither negative nor nihilistic, although there's no doubt that a great deal of mischief has been conducted under the banner of deconstruction, some of it simply silly and some downright evil. But deconstruction in its simplest meaning is the breaking apart of concepts or texts that reveals their component parts and structure, and allows for reconstruction. Deconstruction questions assumed interpretations and the presumption of institutions to be the rightful arbiters of meaning. As to his own deconstructive readings, Jacques Derrida is a model — if sometimes controversial — reader, and Caputo follows his example. Read the rest of the review here: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/februaryweb-only/107-12.0.html.

Cederstrom, Carl. "The Lacanian Left Does Not Exist." EPHEMERA 7.4 (2007).

Following the publication of the groundbreaking 1985 work by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the last two decades have witnessed a surge of books dealing with the odd couple of Lacanian psychoanalysis and political theory. While Hegemony only made a few explicit references to Lacan, it has nevertheless been retroactively construed as the work that made possible a marriage between Lacan and political analysis. The reason for this construal has a name: Slavoj Žižek. This Slovene philosopher, also known as the giant from Ljubljana, not only re-read Hegemony in his first book written in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, making the former perhaps more Lacanian than was intended, but was also the most industrious theorist among those who have tried to introduce psychoanalysis to political theory. Publishing books at an immense speed, Žižek has consistently poured his unique theoretical cocktail over the bald heads of boring and dull academics. He has, perhaps more convincingly than anyone else, shown how ideology operates not only at the level of meaning but also, and more forcefully, at that of enjoyment. Starting out with an intense intellectual friendship, even publishing a book together (Butler, Laclau and Žižek, 2000), Žižek and Laclau have gradually parted. If before only an element of animosity smouldered, then now, after their heated debate in Critical Inquiry, following on from Laclau’s latest book, On Populist Reason, it has become clear that the two are open enemies. What did this debate generate, beyond a portrayal of their mutual dislike? If it gave a few indications of their different understandings of Lacan, for example as concerns the notion of the Real, and their opposing views of what class struggle may bring about, it did not say much about their own respective theoretical standpoints. . . Read the entire review here: http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/7-4/7-4cederstrom.pdf.

Peterson, Tobias. "Discipline and Punish: the Official Functions." POPMATTERS February 7, 2008.

As the ones responsible for rule enforcement, the referees are physical manifestations of discipline and power, actors whose penalizing reinforces a larger sense of law and punishment for the rest of us. To better see how this might be so, it’s helpful to invoke the work of theorist Michel Foucault. In his book, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, Foucault describes a shift in the popular conception of discipline from an external notion to a more internalized understanding. To illustrate the case, he discusses the early history of corporal punishment as a very public event, where criminals would be tortured or otherwise castigated in a ritualistic and public display. The considerable audiences that attended these floggings, hangings, beheadings, and so forth, were reminded of the threat of authorities from without (and above) should they ever be tempted to break the rule of law. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/columns/article/53667/discipline-and-punish-the-official-functions/.

Gee, Alice. "Review of Thomas Szasz's COERCION AS CURE." METAPSYCHOLOGY February 12, 2008.

Szasz, Thomas. Coercion as Cure: a Critical History of Psychiatry. Somerset, NJ: Transaction, 2007. In Coercion as Cure, Szasz covers an extensive history of the use of coercion throughout psychiatry, including the early use of various mechanical restraints (e.g. the tranquilising chair), moral treatment, the 'resting cure', insulin shock therapy, ECT, lobotomy, and finally the development of modern-day drug therapies. He maintains throughout that each one of these breakthrough 'discoveries' in psychiatric medicine are simply a reworking of old ideas, all share in common the act of coercion, that is, the depriving of innocent persons of liberty. . . . Read the rest here: http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=4078.

Society for Interdisciplinary Feminist Phenomenology

Society for Interdisciplinary Feminist Phenomenology was created in 2006 by Dr. Bonnie Mann and Dr. Beata Stawarska, professors in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon and affiliated faculty at the Center for the Study of Women in Society. SIFP was created to establish a community of feminist scholars working in and between various disciplines (including developmental psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and philosophy) and employing phenomenology. We strongly believe that phenomenology, with its focus on lived experience, embodiment, and social relations, continues to offer valuable resources for feminist inquiry and empirical research. Feminists working in this area have recently published important philosophical accounts of female body experience (Young, 2005), racial identity (Alcoff, 2006), and disability (Weiss, 2007). Society for Interdisciplinary Feminist Phenomenology is designed to help generate, promote and disseminate cutting edge research conducted by women that is sensitive to gender and representative of women’s role in the social context. . . . Read more about this relatively new association here: http://whp.uoregon.edu/sifp/.

CFP: "Argument Cultures," Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation," University of Windsor, June 3-6, 2009.

The Organizing Committee invites proposals for papers in informal logic or rhetorical or argumentation theory on topics related to the above theme, Argument Cultures. Abstracts prepared for blind refereeing must be submitted electronically no later than Sept. 8, 2008 to H. V. Hansen hhansen@uwindsor.ca. They should be between 200 and 250 words long. Please consult the Conference website for additional information on how to prepare proposals. It is part of OSSA’s mandate to promote the work of graduate students and young scholars in the field, thus we strongly encourage submissions from this group. Please mention the degree and program at the time of submission. For the purposes of the 2009 conference, ‘graduate students’ are those who have not completed their graduate program by September 8, 2008. (The J. Anthony Blair Prize is awarded to the best student paper presented at the conference. The competition is open to all students who have their proposals accepted for the conference but Canadian graduate students who need financial assistance in order to attend should advise the Organizing Committee when they submit their proposals.

