PHILOSOPHY'S OTHER: 'THEORY' ON THE WEB

Contemporary Dilemmas of Visuality, 10th Congress, International Association of Visual Semiotics (AISV-IAVS), University of Buenos Aires, September 4-8, 2012.

2011-11-27T19:40:00.001-04:00

A dilemma (from the Greek, dis = two, lemma = topic or premise) is a problem whose solution allows for two possibilities, but none of them is completely satisfactory, so that a diﬃcult choice comes out, upon which ethical and moral issues oﬅen impact. When a dilemma appears it is not possible to choose from a correct or an incorrect issue, but between two options that may be correct at the same time, but contrary to each other in a certain sense; between two equally appreciated values which, however, come into a conﬂict. In the ﬁeld of visuality the dilemmas appear frequently, and seem to have multiplied themselves in the contemporary world, where images and their implications have acquired new strength in the inﬁnite web of global connectivity.

It is perhaps in the ﬁeld of photography –and particularly in press photography, traditionally linked to the greater eﬀects of reality– where the most dilemmatic situations arise today: to make visible –or not– the oﬅen terrifying image of the present conﬂictive scenario, with its wars, attacks, famine, forced migrations, that put us “regarding the pain of others”, as Susan Sontag pointed out, and that may elicit undecidable political dilemmas that involve power factors in a worldwide level. In this extreme visibility, which expands the limits of the knowable, where the many forms of art also are displayed, images seem to recover the symbolic power that worried the ancient people, putting them at the risk of new idolatries. Visibility is assumed as a condition of democracy, as an imaginary of transparency, but also as an erasure of the uncertain threshold between public and private domains, another of the dilemmatic zones.

The dilemmatic visual situations are not limited, however, to moral or cultural questions; they appear equally in the more primary context of visual perception. In this sense, visual ambiguities, paradoxes and antinomies have also a place in the theme we are concerned with. The identiﬁcation of the referents may suﬀer from the hesitations coming both from the perceptual organism and from the organization of the object. Even images that are generated and used in the context of scientiﬁc practices (diagnosis, experimentation, demonstration, explanation, etc.), which are oﬅen endorsed with a pretension of objectivity and unambiguity, do not escape from these situations.

Thus, visual contemporary dilemmas concern both ethics and aesthetics, politics, human and social sciences in general, as well as natural sciences, perhaps with special emphasis on biology. Since all knowledge relies on signs, the semiotic perspective allows precisely for an interdisciplinary and integrating view. Is in this vast territory that we want to pose the semiotic reﬂection on the dilemmas of visuality, calling to questioning, thinking and criticism.

http://iassais.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/1170/

Pub: Jean-Francois Lyotard, DISCOURSE, FIGURE.

2011-11-27T19:33:00.001-04:00

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. Discourse, Figure. Trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011.

Jean-François Lyotard is recognized as one of the most significant French philosophers of the twentieth century. Although nearly all of his major writing has been translated into English, one important work has until now been unavailable. Discourse, Figure is Lyotard’s thesis. Provoked in part by Lacan’s influential seminars in Paris, Discourse, Figure distinguishes between the meaningfulness of linguistic signs and the meaningfulness of plastic arts such as painting and sculpture. Lyotard argues that because rational thought is discursive and works of art are inherently opaque signs, certain aspects of artistic meaning such as symbols and the pictorial richness of painting will always be beyond reason’s grasp.

A wide-ranging and highly unusual work, Discourse, Figure proceeds from an attentive consideration of the phenomenology of experience to an ambitious meditation on the psychoanalytic account of the subject of experience, structured by the confrontation between phenomenology and psychoanalysis as contending frames within which to think the materialism of consciousness. In addition to prefiguring many of Lyotard’s later concerns, Discourse, Figure captures Lyotard’s passionate engagement with topics beyond phenomenology and psychoanalysis to structuralism, semiotics, poetry, art, and the philosophy of language.

http://www.amazon.com/Discourse-Figure-Cultural-Critique-Books/dp/0816645655#_

"The First Sail: an Interview with Dragan Kujundzic." SIN FRONTERAS (Spring 2011).

2011-11-27T19:12:00.001-04:00

An interview with Dragan Kujundzic concerning his upcoming film The First Sail devoted to J. Hillis Miller, the prominent deconstructionist.

http://ufsinfronteradotcom.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/dragan-kujundzic-first-sail-interview.pdf

"Bellwether: an Interview with J. Hillis Miller by Jeffery J. Williams." MINNESOTA REVIEW 73-74 (2009)

2011-11-27T19:10:00.001-04:00

Hillis Miller has been a bellwether of academic literary criticism for the past fifty years. Trained at Harvard when it was a bastion of the old historicism, he staked out the newer criticism, drawing especially on Kenneth Burke. In his first job at Johns Hopkins University, he came to embrace the phenomenological criticism inspired by Georges Poulet, writing several books that try to capture the consciousness of a writer and his or her work. Already conversant in Continental thought, he shifted allegiances to deconstructive criticism by the early 1970s, inspired by colleagues Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida. Over the past two decades, he has widened his concerns to ethics, the fate of humanistic education, and the new, digital technologies, especially drawing on the later Derrida.

http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns7172/interview_miller.shtml

Phenomenology, Aesthetics and the Arts, Joint Conference of the Irish Phenomenological Circle and the British Society for Phenomenology, University College Cork, March 30-April 1, 2012.

2011-11-27T19:05:00.001-04:00

Confirmed speakers: Prof Paul Crowther, National University of Ireland, Galway, Prof Joanna Hodge, Manchester Metropolitan University, Prof Gary Schapiro, University of Richmond.

Phenomenology has always been closely associated with aesthetics and the arts. Even Husserl, who conceives it as a 'rigorous science', remarks on the close relation between phenomenological reflection and 'disinterested' aesthetic judgment. The later Heidegger, although dismissive of aesthetics, describes poetic art as the 'happening of truth' and the 'opening of the world'. Merleau-Ponty hopes to find in artistic practice clues for a practice of phenomenology as an embodied alternative to scientistic and intellectualist models of inquiry. We should remember also the contributions made to phenomenology, aesthetics, and reflections on the arts by Sartre, Levinas, Ricoeur, Ingarden, Dufrenne, De Beauvoir, and Hartmann among others. More generally, hermeneutic and later post-structuralist strands of phenomenology, with their emphasis on interpretation and textuality over and against purely logical or causal explanation, often pitch their critiques in artistic, or literary, modes of engagement.

Artists, in turn, find in phenomenology a type of philosophical reflection that offers ways of thinking about the complex embodied and social experiences of their practice. In particular, phenomenological approaches have been exploited as alternatives to the earlier conceptual turn in art making. Now it is time to rethink the relations between phenomenology, aesthetics and the arts in contemporary contexts of new political, wider social and scientific developments.

The British Society for Phenomenology and the newly established Irish Phenomenological Circle have joined together for this conference in order to unite international voices from both philosophical and artistic fields for an open discussion of the potential contributions phenomenology can make to philosophical and artistic practices and debates.

If you are interested in reading a paper at the conference, please send an abstract of approx. 1000 words by 15 January, 2012 to bsp.ipc.2012@gmail.com.

Tacit Knowledge in Science: Discussions with Harry Collins, Universite de Nancy 2, December 12-13, 2012.

2011-11-27T18:50:00.001-04:00

The aim of this conference is to discuss the argument of Harry Collins’ book Tacit and Explicit Knowledge (2010), and related issues.

The detailed programme and the abstracts are available at:
http://poincare.univ-nancy2.fr/digitalAssets/146580_plaquette-TKdec11.pdf

The London Conference in Critical Thought, Birkbeck College, University of London, June 29-30, 2012.

2011-11-27T18:46:00.001-04:00

In collaboration with the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, the London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT) is designed to create a space for an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas for scholars who work with “critical” traditions and concerns. We welcome work from the humanities and social sciences, including but not limited to papers drawing upon continental philosophy, critical legal theory, critical geography and the Frankfurt School. The LCCT aims to provide an opportunity for those who frequently find themselves at the margins of their department or discipline to engage with other scholars who share theoretical approaches and interests. Interdisciplinary and inter-institutional, the conference hopes to foster emergent critical thought and provide new avenues for critically orientated scholarship and collaboration.

Scholars working in philosophy, literature, geography, law, art, and politics departments have already proposed panels and/or streams for the conference. These address issues as diverse as animality, sovereignty, human rights, cosmopolitanism, the city, and the relationship between text and space. Through these streams participants are encouraged to engage with a variety of thinkers including Kant, Deleuze, Marx, Lacan, Foucault, Spinoza and Derrida, to name a few.

http://londonconferenceincriticalthought.wordpress.com/

Pub: Pierre Macherey, HEGEL OR SPINOZA.

2011-11-27T17:43:00.001-04:00

Hegel himself than about his object of analysis. Against Hegel’s characterization of Spinoza’s work as immobile, Macherey offers a lively alternative that upsets the accepted historical progression of philosophical knowledge. He finds in Spinoza an immanent philosophy that is not subordinated to the guarantee of an a priori truth.

Not simply authorizing a particular reading—a “good” Spinoza against a “bad” Hegel—Hegel or Spinoza initiates an encounter that produces a new understanding, a common truth that emerges in the interval that separates the two.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0816677409/ref=pe_143810_21777940_snp_dp

Macavoy, Leslie. Review of Francis Mootz, et al., eds. GADAMER AND RICOEUR. NDPR (November 2011).

2011-11-27T17:33:00.000-04:00

Mootz III, Francis J., and George H. Taylor, eds. Gadamer and Ricoeur: Critical Horizons for Contemporary Hermeneutics. London: Continuum, 2011.

This volume is a collection of essays on the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. Taylor and Mootz state in their introduction that the motivation for the project was to encourage further interest in both philosophers’ work. The collection aims to "demonstrate the continuing fruitfulness of Gadamer's and Ricoeur's work and to assess continuing points of similarity and difference in order to refine and extend their legacies" (1). All in all, the book accomplishes this goal. The essays are engaging and work to bring philosophical attention back to issues in hermeneutics that remain of pressing importance but which have been less prominent in the continental philosophical literature of late. They also suggest new directions for the application of insights drawn from hermeneutic philosophy.

The collection consists of twelve essays and is organized into three sections. The first and shortest section is entitled 'History' and aims to provide some historical context to the development of hermeneutic philosophy. This section contains only one essay, which seems somewhat out of balance in relation to the number of essays in the other sections, and those interested in the historical development of hermeneutics leading up to Gadamer and Ricoeur might find themselves wanting something more than is offered here. The second, largest part of the book is entitled 'Engagements' and features seven essays that elaborate upon prominent themes in the work of Gadamer and Ricoeur and put their positions into critical engagement with one another. The first four essays in this section critically examine the work of Gadamer and Ricoeur with respect to issues that emerged as significant in the Gadamer-Habermas debate, specifically the emphasis in Gadamer on universality and on belonging to a tradition and its implications for the possibility of a critical hermeneutics. Those interested in this debate and Ricoeur's position in relation to Gadamer on these issues will especially appreciate this part of the book. The third and final section of the book contains four essays and is called 'Extensions.' As the heading suggests, the organizing theme here is to develop and extend the thought of Gadamer and Ricoeur in directions that they do not explicitly pursue. The topics engaged here are quite divergent, ranging from feminism and the body to political action to the philosophy of technology to Chinese philosophy. In what follows, I will offer a few remarks on each of the essays. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/27486-gadamer-and-ricoeur-critical-horizons-for-contemporary-hermeneutics/

CONSTRUCTIVIST FOUNDATIONS 7.1 (2011).

2011-11-27T17:22:00.001-04:00

TARGET ARTICLE

Siegfried J. Schmidt, From Objects to Processes: A Proposal to Rewrite Radical Constructivism

WITH 15 OPEN PEER COMMENTARIES

Christine Angela Knoop, Toward a Theory of Observers in Action

Winfried Nöth, Some Neglected Semiotic Premises of Some Radically Constructivist Conclusions

Richard Buttny & John W. Lannamann, Investigating Process as Language and Social Interaction

Stefano Franchi, Radical Constructivism's Tathandlung, Structure, and Geist

Hugh Gash, Moving Forward from Radical or Social Constructivism to a Higher Level Synthesis

John Stewart, Life as a Process of Bringing Forth a World

Mariaelena Bartesaghi, On Making Process Practically Visible, or Moving Constructivism Beyond Philosophical Argumentation

John Shotter, Perceiving "Things" and "Objects" from Within Processes: Resolutions Situated in Practices

Ekkehard Kappler, ...And so on and so on and so ...

André Donk, All Quiet on the Constructivism Front -- Or is there a Substantial Contribution of Non-Dualistic Approaches for Communication Science?

Armin Scholl, How a Process-oriented Approach in Radical Constructivism Affects Empirical Research
Edmond Wright, Faith as Ethically Basic to the Task of Constructing
David Krieger, Making a Difference
Stefan Weber, Does Schmidt's Process-Orientated Philosophy Contain a Vicious Infinite Regress Argument?
Karl H. Müller, The Missing Links in S. J. Schmidt's Rewriting Operations. An Austrian Contribution
________________________

REGULAR ARTICLES

Hugo Urrestarazu, Autopoietic Systems: A Generalized Explanatory Approach -- Part 2

Vincent Kenny,Continuous Dialogues II: Human Experience. Ernst von Glasersfeld's Answers to a Wide Variety of Questioners on the Oikos Web Site 1997-2010
________________________

REVIEWS

Bart Van Kerkhove, Dialectics in Action, World at Stake. Review of Bridges to the World. A Dialogue on the Construction of Knowledge, Education, and Truth by David Kenneth Johnson & Matthew R. Silliman

David A. Reid, Enaction: An Incomplete Paradigm for Consciousness Science. Review of Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science edited by John Stewart, Olivier Gapenne and Ezequiel A. Di Paolo
Jakub Ryszard Matyja, (Just Like) Starting Over? Review of Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain by Antonio Damasio
Tom Ziemke, Realism Redux: Gibson's Affordances Get a Well-Deserved Update. Review of Radical Embodied Cognitive Science by Anthony Chemero

http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/7/1

International Conference on Rhetoric, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia, April 19-22, 2012.

2011-11-27T17:06:00.001-04:00

This conference (April 19th – 22nd 2012) in honour of Ivo Škarić is an international conference aiming at presentation of new scientific research and knowledge within the interdisciplinary field of rhetoric and argumentation theory. Professor Emeritus Ivo Škarić was interested in various areas of phonetics, defined as the science of speech. Exploring the phenomenon of speech communications, he revealed a natural connection between phonetics and rhetoric both in education and evaluation of public speakers (politicians, teachers, speakers in the electronic media, etc.). One of the results of his scholarly work is The School of Rhetoric for gifted high school students, which now bears his name. His students and colleagues wanted to name the new event after him – this time as a synonym for the scientific conference devoted to subjects in which he was the indisputable authority in Croatia. The organizers hope that this meeting will become a permanent meeting point for rhetorician from around the world in order to contribute to the development of rhetoric.

