McCumber, John. "The Failure of Rational Choice Philosophy." Opinionator Blog. NEW YORK TIMES June 19, 2011.

According to Hegel, history is idea-driven. According to almost everyone else, this is foolish. What can “idea driven” even mean when measured against the passion and anguish of a place like Libya?But Hegel had his reasons. Ideas for him are public, rather than in our heads, and serve to coordinate behavior. They are, in short, pragmatically meaningful words. To say that history is “idea driven” is to say that, like all cooperation, nation building requires a common basic vocabulary.

One prominent component of America’s basic vocabulary is ”individualism.” Our society accords unique rights and freedoms to individuals, and we are so proud of these that we recurrently seek to install them in other countries. But individualism, the desire to control one’s own life, has many variants. Tocqueville viewed it as selfishness and suspected it, while Emerson and Whitman viewed it as the moment-by-moment expression of one’s unique self and loved it.

After World War II, a third variant gained momentum in America. It defined individualism as the making of choices so as to maximize one’s preferences. This differed from “selfish individualism” in that the preferences were not specified: they could be altruistic as well as selfish. It differed from “expressive individualism” in having general algorithms by which choices were made. These made it rational.

This form of individualism did not arise by chance. Alex Abella’s Soldiers of Reason (2008) and S. M. Amadae’s Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy (2003) trace it to the RAND Corporation, the hyperinfluential Santa Monica, Calif., think tank, where it was born in 1951 as “rational choice theory.” Rational choice theory’s mathematical account of individual choice, originally formulated in terms of voting behavior, made it a point-for-point antidote to the collectivist dialectics of Marxism; and since, in the view of many cold warriors, Marxism was philosophically ascendant worldwide, such an antidote was sorely needed. Functionaries at RAND quickly expanded the theory from a tool of social analysis into a set of universal doctrines that we may call “rational choice philosophy.” Governmental seminars and fellowships spread it to universities across the country, aided by the fact that any alternative to it would by definition be collectivist. During the early Cold War, that was not exactly a good thing to be.

The overall operation was wildly successful. Once established in universities, rational choice philosophy moved smoothly on the backs of their pupils into the “real world” of business and government (aided in the crossing, to be sure, by the novels of another Rand—Ayn). Today, governments and businesses across the globe simply assume that social reality is merely a set of individuals freely making rational choices. Wars have been and are still being fought to bring such freedom to Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Grenadans, and now Libyans, with more nations surely to come. . . .

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/the-failure-of-rational-choice/

Metcalf, Stephen. "The Liberty Scam: Why Even Robert Nozick Gave Up On the Movement He Inspired." SLATE June 20, 2011.

The Times Literary Supplement ranks Anarchy, published in 1974, as one of the "100 Most Influential Books Since the War," and that, I think, is underselling it. To this day, left intellectuals remember where they were when they first heard Nozick's arguments against not just socialism but wealth redistribution of any kind. "It is no exaggeration to say," the Telegraph wrote, after Nozick died in 2002, "that Nozick, more than anyone else, embodied the new libertarian zeitgeist which, after generations of statist welfarism from Roosevelt's New Deal to Kennedy, Johnson and Carter, ushered in the era of Reagan and Bush, pere et fils." Prior to Anarchy, "liberty" was a virtual synonym for rolling back labor unions and progressive taxation, a fig leaf for the class interests of the Du Ponts and the B.F. Goodriches. After Anarchy, "liberty" was a concept as worthy of academic dignity as the categorical imperative.

As a moral philosopher, Nozick was free to stretch liberty further than even an Austrian economist. That is, he was able to separate out a normative claim (that liberty is the fundamental value of values, and should be maximized) from an empirical claim (that the most efficient method for allocating goods and services is a market economy). Free to pursue liberty as a matter of pure principle, Nozick let nothing stand in his way. Should we tax the rich to feed the poor? Absolutely not, as "taxation of earnings is on par with forced labor." (Or more precisely: "Taking the earnings of n hours of labor is like taking n hours from the person.") Well, isn't at least some redistribution necessary on the basis of need? "Need a gardener allocate his services to those lawns which need him most?"

To the entire left, Nozick, in effect, said: Your social justice comes at an unacceptable cost, namely, to my personal liberty. Most distressingly, to this end Nozick enlisted the humanist's most cherished belief: the inviolability of each human being as an end unto himself—what Nozick, drawing on Immanuel Kant, calls "the separateness of persons." For Nozick, the principle of the separateness of persons is close to sacred. It affirms, as he writes, "the underlying Kantian principle that individuals are ends and not merely means; they may not be sacrificed or used for the achieving of other ends without their consent. Individuals are inviolable." . . . .

http://www.slate.com/id/2297019/pagenum/all/

See, too, the following responses:

• "Nozick, Libertarianism, and Thought Experiments" by Julian Sanchez (here: http://www.juliansanchez.com/2011/06/21/nozick-libertarianism-and-thought-experiments/) and
• "Misunderstanding Nozick, Again" by David Boaz (here: http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/misunderstanding-nozick-again/).

Vernon, Mark. "William James, Part 3: On Original Sin." GUARDIAN November 1, 2010.

Original sin is a religious doctrine that divides perhaps more than any other. For some, it only makes sense – maybe not the part about the apple and the garden, but the general idea that humankind is flawed: we do what we wouldn't do, and don't do what we would do, as St Paul put it. For others, though, original sin is vile and offensive. It feeds the fear of hell, a hopelessness about progress, and leaves us pathetically dependent on God. Each side has a radically different view of what it is to be human, and William James understands exactly what's a stake.

It follows from one of the most interesting distinctions he draws in the Varieties. There are some, he explains, who take the happiness that religion gives them to be the amplest demonstration of its truth. Then, there are others who take the remedy that religion offers for the ills of the world to be the amplest reason for its necessity. James adopts the terms "once-born" to describe the happy sort, and "twice-born" for the more pessimistic.

The link between the phrase "once-born" and the positive temperament is that these individuals believe that seeing God – or finding fulfilment, or simply living well – is no more or less difficult than seeing the sun. On some days it will be cloudy. But the skies eventually clear.

The cosmos is fundamentally good, they affirm. Human individuals are, basically, kind. Your first birth, as a baby, is the only birth that's required to see the world aright. This temperament is, James explains, "organically weighted on the side of cheer and fatally forbidden to linger, as those of opposite temperament linger, over the darker aspects of the universe." James's favourite example of the once-born is Walt Whitman. "He has infected [his readers] with his own love of comrades, with his own gladness that he and they exist." . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/nov/01/williams-james-part-three

Carlisle, Clare. "Spinoza, Part 3: What God is Not." GUARDIAN February 21, 2011.

Spinoza's Ethics is divided into five books, and the first of these presents an idiosyncratic philosophical argument about the existence and nature of God. We'll examine this in detail next week, but first we need to look more closely at how the Ethics challenges traditional Judeo-Christian belief in God.

The view that Spinoza wants to reject can be summed up in one word: anthropomorphism. This means attributing human characteristics to something non-human – typically, to plants or animals, or to God. There are several important implications of Spinoza's denial of anthropomorphism. First, he argues that it is wrong to think of God as possessing an intellect and a will. In fact, Spinoza's God is an entirely impersonal power, and this means that he cannot respond to human beings' requests, needs and demands. Such a God neither rewards nor punishes – and this insight rids religious belief of fear and moralism.

Second, God does not act according to reasons or purposes. In refusing this teleological conception of God, Spinoza challenged a fundamental tenet of western thought. The idea that a given phenomenon can be explained and understood with reference to a goal or purpose is a cornerstone of Aristotle's philosophy, and medieval theologians found this fitted very neatly with the biblical narrative of God's creation of the world. Aristotle's teleological account of nature was, then, adapted to the Christian doctrine of a God who made the world according to a certain plan, analogous to a human craftsman who makes artefacts to fulfil certain purposes. Typically, human values and aspirations played a prominent role in these interpretations of divine activity. . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/feb/21/spinoza-ethics-god-human-traits

Vernon, Mark. "Carl Jung, Part 5: Psychological Types." GUARDIAN June 27, 2011.

It is striking how differently individuals can react to precisely the same thing. Some love Marmite and others loathe it. And more seriously, many arguments self-perpetuate aside from whether there is evidence or sound reason to decide the issue, because opposing sides embody different temperaments. Depending upon your outlook, Wimbledon is two weeks of poetry in motion, or two weeks of channel-hogging TV tedium. The internet will save civilisation according to the geek, and scramble your brains according to the Luddite. The heavens tell of the glory of God in the eyes of the saint, and of the troubling meaninglessness of empty space for at least some scientists.

Such oppositions struck Jung after his split with Freud. How was it, he asked, that they could interpret psychological problems so differently? The conclusion he reached was that he and Freud exhibited different personality types. The thought led him to a systematic reflection on temperament that is still widely deployed.