Keynote Speakers:

• Ruth Amossy, Department of French, University of Tel-Aviv
• Robert C. Pinto, Department of Philosophy, University of Windsor
• David Zarefsky, School of Communication, Northwestern University

Organizing Committee:

• H. V. Hansen
• C. W. Tindale
• J. A. Blair
• R. H. Johnson

Additional information on the conference is available on the website: www.uwindsor.ca/ossa.

SUMMER INSTITUTE ON ARGUMENTATION

The Centre for Research on Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric (CRRAR) at the University of Windsor will be offering a Summer Institute on Argumentation that will include the conference but begin a week earlier. The Institute will offer a course for graduate students as well as serve as an orientation to recent research in argumentation for post-doctoral students and junior faculty at universities and colleges. The course in the Institute will be taught by internationally recognized argumentation scholars. Further announcements of the Summer Institute and its programmes will be made in April and September 2008. Further information is available on the institute's website: www.uwindsor.ca/crrar.

"History, Fable and Myth: Lamming at 80," 27th Annual Conference on West Indian Literature, University of West Indies, February 28-March 1, 2008.

The conference organizers are taking the opportunity provided by the conference to mark the occasion of George Lamming’s 80th birthday and to celebrate his contribution to West Indian Literature with panels dedicated to his work as well as remarks by Mr. Lamming himself. The larger theme of the conference will of course inform all the panels. Suggested topics for panels include: 1. Lamming’s poetry/novels 2. Lamming’s essays and other writings 3. Critical responses to Lamming’s work 4. History and West Indian literature 5. Caribbean fables of identity 6. Myth and folklore in the literature of the Caribbean 7. Myth, memory and imagination: filling the voids in Caribbean History 8. Gender and sexuality in Caribbean writing: myths, legends and mischief 9. Myths, fables and migration: the literature of the Caribbean diaspora 10. Caribbean literature and the visual arts 11. West Indian literature and contemporary critical theory 12. Caribbean cinema as instrument of history, myth and fable. Further information is here: http://www.cavehill.uwi.edu/fhe/specialevents/lll/wilc/.

Atlas, James. "The Nation: Leo-Cons; a Classicist's Legacy: New Empire Builders." NEW YORK TIMES May 4, 2003.

Strauss Redux: To intellectual-conspiracy theorists, the Bush administration's foreign policy is entirely a Straussian creation. Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, has been identified as a disciple of Strauss; William Kristol, founding editor of The Weekly Standard, a must-read in the White House, considers himself a Straussian; Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for the New American Century, an influential foreign policy group started by Mr. Kristol, is firming in the Strauss camp. One is reminded of Asa Leventhal, the hero of Saul Bellow's novel 'The Victim,' who asks his oppressor, a mysterious figure named Kirby Allbee, ''Wait a minute, what's your idea of who runs things?'' For those who believe in the power of ideas, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to answer: the intellectual heirs of Leo Strauss. So how did it come to pass that a European-born émigré identified by the Harvard professor of government Harvey Mansfield (also a Straussian) as ''an obscure professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago who died in 1973'' now occupies a position of such disproportionate influence? . . . The rest is here: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E7D8153CF937A35756C0A9659C8B63.

Horton, Scott. "Will the Real Leo Strauss Please Stand Up?" HARPER'S MAGAZINE January 21, 2008.

Leo Strauss died back in 1973. But in the last few years it’s been hard to come up with a figure who has been more loved and reviled among those who study and write about political philosophy. And even among those who love him, there seems to be a very catty rage over just who are the proper “Straussians.” A lot of this of course has to do with the Neoconservative movement, which properly claims roots in the writing and thinking of Leo Strauss. The obvious starting point would be to note that while it may be true that the Neocons are Straussians, the suggestion that Strauss is a Neocon is more than doubtful. After all, he died in 1973, and this would seem to attribute to him rather firmly developed notions about a number of things as to which he had no documented position whatsoever. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/01/hbc-90002212.

Chaplin, Tamara. "Excerpt from TURNING ON THE MIND: FRENCH PHILOSOPHERS ON TELEVISION."

Chaplin, Tamara. Turning on the Mind: French Philosophers on Television. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007. In the decades following World War II, television laid siege to the culture of the book. However, with French television regarded less as a creative form in its own right than as a means for the transmission of the classical heritage, most early aficionados saw the medium not as a threat but rather as a boon to print culture. Television would “spread the word”—heightening public awareness about important new publications, encouraging viewers to read, and bringing the rich legacy of the French humanistic tradition directly into the homes and heads of the nation’s citizens. Few countries have worked as hard as France to merge the word and the image via the small screen. Indeed, between 1953 and 1989 alone, 106 series dedicated to literary programming sought to marry these disparate entities on French TV. Since its inception, the format known as the émission littéraire, or television book show, has also provided one of the dominant platforms for the televising of philosophy in France. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/509914.html.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. "The New New Philosophy [on Experimental Ethics]." NEW YORK TIMES December 9, 2007.