Keynote Speakers:

LEO GROARKE began his academic career as a student at the University of Calgary, Simon Fraser University, the University of Helsinki, and the University of Western Ontario. He received his Ph.D. in 1982. Before coming to the University of Windsor, he was Professor of Philosophy at Wilfrid Laurier University. He was appointed Provost/Vice-President Academic at the University of Windsor in 2010. Prof. Groarke’s areas of research and scholarly interest include ancient philosophy, the history of ideas, social and political philosophy, informal logic and argumentation theory. He has published many articles and books.

IGOR Ž. ŽAGAR studied philosophy, sociology, and linguistics in Ljubljana, Paris, and Antwerp. He received his doctoral degree in Sociology of Culture from the University of Ljubljana. He is Professor of Rhetoric and Argumentation (University of Maribor) and Senior Research Fellow (Head of the Centre for Discourse Studies) at the Educational Research Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia. He has lectured in Belgium, United States, Italy, China, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Spain, Russia, Romania, Poland, and France. Žagar’s interests lie in pragmatics (speech act theory, (critical) discourse analysis), philosophy of language, argumentation, and rhetoric.

Conference topics include, but are not limited to:

Argumentation and Law
History of Rhetoric
Rhetoric and Philosophy
Media Rhetoric
Rhetoric of Political Discourse
Rhetoric of Religious Discourse
Rhetoric of Scientific Discourse
Rhetoric in Education
Argumentation Theory

http://www.ffzg.unizg.hr/dis/

Interview with Mark L. Johnson. FIGURE / GROUND COMMUNICATION (2011).

2011-11-27T16:59:00.001-04:00

The Figure/Ground Communication scholarly interview series continues with an in-depth conversation with Mark L. Johnson - Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. Professor Johnson is well-known for contributions to embodied philosophy, cognitive science and cognitive linguistics, some of which he has co-authored with George Lakoff such as Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (Basic Books, 1999). His latest book, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago, 2007), further investigates aspects of embodied meaning and cognition that have traditionally been ignored or under-valued in mainstream philosophy.

http://figureground.ca/interviews/mark-l-johnson/

Seventh Annual Meeting, Comparative and Continental Philosophy Circle, San Diego University, March 8-10, 2012.

2011-11-27T16:51:00.001-04:00

Keynote Speakers:

Douglas Kellner (UCLA)
Brian Schroeder (Rochester Institute of Technology)

For more information, visit http://www.comcontphilosophy.org/.

Rush, Fred. Review of Michael N. Forster, AFTER HERDER. NDPR (November 2011).

2011-11-27T16:38:00.001-04:00

Forster, Michael N. After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition. Oxford: OUP, 2010.

After Herder and German Philosophy of Language are books to be reckoned with and will amply repay the most serious attention from historians of philosophy, philosophers of language, and social theorists. While there is significant overlap between chapters due to the origins of some of them as separate essays published previously, and while some of the pieces are synoptic, taken as a whole these essays comprise a cohesive alternative vision for both the philosophy of language and the history of the period. Along with a philosophical reconsideration of Goethe, reevaluating Herder is of the utmost importance to a balanced view of the German philosophical tradition and of its philosophical resources.

To return to the initial question: is the slogan 'back to Herder' apt? Probably not. The object of a slogan must present itself, or be presented, as a stable point of reference. For some, Kant is such a figure. I think this is an error. Kant is much more a transitional figure, simultaneously inhabiting two very different philosophical worlds at their interstices: one rooted in theologically-based teleology and the other in naturalism. But there can be no mistake about Herder in this regard. He is patently many-sided and, for that, a fitting figure for consideration in genealogies of many concepts that have come to play significant roles in various philosophical disciplines. But being of genealogical importance is precisely not to be an appropriate object for 'back to . . .' sloganeering. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/27469-after-herder-philosophy-of-language-in-the-german-tradition-and-german-philosophy-of-language/

Global Semiotics: Bridging Semiotic Traditions, 11th World Congress, International Association for Semiotic Studies, Nanjing, October 5–9, 2012.

2011-11-27T16:03:00.001-04:00

Modern semiotic theories can be traced back to four theoretical sources originating in the beginning of the 20^th century: Saussurean structural linguistics, Peircean pragmatism, Husserlian phenomenology and analytical philosophy. Since then a variety of semiotic theories in various fields of European and American human and social sciences have developed in addition to philosophical ways of reasoning. Semiotic theorization is typically interdisciplinary in nature, indicating a pluralization of scientific thinking about mankind. This pluralized theoretical tendency has been further strengthened by the unprecedented progress of current semiotic sciences since the end of the Second World War. Current semiotics has become a major impetus for structural reform efforts in the human sciences.

After its hundred years of modernization contemporary semiotics has arrived at another turning point at the beginning of the 21^st century: the globalization of semiotics, or cross-cultural semiotic expansion. Cross-cultural semiotics is the natural development and extension of the interdisciplinary humanities of the West in our times. Unlike the natural and social sciences, human sciences, including their semiotic epistemology and methodology, deal with both horizontal and diachronic phenomena in human history. That means semiotics, as a constitutive part of human sciences, is fated to be confronted with the most difficult as well as the most significant challenges arising from human conditions.

Semiotics is popularly called the logic or general semantics of culture. So it implicitly includes cultural-academic globalization and cross-civilization communication. In light of comparative scholarship, this new-century semiotics signifies a comprehensive interaction between European-American and non-European-American intellectual sources, characterized by its strength in doing general-semantic analysis in respect to linguistic-expressive, behavior-communicative and institutional-compositional levels. In this sense, semiotic work, necessarily interdisciplinary, must be converged with the modern theoretical practice of all human sciences still partly suffering from its traditional semantically ambiguous composition. The typology of the scientific and the rational practices would thus be more relevantly adjusted to accommodate different historical realities. Semiotics, functioning as a universal semantic denominator, will promote intellectual communication among different civilizations, cultures and disciplines.

http://www.semio2012.com/

Pub: PARRHESIA 12 (2012).

2011-11-27T15:57:00.001-04:00

FEATURES

History and Event in Alain Badiou

Quentin Meillassoux, translated by Thomas Nail

Dark Life

Eugene Thacker

DOSSIER: Discours, Figure

Thickness on the Margins of Discourse

Jean-François Lyotard, translated by Antony Hudek

Go Figure

Geoffrey Bennington

A Return to Jean-François Lyotard

Guy Callan and James Williams

Seeing through Discourse, Figure

Antony Hudek

ESSAYS

Dissipative Individuation

Esra Atamer

What is the Aesthetic Regime?

Joseph J. Tanke

The Truth of Politics in Alain Badiou: 'There is Only One World'

Adriel Trott

REVIEWS

Benjamin Noys,The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory

Baylee Brits

Form, Person and Inexhaustible Interpretation: Luigi Pareyson, Existence, Interpretation, Freedom: Selected Writings

Peter Carravetta

http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/

"Rhetoric in the 21st Century," Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Oxford, July 3-7, 2012.

2011-11-14T17:33:00.001-04:00

Keynote speakers include: Brian Vickers and James J. Murphy.

For further information, visit:

http://www.cmrs.org.uk/research/rhetoric-in-the-twenty-first-century-summer-2012

or

http://associationdatabase.com/aws/RSA/asset_manager/get_file/39555/rhetoric_in_the_21st_century_oxford_symposium.pdf

"Re/Framing Identifications," 15th Biennial Conference, Rhetoric Society of America, Philadelphia, May 25-28, 2012.

2011-11-14T17:15:00.001-04:00

Given our Philadelphia conference site, the theme “Re/framing Identifications” obviously invites a consideration of the framers and the framing of the U.S. Constitution in the late 18^th century—that is, a consideration of the convergence of people and events that reframed colonies’ identifications with each other, with European, African and Asian nations as well as with North, Central and South American nations, including Native nations. But the theme “Re/framing Identifications” also invites a broader consideration of myriad historical and current instances when people, communities, and systems have elected and/or been forced to reframe their identifications. Kenneth Burke famously asserted the importance of identification to persuasion, but this conference pushes on Burke’s claim to ask: What may we learn about rhetoric if we focus on identification not just as a means to persuasion but as a place of perpetual reframing that affects who, how, and what can be thought, spoken, written, and imagined?

The theme “Re/framing Identifications” invites papers that ask: What exigencies trigger reframed identifications and disidentifications? What rhetorical tactics are employed in such reframings? How are such reframings experienced differently, even violently, depending on power differentials of parties involved? In these reframings, what is named and unnamed? What is possible and impossible? What is ethical and unethical? What is effective and ineffective? What are benefits and what are costs? What is gained and what is lost? What can and what cannot transfer to the rhetorics of our world today?

This theme offers conference attendees—who identify as scholars, teachers, students, and citizens across a wide range of ideologies—an opportunity not only to extend our scholarly knowledge of rhetorical histories, theories, tactics, technologies, geographies, and practices but also to extend our roles as public intellectuals by discussing how to name, analyze, evaluate, teach, and take action rhetorically on challenges facing our world, challenges that include but are not limited to debates about national/ transnational politics, global economies, immigration, the environment, energy, digital/social media and other technologies, disabilities, international women’s rights, sexual identity, ethnic divisions, racism, religion, academic freedom, and war.

http://associationdatabase.com/aws/RSA/pt/sp/conferences

"Medicine, Health, and Publics," Association for the Rhetoric of Science & Technology (ARST) Preconference, held in conjunction with the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) Biennial Conference, Philadelphia, May 24-25, 2012.

2011-11-14T16:18:00.001-04:00

Health and medicine occupy increasingly prominent places in public discourse with citizen advocates playing significant roles in developing, engaging, and critiquing biomedical texts and practices. But how, exactly, have diverse stakeholders used rhetoric to shape the discourses and practices of health and medicine? This preconference will address the multiple ways that publics and the medical establishment mutually influence one another. Preconference papers should extend theory, criticism, and/or practice related to the rhetoric of medicine and publics by addressing one or more of the following themes: the roles of new media in health advocacy, the place of direct-to-consumer advertisements in public health discourse, the successes and failures of health-related social movements, expert and lay health risk discourses, biomedical stakeholder engagement initiatives, the construction of publics in medical rhetoric, or any another topic that directly speaks to the preconference theme. Papers and presentations reflecting diverse methods spanning conventional and critical-cultural rhetorical analysis, ethnography, interviewing, discourse analysis, and hybrid methods are welcome. The strongest submissions may be invited for revision for publication in a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities on "Medicine, Health, and Publics," edited by Lisa Keränen.

http://www.arstonline.org/index.html

Miller, Michael H. "Sigmund Says: Analysts Expand Their Horizon By Going Beyond Father Freud." NEW YORK OBSERVER October 25, 2011.

2011-11-14T13:03:00.001-04:00

1909, after a six-day journey from Vienna with his associates Carl Jung and Sándor Ferenczi, Sigmund Freud arrived in New York Harbor and spent a week sightseeing in the city. He had traveled to America to give a series of lectures on his “talking cure” at Clark University in Massachusetts. Before heading north, he spent time walking in Central Park and visiting the tenements of the Lower East Side. He saw the amusement rides on Coney Island and marveled at the antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum. Though his physical presence in the city was short-lived, New York has become Freud’s cultural home in the U.S. One hundred years later, the archetype of the neurotic, upper-middle-class Upper West Sider lying on the couch—perpetuated by everyone from Philip Roth to Woody Allen—is still how much of the public thinks of psychoanalysis. (“Tell me about your relationship with your mother…”) Several generations have been raised on the notion of psychoanalysis as New Yorker cartoon. This is something that analytic institutions like the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute must reckon with.

Inside NYPSI’s headquarters on the Upper East Side, the cream-colored walls and dark brown carpet give off a sterile, medical feel, like a photograph of a hospital lobby from decades past. Posters and busts of Freud adorn the space. NYPSI, the oldest analytic institution in the country, celebrated its 100th anniversary this year. The faculty here have a reputation among fellow analysts as the most Freudian of Freudians, but they are nevertheless trying to keep up with changing times. . . .

http://www.observer.com/2011/10/sigmund-says-analysts-expand-their-horizon-by-going-beyond-father-freud/?show=all

Broadcasts on Jewish Philosophy at PHILOSOPHER'S ZONE.

2011-11-14T12:39:00.001-04:00

Including the following programmes:

Overview 1: We begin this series with an introduction to Jewish philosophy, from Ancient times onwards - an attempt to explore some of the key thinkers and recurring philosophical questions. Our guide is Tamar Rudavsky from Ohio State University (http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2011/3318686.htm);
Overview 2: in part two of our introduction we take up the story during the 17th century, with the great European thinker Baruch Spinoza. Tamar Rudavsky from Ohio State University is again our guide (http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2011/3318715.htm);
Maimonides: Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimon, also known as Maimonides, became a hugely important figure in that great era of Moorish cultural flourishing, 12th century Spain (Cordoba). Maimonides adapted the ideas of Aristotle, was a significant influence on Thomas Aquinas, and became one of the leading Rabbinical scholars of his time, and perhaps of all time (http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2011/3318761.htm);
Moses Mendelssohn: Moses Mendelssohn scandalised his more pious fellow 18th century Germans when he said: 'My religion recognises no obligation to resolve doubt other than through rational means; and it commands no mere faith in eternal truths.' This week we look at the life and ideas of one of the great proponents of Judaism as a rational religion (http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2011/3318825.htm);
Martin Buber: Martin Buber was born in pre-Nazi Austria and emigrated to Israel in 1938 where he spent much of the rest of his life. He grappled with Zionism, Jewish thought, secular philosophy and politics and the result is a body of thought very much based on relationships (http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2011/3318843.htm).

Spear, Andrew D. "Husserl on Intentionality and Intentional Content." INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY November 6, 2011.

2011-11-14T12:23:00.001-04:00

Edmund Husserl (1859—1938) was an influential thinker of the first half of the twentieth century. His philosophy was heavily influenced by the works of Franz Brentano and Bernard Bolzano, and was also influenced in various ways by interaction with contemporaries such as Alexius Meinong, Kasimir Twardowski, and Gottlob Frege. In his own right, Husserl is considered the founder of twentieth century Phenomenology with influence extending to thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and to contemporary continental philosophy generally. Husserl’s philosophy is also being discussed in connection with contemporary research in the cognitive sciences, logic, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind, as well as in discussions of collective intentionality. At the center of Husserl’s philosophical investigations is the notion of the intentionality of consciousness and the related notion of intentional content (what Husserl first called ‘act-matter’ and then the intentional ‘noema’). To say that thought is “intentional” is to say that it is of the nature of thought to be directed toward or about objects. To speak of the “intentional content” of a thought is to speak of the mode or way in which a thought is about an object. Different thoughts present objects in different ways (from different perspectives or under different descriptions) and one way of doing justice to this fact is to speak of these thoughts as having different intentional contents. For Husserl, intentionality includes a wide range of phenomena, from perceptions, judgments, and memories to the experience of other conscious subjects as subjects (inter-subjective experience) and aesthetic experience, just to name a few. Given the pervasive role he takes intentionality to play in all thought and experience, Husserl believes that a systematic theory of intentionality has a role to play in clarifying and founding most other areas of philosophical concern, such as the theory of consciousness, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of logic, epistemology, and the philosophies of action and value. This article presents the key elements of Husserl’s understanding of intentionality and intentional content, specifically as these are developed in his works Logical Investigations and Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. . . .

http://www.iep.utm.edu/huss-int/

Preview: Leslie Marsh and Paul Franco, eds. COMPANION TO MICHAEL OAKESHOTT.