Two types seem especially clear: the introvert and the extravert [sic]. An introvert, as Jung was, is more persuaded by the voice of their inner self. An extravert, as he took Freud to be, finds their interest inexorably drawn to external things. "Since we all swerve rather more towards one side or the other, we naturally tend to understand everything in terms of our own type," he explained in Psychological Types, published in 1921. . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jun/27/carl-jung-psychological-types

Carlisle, Clare. "Spinoza, Part 2: Miracles and God's Will." GUARDIAN February 14, 2011.

At the heart of Baruch Spinoza's philosophy is a challenge to the traditional Judeo-Christian view of the relationship between God and the world. While the Hebrew Bible and the Christian scriptures share a conception of God as the creator of the natural world and the director of human history, Spinoza argues that everything that exists is an aspect of God that expresses something of the divine nature. This idea that God is not separate from the world is expounded systematically in the Ethics, Spinoza's magnum opus. However, a more accessible introduction to Spinoza's view of the relationship between God and nature can be found in his discussion of miracles in an earlier text, the Theologico-Political Treatise. This book presents an innovative interpretation of the bible that undermines its authority as a source of truth, and questions the traditional understanding of prophecy, miracles and the divine law. . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/14/spinoza-philosophy-god-nature-miracles

Epstein, Joseph. "Heavy Sentences." THE NEW CRITERION (June 2011).

Fish, Stanley.  How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One.  New York: HarperCollins, 2011.

Fish’s central key to good writing, his Open Sesame, is to master forms of sentences, which can be imitated and later used with one’s own content when one comes to write one’s own compositions. Form, form, form, he implores, it is everything. “You shall tie yourself to forms,” he writes, “and forms will set you free.”

By forms Stanley Fish means the syntactical models found in the sentences of good writers, or sometimes even in grabber lines from movies, or even interviews with movie stars: “If you want to see the girl next door,” he recounts Joan Crawford saying, “go next door.” He serves up John Updike’s sentence about Ted Williams’s last home run in Fenway Park—“It was in the books while it was still in the sky”—as a form that can be made use of in one’s own writing by wringing changes on the original. “It was in my stomach while it was still on the shelf” is Fish’s example of such a change.

Fish’s first bit of instruction is that one practice wringing changes on these forms, over and over again, as a beginning music student might practice scales. “It may sound paradoxical,” he writes, “but verbal fluency is the product of hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales.” He adds: “For the purposes of becoming a facile (in the positive sense) writer of sentences, the sentences you practice with should have as little meaning as possible.” Is this true? Taking the Updike sentence for my model, allow me to kitchen-test the method: “My toches was still in Chicago while my mind was in Biarritz”; “My mind was still in Vegas while my toches was in the Bodleian.” I fear it doesn’t do much for me, but perhaps I am too far gone for such warming-up exercises.

The larger point for Fish is that one learns to write

not by learning the rules [of grammar, syntax, and the rest], but by learning the limited number of relationships your words, phrases, and clauses can enter into, and becoming alert to those times when the relationships are not established or are unclear: when a phrase just dangles in space, when a connective has nothing to connect to, when a prepositional phrase is in search of a verb to complement, when a pronoun cannot be paired with a noun. . . .

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Heavy-sentences-7053

Pub: "Marx, Politics and . . . Punk." MEDIATIONS: THE JOURNAL OF THE MARXIST LITERARY GROUP 25.1 (2010).

Editors' Note

Fredric Jameson: A New Reading of Capital

Is Capital about labor, or unemployment? Does Marxism have a theory of the political, or is it better off without one? Fredric Jameson previews the argument of his forthcoming book, Representing Capital.

Anna Kornbluh: On Marx’s Victorian Novel

As out of place as Marx himself might have been in Victorian England, Capital is less out of place than one might have thought among Victorian novels. But this does not have to mean that its mode of truth is literary. Anna Kornbluh explores the tropes that propel Capital in order to establish the novel relationship Marx produces between world and text.

Roland Boer: Marxism and Eschatology Reconsidered

The variations on the thesis of Marxism’s messianism are too many to count. But is it plausible to imagine that Marx or Engels took up Jewish or Christian eschatology, in any substantial form, into their thought? Roland Boer weighs the evidence.

Reiichi Miura: What Kind of Revolution Do You Want?  Punk, the Contemporary Left, and Singularity

What does punk have to do with Empire? What does singularity have to do with identity? What does the logic of rock ‘n’ roll aesthetics have to do with a politics of representation? What does the concept of the multitude have to do with neoliberalism? The answer to all these questions, argues Reiichi Miura, is a lot more than you might think.

Alexei Penzin: The Soviets of the Multitude: On Collectivity and Collective Work: an Interview with Paolo Virno

One of the principle conundrums that confronts the theorization of the multitude is the relationship it entails between individual and collective. Alexei Penzin, of the collective Chto Delat / What Is To Be Done?, interviews Paolo Virno.

http://www.mediationsjournal.org/

Crowell, Stephen Galt. Interview with Laureano Ralon, FIGURE / GROUND June 22, 2011.

I think a lot of work in philosophy is phenomenological even if it doesn’t fly under that banner – work in moral psychology, philosophy of mind, and epistemology, to give just a few examples. Phenomenology is committed to the analysis of first-person experience, and while this is not the only approach possible to the problems of “this age of information and digital interactive media,” of course, there are certain questions that it is best in a position to address. For instance, what is meant by “information”? There are a great many theories out there that appeal to this notion, but can it really do the work it is expected to do? There are theories that try to account for our awareness of a world of meaningful things – that is, intentionality as consciousness of something as something – in terms of information processing, but phenomenology has developed some trenchant criticisms of this project: information is not intrinsically norm-governed, whereas meaning is. To study the conditions of meaning, then (which are also the conditions that make us able to recognize something as “information” or as a “digitally interactive medium” and to appreciate their essential relations to one another, such as they are), is to stumble, inevitably, into phenomenology at some point. And at that point, everything depends on whether one does it well or badly. Of course, one might want to be reductive about the concept of meaning, but phenomenology has also laid out some pretty good reasons why such a project must fail. . . .

http://figureground.ca/interviews/steven-galt-crowell/

5th Annual Ida B. Wells Philosophical Conference, Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis, October 28-29, 2011.

Keynote Speakers:

Yolonda Wilson, Ph.D., Duke University
Kris Sealey, Ph.D., Fairfield University

We welcome submissions in all areas of philosophy and particularly papers that illuminate African-American experiences. The IBWPC is dedicated to furthering discussion of philosophical issues that arise from the African-American experience, as well as provide a context in which undergraduates and graduates can be encouraged in their philosophical aspirations.

Advisor: Dr. Bill E. Lawson
Coordinators: William Allen and Alfonso Giscombe

Contact: William Allen
Email: wsallen@memphis.edu

Foges, Peter. "The Mystique of the Manual." LAPHAM'S QUARTERLY June 14, 2011.

One of her “big ideas” was that the sickness of the modern world is caused by “uprootedness.” We are, Simone Weil believed, lost. The only antidote is a social order grounded in physical labor. Only manual work can save us.

Weil herself was preternaturally a worker by brain, not by hand. Small, myopic, physically awkward and weak, it is difficult to think of anyone less suited to toil in a factory, workshop or field. Weil was a French intellectual of the purest sort. Considered a prodigy from childhood alongside her brother Andre, who went on to become one of the twentieth century’s greatest mathematicians, she had mastered classical Greek by age twelve, was steeped in advanced mathematical physics by fifteen and at twenty came top in the entrance exam to the super-elite École Normale Supérieure. That was the same year, 1928, that Simone de Beauvoir had finished second.

Part philosopher, part activist, part mystic, Weil is almost impossible to classify. A youthful Marxist who abandoned the faith in favor of liberal pluralism. A lover of all things ancient Greek who equated the Roman Empire with Nazi Germany and Hitler with Caesa, she was a mass of contradictions. Yet her reputation has grown over time as one of the most original and uncomfortable thinkers of the twentieth century. T.S. Eliot, a great admirer, considered her “a woman of genius, a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.” “A genius,” added one of her many anthologists, “of immense revolutionary range.”

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/roundtable/the-mystique-of-the-manual.php

Vernon, Mark. "Carl Jung, Part 4: Do Archetypes Exist?" GUARDIAN June 20, 2011.

Jung took the inner life seriously. He believed that dreams are not just a random jumble of associations or repressed wish fulfilments. They can contain truths for the individual concerned. They need interpreting, but when understood aright, they offer a kind of commentary on life that often acts as a form of compensation to what the individual consciously takes to be the case. A dream Jung had in 1909 provides a case in point.

He was in a beautifully furnished house. It struck him that this fine abode was his own and he remarked, "Not bad!" Oddly, though, he had not explored the lower floor and so he descended the staircase to see. As he went down, the house got older and darker, becoming medieval on the ground floor. Checking the stone slabs beneath his feet, he found a metal ring, and pulled. More stairs led to a cave cut into the bedrock. Pots and bones lay scattered in the dirt. And then he saw two ancient human skulls, and awoke.