Can you really do philosophy with clipboards and questionnaires? It seems that you can. Joshua Knobe, of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is the philosopher who investigated how people responded to those two stories about the company chairman. (Full disclosure: I examined him on his dissertation.) You might have supposed that whether we judge an action to be (say) blameworthy depends on whether we think it was intentional, and the nature of intentional action is something philosophers have had plenty to say about. But the so-called Knobe effect suggests that — oddly enough — it may not be clear to us whether an action is intentional until we’ve decided whether it’s good or bad. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/magazine/09wwln-idealab-t.html?ex=1354856400&en=42f8ef6876e20ada&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss.

Singer, Peter. "Putting Practice Into Ethics [Review of Appiah's EXPERIMENTS IN ETHICS]." NEW YORK SUN January 16, 2008.

Appiah, Anthony Kwame. Experiments in Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. You are standing by a railroad track when you notice that a trolley, with no one aboard, is rolling down the track, heading for a group of five people. If the trolley continues on its present track, they will all be killed. The only thing you can do to prevent this tragedy is throw a switch that will divert the trolley onto a sidetrack. But there is one person on this sidetrack, and he will be killed. Should you throw the switch? In another version of this dilemma, the trolley is again rolling down the track, heading for a group of five people. This time, however, there is no switch or sidetrack. Instead, you are on a footbridge above the track. You consider jumping off the bridge, in front of the trolley, thus sacrificing yourself to save the five people in danger, but you realize that you are far too light to stop the trolley. Standing next to you, however, is a very large stranger. The only way you can stop the trolley killing five people is by pushing this large stranger in front of the trolley. He will be killed, but you will save the other five. Should you push the stranger? Philosophers have been pondering these dilemmas since the 1960s. Many — notably Judith Jarvis Thomson and Frances Kamm — have agreed that you may throw the switch, but must not push the large stranger. But why? In each case, we face a choice between bringing about the death of one person or allowing five to die. Where does the moral difference lie? The discussion has embraced a variety of moral theories, but it has not produced a truly satisfying answer. What philosophers did not do, until recently, is take an interest in empirical research about our responses to these or other dilemmas. Now, as philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah describes in his concise yet erudite and engagingly written new book, Experiments in Ethics (Harvard University Press, 288 pages, $22.95), this is changing. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nysun.com/article/69595.

Donoghue, Dennis. "On Eloquence." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION January 18, 2008.

Eloquence is not the same as rhetoric. Eloquence isn't even a distant cousin of rhetoric — it comes from a different family and has different eyes, hair, and gait. Long thought to be a subset of rhetoric's devices, eloquence has declared its independence: It has no designs on readers or audiences. Its aim is pleasure; it thrives on freedom among the words. Unlike rhetoric, it has not sent any soldier to be killed in foreign countries. I'd like to say how I came to this one beautiful idea. . . . Find out how here: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=nyhrj8jd59dvt47dtvdzjk3g6vqqnrv9.

Papineau, David. "Power and Consciousness on the Clapham Omnibus [on John Searle]." TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT January 16, 2008.

Searle is American through and through, but his formative philosophical years were spent in Oxford. He arrived as a Rhodes Scholar in 1952 and stayed for seven years, first as an undergraduate and then as a don at Christ Church. Back then, Oxonian “linguistic philosophy” was the dominant philosophical influence in the English-speaking world. It taught that careful attention to everyday language is the way to solve philosophical problems. Our common language embodies the accumulated wisdom of past generations, J. L. Austin and P. F. Strawson assured their students. Philosophical clarity is best achieved by applying the intricate web of distinctions implicit in everyday discourse. Searle’s earliest published work was squarely in this tradition, focusing on foundational issues in the workings of ordinary language. But at the end of the 1950s he returned to America and joined the Department of Philosophy at Berkeley, where he has remained ever since. Over the years Searle has drifted away from his Oxford roots. Initially he continued his work in the philosophy of language. His first book, Speech Acts, published in 1969, developed Austin’s analysis of the different ways in which language can be used. But by the 1980s he had ceased to place language at the centre of the philosophical enterprise, and had come to regard the human mind as the more fundamental realm, with language merely the medium by which we make thought public. Moreover, there is something decidedly unOxonian about Searle’s current programme of explaining how humans fit into the world of basic science. His teachers would have viewed any such ambition as a species of American vulgarity. Oxford philosophy has long been deeply anti-scientific, regarding it as some kind of category mistake to suppose that scientific findings can in any way threaten or illuminate our everyday understanding of people. . . . Read the rest here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3196720.ece.

Scialabba, George. "A Great Deal of Work [on Edmund Wilson]." THE NATION January 28, 2008.