2011-11-14T12:18:00.001-04:00

Marsh, Leslie, and Paul Franco, eds. Companion to Michael Oakeshott. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, forthcoming.

A forthcoming volume of specially commissioned essays on all aspects of Michael Oakeshott’s thought.

For further details: http://acompaniontomichaeloakeshott.wordpress.com/.

McQuillan, Colin. Review of Alison Stone, ed. EDINBURGH CRITICAL HISTORY OF NINETEENTH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY. NDPR (November 2011).

2011-11-14T11:17:00.001-04:00

Stone, Alison, ed. Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011.

The idea of "critical" history emerged during the nineteenth century, when historians adopted critical methods from philology. By applying critical methods to history, historians hoped to produce a history that was like the critical edition of a text. Critical history would present an authentic account of the period it addressed, note important sources and variations, and provide an apparatus that provides context and perspective.

In the General Editors' Preface to the Edinburgh Critical History of Philosophy series, Howard Caygill and David Webb present a different view of critical history, which is related to Kant's critical philosophy (vii). Caygill and Webb argue that while critical philosophy reflects on the limits of what can be thought, the history of philosophy reminds us that different things have been and can be thought at different times. This makes a critical history of philosophy "an indispensable resource, a testing ground, and a reminder that we are never really done with thinking" (vii).

Alison Stone's introduction reveals that the Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy is more narrowly focused. According to Stone,

nineteenth-century philosophy can be broadly characterized by several themes: the conflict between metaphysics and religious faith on the one hand and the empirical sciences on the other; a new focus on history, progress, and evolution; new ideas of individuality, society, and revolution; and ever-increasing concerns about nihilism(1).

These are the themes which "become important in relation to later Continental European philosophy" and they represent the "particular but not exclusive focus" of the volume (5). . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/27322-the-edinburgh-critical-history-of-nineteenth-century-philosophy/

Kirkland, Frank M. Review of Lawrie Balfour, DEMOCRACY'S RECONSTRUCTION. NDPR (November 2011).

2011-11-14T11:09:00.001-04:00

Balfour, Lawrie. Democracy's Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E. B. Du Bois. Oxford: OUP, 2011.

Lawrie Balfour's Democracy's Reconstruction points out a kind of negligence in political theory. The laxity stems from political theory's longstanding inattention to race and racial injustice as important in a full-fledged and fundamental way to both the character of democratic life and to the inquiry into the ideals and conditions of freedom, equality, and justice that enable that life. If it does attend to them, it treats them as specialties of the aforementioned inquiry or as incidental to the aforementioned life. But it is not simply that race and racial justice have appeared now and then on the democratic landscape, with political theory focusing either on other things or specifically on them as atypical to that life or those ideals. Rather they have mattered and continue mattering to democratic life without political theory seriously attending to them at all. Balfour is of the mind that political theory as a practice remains shadowed by an "unowned past," pertinent not only to the object of political theory's investigation -- democratic life -- but also to the way political theory conducts its investigation on that life.

The aim of Balfour's book is to challenge these states of affairs by endorsing the importance of the corpus of W. E. B. Du Bois. She regards his work as having both longstanding and current significance in its investigation of the democratic experiment, because it strives to understand "the meaning of freedom, equality, leadership, citizenship, and democracy with the slave trade, slavery, and colonial conquest always in sight" (p. 6, emphasis added). Slavery, the slave trade, and colonial conquest are historically not tangentially concurrent with or not simply the underside of democratic life, a life defined and justified by its embrace of the norms of freedom and equality. They are rather historically integral to and concomitant with that life and these norms. Living freely and equally and analyzing the socio-political structures that enable one and all to live historically and currently in that way must be thought in unison with the "peculiar institution," its history, and the ongoing extent of its ramifications.

Not to do so is to cleave the democratic experiment (the enabling of one and all to live freely and equally in an ongoing way) from any account grappling with the life and afterlife of slavery stamped on the cultural, economic, and political arrangements pertinent to the experiment. Not to do so is to give carte blanche to political theory consigning intellectually that life and afterlife to historical oblivion while conveying an account of that experiment as a rather unproblematic and progressively uninterrupted movement toward freedom and equality. Du Bois is unique as a political theorist, Balfour contends, because he thinks these aspects as always in unison and views all people, especially those of the African-diaspora, as those who should have to live with them jointly for the purpose of constantly re-orienting their comprehension of what democracy requires. Otherwise they continually live with them separated, which has as its consequence acquiescence to undemocratic practices by virtue of an ongoing forgetfulness of deliberate actions and policies of racial injustice. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/27285-democracy-s-reconstruction-thinking-politically-with-w-e-b-du-bois/

Pensky, Max. Review of Michael J. Thompson, ed. GEORG LUKACS RECONSIDERED. NDPR (November 2011).

2011-11-14T10:54:00.001-04:00

Thompson, Michael J., ed. Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Critical Essays in Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics. London: Continuum, 2011.

This anthology of essays on Georg Lukács (1885-1971) counts as part of a current wave of secondary literature on the Hungarian Marxist theorist, philosopher and literary critic. Lukács' work and intellectual legacy, always complex and provocative, have in fact never wanted for attention, but in the past few years new impetus for re-engaging with his work has come from literary studies, where his theory of literary realism and his implacable opposition to literary modernism in all its forms resonate with neo-realist aesthetics, and from social and political theory, where Axel Honneth's recent re-appropriation of the central concept of reification has initiated a renewed critical conversation on just what Lukács did and did not mean by reification, and how well the concept might survive transplantation into theoretical climates far different than Lukács' own. "Reconsideration" (an earlier anthology, by Lukács' Hungarian students, opted to "revalue" him) is therefore an apt expression. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/27375-georg-lukcs-reconsidered-critical-essays-in-politics-philosophy-and-aesthetics/

"Subjectivity, Selfhood and Agency in the Arabic and Latin Traditions," Uppsala University, Sweden, August 15-18, 2012.

2011-11-14T10:48:00.001-04:00

Subjectivity, consciousness, self-awareness, and the intentional aspects of perception and apprehension are popular topics in the contemporary philosophy of mind. A common thread amongst the various approaches to them has been dissatisfaction with the Cartesian paradigm of a self-constituted subject that is perfectly free in its volitions and epistemically transparent to itself, typically presented as standard for the modern age. Working from the opposite end, historians of philosophy and ethicists have noted that ancient and medieval ethics operated in a strikingly different understanding of self. Far from subscribing to the Cartesian notion, pre-modern moral philosophy generally took its cue from the assumption that human selfhood is socially construed. Our instinctive apprehension and evaluation of reality has as much to do with our upbringing as it does with our conscious acts of cognition and evaluation.

It is in the Middle Ages that these two lines of thought converge. Historians of philosophy have noted that Descartes’ understanding of subjectivity did not develop in a vacuum; rather, it represents the culmination of medieval debates, which in turn build on ancient precedents. At the same time, the virtue ethics tradition underwent significant transformations, thanks in part to pressures arising from religious and legal considerations. These include a preoccupation with the freedom of choice and one’s culpability for the character one acquires.

Contact: jari.kaukua@jyu.fi.

Graham, Daniel W. Review of Patrick Lee Miller, BECOMING GOD. NDPR (November 2011).

2011-11-14T10:41:00.001-04:00

Miller, Patrick Lee. Becoming God: Pure Reason in Early Greek Philosophy. London: Continuum, 2011.

This book explores the notion, found in some early Greek philosophers, that humans can become divine or god-like through reason. Patrick Lee Miller of Duquesne University provides a general introductory chapter, followed by a chapter each devoted to Heraclitus, Parmenides and the Pythagoreans, and Plato, respectively. This is, then, something like a history of ideas focusing on some important philosophical themes and developments. The topic, if foreign to modern ways of thinking, is interesting precisely because it gets to the heart of some unique Greek concerns, and it exercises an influence into late antiquity and early Christian theology. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/27394-becoming-god-pure-reason-in-early-greek-philosophy/

Cfp: INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BADIOU STUDIES 1.1 (Forthcoming).

2011-11-14T10:37:00.001-04:00

The inaugural issue of the IJBS will be dedicated to the idea of 'Badiou Now!' Why? Because Badiou's philosophical interest is fundamentally contemporary and political. The notion of Badiou Now! captures the urgency that Badiou sees in combating the 'Thermidorian' spirit, reactive and obscurantist subjects that deny the necessity of rupture, events, acts, new truths, who replace action with political apathy, and radical democracy with a return to 'pure' transcendental notions. In contrast to the Evental-negating/denying subject, Badiou is concerned with the question of how to maintain fidelity to the event, while remaining aware of competing subjective forces and of the materialist dialectical need for endless events, for perpetual breaks and splits, which promote the present as future. The first issue then, will seek proposals that address the role of Badiou's thought in building a 21st century conception of human organization.

http://badioustudiesorg.ipower.com/cgi-bin/ojs-2.3.6/index.php/ijbs

Prinz, Jesse. "Culture and Cognitive Science." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY November 2, 2011.

2011-11-07T14:59:00.001-04:00

Within Western analytic philosophy, culture has not been a major topic of discussion. It sometimes appears as a topic in the philosophy of social science, and in continental philosophy, there is a long tradition of “Philosophical Anthropology,” which deals with culture to some degree. Within core areas of analytic philosophy, culture has most frequently appeared in discussions of moral relativism, radical translation, and discussions of perceptual plasticity, though little effort has been made to seriously investigate the impact of culture on these domains. Cognitive science has also neglected culture, but in recent years, that has started to change. There has been a sizable intensification of efforts to empirically test the impact of culture on mental processes. This entry surveys ways in which the emerging cognitive science of culture has been informing philosophical debates.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/culture-cogsci/

"Contemporary Rhetorical Citizenship: Purposes, Practices, and Perspectives," Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication, Section of Rhetoric, University of Copenhagen, January 15-18, 2013.

2011-11-07T14:54:00.002-04:00

With the concept of rhetorical citizenship we want to draw critical attention to the ways in which being a citizen in a modern democratic state is in many respects a discursive phenomenon. Citizenship is not just a condition such as holding a passport, it is not just behavior such as voting; citizenship also has a communicative aspect: Some perform citizenship when they watch a political debate on TV or discuss a program about homeless people with their colleagues over lunch - or when, one day, they don’t duck behind the fence but engage their cranky neighbor in conversation about her views on city street lighting. Others enact citizenship when they engage in political debates on Facebook or Twitter or join their friends in coming up with the most poignant wording for a protest sign the day before a street demonstration. And for others still, “rhetorical citizenship” is a distant ideal far from the realities of their everyday life; because the legal citizenship, literacy, and media access that such a conception of citizenship often presupposes aren’t within their reach, their experience with rhetorical citizenship is one of exclusion.

Rhetoric, with its double character as academic discipline and practice, stands in a unique position to engage the linguistic and discursive aspects of collective civic engagement. Drawing on and in collaboration with neighboring fields of inquiry such as political science, discourse studies, linguistics, media studies, informal logic, practical philosophy and social anthropology, scholars of rhetoric are able to study actual communicative behavior as it circulates in various fora and spheres – from face to face encounters to mediated discourse. With our diverse theoretical and methodological backgrounds we hold many keys to pressing concerns such as the alleged polarization and coarsening of the ‘tone’ in public debate, the turning away from political engagement toward smaller spheres of interest, and the general difficulty in making politics work constructively in many parts of the world, not least the EU.

We invite attendees – scholars, teachers, students, and citizens across a range of disciplinary traditions – to extend our knowledge of the social roles of rhetoric through theoretical and critical study, and to consider our roles as public intellectuals: how are we to name, describe, criticize, analyze, and, indeed, undertake or teach rhetorical action on matters of communal concern whether locally, nationally, or internationally?

We invite papers that help address questions such as, e.g.:

How is rhetorical citizenship to be defined and developed as a critical frame for studying rhetoric in society?
What conditions must obtain for rhetorical citizenship to be possible and thrive?
What rhetorical processes and maneuvers can be observed in practitioners of rhetorical citizenship?
How is rhetorical citizenship instantiated across genres, settings, and cultural or geographical settings?
How is rhetorical citizenship experienced differently, even controversially, depending on power differentials and social or regional constraints?
How can rhetorical history and pedagogy serve as a resource for contemporary theory, practice and critique of rhetorical citizenship?
What disciplinary connections need to be made or reinvigorated for fruitful interdisciplinary work on rhetorical citizenship?
What are potentials and pitfalls for sound and dynamic public rhetorical engagement?
What is good and what is poor rhetorical citizenship?

http://rhetoricinsociety.hum.ku.dk/

Corradetti, Claudio. "The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory." INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY October 21, 2011.

2011-11-07T14:50:00.002-04:00

The Frankfurt School, also known as the Institute of Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), is a social and political philosophical movement of thought located in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. It is the original source of what is known as Critical Theory. The Institute was founded, thanks to a donation by Felix Weil in 1923, with the aim of developing Marxist studies in Germany. The Institute eventually generated a specific school of thought after 1933 when the Nazis forced it to close and move to the United States, where it found hospitality at Columbia University, New York.

The academic influence of the “critical” method is far reaching in terms of educational institutions in which such tradition is taught and in terms of the problems it addresses. Some of its core issues involve the critique of modernities and of capitalist society, the definition of social emancipation and the perceived pathologies of society. Critical theory provides a specific interpretation of Marxist philosophy and reinterprets some of its central economic and political notions such as commodification, reification, fetishization and critique of mass culture.

Some of the most prominent figures of the first generation of Critical Theorists are Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Friedrich Pollock (1894-1970), Leo Lowenthal (1900-1993), Eric Fromm (1900-1980). Since the 1970s, the second generation has been led by Jürgen Habermas who has greatly contributed to fostering the dialogue between the so called “continental” and “analytical” tradition. This phase has also been substantiated by the works of Ralf Dahrendorf, Gerhard Brandt, Alfred Schmidt, Klaus Offe, Oskar Negt, Albrecht Wellmer and Ludwig von Friedeburg, Lutz Wingert, Josef Früchtl, Lutz-Bachman. More generally, it is possible to speak of a “third generation” of critical theorists, symbolically represented in Germany by the influential work of Axel Honneth. The philosophical impact of the school has been worldwide. Early in the second decade of the twenty-first century, a fourth generation of critical theory scholars emerged and coalesced around one of Honneth’s most proactive representatives: Rainer Forst.