Jung interpreted the dream as affirming his emerging model of the psyche. The upper floor represents the conscious personality, the ground floor is the personal unconscious, and the deeper level is the collective unconscious – the primitive, shared aspect of psychic life. It contains what he came to call archetypes, the feature we shall turn to now. They are fundamental to Jung's psychology.

Archetypes can be thought of simply as structuring principles. For example, falling in love is archetypal for human beings. Everyone does it, at least once, and although the pattern is common, each time it feels new and inimitable. . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jun/20/jung-archetypes-structuring-principles

Begley, Sharon. "The Limits of Reason: Why Evolution May Favor Irrationality." NEWSWEEK August 5, 2010.

The fact that humans are subject to all these failures of rational thought seems to make no sense. Reason is supposed to be the highest achievement of the human mind, and the route to knowledge and wise decisions. But as psychologists have been documenting since the 1960s, humans are really, really bad at reasoning. It’s not just that we follow our emotions so often, in contexts from voting to ethics. No, even when we intend to deploy the full force of our rational faculties, we are often as ineffectual as eunuchs at an orgy.

An idea sweeping through the ranks of philosophers and cognitive scientists suggests why this is so. The reason we succumb to confirmation bias, why we are blind to counterexamples, and why we fall short of Cartesian logic in so many other ways is that these lapses have a purpose: they help us “devise and evaluate arguments that are intended to persuade other people,” says psychologist Hugo Mercier of the University of Pennsylvania. Failures of logic, he and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber of the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris propose, are in fact effective ploys to win arguments.

That puts poor reasoning in a completely different light. Arguing, after all, is less about seeking truth than about overcoming opposing views. So while confirmation bias, for instance, may mislead us about what’s true and real, by letting examples that support our view monopolize our memory and perception, it maximizes the artillery we wield when trying to convince someone that, say, he really is “late all the time.” Confirmation bias “has a straightforward explanation,” argues Mercier. “It contributes to effective argumentation.” . . .

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/05/the-limits-of-reason.html

Burkeman, Oliver. "This Column Will Change Your Life: the Power of Persuasion." GUARDIAN November 27, 2010.

Faced with any choice, especially big ones, we use our rational minds to identify reasons for and against, test them if possible, then do what seems most sensible. We know we're not infallible: numerous biases lead us astray, and we're horribly prone to rationalisation – that is, misusing our reasoning faculties to corral our emotions into line. But these are exceptions, we tell ourselves. After all, we're rational beings. That's what separates us from horses, or sardines, or Jeremy Clarkson.

Yet a forthcoming paper by the cognitive scientist Dan Sperber and the philosopher Hugo Mercier, "Why Do Humans Reason?", proposes a radical alternative. What if we evolved the capacity to reason not to get closer to the truth, but to persuade others (and ourselves) of viewpoints, regardless of their relation to truth? In evolutionary terms, the survival benefits of such a talent are obvious. Maybe – to borrow the analogy used by Jonah Lehrer, who highlighted the paper on his blog at wired.com/wiredscience – we don't go about life as quasi-scientists, as we flatter ourselves, but as quasi-talk radio hosts, devoting our reasoning energies to concocting arguments that feel persuasive.

This is speculation, but Sperber and Mercier show it makes sense of countless psychological quirks that otherwise seem mysterious. Lehrer cites the famous study in which people were asked to rate five jams previously rated by food experts. Non-experts ranked them the same as experts – except those who were asked to provide reasons, who diverged hugely, preferring jams that (according to expert opinion) were worse. Seemingly, they were casting about for convincing-sounding reasons – "Smoother jam is better", say – which threw them from their instinctive preference for the jams everyone else agreed were best. If reasoning is about truth-finding, this is bewildering, but if it's about generating fuel for persuasion, it makes sense. Rationalisation, from this perspective, isn't a failure of reasoning. It's what reasoning's for. . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/nov/27/reasoning-gut-instinct-oliver-burkeman

Cohen, Patricia. "Reason Seen More as Weapon than Path to Truth." NEW YORK TIMES June 14, 2011.

For centuries thinkers have assumed that the uniquely human capacity for reasoning has existed to let people reach beyond mere perception and reflex in the search for truth. Rationality allowed a solitary thinker to blaze a path to philosophical, moral and scientific enlightenment.  Hugo Mercier is among the researchers now asserting that reason evolved to win arguments, not seek truth.

Now some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose: to win arguments. Rationality, by this yardstick (and irrationality too, but we’ll get to that) is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena. According to this view, bias, lack of logic and other supposed flaws that pollute the stream of reason are instead social adaptations that enable one group to persuade (and defeat) another. Certitude works, however sharply it may depart from the truth. 

The idea, labeled the argumentative theory of reasoning, is the brainchild of French cognitive social scientists, and it has stirred excited discussion (and appalled dissent) among philosophers, political scientists, educators and psychologists, some of whom say it offers profound insight into the way people think and behave. The Journal of Behavioral and Brain Sciences devoted its April issue to debates over the theory, with participants challenging everything from the definition of reason to the origins of verbal communication.

“Reasoning doesn’t have this function of helping us to get better beliefs and make better decisions,” said Hugo Mercier, who is a co-author of the journal article, with Dan Sperber. “It was a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.” Truth and accuracy were beside the point.       

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/arts/people-argue-just-to-win-scholars-assert.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all

Mercier, Hugo, and Dan Sperber. "Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory." BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES 34.2 (2011): 57-74.

Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow erroneous beliefs to persist. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: Look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and, ceteris paribus, favor conclusions for which arguments can be found.

Download the paper here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1698090.

McCloskey, Deidre. "The Role of Rhetoric in Economics." Interview with Mark Colvin. PM December 17, 2010

McCloskey, Deirdre.  Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010.

What made us modern, and rich, was a change in ideology, or 'rhetoric.' First in little Holland and then in Britain a new dignity and liberty for the middle class freed innovation. A unique wave of gadgets, and then a tsunami, raised incomes from $3 a day to $30 a day and beyond. I try to show that the usual materialist explanations don't work — coal, slavery, investment, foreign trade, surplus value, imperialism, division of labor, education, property rights, climate, genetics. The most important secular event since the domestication of plants and animals depended on more than routine. It arose from liberties around the North Sea achieved in the civil and anti-imperial wars from 1568 to 1688, and above all from a resulting revaluation of bourgeois life. In recent decades China and then India have revalued their business people, and have thereby given hundreds of millions of people radically fuller lives. The modern world began in northwestern Europe, in the same way: ideas led. The book gently rejects the materialism typical of conventionally Marxist or economic approaches. Its ambition is to introduce a humanistic science of the economy - 'humanomics' - directing attention to meaning without abandoning behavior, using literary sources without ignoring numbers, combining the insights of the human and the mathematical sciences.

Discussed here: http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2010/s3096384.htm.

McCloskey, Deirdre. "The Rhetoric of the Economy and the Polity, Whether or Not 'In Crisis.'" ANNUAL REVIEW OF POLITICAL SCIENCE 14 (2011)

The first thing to understand is that there is no world 'crisis,' not in the horror-movie form your newspaper implies. The 'crisis' was a fall of 3 or 4 percent in US national income peak to trough (as against ten times that amount from 1929 to 1933), by now made up. A high percentage of the new unemployed are Americans — unsurprisingly considering that the core optimism was overbuilding in the American Sun Belt (with supplements on the Spanish Costa del Sol and the Irish Coast of Much Rain). The panic of the Americano-centric crisis shifts like a balloon pressed down in one place, pushing up in another: Nevada, Iceland, Illinois, Estonia. But real incomes in the wider world are at all-time highs, and their rates of growth impressive. India, China, Australia, Chile in the past few years have done just fine. 

'Crisis' comes from Greek krīnein, to separate, to judge, as at a trial, later extended to the decisive turning point of a disease, the turn towards death or recovery. Some people fear that our Great Recession of 2007-2009 is a prelude to death, the Last Crisis of Capitalism. The left regards such a death as a consummation devoutly to be wished, and has been heralding every recession since 1857 as The End. A recent cartoon in the New Yorker showed a couple looking back at a bearded man who had just walked past them in a prophet's robes, holding a sign: "The End is Still Near." Says the woman: "Wasn't that Paul Krugman?" During the 1980s the late Richard Rorty would go around claiming that the Savings-and-Loan "Crisis" was just that, the last judgment of capitalism. He could not be persuaded to think of it as a bad bet by owners of shopping malls, tiresome but normal in an innovative economy. "Dick, their bets proved wrong, and surely there was a good deal of scamming, too. But the magnitude relative to all economic activity is too small to be a world crisis, or even a national one. We Americans are selling Rockefeller Plaza to the gullible Japanese. Good for us. Quit worrying." "No, no: look at these amazing numbers. Billions, billions! Capitalism is finished!" 