The Library of America's new two-volume issue of Wilson's essays and reviews from the 1920s, '30s and '40s is one of the summits of twentieth-century literary criticism. Edmund Wilson's life story is well-known from his many published journals (The Twenties through The Sixties), memoirs ("The Author at Sixty" and Upstate) and letters (a superb collection, Letters on Literature and Politics, edited by Elena Wilson, his fourth wife), other people's remembrances and two good biographies by Jeffrey Meyers and Lewis Dabney. He was born in 1895--with difficulty, because he already had an unusually large head. His father was a reforming lawyer and Attorney General of New Jersey but was disabled for much of his later life by hypochondria and depression. Young Edmund got an extraordinary education at the Hill School in Pennsylvania and a decent one at Princeton, especially after he encountered the literary scholar and peerless teacher Christian Gauss. At Princeton he also (like Dwight Macdonald at Yale) began several lifelong literary friendships, notably with F. Scott Fitzgerald and the poet John Peale Bishop. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080128/scialabba.

Prochnik, George. "Review of REVOLUTION IN MIND: THE CREATION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS by George Makari," NEW YORK TIMES January 20, 2008.

In Revolution in Mind, Makari argues that we’ve been blinded to the cultural reach of psychoanalysis by the magnitude of Freud’s stature and the magnetic pull or repulsion of his personality and theories. In Makari’s view, much contemporary discussion about the relevance of psychoanalysis is based on a false choice: “Freud as everlasting genius, or Freud as relic and fraud.” To Makari, the director of Cornell University’s Institute for the History of Psychiatry, this dichotomy is artificial. Instead, he argues, we should look to the rich, polyphonous context that gave birth to and was influenced by the analytic enterprise: “the culture of Kant; the assumptions of Geisteswissenschaft and a European classical education,” along with “evolutionary biology, positivism and Newtonian physics.” . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/books/review/Prochnik-t.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin.

Dalrymple, Theodore. "Freud and Us: Review of George Makari's REVOLUTION IN MIND: THE CREATION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS." NEW YORK SUN January 16, 2008.

What, if anything, did Sigmund Freud actually discover? What concrete human knowledge would be lacking if he, or someone very like him, had never lived? With most scientists, the same questions would not be hard to answer. In the case of William Harvey, we might say: He discovered the circulation of the blood. Though philosophers may tell us that all scientific hypotheses are provisional, no one now seriously expects a future scientist to discover that the blood does not, in fact, circulate. Freud also claimed to be a scientist in the strictest sense of the word (though his world outlook was more scientistic than scientific), but all of his supposed discoveries, such as that of the Oedipus complex, were highly speculative. With little independent empirical evidence to support them, his theories were more like inventions than discoveries. No one would take seriously a doctor who concluded from the fact that a young man had broken his leg playing football that playing football was the one and only cause of broken legs; but this was more or less Freud's method. Nevertheless his claims to be a scientist were widely accredited, particularly later in his life. When he sought refuge in Britain after the Anschluss, he was at once awarded the highest scientific honor that the country could bestow, Fellowship of the Royal Society. Ironically, the Society's motto is "Nullius in verba" ("On the word of no one"), which is to say that truth does not inhere in anyone's personal authority, however great it might be. But no one ever used personal authority to more effect than Freud, who was a master of the employment of rhetoric to deflect the need for evidence. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nysun.com/article/69618.

Wellington, Darryl Lorenzo. "History, Amnesia and the N Word." DISSENT MAGAZINE Winter 2008.

• The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why by Jabari Asim (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) 239 pp $26
• Nigger: the Strange Career of a Troublesome Word by Randall Kennedy (Vintage, 2003) 208 pp $12.95 paper

THE SUBJECT is small—a word. Yet the subject contained within the subject is immeasurable: racism American-style. It isn’t always a good idea to reduce vast social dimensions to a pithy cognomen—all the great “isms” are finally irreducible—but there are special cases, and when Jabari Asim asks us to examine American racism (particularly racism against black Americans) through the lens of a single word, it’s remarkable how much history he squeezes into the text. . . Read the rest of the review here: http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=998.

Monaghan, Peter. "Coming Together: on the 50th Anniversary of Achebe's THINGS FALL APART." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION February 8, 2008.

Fifty years after he published Things Fall Apart, his first novel, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe recalls having modest hopes for the book. At the time, he was a young university graduate who had found a job at the Nigerian Broadcasting Company, in Lagos. "I was alone in my room, scribbling away, and if nobody had paid any attention at all to me, I wouldn't have been terribly surprised," Achebe recalls with a quiet chuckle, here in his home on the campus of Bard College. Yet the towering achievement of Things Fall Apart has been to become arguably the most influential work of fiction by an African writer. Since William Heinemann Ltd. first issued it in London, the novel has sold about 11 million copies in some 50 countries and as many languages. (This month Anchor Books will issue a 50th-aniversary edition.) In the United States, in an era of multiculturalism, it has become a fixture on college and high-school reading lists — for Americans, the quintessential novel about Africa. The influential critic Harold Bloom included it in 1994 in his selection of the canonical works of world literature, along with two of Achebe's later novels dealing with Nigeria's transition through colonization to troubled independent nationhood, No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=wwnsjpymmr1tl2jn03ghjn0t0x6s5sg2.

CFP: "Tales of Slavery: Narratives of Slavery, the Slave Trade and Enslavement in Africa," University of Toronto, May 20-23, 2009.