The “first generation” of critical theorists was largely occupied with the functional and conceptual re-qualification of Hegel’s dialectics. After Habermas, preference has been assigned to the understanding of the conditions of action coordination through the underpinning of the conditions of validity for speech-acts. The third generation, then, following the works of Honneth, turned back to Hegel’s philosophy and in particular to Hegel’s notion of “recognition” as a cognitive and pre-linguistic sphere grounding intersubjectivity. . . .

http://www.iep.utm.edu/frankfur/

Aronson, Ronald. "Albert Camus." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY OCtober 27, 2011.

2011-11-07T14:45:00.005-04:00

Albert Camus (1913–1960) was a journalist, editor and editorialist, playwright and director, novelist and author of short stories, political essayist and activist—and arguably, although he came to deny it, a philosopher. He ignored or opposed systematic philosophy, had little faith in rationalism, asserted rather than argued many of his main ideas, presented others in metaphors, was preoccupied with immediate and personal experience, and brooded over such questions as the meaning of life in the face of death. Although he forcefully separated himself from existentialism, Camus posed one of the twentieth century's best-known existentialist questions, which launches The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide”(MS, 3). And his philosophy of the absurd has left us with a striking image of the human fate: Sisyphus endlessly pushing his rock up the mountain only to see it roll back down each time he gains the top. Camus's philosophy found political expression in The Rebel, which along with his newspaper editorials, political essays, plays, and fiction earned him a reputation as a great moralist. It also embroiled him in conflict with his friend, Jean-Paul Sartre, provoking the major political-intellectual divide of the Cold-War era as Camus and Sartre became, respectively, the leading intellectual voices of the anti-Communist and pro-Communist left. Furthermore, in posing and answering urgent philosophical questions of the day, Camus articulated a critique of religion and of the Enlightenment and all its projects, including Marxism. In 1957 he won the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in a car accident in January, 1960, at the age of 46.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus/

Murphy, Samantha. "Was Sybil a Psychiatrist's Creation?" NEW SCIENTIST October 20, 2011.

2011-11-07T14:17:00.001-04:00

Nathan, Debbie. Sybil Exposed: the Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011.

It is the tale that launched a thousand alter egos: the famous true story of "Sybil", who endured years of torture at the hands of her sadistic mother and grew up into the meek, anxiety-ridden adult whose head was said to house 16 personalities.

For many, she provided a startling introduction to a rare and intriguing condition: then known as multiple personality disorder (MPD), a disease of the mind affecting mostly women, in which a person hosts several vastly different personalities representing fractured aspects of a haunted past.

Luckily, with the help of her psychiatrist's enduring dedication to her treatment - which included many punched-out office windows and late-night house calls - Sybil was finally able to come to terms with the other sides of herself and integrate them, triumphing over her disease. The tale made for a compelling book, Broadway show and an even more engaging movie in 1976 (and a less riveting remake in 2007). The book and film became instant classics, not to mention teaching tools for psychology students.

But according to investigative journalist Debbie Nathan, the story of Sybil has one big problem: it's mostly bunk. . . .

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/10/was-sybil-a-psychiatrists-creation.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

See also: Neary, Lynn. "Real 'Sybil' Admits Multiple Personalities Were Fake." NPR Books October 20, 2011 (http://www.npr.org/2011/10/20/141514464/real-sybil-admits-multiple-personalities-were-fake?ft=1&f=1032.)

(Thanks to Marcel Pragnell [www.vividview.com] for the links.)

2012 London Critical Theory Summer School, Birkbeck College, University of London, June 11-22, 2012.

2011-11-07T12:27:00.000-04:00

This unique opportunity is for graduate students and academics to follow a course of study and to foster exchange and debate. It will consist of at least 6 modules over the two weeks, each convened by one of the participating academics. This course does not offer transfer of credits.

Participating Academics will include:

Etienne Balibar
Wendy Brown
Drucilla Cornell
Costas Douzinas
Stephen Frosh
Gayatri Spivak
Slavoj Zizek

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bih/

"Deleuze, Philosophy, Transdisciplinarity," Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London, February 10-11, 2012.

2011-11-07T12:12:00.001-04:00

Invited Speakers: Eric Alliez, Miguel de Beistegui, John Mullarkey, Laura Cull, Christian Kerslake, Thomas Baldwin, Iain MacKenzie, Nathan Widder, Andrew Goffey, Stamatia Portanova.

Organised by the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University of London and the University of Kent.

We are now entering a new phase of Deleuze studies which seeks to understand the specificity of Deleuze’s mode of philosophising. This is necessary, firstly in order to establish an account of his work’s developments and ruptures which is neither reductive nor partisan and secondly, to be able to better situate Deleuze within the context of contemporary thought. While the concept of immanence has recently been seized upon as the way of measuring Deleuze’s philosophical development (Kerslake, 2009; Beistegui, 2010), this conference would like to shift the focus to another yet closely interrelated problematic, which is the concept of philosophy and its essential relation to transdisciplinarity.

What precisely does Deleuze understand by the term ‘philosophy’? In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze states that ‘Philosophy merges with ontology, but ontology merges with the univocity of Being’ (p. 205, Continuum, 2004). Does philosophy have privileged access to a univocal Being that is itself non-philosophical, and which subsumes not only philosophy but also philosophy’s preconditions - what The Logic of Sense refers to as the ‘sciences’ of logic, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, as well as art? Does Deleuze and Guattari’s re-formulation of this problematic in What is Philosophy? contradict the earlier Deleuze when it appears to posit a more extrinsic relation – or interference – between philosophy, science, and art, all three of which open up to Chaos, which they claim is equally distinct from the preconditions of philosophy, science and art (nonphilosophy, nonscience, nonart)? Are we to understand Deleuze’s concept of philosophy as essentially and inherently transdisciplinary, and if so, how? What is at stake here is the possibility of establishing a ‘common ethico-aesthetic discipline’ (Guattari, Continuum, 2000) and the role of philosophy in such a
project.

We aim to have a wide range of papers converging on the concept of philosophy found in Deleuze’s work and dialoguing with the problems we have alluded to. Suggested paper topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Deleuze and the history of philosophy: his methodology, his conception of the history of philosophy, his readings of specific philosophers and thinkers- The place of science and logic in Deleuze’s philosophy
- The place of art in Deleuze’s philosophy
- Deleuze and non-philosophy, and the role of the pre/post-philosophical in his philosophy
- Shifts in Deleuze’s readings of particular philosophers, and more generally in Deleuze’s own concept of philosophy, throughout his career
- The critical assessment of Guattari’s influence on Deleuze’s philosophy

Please send abstracts (350 words) and a short biography to guillaume.collett@hotmail.co.uk by 16th December 2011. Registration is free but please contact us by January 2012 if you would like to attend the conference.

"The Forces of the Cosmos and the Ontopoietic Genesis of Life," 62nd International Congress of Phenomenology, Lucernaire Centre National d’Art et d’Essai, Paris, August 8-10, 2012.

2011-11-07T11:59:00.002-04:00

International Scientific Committee, Directed by Angele Kremer-Marietti (FRANCE):

AZERBAIJAN: Salahaddin Khalilov;
FRANCE: Claire Hill;
ITALY: Angela Ales Bello, Francesco Totaro, Daniela Verducci;
NORWAY: Konrad Rokstad,
POLAND: Maria Bielawka, Mariola Sulkowska-Janowska;
TURKEY: Klymet Selvi, Erkut Sezgin;
UNITED STATES: Ogla Louchakova-Schwartz, Thomas Ryba, Patricia Trutty-Coohill, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka

Local Organization Committee: Carmen Cozma, Claire Hill, Konrad Rokstad, Leszek Pyra
Conference Director: Daniela Verducci
Program Presided by: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka

Topics of Sessions will be announced later, on our website: Website: http://www.phenomenology.org

Proposals of contributions should be sent to Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, President, World Phenomenology Institute, 1 Ivy Pointe Way, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755, United States, E-mail: wphenomenology@aol.com, Fax: 802-295-5963.

Proposals are due January 1, 2012. Full papers are due April 1, 2012.

All papers submitted are copyrighted for the first option of publication by A-T. Tymieniecka in Analecta Husserliana: the Yearbook of Phenomenological Research.

Cfp: EVENTAL AESTHETICS 1.2 (forthcoming).

2011-11-07T10:37:00.002-04:00

Deadline: January 30, 2012

We are pleased to invite submissions for the next issue of the online, peer-reviewed journal Evental Aesthetics, to be published in Spring 2012. We welcome submissions on any question pertaining to aesthetics. Authors may explore the intersections between philosophy and art, and/or aesthetic issues in the non-artworld, such as everyday aesthetics and environmental aesthetics. Traditional and experimental philosophical approaches are welcome, as are examinations of traditional and experimental art in any form.

For more information and for submission guidelines, please see: http://www.eventalaesthetics.net.

"Philosophy and Rhetoric," Boston College, March 2012.

2011-11-07T10:34:00.000-04:00

Keynote Speakers:
John Lysaker, Department of Philosophy, Emory University
Colin Heydt, Department of Philosophy, University of South Florida
Marina McCoy, Department of Philosophy, Boston College

Traditionally, philosophy as the art of rational argumentation has been distinguished from rhetoric as the art of persuasion. However, the analytic grounds for this distinction are not immediately evident
and the borders between them are often porous. As a mode of address philosophy makes its appeal to rational intelligence more narrowly conceived, while rhetoric makes its appeal to a more expansive human intelligence, which encompasses dimensions of affectivity and historicity. Yet, when philosophical or rhetorical argumentation succeed this seems to require and appeal to both reason and
affectivity.

And so the uneasy relationship between philosophy and rhetoric continues to be reconceived throughout the history of philosophy. Recent debates in the philosophy of language, for example, have questioned the structures and stability of language and the role that it plays as the ground of both sound argumentation and the art of persuasion. Much work in moral and political philosophy has examined the roles of rational, affective, and historical reasoning in the formation of our basic moral and political beliefs. The relationship between philosophy and rhetoric seems to hold further implications for fields as diverse as political philosophy, informal logic, philosophy of language, ethics, meta-philosophy, literary theory, and hermeneutics.

This conference invites thoughtful papers examining the nature of this relationship in any of its conceptions throughout the history of philosophy as well as in contemporary analytic and continental
discourses. Papers are to be prepared for blind review, and should not exceed 4000 words. Applicants may forward their submissions to philgrad@bc.edu.

"Situating and Interpreting States of Mind, 1700-2000," Northumbria University, June 14-16, 2012.

2011-11-07T10:29:00.003-04:00

Keynote Speakers:

Professor Joel P. Eigen (Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology, Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania)
Professor Melinda A. Rabb (Professor of English, Brown University, Rhode Island)
Dr. Judith A. Tucker (Lecturer in the School of Design, Leeds University)

This cross-period and interdisciplinary conference seeks to situate and interpret states of mind from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first questioning how the space, place and historical context in which mental states are experienced shaped the narratives produced by individuals. Interweaving perspectives from across such disciplines as literature, history, philosophy, art history, creative writing, psychology and sociology, the conference will explore accounts of states of mind including mental illness, dreams, sleep-walking, imaginative states and self-awareness. The conference seeks to assess how these varying states of consciousness are expressed and how such narratives are influenced by historical change, continuity or the reconfiguration of these forms of expression.

We would like to invite abstracts for papers from across disciplines on the theme of the conference, particularly related, but not limited, to the following key strands:

Experience and Representation of Mental Illness
- the gap between individual experience and interpretations by medical and legal practitioners
- the relationship between mental distress, agency, literature and cognition
- representations of mental derangement and criminal responsibility

Liminal States of Mind
- representations of liminal states of consciousness
- the relationship between experiences and representations of dreams and sleepwalking
- categorisation of imaginative states in cognitive science and philosophy
- concepts of interiority, selfhood and imaginative processing of real or fictional worlds

Self-awareness and Place
- relationship between self and place, particularly regarding the past, decay and dilapidation
- artistic expressions of situating self-awareness
- creative representations of landscape as a geographic metaphor

http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/sass/about/humanities/englishhome/englresearch/groups/statesofmind/

"A Dangerous Liaison: the Analytic Engagement with Continental Philosophy," Department of Philosophy, University of York, December 9, 2011.

2011-11-07T10:22:00.001-04:00

The history of antagonism between the analytic and hermeneutic-phenomenological traditions of philosophy suggests that dialogue is simply not possible, and that the difference runs deeper than approaches, methods, and styles. It seems, however, that both are asking the same questions – or at least questions about the same subjects – even if their answers differ radically. The problems of knowledge, existence, ethics, and aesthetics feature on the agendas of Anglo-American and Continental philosophy alike, and a minority of analytic philosophers have regarded their counterparts as a source of potential enlightenment. Phenomenology in particular is relevant to the philosophy of mind, and Merleau-Ponty’s work has been employed by Shaun Gallagher, Alva Noë, Brian O’Shaughnessy, and Charles Taylor. Husserl is another popular choice, with Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher editing Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, a journal aimed at applying Husserl’s work to analytic philosophy and other disciplines. Heidegger’s hermeneutics have drawn attention from Richard Rorty, Hubert Dreyfus, Gilbert Ryle, and Andy Clark. Christopher Norris has even argued against the perception of Derrida as a postmodernist, advancing his work as a Kantian critique rather than a deconstruction of analytic philosophy. It appears that cross-pollination is not just possible, but actively practised by a self-selected few. The aim of this one-day conference is to explore the potential for the analytic engagement with the hermeneutic-phenomenological tradition, and consider the value of such an engagement.

09:00: Registration.
09:30: Professor Christopher Norris (Cardiff) on Derrida.
Response: Dr Donnchadh O Conaill (Durham).
10:45: Break.
11:00: Mr Paul Giladi (Sheffield): ‘Hegel: Analytic Philosophy’s Pharmakon’.
11:45: Break.
12:00: Professor Barry Dainton (Liverpool) on Husserl.
Response: Mr David Allen (Warwick).
13:15: Lunch.
14:30: Dr Denis McManus (Southampton) on Heidegger.
Response: Dr Andreas Vrahimis (Birkbeck).
15:45: Break.
16:00: Mr Joshua Tepley (Notre Dame): ‘Heidegger and the Properties of Being’.
16:45: Break.
17:00: Dr Joel Smith (Manchester) on Merleau-Ponty: ‘Egocentric Space’.
Response: Mr Jack Wadham (Sheffield).
18:15: Close

https://sites.google.com/site/rafemcgregor/conference-a-dangerous-liaison

"LIT CRI '12," Fine Arts University of Mimar Sinan, Istanbul, May 2-5, 2012.