The rhetoric of a 'crisis' takes the headline today as the outcome tomorrow. Thus the Marxist geographer David Harvey points to the crisis in Southeast Asia in 1997 as typical of IMF-sponsored cuts in real wages (Harvey 2010). Fair enough. Yet he does not acknowledge the long-run good of the innovation thus secured — even in Southeast Asia, whose incomes for poor people now exceed what they were before the 'crisis.' The Mexican debt crisis of 1982 was followed by a decade of stagnation, true, and very nasty, though not the fault of the IMF. But now the real income per head of ordinary Mexicans is above its level in 1981, and is growing pretty smartly. 

People want to think of our recent troubles as portentous, revealing deep scandals about the sinners amongst us, or to be exact amongst you-bad-not-us. The rhetoric sells newspapers, because we like being told that Bad People Did It. It is the master narrative of journalism, after all, from Rachel Maddow to John Stossel. The Democrats point to the greed on Wall Street during Bush II, and want you to draw the inference that Wall Street needs to be regulated much more closely. And anyway bankers are bums. They do not acknowledge that banking is already the most regulated industry in the country, and the stock market is not far behind. The Republicans point to the congressional instructions to Fanny May during the Clinton administration to offer mortgages to poor folks, and want you to draw the inference that subsidies to the poor are dangerous. And anyway the poor are bums. They do not acknowledge that Bush II also pushed for wider home ownership. . . .

http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/articles/polity.php

"Educating the Imagination," A Conference in Honour of Northrop Frye on the Centenary of His Birth, Victoria University in the University of Toronto, October 4-6, 2012.

Twenty years after his death, Northrop Frye, the author of Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism, continues to be one of the most read and the most quoted of literary critics. His attention to form, specifically to genre and mode, and his understanding of literature as a totality have directly influenced two later generations of critics, including Hayden White Fredric Jameson, and Franco Moretti. In order to celebrate this ongoing legacy, the Department of English and the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, Frye’s home throughout his career, have organized a three-day symposium in his honour.

Keynote Speakers:

Ian Balfour, York University, author of Northrop Frye (1988), The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (2002)
Robert Bringhurst, poet, author of A Story As Sharp As a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (1999) and Selected Poetry (2009)
J. Edward Chamberlin, University of Toronto, author of Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies (1993) and If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? (2003)
Michael Dolzani, Baldwin-Wallace College, editor of Frye’s Notebooks
W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago, editor of Critical Inquiry and author of What Do Pictures Want? (2005) and Picture Theory (1994)
Gordon Teskey, Harvard University, author of Delirious Milton (2006); Allegory and Violence (1996)

http://fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca/2011/06/20/call-for-papers-frye-centenary-conference-october-2012/

Vernon, Mark. "Carl Jung, Part 3: Encountering the Unconscious." GUARDIAN June 13, 2011.

Jung's split with Freud in 1913 was costly. He was on his own again, an experience that reminded him of his lonely childhood. He suffered a breakdown that lasted through the years of the first world war. It was a traumatic experience. But it was not simply a collapse. It turned out to be a highly inventive period, one of discovery. He would later say that all his future work originated with this "creative illness".

He experienced a succession of episodes during which he vividly encountered the rich and disturbing fantasies of his unconscious. He made a record of what he saw when he descended into this underworld, a record published in 2009 as The Red Book. It is like an illuminated manuscript, a cross between Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Its publication sparked massive interest in Jungian circles, rather like what happens in Christian circles when a new first-century codex is discovered. It is of undoubted interest to scholars, in the same way that the notebooks of Leonardo are to art historians. And it is an astonishing work to browse, for its intricacy and imagination. But it is also highly personal, which is presumably why Jung decided against its publication in his own lifetime. So, to turn it into a sacred text, as some appear inclined to do, would be a folly of the kind Jung argued against in the work that followed his recovery from the breakdown.

In particular he wrote two pieces, known as the Two Essays, that provide a succinct introduction to his mature work. (He can otherwise be a rambling, elusive writer.) On the Psychology of the Unconscious completes his separation from Freud. He shows how tracing the origins of a personal crisis back to a childhood trauma, as Freud was inclined to do, might well miss the significance of the crisis for the adult patient now.

In The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious, he describes a process whereby a person can pay attention to how their unconscious life manifests itself in their conscious life. It will be a highly personal and tortuous experience. "There is no birth of consciousness without pain," he wrote. But with it, the individual can become more whole. . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jun/13/carl-jung-red-book-unconscious

THE PHILOSOPHER'S ZONE: "Who was Plotinus?" June 11, 2011.

He believed in the One, a fundamental principle of the universe. He believed in the Intellect and the Soul. He also thought that matter was evil. This week, the Philosopher's Zone enters the strange world of Plotinus, a great philosopher who kept the pagan flame alight at a time when the Roman empire was about to give itself up to Christianity.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2011/3237626.htm

THE PHILOSOPHER'S ZONE: "An Atheist's God: the Paradox of Spinoza." June 4, 2011.

This week on The Philosopher's Zone, we meet Spinoza's god, which might seem an odd thing to do. Baruch Spinoza, one of the greatest philosophers of his day, was expelled from the Amsterdam synagogue in 1656 because of his unorthodox religious views. Ever since, he has been regarded as the great atheist of the Western tradition. Yet he mentions God very often throughout his writings. So this week, we try to reconcile the paradox in Spinoza between his perceived atheism and his constant references to the divine.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2011/3231566.htm

"Beyond Spinoza: Exploring the Presence of Early Modern Concepts in Contemporary Thought," Goldsmiths College, University of London, July 12, 19 and 26, 2011.

Tuesday 12th July 2011, 6 - 8pm

Introduction: Matthew Dennis (Co-Organiser), "The Contemporary Renaissance of Early Modern Philosophy"
Cesare Casarino (Minnesota), "The Expression of Time: Deleuze, Spinoza, Cinema"
Charlotte Knox-Williams (Winchester), "The Studio Transformed: the Expanded Monad as a Model for the Studio in Practice-based Research"

Tuesday 19th July 2011, 6 - 8pm

Guillaume Collett (Kent), "Deleuze and Spinoza: from Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza to The Logic of Sense"

Robin Dunford (Exeter), "Assemblage Theory and ‘Emergentic Spinozism’"

Tuesday 26th July 2011, 6 - 8pm

Simon O’Sullivan (Goldsmiths), "The Care of the Self versus the Ethics of Desire (or, Spinoza between Lacan and Foucault)"

Assunta Ruocco (Goldsmiths), "Monad and Multitude"

Concluding remarks: Nicole Osborne (Co-Organiser), "Spinoza and Contemporary Practice"

http://beyondspinoza.wordpress.com/

Goldstein, Rebecca. "Sell Descartes, Buy Spinoza ." PROSPECT MAGAZINE May 25, 2011.

Thinking of buying shares in a great philosopher? The first question you need to ask is whether you’re interested in long or short-term investment. If you are looking long-term, then prepare yourself for serious scholarship. Alternatively, short-term investment could merely involve comparing the battle over women’s hemlines on catwalks in Milan and New York to Wittgenstein’s language-games. Investors must also keep in mind a philosopher’s obscurity, as this allows room for interpretation. Counter-intuitive shock appeal is also a plus.

These ruminations were sparked by the broadcaster Alan Saunders’s comment that, were he dealing in philosophical shares, he would be selling off Descartes and buying Spinoza. I was surprised Saunders retained any substantial Descartes, which for decades have been rated as junk bonds. But he’s onto something in picking Spinoza as a hot stock.

The 17th-century rationalist, who made every claim for reason that has ever been made, was for many years considered too insignificant to refute (unlike Descartes). Obscure, yes. Counter-intuitive, yes. But there wasn’t fast bidding for a philosopher who argues that there is only one substance, which can be viewed alternatively as God or nature, and from whose essence each and every finite thing, or modification, follows. (As being unmarried follows from being a bachelor.) Those of us in Anglo-American philosophy looked askance at system-builders like Spinoza, setting our sights on more feasible problems (such as showing why, precisely, being unmarried follows from being a bachelor).

But Spinoza’s stock has risen, his symbol emerging in varied markets. Take the movement which calls itself “deep ecology,” distinguishing itself from that “shallow ecology” which seeks to redress pollution and other practices deleterious to humans. . . .

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/05/sell-descartes-buy-spinoza/

Jenkins, Simon. "A. C. Grayling has Caricatured British Universities. No Wonder They're Fuming." GUARDIAN June 9, 2011.

This has been a purple week for red rage. The hirsute philosopher, AC Grayling, may call himself a "pinko" but his embryo London humanities university in Bedford Square has induced apoplexy in the old left. He and 13 high-octane scholars are having their lectures "targeted". The Guardian is in ideological meltdown. Foyles has been hit by a smoke bomb. The Kropotkin of our age, Terry Eagleton, claims to be fit to vomit. Bloomsbury has not been so excited since semen was spotted on Vanessa Bell's dress.