The export of men, women and children from Africa to the America lasted over four hundred years and touched most communities in Africa, directly or indirectly. We now know a great deal about this trade: its gender and age composition, the ways in which individuals and communities responded to the trade, the extent to which warfare, kidnapping, legal mechanisms, economic processes and religious institutions generated a pool of people to be bought and sold. We know about resistance, the formation of slave-trading states and the increased use of slaves within Africa. We have some autobiographical accounts by those who were literate or achieved literacy after their capture, but these are few. Most of the sources used to write the history of slavery in Africa are European, but the memories of the external and internal slave trade remain and are embedded in African ritual, song, and memory. We are inviting proposals dealing with the exploration of new research methodologies and the re-examination of old ones. Our major objective is to make available to students and scholars African sources on slavery, enslavement, the slave trade and to improve our understanding of these documents. The conference will deal with all parts of Africa and is open to any methodology that taps African voices. Our goal is to seek out and explore newer methodologies, to find more African sources, and if possible, to look for the voices of the slaves themselves. We also want to make these sources more widely available. We can accept sources originating from other continents only if they involve memories of Africa and the trade from Africa. This conference follows on one organized at Bellagio, Italy in September 2007 and entitled 'Finding the African Voice: Narratives of Slavery and Enslavement.' It explored a wide range of different kinds of sources: oral traditions, life histories recorded by missionaries, court documents from both colonial and Islamic courts, petitions to colonial authorities, proverbs, folk-lore, music, and personal correspondence.Because of space limitations at Bellagio, we limited ourselves to West and Northwest Africa and to the historic past. We are now interested in opening up a wider range of questions, for example, the impact of the slave experience on witchcraft belief and on contemporary representation of political power, personal and social memories relating to trajectories of emancipation/resubordination in colonial and postcolonial times, and narratives of contemporary enslavement. We are also interested in a fuller exploration of music, dance, proverbs and folklore and would like to collect as many life histories as possible from the point of view of descendants of slaves and of former masters and slave-dealers.

Interested persons should submit a title and an abstract to http://www.blogger.com/ <http://www.blogger.com/>. All participants will be expected to post on the conference web-site a month before the conference a copy of their papers and at least one document on which the paper is based. Our objective is to publish both a collection of sources and a volume ofessays. We hope to have funds available to bring scholars from Africa, including graduate students working on questions of slavery. Other participants will be expected to find their own funding.

"Toronto's Afrocentric School," Editorial, STABROEK NEWS February 7, 2008.

Last week the Toronto District School Board decided to approve a new school in which the "knowledge and experiences of peoples of African descent [will be] an integral feature of the teaching and learning environment." The school, which will be funded by taxpayers, has been proposed as one way of curbing the alarming drop out rates among the city's black students - one study suggests that as many as four out of every ten black students fail to graduate from high school. The decision has been met with a chorus of disapproval from radio talk show hosts and editorial writers across Canada. These have generally branded the idea of a separate school as a form of 'segregation' and argued that it directly contradicts modern Canada's steadfast refusal to yield to easy ethnic, cultural and religious divisions. Many critics are adamant that public money should not be used to undermine a wider sense of national identity, and they warn that the precedent could encourage further fractures within the country's large immigrant population - half of Toronto's 5.5 million residents are foreign born. Some have also questioned the idea that black students are being failed by the school system at all. A BBC report quotes a former university professor with experience of youth outreach and employment programmes saying that in one particularly problematic working-class neighbourhood, "Out of the 100 or so families I worked with … I would say 80% of the families were non-supportive of their children's education. When you'd go into a lot of the houses, there was a lot of yelling and arguing. There were lots of latchkey kids." If that pattern holds true for the wider Afro-Caribbean population, it is not easy to see what difference a new Afrocentric school would make. There are simpler objections too. Just a few decades ago, black Americans risked life and limb to integrate themselves into a hostile white education system. They did this, presciently, because they understood that a successful education in difficult circumstances is best measured by the progress one makes within the dominant culture. Communities that seek the comfort of an education among their own kind may spare themselves the stress of competition and cultural confrontation, but they also lose the knowledge that allows their rivals to keep outperforming them in the marketplace of ideas. Black America understood this in the segregation years. For all the deficiencies in their curricula, white schools still offered the best route to certification in the wider society. Multicultural societies are always vulnerable to racial insecurities. What is not clear is how well these insecurities are resolved by the supposedly changed contexts of racially-sensitive education. Take, for example, the undeniable neglect of the great Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture. In most mainstream historiography, Toussaint and his comrades appear briefly as leaders of a 'slave rebellion' that distracts Napoleon for a while during the momentous period in which he agrees to the Louisiana purchase. C.L.R. James's wonderful account of the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins, and an increasing body of modern scholarship, have shown that the reality was certainly quite different. Without Toussaint's extraordinary political and military leadership, the French army - which the Americans feared was unstoppable - would have been free to give its full attention to the struggling new republic in the north. In other words, without the bewildering success of self-educated former slaves against a professional army that had overrun most of Europe, there may well have been no America. The whole episode deserves far more attention than it has yet received, as does the political skill of their leader, a man who wished to live independent of French control but was also a proud inheritor of the culture and values of the French Enlightenment. L'Ouverture wanted freedom as much as anyone else, but he never wished to discard the glories of France that his education had allowed him to share. In this sense he perfectly embodies the tensions of modern Caribbean identity, and the many hesitations we all have about the turbulent pasts that have formed us. Learning more about the Haitian revolution would no doubt be part of a school curriculum that focused on "the knowledge and experiences of peoples of African descent," but what use would such knowledge be if one remained ignorant of the French and American revolutions that made Toussaint's achievement so remarkable? We are all involved says the poet, none of us can retreat to our pasts any more. Our reality is too entangled with other peoples and other cultures for us to make sense of ourselves in isolation. However noble its intentions, an education based on cultural separation will always end up proving itself too self-limiting to be of lasting value. (Thanks to Mark McWatt; the editorial is here: http://www.stabroeknews.com/index.pl/article_editorial?id=56538593.)