2011-11-07T10:04:00.000-04:00

LIT CRI 2012 intends raising questions on new dimensions of literature, literary theory and literary criticism in the new millennium.

Themes

Re-reading 20th century

Roots of contemporary literature

Creative heritage of 20th century
Texts preserving actuality in different places of the world
Recent date masterpieces
Historical and geographical interactions

Actual Tendencies

Budding genius authors in different places of the world
Re-discovered ones
Newly emerged themes, forms, styles
Experimental works
Reflections of politic and social life to literature

Discussions

Relations between literatures of countries/languages

The problem of centrality and locality
Literature criticism in recent period
Literature history
Literature theory
Translation discussions

Relation of literature with other close disciplines

New media, technology and daily life

Cities and culture
Literature and politics
Literature and philosophy
Literature and sociology

Logistics of literature

Activities, fests, fairs

Rewards, institutes, funds
Creative writing education
Magazines, publishers, web-portalS

http://www.litcriconference.org/

Pub: Simon Glendenning, DERRIDA: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION.

2011-11-07T09:56:00.002-04:00

Glendinning, Simon. Derrida: a Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP, 2011.

Explores Derrida's main books and essays and considers his central themes to provide a comprehensive picture of his work
Explains the theory of deconstruction and refutes the claims that it is negative and destructive
Defends Derrida against some of the attacks from the analytical philosophical community whilst explaining why it is that his work inspires such passionate criticism
Seeks to give the newcomer a sense of Derrida's challenge to the philosophical tradition, combined with some understanding of the range of reactions that challenge has provoked
Part of the bestselling Very Short Introductions series - over three million copies sold worldwide

Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher, developed his critical technique known as 'deconstruction'. His work is associated with ideas surrounding both post-structuralism and post-modern philosophy, and he was known to have challenged some of the unquestioned assumptions of our philosophical tradition.

In this Very Short Introduction, Simon Glendinning explores both the difficulty and significance of the work of Derrida. He presents Derrida's challenging ideas as making a significant contribution to, and providing a powerful reading of, our philosophical heritage. Defending Derrida against many of the charges that were placed against him, he attempts to show why Derrrida's work causes such extreme reactions.

Glendinning explains Derrida's distinctive mode of engagement with our philosophical tradition, and shows that this is not a merely negative thing. By exploring his most famous and influential texts, Glendinning shows how and why Derrida's work of deconstruction is inspired not by a 'critical frenzy', but by a loving respect for philosophy.

http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780192803450.do

"Rethinking the Self: Transnational and Transdisciplinary Bioethical and Biopolitical Concerns," Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, April 10-12, 2012.

2011-11-07T09:47:00.001-04:00

Keynote speakers include Prof. Beverley Skeggs, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, and Dr. Jenny Slatman, Maastricht University, the Netherlands.

This international and interdisciplinary symposium addresses how cultural, medical and political understandings of the self are shifting and changing in contemporary societies. It explores how humanness is imagined and conceived in various symbolic systems of knowledge, and how gender, disability, class and ethnicity articulate these understandings. With a particular focus on how ideas of the flesh and national identity reconfigure experiences of the embodied self, the symposium aims to bring together scholars whose work engages with issues that range from medical and cultural technologies, globalisation, migration and neoliberalism to phenomenology and ethics, political ideologies and subjectivities, and theories of social transformation.

This symposium aims to create a transdisciplinary dialogue regarding the local and global changing understandings of and practices related to the self by bringing together speakers from a broad range of cultural, methodological, national, disciplinary and transnational foci. It seeks to further conversations and research on topical and vexing questions of the self, especially in relation to recent medical, cultural, technological, political, social and neo-colonial developments. With an emphasis on the biopolitics of bodies, machines and institutional structures, the symposium also addresses the ethics of human selfhood, specifically how we define the human and what is at stake in our definitions of this now global being.

We welcome submissions for papers, poster-presentations and artwork from a broad range of disciplines and fields of research. Topics can include, but are not limited to:

Theories and technologies of the self (Foucault, Agamben, Butler, etc.)
Community belonging and violence
Contemporary medical therapies, technologies and ethics (organ donation and transplantation, gene therapy, HIV therapies, etc.)
Class dimensions of the self (Skeggs, etc.)
The self, disability and monstrosity (Shildrick, etc)
Self harm and narratives of the self
Medicalised race theories
Gender, sexuality and queering the self
Phenomenology, the senses and an embodied sense of self
Ethics and the ethics of the human

http://www.helsinki.fi/collegium/events/rethinking-the-self.htm

Madigan, Arthur. Review of Lloyd P. Gerson, ed. CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY IN LATE ANTIQUITY. NDPR (October 2011).

2011-11-07T09:30:00.002-04:00

Gerson, Lloyd P., ed. Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity. 2 Vols. Cambridge: CUP, 2010.

These two volumes are the successor to The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, edited by A. H. Armstrong, which appeared in 1967. The difference in titles reflects a fundamental difference in outlook. Armstrong treated this era as an interim period between classical Greek philosophy and the philosophy of the Middle Ages, each of which had its own unity and coherence. The present volume conceives of late ancient philosophy as a field in itself, having its own unity and coherence. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/27054-the-cambridge-history-of-philosophy-in-late-antiquity/

"Responsibility, Formal Knowledge and the Life-World," Australasian Phenomenology and Hermeneutics Association, Murdoch University, November 28-29, 2011.

2011-11-07T09:18:00.000-04:00

Confirmed Speakers

Prof. Chan-Fai Cheung The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Ivan Chvatík, Dr.h.c. Charles University Prague, Czech Republic
Prof. Jeff Malpas University of Tasmania, Australia
Prof. Dermot Moran University College Dublin, Ireland
Prof. Horst Ruthrof Murdoch University, Australia
Prof. Chung-chi Yu National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan
Dr Suzi Adams Flinders University, Australia
Dr Ingo Farin University of Tasmania, Australia
Dr Paul Healy Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
Dr Lucy Tatman University of Tasmania, Australia
Dr Lubica Učník Murdoch University, Australia

http://jrl-workshop.heroku.com/

Stern, Tom. Review of Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, THE THREE STIGMATA OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. NDPR (October 2011).

2011-11-07T08:58:00.001-04:00

Mellamphy, Nandita Biswas. The Three Stigmata of Friedrich Nietzsche: Political Physiology in the Age of Nihilism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Mellamphy's book aims to draw together three strands of Nietzsche's thought: his 'great politics', his philosopher of the future and the eternal recurrence. Her claim is that they are 'always co-extensive and mutually implicated' (x); hence, a reference by Nietzsche to one of these concepts necessarily invokes the others. The future philosopher is 'undoubtedly a political figure' (with artistic features) (15); and, for the future philosopher, the experience of the eternal recurrence is central to the 'task of establishing 'great politics'' (41). It is the emphasis on Nietzsche's 're-articulation of the 'political'' (121) which is most prominent, though, as stated, Mellamphy takes the three concepts together. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/26960-the-three-stigmata-of-friedrich-nietzsche-political-physiology-in-the-age-of-nihilism/

Rheins, Jason G. Review of Daniel W. Graham, ed. and trans. THE TEXTS OF EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY. NDPR (October, 2011).

2011-11-07T08:54:00.003-04:00

Graham, Daniel W., ed. and trans. The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy: the Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies of the Major Presocratics. 2 Vols. Cambridge: CUP, 2010.

Hermann Diels' seminal Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (hereafter, DK) set the highest of standards for sourcebooks of early ancient Greek philosophy, and it has remained the scholar's single most indispensible tool for researching and reconstructing the philosophical thought of the figures of that time. However, nearly six decades have passed since Walther Kranz produced the sixth and latest revised edition of that work. Without periodic polishing over that time, our gold standard has lost some of its luster, for in those three score years, the body of our source material has grown as new texts have been discovered (e.g., the Derveni and Strasbourg papyri) and significant fragments and testimonials have been identified in already extant works. At the same time, scholarly opinions concerning the 'Presocratics' have developed and shifted, sometimes radically. Nonetheless, DK has remained utterly indispensible, as no other comparable work has come forward to either update or replace it.

Daniel Graham makes similar observations in his preface to The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy (hereafter, TEGP), where he discusses how and why this work came about. A newly revised version of DK, and one, furthermore, which would also include English translations of all its fragments and testimonies, would constitute a truly peerless contribution to the study of the history of philosophy and to classical scholarship more broadly. Readers of TEGP who come to it expecting a successor to DK will leave it disappointed, however; it is not sufficiently comprehensive or exhaustive. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to undervalue Graham's work for that reason, as TEGP is not really designed to replace DK. Rather, it is intended to satisfy a legitimate and pressing need for which there is currently no suitable alternative -- namely, for what Graham describes as "not so much an exhaustive collection" but "a bridge between the introductory textbook and the exhaustive collection, a kind of portable and up-to-date assemblage of the texts everyone should have access to for the figures everyone studies" (p. xiii). TEGP succeeds in this mission, and admirably, though not flawlessly. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/26948-the-texts-of-early-greek-philosophy-the-complete-fragments-and-selected-testimonies-of-the-major-presocratics-2/

Pub: Patrick Colm Hogan, AFFECTIVE NARRATOLOGY.

2011-11-07T08:43:00.000-04:00

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Affective Narratology: the Emotional Structure of Stories. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2011.

Stories engage our emotions. We’ve known this at least since the days of Plato and Aristotle. What this book helps us to understand now is how our own emotions fundamentally organize and orient stories. In light of recent cognitive research and wide reading in different narrative traditions, Patrick Colm Hogan argues that the structure of stories is a systematic product of human emotion systems. Examining the ways in which incidents, events, episodes, plots, and genres are a function of emotional processes, he demonstrates that emotion systems are absolutely crucial for understanding stories.

Hogan also makes a case for the potentially integral role that stories play in the development of our emotional lives. He provides an in-depth account of the function of emotion within story—in widespread genres with romantic, heroic, and sacrificial structures, and more limited genres treating parent/child separation, sexual pursuit, criminality, and revenge—as these appear in a variety of cross-cultural traditions. In the course of the book Hogan develops interpretations of works ranging from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to African oral epics, from Sanskrit comedy to Shakespearean tragedy. Integrating the latest research in affective science with narratology, this book provides a powerful explanatory account of narrative organization.

Further information is here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0803230028/ref=pe_143810_21434970_snp_dp.

"Epictetus and Stoicism," Department of Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology, April 26-27, 2012.

2011-10-31T18:43:00.002-04:00

The RIT Philosophy De-partment invites papers that address any topic on or related to Epictetus and Stoicism, including, but not limited to: happiness, tranquility, detachment, reason, fate, volition, agency, what is (and is not) under our control, our moral purpose, virtue, cosmic order, divine providence, death, the Stoic sage, Epictetus as teacher, influence of earlier thinkers on Epictetus, Epictetus’s influence on later thinkers (including writers of our own time), the "practical" philosophy of Stoicism, and comparisons and contrasts with other traditions (such as Buddhism, Epicureanism, Christianity).

Please note that selected conference papers will be considered for publication in a collection of essays on Epictetus: his Continuing Influence and Contemporary Relevance to be published with RIT Press.

Keynote Speaker: Katja Vogt (Columbia University).

Papers should be 4,500-5,500 words in length (35-40 minutes reading time), and prepared for blind-review. Please submit full papers as email attachments to: David.Suits@rit.edu.

Submission Deadline: January 15, 2012.

Wheeler, Michael. "Martin Heidegger." (STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY).

2011-10-17T09:10:00.000-04:00

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was a German philosopher whose work is perhaps most readily associated with phenomenology and existentialism, although his thinking should be identified as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification. His ideas have exerted a seminal influence on the development of contemporary European philosophy. They have also had an impact far beyond philosophy, for example in architectural theory (see e.g., Sharr 2007), literary criticism (see e.g., Ziarek 1989), theology (see e.g., Caputo 1993), psychotherapy (see e.g., Binswanger 1943/1964, Guignon 1993) and cognitive science (see e.g., Dreyfus 1992, 2008; Wheeler 2005; Kiverstein and Wheeler forthcoming). . . .

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/

"Rhetoric and Performance," Nineteenth Biennial Conference, International Society for the History of Rhetoric (ISHR), Chicago, July 24-27, 2013.

2011-10-17T09:06:00.002-04:00

The Society calls for papers that focus on the historical aspect of the theory and practice of rhetoric. The special theme of the conference will be “Rhetoric and Performance.” Papers dedicated to this theme will explore the theory and practice of rhetorical delivery, the historical contexts of rhetorical performance, the performativity of rhetorical texts, and other related topics.

Papers are also invited on every aspect of the history of rhetoric in all periods and languages and the relationship of rhetoric to poetics, literary theory and criticism, philosophy, politics, art, religion, geographic areas and other elements of the cultural
context.

http://ishr.cua.edu/

Prado, C. G. Review of Jeff Malpas, ed. DIALOGUES WITH DAVIDSON. NDPR (October 2011).

2011-10-17T08:56:00.002-04:00

Malpas, Jeff, ed. Dialogues with Davidson: Acting, Interpreting, Understanding. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.

This is an impressive collection, though one defying brief review. It consists of an illuminating Foreword, a clear, stage-setting Introduction, twenty articles in three topical sections, and an extensive Bibliography. The orientation of the collection turns on Jeff Malpas' attempt to cast Donald Davidson's work as broader than the narrowly analytic corpus many take it to be: e.g., Ernest LePore. (xviii) Another collection in this vein, to which I refer below, is Ludwig 2003.

Two comments on the orientation before turning to the articles: first, no one, including the philosopher in question, can legitimately limit interpretation of and extrapolation from a philosophical corpus. Second, that said, I had the privilege of meeting Davidson and commenting on his "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs" two years before its publication. (Queen's University, 9/27/84). I drew a parallel between him and Gadamer that Davidson resisted. He seems later to have changed his mind to some extent, but I suspect he would be ambivalent about several of this collection's articles, despite their being as intellectually productive as they are convincingly supportive of Malpas' view of Davidson's work.

I proceed by saying a bit about each article and more about those I found most interesting. I will say now that this is a book anyone interested in Davidson should own.

A preliminary point: the collection's articles are "dialogues" with Davidson; discussion of his work in relation to continental thinkers is not about one-way or reciprocal influences but about parallels in philosophical thought. It is one thing to draw parallels, though, and another to exploit them: a difference evident in the more and less successful articles. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/26831-dialogues-with-davidson-acting-interpreting-understanding/

"Communism, a New Beginning?," Cooper Union, New York, October 14-16, 2011.

2011-10-17T08:46:00.001-04:00

Organised by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek.

A new conference with leading thinkers to discuss the continued relevance of the communist idea.

"The long night of the left is coming to a close" wrote Slavoj Zizek and Costas Douzinas in their introduction to The Idea of Communism. The continuing economic crisis, the shift away from a unipolar world defined by American hegemony, and the ecological crisis mean that growing numbers of people are keen to explore an alternative, and to re-discover the idea of communism. With the advent of the Arab awakening millions have sought new ways to overcome corruption and dictatorship.