Britain's professors, lecturers and student trade unionists appear to be united in arms against what they most hate and fear: academic celebrity, student fees, profit and loss, one-to-one tutorials and America. Grayling's New College of the Humanities may be no more than an egotists' lecture agency, better located at Heathrow Terminal 5, but the rage it has evoked is fascinating.

What Grayling has done is caricature the British university. He has cartooned it as no longer an academic community but a high-end luxury consumable for the middle classes, operating roughly half a year, with dons coming and going at will, handing down wisdom in between television and book tours. Just when state universities have been freed by the coalition to triple their income per student (initially at public expense) to £9,000, Grayling has mischievously doubled that to £18,000.

The new institute will offer bursaries, which the left complains "condescend to the deserving poor", to a fifth of the intake. These will be cross-subsidised not, as in state universities, by taxpayers and future graduates but direct from the fees pool. Grayling thus reveals today's "anti-fees" demonstrators for what they are: middle-class militants protecting their parents' incomes from fees today and their own incomes from a graduate tax tomorrow. He wants to make the rich pips squeak.

For Eagleton, "nausea wells to the throat" at the thought of globe-trotting "prima donnas" jumping from state universities into the trough of lucre. He derides Grayling's creation as Oxbridge on Thames, "raking off money from the rich" and thus relegating existing universities to a second division. He omits to mention his own Grayling-ite credentials, as "excellence in English distinguished visitor" to America's private Notre Dame Catholic university. There he gives three weeks' teaching per semester for an undisclosed sum. Moral consistency has never been a Marxist strong suit, though Eagleton protects himself by lecturing on "the death of criticism" and "problems of interpretation".

Grayling's enemies like to see British universities as a welfare state of the intellect. . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/09/ac-grayling-caricatured-british-university-fuming

Pub: Michael Dear, et al., eds. GEOHUMANITIES.

Dear, Michael, Jim Ketchum, Sarah Luria, and Doug Richardson, eds.  GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place.  London: Routledge, 2011.

In the past decade, there has been a convergence of transdisciplinary thought characterized by geography’s engagement with the humanities, and the humanities’ integration of place and the tools of geography into its studies.

GeoHumanities maps this emerging intellectual terrain with thirty cutting edge contributions from internationally renowned scholars, architects, artists, activists, and scientists. This book explores the humanities’ rapidly expanding engagement with geography, and the multi-methodological inquiries that analyze the meanings of place, and then reconstructs those meanings to provoke new knowledge as well as the possibility of altered political practices. It is no coincidence that the geohumanities are forcefully emerging at a time of immense intellectual and social change. This book focuses on a range of topics to address urgent contemporary imperatives, such as the link between creativity and place; altered practices of spatial literacy; the increasing complexity of visual representation in art, culture, and science; and the ubiquitous presence of geospatial technologies in the Information Age.

GeoHumanties is essential reading for students wishing to understand the intellectual trends and forces driving scholarship and research at the intersections of geography and the humanities disciplines. These trends hold far-reaching implications for future work in these disciplines, and for understanding the changes gripping our societies and our globalizing world.

Visit: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415589802/.

Stanley Fish, "The Triumph of the Humanities":

[W]e can read events not merely historically, as the product of the events preceding them, but geologically, as the location of sedimented patterns of culture, economics, politics, agriculture. What is being attempted is a reorientation of perception, an alternative way of interpreting the world in which “space is not merely in the service of time, but has a poetics of its own, which reveals itself through a geographical or topological imagination rather than a historical one” (Paul Smethurst, “The Postmodern Chronotope”).

The interplay in these quotations between a literary and a geographical vocabulary tells us what GeoHumanities is all about; it is the elaboration, by methods derived from the humanities, of “the stratified record upon which we set our feet” (the title of another essay and a quote from Thomas Mann). It is the realization, in a style of analysis, of the “spatial turn,” a “critical shift that divested geography of its largely passive role as history’s ‘stage’ and brought to the fore intersections between the humanities and the earth sciences” (Peta Mitchell in “GeoHumanities”).

“Intersections” is perhaps too weak a word, because it suggests two disciplines that retain their distinctiveness but collaborate occasionally on a specific project. The stronger assertion, made by many in the volume, is that the division between empirical/descriptive disciplines and interpretive disciplines is itself a fiction and one that stands in the way of the production of knowledge.
An apparently empirical project like geography is, and always has been, interpretive through and through. “The map has always been a political agent”(Lize Mogel), has always had a “generative power” (Emily Eliza Scott), and that power can only be released and studied by those who approach their work in the manner of literary critics. Geography “demands a reader who is at once an archeologist, geologist and geographer, a reader who … is at all times attentive to the stratification of history, memory, language, and landscape and who can read obliquely through their layers” (Peta Mitchell).

Visit: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/the-triumph-of-the-humanities/.

Fish, Stanley. "The Triumph of the Humanities." Opinionator Blog. NEW YORK TIMES June 13, 2011.

If interpretive methods and perspectives are necessary to the practice of geography, they are no less necessary to other projects supposedly separate from the project of the humanities. And that is why, in addition to GeoHumanities, we now have Biohumanities (“the humanities not only comment on the significance or implications of biological knowledge, but add to our understanding of biology itself” — Karola Stotz and Paul E. Griffiths), Disability Studies (of which the X-Men films might be both a representation and an instance), Metahistory (the study of the irreducibly narrative basis of historical “fact”), Law and Literature (the laying bare of the rhetorical and literary strategies giving form to every assertion in the law), Cultural Anthropology (an inquiry into the very possibility of anthropological observation that begins by acknowledging the inescapability of perspective and the ubiquity of interpretation), Cultural Sociology (“the commitment to hermeneutically reconstructing social texts in a rich and persuasive way” — Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith), and other hybrids already emergent and soon to emerge.

What this all suggests is that while we have been anguishing over the fate of the humanities, the humanities have been busily moving into, and even colonizing, the fields that were supposedly displacing them. In the ‘70s and the ‘80s the humanities exported theory to the social sciences and (with less influence) to the sciences; many disciplines saw a pitched battle between the new watchwords — perspective, contingency, dispersion, multi-vocality, intertextuality — and the traditional techniques of dispassionate observation, the collection of evidence, the drawing of warranted conclusions and the establishing of solid fact. Now the dust has settled and the invaded disciplines have incorporated much of what they resisted. Propositions that once seemed outlandish — all knowledge is mediated, even our certainties are socially constructed — are now routinely asserted in precincts where they were once feared as the harbingers of chaos and corrosive relativism.

One could say then that the humanities are the victors in the theory wars; nearly everyone now dances to their tune. But this conceptual triumph has not brought with it a proportionate share of resources or institutional support. Perhaps administrators still think of the humanities as the province of precious insights that offer little to those who are charged with the task of making sense of the world. Volumes like “GeoHumanities” tell a different story, and it is one that cannot be rehearsed too often.

Visit: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/the-triumph-of-the-humanities/.

Vernon, Mark. "Carl Jung, Part 2: A Troubled Relationship with Freud – and the Nazis." GUARDIAN June 6, 2011.

All in all, from early on, Jung was nagged by the thought that Freud placed his personal authority above the quest for truth. And behind that lay deep theoretical differences between the two.

Jung considered Freud too reductionist. He could not accept that the main drive in human life is sexual. Instead, he defined libido more broadly as psychic energy or life force, of which sexuality is just one manifestation. As to the Oedipus complex, Jung came to believe that the tie between a child and its mother was not based upon latent incestuous passion, but stemmed from the fact that the mother was the primary provider of love and care. Jung had anticipated the attachment theory of John Bowlby, which has subsequently been widely confirmed.

Jung also believed that the contents of the unconscious are not restricted to repressed material. Rather, the unconscious resources an individual's life. A human person is built up of layers. The conscious aspect is the psychosomatic whole that comprises the body and cognisant mental life. Beneath that lies a personal unconscious, a supply of material from the life of the individual. And beneath that lies a collective unconscious that is inherited. Jung believed he had objective evidence for this common heritage from his studies of schizophrenics, who apparently spoke of images and symbols they could not have discovered in their reading, say, or culturally. . . .

Visit: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jun/06/carl-jung-freud-nazis.

Robert D. Denham. THE NORTHROP FRYE HANDBOOK.

Denham, Robert D.  The Northrop Frye Handbook: a Biographical and Bibliographic Guide.  Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011.

Canadian literary theorist Northrop Frye reshaped literary studies with his 1957 book, Anatomy of Criticism. During his long career, Frye earned widespread recognition and honors for his contributions to cultural and social critique.