CFP: Collection on Shulasmith Firestone's THE DIALECTIC OF SEX: THE CASE FOR REVOLUTION.

2010 will mark the fortieth anniversary of the most radical manifesto of contemporary feminism. Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex: the Case for Feminist Revolution became a bestseller, yet unlike the other celebrated feminist polemics of that year (Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch and Kate Millett's Sexual Politics), Firestone's work is scarcely remembered today. Firestone called not only for the abolition of the nuclear family and the economic and social independence of children, but for the end of pregnancy itself. The cybernetic revolution was hailed as the technological solution to the curse of Eve and the subordination of mothers just as automation was claimed to offer an end to brutal physical labour. Today, as researchers attempt to devise a prosthetic womb, Firestone's call seems prescient. More importantly, her philosophical challenge to the cultural significance of genital difference returns us to the unresolved question of gender dichotomy, whether this is understood as discursive, social, psychological or physical, and its relation to the continuing subordination of women and homosexuals. We are requesting papers of 7,000 to 9,000 words addressing The Dialectic of Sex, its argument, its reception, its salience today. Please send 300 word synopses, together with a briefbiography, to Mandy Merck and Stella Sandford at m.merck@hul.ac.uk by April 1, 2008.

CFP: "Nietzsche, Naturalism and Normativity," Nietzsche and Modern Moral Philosophy, University of Southampton, July 10-11, 2008.

Speakers: Robert Guay Nadeem Hussain Brian Leiter Christopher Janaway Bernard Reginster Christine Swanton Richard Schacht John Skorupski Further details will be advertised shortly, including how to register for the conference. The registration deadline will be JUNE 16th, 2008. For queries meanwhile, please contact Dr. Simon Robertson at s.j.robertson@soton.ac.uk For further details about the project, visit: http://www.soton.ac.uk/philosophy/research/nietzscheproject.html.

CFP: "The Naturalness of Man and World," 10th International Conference, Spinoza Society, Philipps University of Marburg, Sept. 26-28, 2008.

Keynote Speakers: Dieter Birnbacher (Düsseldorf), Andrea Esser (Marburg), Alan Gabbey (Columbia University), Petra Gehring (Darmstadt), Barbara Merker (Frankfurt), Ursula Renz (ETH Zürich), Winfried Schröder (Marburg), Robert Spaemann (Stuttgart), Rudolf Stichweh (Luzern), Han van Ruler (Rotterdam), Lutz Wingert (ETH Zürich) Proposed Panels: - Reception of Spinozistic conceptions of nature - Nature and history - Nature and Mind - Nature and Lawlikeness - Nature and Religion. Please send abstract (German or English) under the heading of the section the paper should presented till March 31th 2008 to hampe@phil.gess.ethz.ch. Awarded Essay: "How much of Man is natural?" Essays on this question can be submitted till May 15th 2008. Enclose a CV on one page to renz@phil.gess.ethz.ch. Contributors should be under 35 at December 12th 2008 and not yet hold a professorship. Price: 1000 Euro. The elected essay will be presented on the conference and be published in the Conference Proceedings.

CFP: "Philosophy and Film, Film and Philosophy," University of the West of England, July 4-6, 2008.

Keynote Speakers: Stephen Mulhall (Oxford) Vivian Sobchack (UCLA) Robert Sinnerbrink (Maquarrie) Catherine Constable (Warwick) Karin Littau (Essex) Julian Baggini (editor, The Philosopher’s Magazine) In the last years there has been a growing interest in the relationship between philosophy and film within both analytic and European philosophical traditions. At the same time, film studies as a discipline has always raised philosophical questions and has been enriched by a variety of philosophical traditions. The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars from both disciplines to examine this shared history, as well as display the current range and state of philosophical film analysis. In what ways is film philosophically informative? What methodologies have been developed for philosophical analysis of film? What do various philosophical traditions bring to the study of film? What does the practice of film studies bring to the practice of philosophy? What vibrant areas have developed in these fields? The conference theme is deliberately broad and proposals are invited on any conjunction between film and philosophy. We welcome submissions that range from general and methodological observations about the field to readings and interpretations of specific films, genres, film movements or filmmakers. We encourage submissions from graduate students and will reserve some sessions for graduate papers. Topics include (but are not limited to):

• Film as philosophy
• The ontology of cinema
• Film and phenomenology
• Particular philosophical approaches to film (Cavell, Deleuze, Frampton etc.)
• The Epistemology of film
• Film affect
• The philosophical worldview of particular directors
• Subjectivity and cinema
• Film ‘theory’ as philosophy
• Aesthetics and film
• Political philosophy and film
• Historical developments in film-philosophy
• Genre and philosophy
• Philosophy and film movements (German Expressionism, Soviet Montage, Italian Neorealism etc.)
• Cinema as thought experiment
• Morality and movies
• Feminist philosophy and film practice
• Film making as philosophical practice
• Methodologies for philosophical film analysis

Contributions are invited for:

• Panel topics (2-4 speakers)
• Individual papers (20 minutes + 10 minutes for discussion)
• Graduate papers

We will endeavour to include as many papers as possible within the time limits and are happy to discuss initial suggestions for panel discussions. NB: please send us your abstract before the deadline if you require an early response. We strongly recommend this option for overseas participants who may need to book flights.