Responding to Alain Badiou's proposition of the ‘communist hypothesis’, the leading thinkers of the left convened in London in 2009 to discuss the perpetual, persistent notion that, in a truly emancipated society, all things should be owned in common. Two years later, the discussion continues—this time in New York.

www.verso.com

Pub: Gianni Vattimo, et al. HERMENEUTIC COMMUNISM.

2011-10-17T08:40:00.000-04:00

Vattimo, Gianni, and Santiago Zabala. Hermeneutic Communism: from Heidegger to Marx. New York: Columbia UP, 2011.

For information on the book: http://www.cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-15802-2/hermeneutic-communism:

Having lost much of its political clout and theoretical power, communism no longer represents an appealing alternative to capitalism. In its original Marxist formulation, communism promised an ideal of development, but only through a logic of war, and while a number of reformist governments still promote this ideology, their legitimacy has steadily declined since the fall of the Berlin wall.

Separating communism from its metaphysical foundations, which include an abiding faith in the immutable laws of history and an almost holy conception of the proletariat, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala recast Marx’s theories at a time when capitalism’s metaphysical moorings—in technology, empire, and industrialization—are buckling. While Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call for a return of the revolutionary left, Vattimo and Zabala fear this would lead only to more violence and failed political policy. Instead, they adopt an antifoundationalist stance drawn from the hermeneutic thought of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty.

Hermeneutic communism leaves aside the ideal of development and the general call for revolution; it relies on interpretation rather than truth and proves more flexible in different contexts. Hermeneutic communism motivates a resistance to capitalism’s inequalities yet intervenes against violence and authoritarianism by emphasizing the interpretative nature of truth. Paralleling Vattimo and Zabala’s well-known work on the weakening of religion, Hermeneutic Communism realizes the fully transformational, politically effective potential of Marxist thought.

Read the interview here: http://www.cup.columbia.edu/static/vattimo-zabala-hermeneutic-interview.

Fritzman, J. M. Review of Thomas Nenon, ed. KANT, KANTIANISM, AND IDEALISM. NDPR (October 2011).

2011-10-17T08:31:00.000-04:00

Nenon, Thomas, ed. Kant, Kantianism, and Idealism: the Origins of Continental Philosophy. Vol. 1 of The History of Continental Philosophy. 8 Vols. Gen. Ed. Alan D. Schrift. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010.

This is the first of eight volumes in the series The History of Continental Philosophy. In his introductory chapter, Thomas Nenon notes that, in contrast to analytic philosophy, continental philosophy developed through a deep and sustained dialogue with Kant's philosophy and those thinkers influenced by it in France and Germany during the nineteenth century. He is correct; Kant's philosophy begins its rehabilitation in analytic philosophy with the 1966 publications of Jonathan Bennett's Kant's Analytic and Peter Strawson's Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. He also observes that, although Kant's philosophy has now been appropriated by both analytic and continental philosophy, the other philosophers discussed in this book have generally been ignored in analytic philosophy.

Nenon writes that the French Revolution was taken by Kant to directly challenge two of the fundamental beliefs of the Enlightenment. The first belief was that enlightenment is compatible with order, stability, and the gradual reform of political and social institutions. The second was that progress in any one area of human endeavor would be mirrored by progress in other areas. Nenon suggests that there were two chief responses to this challenge. The "romantic view" of Fichte, the early Hegel, and Marx maintained that progress will result in the elimination of the state. The "realist position" of the later Hegel held that the rational state is not only required for progress but is itself an instance of that progress.

Following this introductory chapter, there are ten that discuss specific philosophers. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/26848-kant-kantianism-and-idealism-the-origins-of-continental-philosophy/

"Storytelling: Global Reflections on Narrative," Prague, Czech Republic, May 13-15, 2012.

2011-10-17T08:20:00.001-04:00

Human life is conducted through story, which comes naturally to us. Sharing stories is arguably the most important way we have of communicating with others about who we are and what we believe; about what we are doing and have done; about our hopes and fears; about what we value and what we don't. We learn about and make sense of our lives by telling the stories that we live; and we learn about other lives by listening to the stories told by others. Sometimes, under the influence of the culture in which we are immersed, we live our lives in ways that try to create the stories we want to be able to tell about them.

Members of many professions, including medicine, nursing, teaching, the law, psychotherapy and counseling, spend a great deal of their time listening to and communicating through stories. Story is a powerful tool for teachers, because it is a good way of enabling students and other learners to integrate what they are learning with what they already know, and of placing what is learned in a context that makes it easy to recall. Story plays an important role in academic disciplines like philosophy, theology, anthropology, archaeology, history as well as literature. Narrative methods for the collection of data are increasingly used in research in the social sciences and humanities, where the value of getting to know people in a more intimate and less distant way – almost as if we are getting to know them from the inside, begins to be viewed as having some value. Some academics have begun to realise the value of storytelling as a model for academic writing.

Most of us have lots of experience of relating to other lives through narrative forms, including the nursery stories we encounter as children; the books we read and the movies we watch. When we are moved by a play or a film or by a novel, we are moved because we begin imaginatively to live the lives of the characters that inhabit them. If we are lucky we will encounter as we grow up, fictional stories that stay with us like old friends, throughout our lives that we will revisit again and again as a way coming to terms with and responding to experiences in our own lives.

Storytelling: global reflections on narrative, will provide a space in which stories about story can be told, and in which the use of stories in the widest possible range of aspects of human life, can be reported. Abstracts are invited for individual contributions and for symposia of three closely related papers. They may address any aspect of story or narrative, including, for example:
Story as a pedagogical tool in academic disciplines such as history; anthropology, psychology, theology, cultural theory, medicine, law, philosophy, education, and archaeology.

Narrative and the gathering of stories of lived experience, as a research approach in any area of academic, professional and public life.

The place of story and storytelling in the practice of journalism; PR advertising; conflict resolution; architecture; religion; tourism, politics and the law, and in clinical contexts such as medicine, psychotherapy, nursing and counselling.

Finally abstracts may feature storytelling in any aspect of culture, including music (from opera to heavy metal, folk and sacred music); fine art; theatre; literature; cinema and digital storytelling.

http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/persons/storytelling-global-reflections-on-narrative/

Laruelle in London: the London Graduate School Seminars, December 2011/May 2012.

2011-10-17T08:12:00.002-04:00

Starting this winter, Professor François Laruelle will give two annual seminars and workshops on Non-Standard Philosophy at the London Graduate School. The first of these events will be on December 6th and 7th 2011, and the second will take place in May 2012.

Professor Laruelle has taught at both the University of Paris X, and the Collège international de philosophie, and is the author of over twenty books, including Les Philosophies de la différence (1986), Principes de la non-philosophie (1996), Le Christ futur (2002), and, most recently, Le Concept de non-photographie and Anti-Badiou (both 2011) – all of which have either just appeared or will soon appear in English translation.

Over this forty year period, Laruelle has constructed one of the most demanding, methodical, and provocative intellectual practices in contemporary theory – an absolutely immanent materialism of thought. The purpose of these series of talks at the LGS will be both to cover the conceptual background to Non-Standard Philosophy and to explore its consequences for theory throughout the arts, sciences, and humanities. There will be one evening seminar open to members of the public, followed by one daytime workshop which will be open to all postgraduates working in areas related to this field.

Further information, including all dates, times, and locations for each workshop and seminar, will soon be available through Professor John Mullarkey - j.mullarkey@kingston.ac.uk

http://www.thelondongraduateschool.co.uk/blog/laruelle-in-london-the-lgs-seminars-december-2011may-2012/

Documentary: THE RIGHT TO PHILOSOPHY, October 29, 2012.

2011-10-17T08:08:00.001-04:00

A Documentary by Yuji Nishiyama: The Right to Philosophy: Traces of the International College of Philosophy

What are we allowed to believe about the Right to Philosophy, about the Future of the Humanities?

Saturday 29 October 11:00―14:00
The Cinema, Birkbeck College, 43 Gordon Square, London
Followed by a panel discussion with the director Yuji Nishiyama (Tokyo Metropolitan University)T

This is the first documentary film on the International College of Philosophy (Collège international de Philosophie: CIPH), founded by, among others, Jacques Derrida and François Châtelet in 1983 in Paris.

Through interviews with the key figures in the CIPH, the film explores the "question of the institution", the relationship between philosophy and institutions—a topic that was central for deconstruction as elaborated and practiced by Derrida. The aim of this film is to consider the possibilities of the humanities in general and philosophy in particular under the current conditions of global capitalism.

Among its many provocations, the film contrasts the notion of "intersection" established by the Collège with that of the inter-disciplinarity of Cultural Studies or Comparative Studies departments in the Anglo-Saxon academic landscape. Enlightening and provocative, this film is essential viewing for those engaged in the humanities.

"A wonderful cinematic documentary open to many contexts, an exceptional film about the topic of philosophy that demands a viewing from multiple angles."―Naoki Sakai

This screening is organized as part of the international symposium ‘Humanities After Fukushima’, which is inspired by the film and tries to address issues surrounding humanities education and research in the age of crisis.

For more details please visit our event registration site: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2154622534.

See the trailer here: http://youtu.be/Ps4VhUAhxSc.

"Varieties of Continental Thought and Religion," Ryerson University, June 15-16, 2012.

2011-10-17T08:02:00.003-04:00

We invite submissions from scholars and graduate students based in Canada and abroad on the topic of Continental Thought and Religion. The general theme of the conference is meant to reflect the variety of articulations of religion that have emerged in contemporary European thought. While the focus of the conference is continental thought, we nonetheless conceive the latter in an interdisciplinary manner (including literary theory, social and political thought, psychoanalysis, and religious studies). We also encourage submissions from people interested in exploring possible connections with analytic philosophy.

Confirmed Speakers: John Caputo (Syracuse U.), Bettina Bergo (U. de Montréal), more to be announced in the near future.

In addition to our keynote speaker, John Caputo, we will have four commissioned workshops comprised of two papers and a response, and a series of themed panels. We invite submissions of three-page proposals for essays for the following themed panels with included possible topics:

Phenomenology of Religion
The thought of Chrétien, Henry, Lacoste, Levinas, Marion, and Ricoeur
Topics: the gift; the work of art; appearance and transcendence; call and response

Religion and Politics
The thought of Agamben, Asad, Connolly, Derrida, de Vries, Girard, Habermas, Schmitt, and Taylor
Topics: political theology; the post-secular; sovereignty; religion and violence; pluralism

Religion and Speculative Realism
The thought of Brassier, Harman, Laruelle, and Meillassoux
Topics: materialism; correlationism; nihilism; the things themselves; divine inexistence; ‘future Christ’

Beyond Theism and Atheism
The thought of Caputo, Kearney, Kristeva, Milbank, Vattimo
Topics: kenosis; anatheism; weak theology; a/theology; radical orthodoxy

Continental Thought, Religion, and Aesthetics
The artwork of Bresson, Caravaggio, Celan, Chagall, Dostoyevsky, Dumont, Artemisia Gentileschi, Kahlo, Kapoor, Kiarostami, Kiefer, Malick, Newman, O'Keefe, and Stevens
The thought of Cavell, Cixous, Critchley, Irigaray, Marion, Nancy, and Rancière
Topics: transcendence in art; image and icon; creativity and creation; representation and idolatry

Immanentism and Religion
Agamben, Badiou, Bergson, Deleuze, James, Foucault, Keller, and Žižek
Topics: self-organization; the event; plurality; bio-power; polydoxy

History of Continental Thought and Religion
Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Heidegger
Topics: death of God; reason and faith; scripture and philosophy; religion and fantasy; onto-theology

Please send only one three-page (double-spaced) proposal on one of the above themes and any questions to varieties2012@gmail.com by December 31, 2011

Garner, John V. "Castoriadis, Cornelius." (INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY).

2011-10-10T16:46:00.001-04:00

Cornelius Castoriadis was an important intellectual figure in France for many decades, beginning in the mid-1940s. Trained in philosophy, Castoriadis also worked as a practicing economist and psychologist while authoring over twenty major works and numerous articles that span most of the traditional philosophical subjects, including politics, economics, psychology, anthropology, and ontology. While his works exhibit a vast range of specialized expertise, his oeuvre can be understood broadly as a reflection on the creativity of individuals and of society, on the opposition of traditional ontology to the fact of radically creative humanity, and, perhaps most importantly, on the dangerous political and ethical consequences of a contemporary world that has lost sight of autonomy, that is, a world that ignores the urgency to give limits or laws to itself.
Influenced by his understanding, and often criticism, of traditional philosophical figures such as the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger, Castoriadis was also influenced by thinkers as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Georg Cantor. Castoriadis had dynamic intellectual relationships with his fellow members of Socialisme ou Barbarie (including Claude Lefort and Jean-François Lyotard, among others) as well as with leading figures in mathematics, biology, and other fields.

Perhaps above all, Castoriadis will be remembered for his initial support and then break with Marxism, for his subsequent call for Western thought to embrace the reality of creation in a radical sense (and, in particular, to embrace the fact of human creativity at individual and societal levels), and, finally, for his defense of an ethics and politics based on autonomy, or giving the law to oneself, which is never the autonomy of an isolated being but always involves beings who relate to others and are aided by institutional supports. In the end, for Castoriadis, the central question of philosophy, and the source of philosophy’s importance, is its capacity to creatively break through society’s closure and ask what the relevant questions for humans can be or ought to be. . . .

http://www.iep.utm.edu/castoria/

Groarke, Louis F. "Aristotle: Logic." (INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY).

2011-10-10T16:40:00.001-04:00

Aristotelian logic, after a great and early triumph, consolidated its position of influence to rule over the philosophical world throughout the Middle Ages up until the 19^th Century. All that changed in a hurry when modern logicians embraced a new kind of mathematical logic and pushed out what they regarded as the antiquated and clunky method of syllogisms. Although Aristotle’s very rich and expansive account of logic differs in key ways from modern approaches, it is more than a historical curiosity. It provides an alternative way of approaching logic and continues to provide critical insights into contemporary issues and concerns. The main thrust of this article is to explain Aristotle’s logical system as a whole while correcting some prominent misconceptions that persist in the popular understanding and even in some of the specialized literature. Before getting down to business, it is important to point out that Aristotle is a synoptic thinker with an over-arching theory that ties together all aspects and fields of philosophy. He does not view logic as a separate, self-sufficient subject-matter, to be considered in isolation from other aspects of disciplined inquiry. Although we cannot consider all the details of his encyclopedic approach, we can sketch out the larger picture in a way that illuminates the general thrust of his system. For the purposes of this entry, let us define logic as that field of inquiry which investigates how we reason correctly (and, by extension, how we reason incorrectly). Aristotle does not believe that the purpose of logic is to prove that human beings can have knowledge. (He dismisses excessive scepticism.) The aim of logic is the elaboration of a coherent system that allows us to investigate, classify, and evaluate good and bad forms of reasoning. . . .

http://www.iep.utm.edu/aris-log/

Nicholls, Tracey. "Frantz Fanon." (INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY).