This biographical and bibliographic guide to Frye and his work includes a chronology, a catalog of primary and secondary materials, a list of conferences devoted to him, annotations in books in his personal library, his honorary degrees, dissertations under his direction, the application of his criticism in other disciplines, and his role in the Bodley Club as an Oxford student. Explorations of books and journals dedicated to his work and of the volumes in his Collected Works complete this exhaustive compilation on one of the most influential literary critics of the 20th century.

Visit: http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-6370-1.

Pbk Ed.: Daniel Tanguay, LEO STRAUSS: AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY.

Tanguay, Daniel.  Leo Strauss: Une Biographie Intellectuelle.  Paris: Grasset et Fasquelle, 2003.  Leo Strauss: an Intellectual Biography.  Trans. Christopher Nadon.  New Haven: Yale UP, 2007.

Since political theorist Leo Strauss' death in 1973, American interpreters have heatedly debated his intellectual legacy. Daniel Tanguay recovers Strauss from the atmosphere of partisan debate that has dominated American journalistic, political, and academic discussions of his work. Tanguay offers in crystal-clear prose the first assessment of the whole of Strauss' thought, a daunting task owing to the vastness and scope of Strauss' writings. This comprehensive overview of Strauss' thought is indispensable for anyone seeking to understand his philosophy and legacy. Tanguay gives special attention to Strauss' little-known formative years, 1920-1938, during which the philosopher elaborated the theme of his research, what he termed the 'theological-political problem'. Tanguay shows the connection of this theme to other major elements in Strauss' thought, such as the Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns, the return to classical natural right, the art of esoteric writing, and his critique of modernity. In so doing, the author approaches what is at the heart of Strauss' work: "God and Politics." Rescuing Strauss from polemics and ill-defined generalizations about his ideas, Tanguay provides instead an important and timely analysis of a major philosophical thinker of the twentieth century.

Visit: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300172109/ref=pe_143810_20165220_snp_dp#_.

Vernon, Mark. "Carl Jung, Part 1: Taking Inner Life Seriously." GUARDIAN May 30, 2011.

If you have ever thought of yourself as an introvert or extrovert; if you've ever deployed the notions of the archetypal or collective unconscious; if you've ever loved or loathed the new age; if you have ever done a Myers-Briggs personality or spirituality test; if you've ever been in counselling and sat opposite your therapist rather than lain on the couch – in all these cases, there's one man you can thank: Carl Gustav Jung. . . .

Visit: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/may/30/carl-jung-ego-self.

Kundert, Matt. "What is Literary Theory?" MATT KUNDERT'S PIRSIG AFFLICTION June 7, 2011.

The underlying intuition to first condition this question is that what is picked out by the word “philosophy” is basically the same as what is picked out by 'theory.'  'Theory' is whatever part of a discipline that reflects on the tools that discipline deploys to do its work. Thus, for example, 'theory' is what is being done when a sociologist reflects on what is picked out by 'society' or 'group' or an anthropologist on 'culture' or 'ritual.' Almost every discipline these days has its own theory department, and no longer farms out the work to philosophy. (This didn’t used to be the case.) This has been a problem for philosophy, insofar as it has been harder for it to justify itself, but just insofar as it’s a problem for philosophy, it is—often covertly to those independent disciplines asking philosophy to justify itself—also a problem for the disciplinary theory-heads. The reason for this is that the experience of philosophy for 2500 years has been with abstract concepts and their relationships to each other. It has dabbled in concrete stuff from time to time, but every time it gets on a roll, the group of people in charge of the inquiry become full of themselves and secede from the union (a typical origins-story about disciplines from philosophy’s point of view). Without a doubt, every discipline has its own special problems that it needs its own special tools for, and for the most part it is best that a discipline make and improve its own tools (though outright stealing works, too). However, when it comes to seeing the relationship between those special tools and the special tools that other people are using, no one has any special province. The closest you can get is philosophy—that group of people with 2500 years of experience dealing with that kind of thing.

If you start with this understanding of 'philosophy' and 'theory,' the relationship between literary criticism and literary theory becomes a little clearer. It’s really the relationship between practical criticism of literary texts and theoretical reflection on the tools you use in those practical contexts. When you read Hawthorne through the lens of Freudian psychoanalysis or Melville through the lens of Derridean deconstruction, you’re doing practical criticism when the primary goal of your train of thought is reading Hawthorne or Melville. If you’re trying to make a comment on psychoanalytic theory or deconstruction using whatever insight you may have pulled from reading Hawthorne or Melville, the comment itself is theory and besides the point of reading Hawthorne or Melville. Getting the theory right is a different context than using it to read other texts. It’s important to understand this. In the act of writing, one can attempt to do many things. But to know you’re doing many things, or to just do one thing and not those other things, one needs to see how to differentiate between different activities. And in the terms I’ve laid out, 'getting theory right' means doing philosophy, which means attending to the problems generated in a different disciplinary sector than that of getting the literary text right. . . .

Visit: http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2011/06/what-is-literary-theory.html.

Fourth Conference, Association for Feminist Epistemologies, Methodologies, Metaphysics and Science Studies, Pennsylvania State University, May 10-12, 2012.

We welcome new participants and perspectives from across the academy and outside it that provide feminist discussion on any topic in epistemologies, methodologies, metaphysics, or science studies. Note the following broad themes of recent and ongoing interest:

• Practicing & teaching science as a feminist
• Gender, justice & climate change
• Liberatory approaches to science policy
• Feminist perspectives on cognition, logic, argumentation & rhetoric
• Liberatory methodologies
• Knowledges of resistance
• Experience, authority & ignorance
• Science, technology & the state
• Public philosophy

Proposals must be submitted using the EasyChair conference system. Please register at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=femmss4. Enter an abstract of 250-300 words plus bibliography in the “abstract” section, then 3-10 keywords in “keywords” space. Upload a CV of no more than 3 pages in .pdf format or Word (.doc or .docx) into the space for a “paper.” Submissions are due by August 1. (If you have any difficulty with the system contact Cate: hundleby@uwindsor.ca.)

Rothman, Josh. "Harold Bloom on the Canon and Creativity." BRAINIAC May 25, 2011.

Bloom, Harold.  The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life.  New Haven: Yale UP, 2011.

Harold Bloom, who will turn 81 this July, has been one of America's most fascinating literary critics for nearly half a century. In his newest book, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life, Bloom revisits the ideas that made him a star -- and explains, in a straightforward way, why he's spent his career trying "to build a hedge around the secular Western canon." Bloom argues that it's simply impossible to understand how literature really gets made unless you recognize that some books are head-and-shoulders above the rest. It's the genius of those books, he contends, that powers the whole of literary creation. . . .

Visit: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2011/05/harold_bloom_on.html?camp=obnetwork.

Coughlan, Sean. "Tudor Coroners' Records Give Clue to 'Real Ophelia' for Shakespeare." BBC NEWS June 8, 2011.

An Oxford historian has found evidence of a story that could be the real-life inspiration for Shakespeare's tragic character, Ophelia. Dr Steven Gunn has found a coroner's report into the drowning of a Jane Shaxspere in 1569. The girl, possibly a young cousin of William Shakespeare, had been picking flowers when she fell into a millpond near Stratford upon Avon. Dr Gunn says there are "tantalising" links to Ophelia's drowning in Hamlet. A four-year research project, carried out by Oxford University academics, has been searching through 16th century coroners' reports. . . .

Coroners' reports of fatal accidents are a useful and hitherto under-studied way of exploring everyday life in Tudor England," says Dr Gunn. "Some medieval historians have used them, but the Tudor records are much fuller. The enquiries into the deaths were extensive and solemnly undertaken."

Visit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-13682993.

Beck, Richard. "Hamlet and the Region of Death." BOSTON GLOBE May 29, 2011.

For as long as anyone can remember, the basic task of literary scholarship has been close reading. Sit down with a book, pencil in hand, read, pay attention — and then tell the world what you noticed.

Franco Moretti, however, often doesn’t read the books he studies. Instead, he analyzes them as data. Working with a small group of graduate students, the Stanford University English professor has fed thousands of digitized texts into databases and then mined the accumulated information for new answers to new questions. How far, on average, do characters in 19th-century English novels walk over the course of a book? How frequently are new genres of popular fiction invented? How many words does the average novel’s protagonist speak? By posing these and other questions, Moretti has become the unofficial leader of a new, more quantitative kind of literary study.

To many readers — and to some of Moretti’s fellow academics — the very notion of quantitative literary studies can seem like an offense to that which made literature worth studying in the first place: its meaning and beauty. For Moretti, however, moving literary scholarship beyond reading is the key to producing new knowledge about old texts — even ones we’ve been studying for centuries. . . .

Visit: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/05/29/hamlet_and_the_region_of_death/?page=full.

Seaton, James. "An Obvious Secret." THE WEEKLY STANDARD June 6, 2011.

McCloskey, Deirdre.  The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.