Please send proposals (500 word abstract) by Friday 8 April, 2008 to: Dr Havi Carel Havi.carel@uwe.ac.uk Dr Greg Tuck greg.tuck@uwe.ac.uk We prefer email submissions but you can also post your abstract to: Dr Havi Carel/ Dr Greg Tuck HLSS University of the West of England (UWE) St Matthias Campus Oldbury Court Rd Fishponds Bristol BS16 2JP UK

PUB: HISTORY AND THEORY 47.1 (2008).

The Table of Contents may be found here: http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/hith/47/1.

Martin, Clancy. "Review of Two Recent Translations of Nietzsche's THUS SPOKE ZARATHRUTRA." NDPR Feburary 6, 2008.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra (hereafter TSZ) is a difficult book to translate. With a traditional philosophical text the translator's conscience is driven by accuracy, and when in doubt the translator will be as literal as possible. But that won't work with TSZ. While it is an undeniably philosophical work -- Nietzsche, the most widely influential philosopher of the past two hundred years, considered it his masterpiece -- it is also a work of literature. And you can't translate literature literally and have it work out well. Literature doesn't have only a sense, it also has a sound. That Nietzsche, like Kierkegaard, the German Romantics, and many of the twentieth-century Existentialists, thought philosophy and literature were ultimately inseparable arts only further complicates the translator's task. . . . Please visit the following link for the reviews of these two translations: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=12285.

CFP: "Erôs in Ancient Greece," Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, March 28-31, 2009.

One of the most exciting developments in recent classics research has been in the field of ancient emotions. We are planning a colloquium co-hosted by UCL and the Institute of Classical Studies which aims to contribute to this area, on the topic of "Erôs in ancient Greece". Chronologically this will cover the Archaic period through the Second Sophistic, including reception. Papers might consider such topics as: the psychological and/or physiological experience of erôs and related passions (e.g. jealousy, fear for a loved one); representations of those under the influence of erotic passions; actions performed by them; iconography associated with erotic passions; and philosophical approaches. Papers might range widely across a variety of topics, or be more narrowly focused on a genre or even a particular text. The colloquium will be held on Sat 28 - Tues 31 March 2009, and will include papers by both academics and postgraduate students. It is anticipated that proceedings will be published. Confirmed speakers include: David Konstan (keynote speaker), Elizabeth Belfiore, Douglas Cairns, James Davidson, Nick Fisher, Christopher Gill, Glenn Most, Ralph Rosen. Anyone interested in giving a paper at this colloquium should send a title and brief summary of content (no more than 50 words) to Ed Sanders at edsanders@gmail.com by 1 March 2008.

CFP: "Gender, Inequality, and Social Justice," North American Society for Social Philosophy, University of Portland, July 17-19, 2008.

A 300-500 word abstract should be sent to the program chairs. Individuals who wish to be considered for the award for best graduate student paper should submit their entire paper and abstract. Electronic Submissions welcomed and encouraged. The deadline for submissions is March 15, 2008 or, for those living outside the United States and Canada, January 15, 2008. Contact: Jordy Rocheleau Department of Philosophy Austin Peay State University Box 4486 Clarksville, TN 37044 tel. 931-221-7925 rocheleauj@apsu.edu or Richard Buck Department of Philosophy Mount Saint Mary’s University 16300 Old Emmitsburg Rd Emmitsburg, MD 21727 tel. 301-447-5368 buck@msmary.edu Further details are here: http://www.pitt.edu/~nassp/nassp.html.

PUB: CRITICAL APPROACHES TO DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ACROSS DISCIPLINES 2.1 (2008).

• Donna L. Lillian "Modality, Persuasion and Manipulation in Canadian Conservative Discourse" pp. 1–16 Download PDF
• Robert De Beaugrande "The Discourse and Counter-Discourse of Hugo Chavez" pp. 17 – 30 Download PDF
• Anna Ewa Wieczorek "Proximisation, Common Ground, and Assertion-Based Patterns for Legitimisation in Political Discourse" pp. 31–48 Download PDF
• Cheng Le and Sin Kui King and Zheng Ying-Long "Contrastive Analysis of Chinese and American Court Judgments" pp. 49–58 Download PDF
• Mei Li Lean "'New Kids on the Block’: the Discursive Construction of two New Premiers by the Mass Media" pp. 59–75 Download PDF
• Joanne Jung-Wook Hong "Changes in McDonald’s Discourse and Ideology: Intertextual Analysis of McDonald’s vs. Criticisms" pp. 76 – 101 Download PDF

Download the issue here: http://cadaad.org/ejournal/2008/1.