2011-10-10T16:26:00.005-04:00

Frantz Fanon was one of a few extraordinary thinkers supporting the decolonization struggles occurring after World War II, and he remains among the most widely read and influential of these voices. His brief life was notable both for his whole-hearted engagement in the independence struggle the Algerian people waged against France and for his astute, passionate analyses of the human impulse towards freedom in the colonial context. His written works have become central texts in Africana thought, in large part because of their attention to the roles hybridity and creolization can play in forming humanist, anti-colonial cultures. Hybridity, in particular, is seen as a counter-hegemonic opposition to colonial practices, a non-assimilationist way of building connections across cultures that Africana scholar Paget Henry argues is constitutive of Africana political philosophy.

Tracing the development of his writings helps explain how and why he has become an inspirational figure firing the moral imagination of people who continue to work for social justice for the marginalized and the oppressed. Fanon’s first work Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) was his first effort to articulate a radical anti-racist humanism that adhered neither to assimilation to a white-supremacist mainstream nor to reactionary philosophies of black superiority. While the attention to oppression of colonized peoples that was to dominate his later works was present in this first book, its call for a new understanding of humanity was undertaken from the subject-position of a relatively privileged Martinican citizen of France, in search of his own place in the world as a black man from the French Caribbean, living in France. His later works, notably L’An Cinq, de la Révolution Algérienne (A Dying Colonialism) and the much more well-known Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth), go beyond a preoccupation with Europe’s pretensions to being a universal standard of culture and civilization, in order to take on the struggles and take up the consciousness of the colonized “natives” as they rise up and reclaim simultaneously their lands and their human dignity. It is Fanon’s expansive conception of humanity and his decision to craft the moral core of decolonization theory as a commitment to the individual human dignity of each member of populations typically dismissed as “the masses” that stands as his enduring legacy. . . .

http://www.iep.utm.edu/fanon/

Burnham, Douglas, and George Papandreopoulos. "Existentialism." (INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY).

2011-10-10T16:20:00.001-04:00

Existentialism is a catch-all term for those philosophers who consider the nature of the human condition as a key philosophical problem and who share the view that this problem is best addressed through ontology. This very broad definition will be clarified by discussing seven key themes that existentialist thinkers address. Those philosophers considered existentialists are mostly from the continent of Europe, and date from the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Outside philosophy, the existentialist movement is probably the most well-known philosophical movement, and at least two of its members are among the most famous philosophical personalities and widely read philosophical authors. It has certainly had considerable influence outside philosophy, for example on psychological theory and on the arts. Within philosophy, though, it is safe to say that this loose movement considered as a whole has not had a great impact, although individuals or ideas counted within it remain important. Moreover, most of the philosophers conventionally grouped under this heading either never used, or actively disavowed, the term ‘existentialist’. Even Sartre himself once said: “Existentialism? I don’t know what that is.” So, there is a case to be made that the term – insofar as it leads us to ignore what is distinctive about philosophical positions and to conflate together significantly different ideas – does more harm than good.

In this article, however, it is assumed that something sensible can be said about existentialism as a loosely defined movement. The article has three sections. First, we outline a set of themes that define, albeit very broadly, existentialist concerns. This is done with reference to the historical context of existentialism, which will help us to understand why certain philosophical problems and methods were considered so important. Second, we discuss individually six philosophers who are arguably its central figures, stressing in these discussions the ways in which these philosophers approached existentialist themes in distinctive ways. These figures, and many of the others we mention, have full length articles of their own within the Encyclopedia. Finally, we look very briefly at the influence of existentialism, especially outside philosophy. . . .

http://www.iep.utm.edu/existent/

Robinson, Bob. "Michel Foucault: Ethics." (INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY).

2011-10-10T16:16:00.001-04:00

The French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926-1984) does not understand ethics as moral philosophy, the metaphysical and epistemological investigation of ethical concepts (metaethics) and the investigation of the criteria for evaluating actions (normative ethics), as Anglo-American philosophers do. Instead, he defines ethics as a relation of self to itself in terms of its moral agency. More specifically, ethics denotes the intentional work of an individual on itself in order to subject itself to a set of moral recommendations for conduct and, as a result of this self-forming activity or “subjectivation,” constitute its own moral being.

The classical works of Foucault’s ethics are his historical studies of ancient sexual ethics in The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, in addition to the late interviews “On the Genealogy of Ethics” and “The Ethics for the Concern of Self as a Practice of Freedom.” The publication of his final three lecture courses at the Collège de France in 1982-3 considerably enhance how those texts are to be understood and provide original resources. The Hermeneutics of the Subject provides greater insight into the ancient ethics of caring for self and how Foucault perceives it in relation to the history of philosophy. Both The Government of Self and Others and The Courage of Truth – his final courses, respectively – make it manifest that he considered the ancient ethical practice of parrhesia or frank-speech central to ancient ethics and, indeed, important to his own philosophical practice.

The significance of this so-called ‘ethical turn’ for Foucault’s philosophy is displayed in the controversial terms through which he ultimately expressed the purpose of his work. He lays claim to the spirit of the tradition of critical philosophy established by Immanuel Kant, and Foucault purports to exemplify this spirit by disclosing, or telling the truth about, the historical conditions of the contingent constraints that we impose on ourselves and, in doing so, opening possibilities for autonomous ethical relations. Foucault’s claim to the spirit of critical philosophy has received, and continues to receive, criticism and considerable discussion in the scholarly literature. Of central concern are the compatibility of his claim to critical philosophy as an ethical practice and his broader views about subjectivity, and whether his critical analysis of modern ethics is meant to be merely descriptive or also evaluative.

The primary focus of this article is the nature of ethics as Foucault conceives it, and it is unpacked by discussion of his published historical studies of ancient Greek and Roman ethics. The article then considers his treatment of the ancient ethical injunction of the care of the self and parrhesia, transitioning into a presentation of, and opinions about, his alleged ethical turn and the contentious role that ethics might play in his critical philosophy. . . .

http://www.iep.utm.edu/fouc-eth/

Philosopher's Zone: "The Mind of Jacques Lacan." September 24, 2011.

2011-10-10T16:09:00.000-04:00

Jacques Marie Emile Lacan, who died in 1981, was a French psychoanalyst and follower of Freud, but his influence has extended far beyond the boundaries of psychiatry: to philosophy, critical theory, literary theory, sociology, feminist theory, film theory and clinical psychoanalysis. And all this despite a literary style of forbidding complexity. This week, we take courage and try to penetrate his thought.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2011/3324385.htm

Philosopher's Zone: "A Very American Philosophy." September 17, 2011.

2011-10-10T16:04:00.002-04:00

Pragmatism was a philosophical doctrine devised by Americans and to a large extent for Americans. This week, we examine its origins, the stories of the men behind it, what it means and its enduring significance, not just for America but for the world.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2011/3316686.htm

Taylor, C. C. W., and Mi-Kyoung Lee. "The Sophists." (STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY).

2011-10-10T15:50:00.003-04:00

The Greek word sophistēs, formed from the noun sophia, ‘wisdom’ or ‘learning’,has the general sense ‘one who exercises wisdom or learning’. As sophia could designate specific types of expertise as well as general sagacity in the conduct of life and the higher kinds of insight associated with seers and poets, the word originally meant ‘sage’ or ‘expert’. In the course of the fifth century BCE the term, while retaining its original unspecific sense, came in addition to be applied specifically to a new type of intellectuals, professional educators who toured the Greek world offering instruction in a wide range of subjects, with particular emphasis on skill in public speaking and the successful conduct of life. The emergence of this new profession, which was an extension to new areas of the tradition of the itinerant rhapsode (reciter of poems, especially of Homer), was a response to various social, economic, political and cultural developments of the period. The increasing wealth and intellectual sophistication of Greek cities, especially Athens, created a demand for higher education beyond the traditional basic grounding in literacy, arithmetic, music and physical training. To some extent this involved the popularization of Ionian speculation about the physical world (see Presocratic Philosophy), which was extended into areas such as history, geography and the origins of civilization. The increase in participatory democracy, especially in Athens, led to a demand for success in political and forensic oratory, and hence to the development of specialized techniques of persuasion and argument. Finally, the period saw the flourishing of a challenging, rationalistic climate of thought on questions including those of morality, religion and political conduct, to which the sophists both responded and contributed. It is important to emphasize the individualistic character of the sophistic profession; its practitioners belonged to no organization, shared no common body of beliefs and founded no schools, either in the sense of academic institutions or in that of bodies of individuals committed to the promulgation of specific doctrines. In what follows we shall illustrate the diversity of sophistic activities, while considering the extent to which we can nevertheless identify common themes and attitudes. . . .

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sophists/

Mulhall, Stephen. Review of Michael Watts, THE PHILOSOPHY OF HEIDEGGER. NDPR (October, 2011).

2011-10-10T15:11:00.002-04:00

Watts, Michael. The Philosophy of Heidegger. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 2011.

This book enters what is by now a rather crowded field: that of providing an introduction to Heidegger's thought (as opposed to a detailed critical engagement with any specific element of it). It aims to survey at least the main themes of Heidegger's writings early and late, rather than focusing exclusively on a particular text or phase of thinking within that immense body of work; and because it also aspires to a certain immediacy and accessibility of style, it tends to avoid detailed engagement with either the established secondary literature or the broader philosophical debates that literature invokes. Both the strengths and weaknesses of the book follow more or less directly from these choices of focus and method.

The structure of the discussion is clear at a general level. After a very brief summary of the main events of Heidegger's life, the second chapter presents Heidegger's interest in the question of (the meaning of) Being as the thread that holds together his life's work; then chapters 2 to 7 present some of the central concepts and themes of Being and Time; chapters 7 to 11 examine a handful of dominant issues in the later writings (covering the period from the 1930s to the 1970s); and the book ends with the now obligatory chapter on Heidegger's politics.

Since there isn't a conclusion, and only a very brief introduction, the reader is given no explicit account of the specific aspects of Heidegger's thought that particularly interest the author, or of what distinguishes the perspective Watts brings to bear on the material from those of any other commentator on Heidegger (not even from those who have similarly attempted to provide an introduction to Heidegger's thought). One might wonder whether the individuality of the treatment rather comes through implicitly, in the choice of concepts or topics to focus upon: but it is hard to believe that anyone faced with the (admittedly unenviable) task of covering the basic elements of Heidegger's thinking would not feel obliged to attend to readiness-to-hand and authenticity, guilt and conscience, truth and meaning in Being and Time, and to art and poetry, technology and Asian thought with respect to the later essays and lectures. Judging by the preliminaries and (as it were) the contents page, then, it's not at all obvious what is meant to distinguish this introduction from its many competitors. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/26751-the-philosophy-of-heidegger/

"Storytelling Scholarship: Beyond Sensemaking and Social Constructivist Narrative," 21st Annual Conference of SC’MOI: Standing Conference on Management and Organizational Inquiry, Providence, Rhode Island, April 12-14, 2012.

2011-10-10T14:56:00.001-04:00

The 21st annual conference of SC’MOI (The Standing Conference on Management and Organizational Inquiry) is now accepting papers on organizational storytelling that include going beyond sensemaking and social constructivism to ontological approaches to storytelling with materiality. How to unite narrative and the antenarrative perspectives, with autoethnography, embodiment, critical pedagogy, organizational (post critical) ethnography, discourse analysis, environmental ‘green’ story, historicality, and cross-cultural places (Being-in-the-world)?

http://www.scmoi.org.

Tierney, John. "The Left-Leaning Tower." NEW YORK TIMES July 22, 2011.

2011-10-02T19:05:00.000-04:00

Why are conservatives such a minority at so many graduate schools? Conservatives like to blame liberal bias. Liberals like other explanations.
One — the most tactful hypothesis — is that conservatives just aren’t interested in academic careers. Another — the most smug hypothesis — is that conservatives are just too close-minded and dimwitted.

Now, fortunately, we have something beyond hypotheses, courtesy of scholars who have been taking a close look at their colleagues. Some even conducted a small sting operation that they believe is the first field experiment on political bias in academia. The perpetrators include Neil Gross, a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, whose previous work showed that Democrats outnumber Republicans by about 4 to 1 among professors, by at least 6 to 1 at elite universities, and by still higher ratios in departments of the humanities and social sciences. . . .

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/education/edl-24notebook-t.html?_r=3&ref=edlife&pagewanted=all

Epstein, Joseph. "What Killed American Lit." WALL STREET JOURNAL August 27, 2011.

2011-10-02T18:58:00.002-04:00

The Editors of The Cambridge History of the American Novel decided to consider their subject—as history is considered increasingly in universities these days—from the bottom up. In 71 chapters, the book's contributors consider the traditional novel in its many sub-forms, among them: science fiction, eco-fiction, crime and mystery novels, Jewish novels, Asian-American novels, African-American novels, war novels, postmodern novels, feminist novels, suburban novels, children's novels, non-fiction novels, graphic novels and novels of disability ("We cannot truly know a culture until we ask its disabled citizens to describe, analyze, and interpret it," write the authors of a chapter titled "Disability and the American Novel"). Other chapters are about subjects played out in novels—for instance, ethnic and immigrant themes—and still others about publishers, book clubs, discussion groups and a good deal else. "The Cambridge History of the Novel," in short, provides full-court-press coverage.

"In short," though, is perhaps the least apt phase for a tome that runs to 1,244 pages and requires a forklift to hoist onto one's lap. All that the book's editors left out is why it is important or even pleasurable to read novels and how it is that some novels turn out to be vastly better than others. But, then, this is a work of literary history, not of literary criticism. Randall Jarrell's working definition of the novel as "a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it" has, in this voluminous work, been ruled out of bounds.

Most readers are unlikely to have heard of the contributors to "The Cambridge History of the American Novel," the majority teachers in English departments in American universities. I myself, who taught in a such a department for three decades, recognized the names of only four among them. Only 40 or 50 years ago, English departments attracted men and women who wrote books of general intellectual interest and had names known outside the academy—Perry Miller, Aileen Ward, Walter Jackson Bate, Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Joseph Wood Krutch, Lionel Trilling, one could name a dozen or so others—but no longer. Literature, as taught in the current-day university, is strictly an intramural game.

This may come as news to the contributors to The Cambridge History of the American Novel, who pride themselves on possessing much wider, much more relevant, interests and a deeper engagement with the world than their predecessors among literary academics. Biographical notes on contributors speak of their concern with "forms of moral personhood in the US novels," "the poetics of foreign policy," and "ecocriticism and theories of modernization, postmodernization, and globalization."