Deirdre McCloskey is well aware that the Western intellectual class—what she calls, following Samuel Coleridge, “the clerisy”—has been, with notable exceptions, hostile to capitalism and downright contemptuous of the morals and attitudes of the middle class that has flourished under capitalism. Since 1848, the most damning adjective among intellectuals from the radical left through the romantic right has been “bourgeois.” McCloskey also knows, and demonstrates beyond cavil, that such contempt has been not only mistaken but dangerous: She observes that “in actual fact middle-class people have not been monsters” while “their sworn enemies, from Lenin to Pol Pot, Abimael Guzman, and Osama bin Laden, commonly have been.” The great anticapitalist tyrannies of the 20th century “killed many millions and nearly killed us all.” . . .

Meanwhile, even well-meaning attempts to interfere with free markets have almost always hurt rather than helped those needing help the most. McCloskey provides plenty of examples:

Minimum wages protected union jobs but made the poor unemployable. .  .  . Zoning and planning permission has protected rich landlords rather than helping the poor. Rent control makes the poor and the mentally ill unhousable. .  .  . Regulation of electricity hurt householders by raising electricity costs, as did the ban on nuclear power. .  .  . The importation of socialism into the third world .  .  . stifled growth, enriched large industrialists, and kept the people poor.

Today there should be little question that capitalism “works better for the average person, as we saw 1917-1989, than so-called central planning backed by a Cheka or a KGB.” The success of capitalism and the failure of central planning in improving the lot of ordinary citizens have not, however, diminished the clerisy’s attraction to government planning or its disdain for the market. Instead, the clerisy has claimed that the wealth of some in a world where others are poor is a sure sign of the sinfulness of the former and the innocence, if not sainthood, of the latter.

McCloskey will have none of it. Ernest Hemingway is supposed to have pointed out to Scott Fitzgerald that the rich were not really different except in having more money. McCloskey makes a similar observation about those with less: “The poor are not better than you and me. They’re just poorer.” Individual success in the market does not require another’s failure, so personal wealth is not an indicator of moral culpability: “Guilt over success in a commercial society is for a victimless crime.”

Likewise, McCloskey briskly dismisses the clerisy’s use of imperialism as a blanket explanation for the gulf between the wealth of the industrialized nations and the poverty of what is still called the Third World: “Countries are rich or poor, have a great deal to consume or very little, mainly because they work well or badly, not because some outsider is adding to or stealing from a God-given endowment.” Or yet more pithily: “Countries where stealing rather than dealing rules become poor and then remain so.” The kleptocratic socialisms of the Third World, that is to say, have succeeded in preventing the embourgeoisement of their countries at the price of keeping the wretched of the earth wretched.

Others, of course, have made the case for capitalism as an instrument for creating wealth, but some of the most influential defenders have erred, McCloskey argues, in assuming that nothing more needs to be said. They have also erred in believing with Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism that human beings are concerned with nothing but maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. On this view, courage, faith, justice, and the other traditional virtues are irrelevant and unnecessary, since the only virtue required for the good life is a narrow prudence. In the American academy for the last half-century the dominant view of capitalism was set by the late Paul Samuelson, whose “Samuelsonian economics” intimated that “the only character we need in understanding capitalism is Mr. Maximum Utility, the monster of Prudence who has no place in his character for Love—or any passion beyond Prudence Only.” Thus “in the late twentieth century even sophisticated capitalists came to recommend a devotion to Prudence Only, Wall Street’s ‘greed is good.’ ”

The clerisy properly rejects such an impoverished view of human beings, but falsely assumes that if Bentham and his intellectual descendants are wrong, then capitalism itself is wrong. Deirdre McCloskey is out to demonstrate that life under capitalism—bourgeois life—nourishes the virtues more than life under feudalism, socialism, or any other alternative. She claims that “actually existing capitalism, not the collectivisms of the left or of the right, has reached beyond mere consumption, producing the best art and the best people.” Even if capitalism were not able to do what almost all observers agree it does do—deliver the goods—McCloskey argues that it would, on moral grounds, still be the best economic and social system around: “Had capitalism not enriched the world by a cent nonetheless its bourgeois, antifeudal virtues would have made us better people than in the world we have lost.” . . .

Visit: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/obvious-secret_571613.html?nopager=1.

Holmes, Oliver. "José Ortega y Gasset." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY June 7, 2011.

José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) was a prolific and distinguished philosopher of Spain in the twentieth century. In the course of his career as philosopher, social theorist, essayist, cultural and aesthetic critic, educator, politician and editor of the influential journal, Revista de Occidente, he has written on a broad range of themes and issues. Among his many books are: Meditations on Quixote (1914), Invertebrate Spain (1921), The Theme of Our Time (1923), Ideas on the Novel (1924), The Dehumanization of Art (1925), What is Philosophy? (1929), The Revolt of the Masses (1930), En Torno a Galileo (1933), History as a System (1934), Man and People (1939), The Origin of Philosophy (1943), The Idea of Principle in Leibnitz and the Evolution of Deductive Theory (1948). In addition to these books, and others, there are hundreds of essays, newspaper and magazine articles, the most important of which are collected in twelve volumes, several of which have been translated into English, French and German. His major writings reveal an intellectual development that traversed the life-world experiences articulated in the perspectives of phenomenology, historicism, and existentialism.

Ortega's perception of human life as fundamental reality and as a “happening,” his analysis of the ontological distinction between “being” and “authentic being,” his description of the intersubjective interaction of the“I” and “Others” in the social world, his concepts of the “generation,” and of“contemporaries” and “co-evals,” and his ideas of “perspectivism,” “vital” and“historical reason,” combine to broaden and to advance his philosophy of human social and historical realities. Through these intellectual orientations, Ortega became concerned with the epistemological status of historical knowledge, and approached the problem of critical philosophy of history as constituting the interpenetration of the philosophical and historical attitudes. Critical philosophy of history thus refers to the position that characterizes the world we know and in which we act as a product of human activity and mind. Accordingly, Ortega represented the“modern” reflective thinker who approached history from philosophy, and whose theories of history as a source of human knowledge have epitomized the tendency to connect concepts of historical temporality and mind. He challenged positivistic approaches to history and contributed an important aspect to the modern concept of history: the tenet that there is a connectedness and a meaning in human history which emanates from a principle of continuity inherent in individual human lives. . . .

Visit: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gasset/.

Brownlee, Timothy. Review of G. W. F. Hegel, THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC. NDPR (June 2011).

Hegel, G. W.  The Science of Logic.  Ed. and trans. George di Giovanni.  Cambridge: CUP, 2010.

The Science of Logic, Hegel's second major work, is a notoriously difficult book. Hegel's prose is dense, and his subject matter is onerous. At the same time, Hegel understands his project in the Logic to be a significant one. Tracing the development of a series of concepts out of "thinking" itself, the Logic is supposed to provide the core of ontology and, in some sense, to mark a renewal of metaphysics after Kant. In this new English translation of Hegel's Science of Logic, George di Giovanni has produced a readable and scholarly edition of Hegel's text that should replace A. V. Miller's translation as the standard one.

This volume is the second in Cambridge University Press's new 'Cambridge Hegel Translations' series, under the general editorship of Michael Baur. (The third, a new translation of the Encyclopedia Logic, has since appeared.) Di Giovanni's edition and translation set a high standard for future volumes. He augments his translation with extensive introductory and supplementary materials. He helpfully documents the history of the publication of the Logic and traces the development of Hegel's thinking about logic and its relation to metaphysics in the Jena writings of the first decade of the nineteenth century. He situates his own interpretation of the Logic in relation to Hegel's idealist predecessors, stressing in particular its relation to the work of Kant and Fichte. He also provides a summary account of the development of the argument of the text itself and relates this account to other prominent interpretations of the text, both historical and contemporary. . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23830.

Coe, Cynthia D. Review of Dianna Taylor, ed. MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS. NDPR (June 2011).

Taylor, Dianna, ed.  Michel Foucault: Key Concepts.  Chesham: Acumen, 2011.

Michel Foucault: Key Concepts is an anthology by contemporary Foucault scholars explaining and applying, as the title suggests, Foucault's most important ideas. The volume is divided into three parts -- power, freedom, and subjectivity -- with four essays addressing each topic. Taken as a whole, the essays provide succinct and insightful explanations of Foucault's contributions to our understanding of those concepts as well as demonstrations of how they can be put to use, both within Foucault's own work and in original applications. Particular attention is paid to the concepts associated with works from Foucault's "middle" and "late" periods: discipline, assujettisement, biopower, power/knowledge, parrhēsia, and the care of the self. Although the introduction begins by highlighting the unsystematic nature of Foucault's work, the essays together reveal the strong connections between the forms of analysis Foucault pursued and the concepts he developed to address those questions.