PUB: Hiltmann, Gabrielle, ed. MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY: 1908 – 2008. JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 39.1 (2008).

Articles: MAURO CARBONE The Mythical Time of the Ideas: Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze as Readers of Proust FRANÇOISE DASTUR Merleau-Ponty and the Question of the Other ELIANE ESCOUBAS Merleau-Ponty: The Body of the Work and the Principle of Utopia DUANE H. DAVIS and TONY O’CONNOR Intentionality, Indirect Ontology and Historical Ontology: Reading Merleau-Ponty and Foucault Together: BERNHARD WALDENFELS The Central Role of the Body in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology GALEN A. JOHNSON The Voice of Merleau-Ponty: the Philosopher and the Poet For more information see: http://britishphenomenology.com/aboutus.aspx.

CFP: "Levinas and the Sacred," Third Annual Conference, North American Levinas Society, Seattle University, August 31-September 2, 2008.

The North American Levinas Society invites submissions of individual paper proposals and panel proposals for the third annual meeting and conference to be held August 31-September 2, 2008, at Seattle University in Seattle, Washington. While we will organize the conference around the broad theme of “Levinas and the Sacred,” we will accept proposals for paper and panels on any topic related to Levinas in an effort to draw the widest array of interests. Without doubt, the theme of “the sacred” will stir up vigorous, productive debates, and there are a number of entry points into such dialogues. For instance, what is the relation between the state and the sacred? What are we to make of the coincidence of the political and the spiritual from, say, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right to some of the more controversial passages in Levinas’ Difficult Freedom? What important insights concerning derivations of the sacred do we find in Levinas’ engagement with Heidegger on the question of truth, being, and the sacred? How do considerations of the sacred respond to critiques of onto-theology? How might the recent postsecular turn in Continental philosophy promote discussions of the sacred as it relates to the ethical and justice? How are we to understand Levinas’ claim that the horror of existence, of the there is (il y a)…, contributes to the destruction of sacred categories? How have notions of the sacred contributed either to colonial and geopolitical violences, and how have notions of the sacred worked to correct such violences? Certainly, these are only a few questions of the sacred broadly posed, but it is clear that such questions open Levinas’ work to a more difficult, and perhaps edifying, scrutiny. We are also interested in receiving panels that address the relation between the sacred, the ethical, community, justice, and pedagogy from a variety of multicultural perspectives. Submissions: ● Individual paper proposals: Individual abstracts should be 200-300 words for a 20-minute presentation. We will assess and organize individual papers into panels of two or three. ● Panel proposal: Panel proposals should be 500 words for a 75-minute session. Please include the session title, name of organizer, institutional affiliation, discipline or department, along with the chair’s name and participants’ names in addition to brief abstracts detailing the focus of each paper. Please send materials via email attachment (preferably Microsoft Word) to: submissions@levinas-society.org. If you have questions regarding the Society or the conference, please send inquiries to secretary@levinas-society.org. The deadline for submissions is March 2, 2008 For further information on the conference, please visit: http://www.levinas-society.org/NALS_2008.doc.

CFP: Annual Conference, Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy, University of Montreal, Quebec, October 30-November 1, 2008.

We invite papers or panels on any theme relevant to the broad concerns of continental philosophy. Please submit complete papers (no more than 4500 words) and a brief abstract (150 words). If you are submitting a panel proposal, send only a 750 word abstract for each paper. Please prepare your paper for blind review as an attachment in Word. All submissions (in French or English) must be sent electronically by June 1, 2008, to: Diane Enns, CSCP President, ennsd@mcmaster.ca If you are a graduate student, please identify yourself as such in order to be eligible for the graduate student essay prize. The winner will be announced at the annual conference and considered for publication in the following spring issue of Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy. Further information may be found here: http://www.c-scp.org/.

CFP: 3rd Annual Conference, North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics, DePaul University, September 26-27, 2008.

NASPH will hold its 3rd annual conference September 26-27, 2008 at DePaul University. Georgia Warnke (UC Riverside) will present the keynote address on Friday evening. Other invited presenters include Fred Dallmayr (Notre Dame) and Lawrence Schmidt (Hendrix College). Submissions for papers are invited on all themes related to philosophical hermeneutics, but we are especially interested in papers discussing the theme of Hermeneutics and Critique. In order to promote a spirit of dialogue and meaningful reflection on each paper, presenters will be asked to make their papers available for posting on our web site to be read in advance. Sessions will consist of 15-20 minutes of reflective summaries of papers, followed by 45-60 minutes of discussion. Since papers will not be read in-session, there is some flexibility regarding length: submissions may be between 3000 and 6000 words in length. Complete papers, formatted for blind review, must be submitted electronically to nasphermeneutics@gmail.com. Attachments in either .doc or .rtf format are preferable. The deadline for full-paper submissions is June 1, 2008. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by July 15, 2008. For more information about the society and/or to be put on an email list, please visit our web site or contact Lauren Barthold (lauren.barthold@gordon.edu) or Jamey Findling (findlingj@newmanu.edu). Further information is here: http://nasph.tamu.edu./.