In addition to presenting a fascinating exposition of Foucault's work, the essays constitute a sustained defense of the political importance of his thought, in response to critiques from Nancy Fraser, Charles Taylor, Nancy Hartsock, and Jürgen Habermas (among others). These critiques have often culminated in the claim that Foucault's positions on power, agency, and freedom undermine the possibility of political activity in the service of any normative vision whatsoever; to the extent that Foucault attempts to avoid moral nihilism in critiquing disciplinary power or offering alternative models based in the care of the self, for instance, he is engaging in "crypto-normativity" (Habermas' term in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 1992).

As Dianna Taylor claims in the introduction, Foucault challenges us to understand power, freedom, and subjectivity differently, and in relation to each other, in order to reflect critically on our own present -- a project the essays in the book admirably advance. In a Nietzschean vein, he refuses the polarity of nihilism and normative foundationalism. If we are searching for normative foundations, what Foucault is up to will look like nihilism. But the purpose of his genealogical work is to illuminate the contingency of our intellectual quests in order to open up new practices of resistance to particularly modern forms of oppression. In that sense this anthology continues recent work by English-speaking Foucault scholars, including Ladelle McWhorter, Amy Allen, and Judith Butler, to address the contradiction of the genealogical subject -- as both the product and author of a genealogy. The task is more precisely not to resolve the contradiction but to draw out the powerful and productive consequences of this ambivalence in our lives. . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23869.

Thompson, Stephen. "Alexander Crummell." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY June 6, 2011.

Alexander Crummell (1819–1898) was the most prominent rationalist of the black American enlightenment thinkers in the nineteenth-century. He stands out among his contemporaries—Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Booker T. Washington, most notably—for his robust defense of the central place of reason in moral agency. His attempts to work out the consequences of that view for the nature of language and history lends his philosophy a breadth and depth not matched by other enlightenment thinkers. The prominence of his protégé, W. E. B. Du Bois, helped ensure Crummell's continuing influence during the rise of pragmatism, but he eventually fell out of favor as such relativistic thinkers as Alain LeRoy Locke and Zora Neale Hurston emerged. . . .

Visit: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/alexander-crummell/.

Pub: Paul Bowman, et al., eds. READING RANCIERE.

Bowman, Paul, and Richard Stamp, eds.  Reading Ranciere: Critical Dissensus.  London: Continuum, 2011.

Reading Ranciere brings together leading international in the first sustained critical exploration of Ranciere's work on politics, aesthetics and philosophy in English. Over the past 40 years, Jacques Ranciere's work has defined itself through a remarkable set of philosophical differences in relation to other key figures working in the fields of politics, philosophy and aesthetics. There have been significant philosophical, theoretical and aesthetic disagreements with influential figures in contemporary thought, including Althusser, Bourdieu, Derrida, Agamben, Deleuze, Foucault, Habermas and Badiou. Through these differences Ranciere has emerged as one of the world's leading contemporary theorists. Whilst Ranciere has long been a well-known force in francophone contexts, the translation of his works into English has generated a lot of excitement and catapulted him to the forefront of attention in several putatively distinct but interconnected fields: philosophy, politics, critical theory, aesthetics and film. Reading Ranciere intervenes in this ongoing discourse by assembling an eminent collection of critical assessments of the significance of Ranciere's diverse impact and growing influence. This book offers the first sustained and critically balanced response to the work of this major contemporary theorist.

Visit: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Reading-Ranciere-Dissensus-Paul-Bowman/dp/1441137815/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1307023007&sr=1-1.

Howley, Kerry. "Hegel Hits the Frontier." THE DAILY May 19, 2011

In 1856, a Prussian immigrant named Henry Conrad Brokmeyer retreated deep into the Missouri woods with a gun, a dog and a copy of Science of Logic, a philosophical text by Georg Hegel. Alone with Hegel’s thoughts over the next two years, Brokmeyer became convinced that this abstruse work by a German 25 years dead could save the nation from the very divisions about to lead it into civil war. It didn’t, of course, and Missouri, a border state, would not escape a gruesome guerrilla war. But a decade later, Brokmeyer and a friend named William Torrey Harris convinced the elite of St. Louis that Hegel’s work was central to the recovery of their country, their city and their own lives. The Civil War, Brokmeyer said, was part of a dialectical process. In what turned out to be one of the oddest episodes in the history of American thought, a group of men known as the St. Louis Hegelians declared that the direction of history led to eastern Missouri.

Brokmeyer sold a warped Hegelianism just flattering enough to believe: History had a direction. That direction was west, from Europe to the United States. History would unfold in the direction of a world-historical city, culminating in a flowering of freedom under a rational state. While Hegel had assumed Europe to be the place to which all of history pointed — when he said “west,” he meant from Asia to Europe — Brokmeyer said history would keep on rolling across the Atlantic, toward the biggest American city west of the Mississippi: St. Louis. . . .

Visit: http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/05/19/051911-opinions-history-hegelians-howley-1-3/.

Lehrer, Jonah. "The Truth Wears Off: Is There Something Wrong with the Scientific Method?" NEW YORKER December 13, 2010.

On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties. The drugs, sold under brand names such as Abilify, Seroquel, and Zyprexa, had been tested on schizophrenics in several large clinical trials, all of which had demonstrated a dramatic decrease in the subjects’ psychiatric symptoms. As a result, second-generation antipsychotics had become one of the fastest-growing and most profitable pharmaceutical classes. By 2001, Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa was generating more revenue than Prozac. It remains the company’s top-selling drug.

But the data presented at the Brussels meeting made it clear that something strange was happening: the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties. Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren’t any better than first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties. “In fact, sometimes they now look even worse,” John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me.

Before the effectiveness of a drug can be confirmed, it must be tested and tested again. Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their results. The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers. . . .

While Karl Popper imagined falsification occurring with a single, definitive experiment—Galileo refuted Aristotelian mechanics in an afternoon—the process turns out to be much messier than that. Many scientific theories continue to be considered true even after failing numerous experimental tests. Verbal overshadowing might exhibit the decline effect, but it remains extensively relied upon within the field. The same holds for any number of phenomena, from the disappearing benefits of second-generation antipsychotics to the weak coupling ratio exhibited by decaying neutrons, which appears to have fallen by more than ten standard deviations between 1969 and 2001. Even the law of gravity hasn’t always been perfect at predicting real-world phenomena. (In one test, physicists measuring gravity by means of deep boreholes in the Nevada desert found a two-and-a-half-per-cent discrepancy between the theoretical predictions and the actual data.) Despite these findings, second-generation antipsychotics are still widely prescribed, and our model of the neutron hasn’t changed. The law of gravity remains the same.

Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren’t surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.) The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe. . . .

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer#ixzz1OV2CPaWU

Kenneth J. Gergen, Interview with Laureano Ralon, FIGURE / GROUND June 5, 2011.

Let’s move on. As you know, the Cartesian notion of a unitary subject with hard boundaries came gradually under attack from different schools of thought: in the first half of the 20th century existential philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty put forth a conception of self as being-in-the-world, amidst things, and past its fleshy boundaries. In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan spoke of media as “extensions of man” – mind, body, and senses. In the 1970s post-structuralist thinkers such as Barthes and Foucault announced the “death of the author” and “the death of man.” More recently, however, Andy Clark, David Chalmers, and Robert Logan have taken on more moderate approaches with their notions of an “extended self.” How did your own notion of a Multi-being or Relational Being contribute to the decentring or de-structuring of the Cartesian subject?

I presume you must be somewhat familiar with my book, Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community, in which those latter concepts were featured. The central contribution that book makes to the sort of decentring of the Cartesian self is certainly different from Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault, and different as well from Barthes and from McLuhan’s extended self. The central argument goes something like this: that to make any sense at all requires coordinated action between two or more persons, so that whatever I say, for example, only comes into sense by virtue of how you coordinate with it, and vice versa. If you affirm what I say, you give sense to my words; if you do not listen, I make no sense; if you disagree my utterance becomes questionable. In this way meaning lies not within the head of an individual, not within the words of an individual, but in the process of coordination. It is not the “me” speaking to “you,” nor you replying; the genesis of meaning lies within the you-me coordinated action.

Consider: If you take words the individual words in a sentence, not one is meaningful alone; words become meaningful only by virtue of their relationship to other words; a paragraph stands as meaningful in terms of its relationship to other paragraphs, and so on. Now, put that in the context of what we call interpersonal relationships. The same holds true: I only make sense in terms of the way my utterances fit into a context or conversation, which is a coordinated activity like a dance. In a Wittgensteinian sense, meaning is created in the game itself – not within the action of any individual player. So if you follow that out, the very idea of a Cartesian self is a by-product of that relational process, or, to put it in another way, any unit like a self, or subject, or boundary between self and other is already coming out of the relational activity. This is to say that everything that has any meaning for us at all has its origins in a relational process, which itself cannot be articulated outside of using its own by-products. So what we have then is a sort of originary source of all meaning lying in coordinated activity, or what I call a confluence, a flowing together…

Visit: http://figureground.ca/interviews/kenneth-j-gergen/.