Yet, through the magic of dull and faulty prose, the contributors to The Cambridge History of the American Novel have been able to make these presumably worldly subjects seem parochial in the extreme—of concern only to one another, which is certainly one derogatory definition of the academic. These scholars may teach English, but they do not always write it, at least not quite. A novelist, we are told, "tasks himself" with this or that; things tend to get "problematized"; the adjectives "global" and "post"-this-or-that receive a good workout; "alterity" and "intertexuality" pop up their homely heads; the "poetics of ineffability" come into play; and "agency" is used in ways one hadn't hitherto noticed, so that "readers in groups demonstrate agency." About the term "non-heteronormativity" let us not speak.

These dopey words and others like them are inserted into stiffly mechanical sentences of dubious meaning. "Attention to the performativity of straight sex characterizes . . . The Great Gatsby (1925), where Nick Carraway's homoerotic obsession with the theatrical Gatsby offers a more authentic passion precisely through flamboyant display." Betcha didn't know that Nick Carraway was hot for Jay Gatsby? We sleep tonight; contemporary literary scholarship stands guard.

The Cambridge History of the American Novel is perhaps best read as a sign of what has happened to English studies in recent decades. Along with American Studies programs, which are often their subsidiaries, English departments have tended to become intellectual nursing homes where old ideas go to die. If one is still looking for that living relic, the fully subscribed Marxist, one is today less likely to find him in an Economics or History Department than in an English Department, where he will still be taken seriously. He finds a home there because English departments are less concerned with the consideration of literature per se than with what novels, poems, plays and essays—after being properly X-rayed, frisked, padded down, like so many suspicious-looking air travelers—might yield on the subjects of race, class and gender. "How would [this volume] be organized," one of its contributors asks, "if race, gender, disability, and sexuality were not available?" . . . .

A stranger, freshly arrived from another planet, if offered as his introduction to the United States only this book, would come away with a picture of a country founded on violence and expropriation, stoked through its history by every kind of prejudice and class domination, and populated chiefly by one or another kind of victim, with time out only for the mental sloth and apathy brought on by life lived in the suburbs and the characterless glut of American late capitalism. The automatic leftism behind this picture is also part of the reigning ethos of the current-day English Department.

As a former English major—"Indeed! What regiment?" asks a character in a Lionel Trilling story—I cannot help wondering what it must be like to be taught by the vast majority of the people who have contributed to "The Cambridge History of the American Novel." Two or three times a week one would sit in a room and be told that nothing that one has read is as it appears but is instead informed by authors hiding their true motives even from themselves or, in the best "context-centered" manner, that the books under study are the product of a country built on fundamental dishonesty about the sacred subjects of race, gender and class.

Some indication of what it must be like is indicated by the steep decline of American undergraduates who choose to concentrate in English. English majors once comprised 7.6% of undergraduates, but today the number has been nearly halved, down to 3.9%. . . .

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903999904576468011530847064.html

Herring, Scott. "Literature Brings the Physical Past to Life." CHRONICLE August 20, 2011.

2011-10-02T18:48:00.000-04:00

Recently, literary theorists have been making another of their occasional efforts to restore a trace of earthly reality to criticism. This time those efforts have taken the form of Darwinian literary studies, which attempt to relate the universal impulse to tell stories to human nature, as shaped by evolution.

My guess is that those theorists are motivated partly by a desperate realization that, in the process of deconstructing the profession, we in the literature business have shot ourselves not in the foot, but in the head. At a time of contracting education budgets, the public is no longer willing to pay for courses titled "Bat[woman] and Cat[man]: Queering the Canonical Comix."

If nothing else, people may appreciate the application of scientific thinking to a field that has known little of it. Americans admire practicality, and our profession has become esoteric and politicized. Today's literary scholarship too often serves as a vehicle for politics, and even professors who care little for public opinion are eager to indoctrinate students in their views. We seem to have given up on the notion that literature itself can be useful. But in doing so, we are forgetting a crucial function of the books we study.

History gives us the facts, sort of, but from literary works we can learn what the past smelled like, sounded like, and felt like, the forgotten gritty details of a lost era. Literature brings us as close as we can come to reinhabiting the past. By reclaiming this use of literature in the classroom, perhaps we can move away from the political agitation that has been our bread and butter—or porridge and hardtack—for the last 30 years.

Besides literary Darwinism, I suggest another way that scholars can ground their studies in reality: Start with a piece of the physical world. . . .

http://chronicle.com/article/Literature-Brings-the-Physical/128706/

Withy, Katherine. Review of Martin Heidegger, INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY. NDPR (September 2011).

2011-10-02T18:41:00.003-04:00

Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Philosophy -- Thinking and Poetizing. Trans. Phillip Jacques Braunstein. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2011.

In the winter semester of 1944, Martin Heidegger began what would be his final lecture course at the University of Freiburg -- indeed, his last official lectures as a professor. Translated here, Einleitung in die Philosophie -- Denken und Dichten (Introduction to Philosophy -- Thinking and Poetizing) asks after the inner relationship of philosophy and poetry, thinking and poetizing. Pursuing this question does not 'introduce' (einleiten) us to philosophy; by our essence, we are already 'in' philosophy. But we are not at home in our philosophizing essence, and so we need a guide (Anleitung) in this "unknown region" (p. 3). Our guides in this course are Nietzsche, the poetizing thinker of homelessness, and Hölderlin, the thoughtful poet of homecoming. An encounter with Nietzsche's poetizing thinking and with Hölderlin's thinking poetizing will guide us towards a dwelling in our essence. Heidegger had spent much of the previous decade in confrontation with both Nietzsche and Hölderlin; here, he finally promises to think them together. Unfortunately, this promise is not fulfilled. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/26609-introduction-to-philosophy-thinking-and-poetizing/

Thompson, Iain. Review of Martin Heidegger, COUNTRY PATH CONVERSATIONS. NDPR (September 2011).

2011-10-02T18:37:00.003-04:00

Heidegger, Martin. Country Path Conversations. Trans. Bret W. Davis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010.

Heidegger wrote these rich, fascinating, and deeply hopeful philosophical dialogues in the middle of what was probably the darkest period in his life. The time between November 1944 and February 1946 centered around Germany's defeat in the Second World War. It began with the 55 year-old Heidegger's conscription into the Volkssturm or German Territorial Army (along with all the other remaining German men between the ages of 16 and 60), where he spent several exhausting weeks digging trenches in the Alsace region between Germany and France (as the Nazis desperately sought to defend their borders from advancing Allied troops). It ended with Heidegger's dismissal from Freiburg University by the French de-Nazification committee and his subsequent psychiatric hospitalization for depression. In the interval, Heidegger supervised the hiding of his voluminous philosophical manuscripts in a cave (after the bank where they had been stored in a vault was reduced to rubble by an Allied air raid on Messkirch); his two sons both went missing in action in Russia (and became captives in Russian prisoner of war camps); his two year-old love affair with Princess Margot of Saxony-Meiningen came to threaten his marriage (when his wife Elfride demanded he choose between them; Heidegger chose Elfride but the Prince and Princess were divorced in 1947); and he lost drawn-out trials with the local and French de-Nazification committees. All these stressful events, especially the last two, precipitated the depressive crisis for which he was hospitalized.

And yet there was also a brief period of calm in the eye of this storm. As soon as Heidegger was discharged from the Volkssturm in December (for the recurrent "heart problems" that now look like psychosomatic symptoms of severe anxiety), he fled on his son's bicycle from the city of Freiburg (where he lived and taught) to his hometown of Messkirch (some 75 miles away!) so as to stay out of the grasp of the French Army. Heidegger spent the next few months writing in Messkirch and teaching at the nearby Wildenstein Castle (an idyllic site high in the hills above Beuron, with a panoramic view of the Danube river valley below), where has was soon joined by what remained of Freiburg University's philosophy department. The philosophy faculty taught joint seminars to about 30 women students and also helped the local farmers bring in their hay harvest in order to earn their own keep (food and other necessities being extremely scarce).

Heidegger felt truly in his element here, and even planned to have one of the towers of Wildenstein Castle restored with hopes of working there in close proximity to the Princess. (He paid a year's rent on the tower but the shortage of laborers and materials made the project impossible to complete at the time. Still, the romantic, Hölderlinian idea of living and working in a tower looms large in the second of these dialogues, "The Teacher Meets the Tower Warden [or, better, the Tower Dweller] at the Door of the Tower Stairway."^[1]) While lecturing primarily on Heraclitus and Hölderlin, on such timely topics as the spiritual riches that material poverty can help disclose, Heidegger also discovered Daoism (recognizing profound affinities with his own views, on the basis of which he hoped one day to conduct a dialogue with the East).^[2] It was during this temporary reprieve -- a brief stay (or Aufenthalte) in the midst of intense historical, political, and psychological turmoil -- that Heidegger wrote his first philosophical dialogues, the Country Path Conversations. In them, the thinker seeks to make sense of some of the troubling events through which he was living by placing them in the broader context of the "history of being," that is, his growing understanding of the way metaphysics focuses and transforms Western humanity's basic sense of what it means to be. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/26610-country-path-conversations/

Inaugural Meeting, Kristeva Circle, Siena College, October 12-13, 2012.

2011-09-19T13:46:00.000-04:00

The Kristeva Circle supports research on or influenced by philosopher, psychoanalyst and novelist Julia Kristeva. Our mission is to establish and advance Kristeva scholarship nationally and internationally. The Circle was established in 2011 by Fanny Söderbäck (Siena College) and Sarah Hansen (Rhodes College) with support from Kelly Oliver (Vanderbilt University).

For more information about The Kristeva Circle, please visit our website: www.kristevacircle.org.

Kelly, Michael R. Review of Keith Ansell-Pearson, et al., eds. THE NEW CENTURY. NDPR (September 2011).

2011-09-19T13:26:00.000-04:00

Schrift, Alan D., and Keith Ansell-Pearson, eds. The New Century: Bergsonism, Phenomenology, and Responses to Modern Science. Vol. 3 of The History of Continental Philosophy. 8 Vols. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010.

The New Century is the third of an eight volume set on the history of continental philosophy. It is aptly titled, capturing the innovative spirit of the early twentieth century, even in philosophy, with a nod toward one of its forgotten idols -- Henri Bergson -- and his emphasis on genesis, novelty, and creativity. For both those new to and those steeped in continental philosophy, it provides useful overviews of most of the most significant thinkers, issues, and movements of the continental tradition from (roughly) the 1890s to the 1930s (ix). Its selection of essays on central and marginal figures, movements, and themes of significance for early continental philosophy is complemented by a generous and helpful (twenty page) timeline of philosophical, cultural, and political events from the seventeenth century to the present (381-400). The contributions, generally of very high quality, are written, by and large, by leading scholars. For any given topic, the extensive (but not tedious) bibliographic information and footnotes should facilitate further research. It is a largely accessible, reliable, and thus recommendable collection that often combines the range of an encyclopedia and the substance of an article.

Like the series as a whole, the volume presents the methods of continental thought and its representative thinkers and issues in the context of "figures and developments outside philosophy (in the sciences, social sciences, mathematics, art, politics and culture)" as well as "philosophers not usually associated with continental philosophy" (viii) rather than "a chronologically organized series of 'great thinker' essays". The editors frame the volume according to the spirit of the times understood as a set of varied responses to nineteenth-century positivism and scientism more specifically (5). As Keith Ansell-Pearson notes in his detailed introduction, 'continental' thinkers at the turn of the 'new century' – thinkers as diverse as its inaugurators, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Husserl -- pursued a unified 'vocation' of regaining philosophy's independence and reasserting culture's future "faith in the human as the being in search of truth and rational modes of being" (4). These thinkers respected the regional inquiries of the sciences while developing the conviction "that the 'true being' is not a possession the human has, like the self-evidence of the 'I am', but . . . echoing Nietzsche, a task" (3). For these thinkers, who one could call the 'founders' of continental philosophy, the task was one of creating anew (in Bergson's case) or renewing (in Husserl's case) philosophy's "own sources of knowledge" rather than "imitating developments in the method of science" (6). . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25986-the-new-century-bergsonism-phenomenology-and-responses-to-modern-science/

Ebels-Duggan, Kyla. Review of Hubert Dreyfus, et al. ALL THINGS SHINING. NDPR (August 2011).

2011-09-19T13:18:00.002-04:00

Dreyfus, Hubert, and Sean Dorrance Kelly. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. New York: Free Press, 2011.

Those not initiated into the practice of academic philosophy tend to assume that daunting questions about the meaning of life are its main occupation. But any academic philosopher knows how far this is from the truth. Speaking to questions simultaneously so momentous and so ill-defined hazards both offensive pretension and embarrassing silliness. So it is easy to see why, over the last century, an increasingly professionalized discipline agreed to treat them as inappropriate for grown-up philosophers, notwithstanding the interest they held for grown-ups such as Plato and Kant. But in a salutary trend, some mature minds have recently returned to this topic. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly are to be commended for their presence among them.

Having determined to face the risks, Dreyfus and Kelly take no half measures. They open All Things Shining with a promise of no less than deliverance from the boredom, nihilism and despair that they think characteristic of our "secular age:"

anyone who is done with indecision and waiting, with expressionlessness and lostness and sadness and angst, and who is ready for whatever it is that comes next; anyone with hope instead of despair, or anyone with despair that they would like to leave behind, can find something worthwhile in the pages ahead. (xi)

To accomplish this deliverance they take readers on a whirlwind tour through the history of Western thought. The tour, though necessarily selective, serves two purposes. First, it provides an account of the causes and character of the contemporary malaise. In short, the problem is the need for a middle path between two tempting, though in the authors' view bankrupt, positions. The first is the "temptation to monotheism," which they trace to the rise of Christianity. But this is not a book for monotheists and does not purport to address them. Rather, its audience is those living in the wake of monotheism, people who cannot regard believing in God as a serious option but still have sensibilities shaped by a recently monotheistic culture. Monotheism promised "ultimate or final" meaning (179), "an ultimate truth behind everything that is" (181). The authors never make entirely clear what they mean by a "final" or "ultimate" account. But, as their extended discussion of Melville's Moby Dick makes clear, they think that the possibility of such a thing disappears with monotheistic faith. Still saddled with unsatisfiable longing for ultimate meaning, post-monotheist secularists fall prey to the second temptation, trying to create this meaning for themselves. This turns out to be merely a detour to the same ennui and despair it aimed to avoid.

Though they claim to provide glimpses of a "hidden history of the West" (89), some elements of the authors' historical story are familiar: Judeo-Christian monotheism crowds out earlier possibilities, Luther -- quite unintentionally -- plants the seeds of autonomous meaning-creation with his individualist opposition to the Catholic church, Descartes expands individualism into epistemology, Kant carries this further than anyone had intended with his Copernican revolution, and this leads on to Nietzsche's subjectivism. David Foster Wallace is cast as spokesperson for the contemporary inheritors of the nihilism that the authors think results. On their view, Wallace displays particular insight into the problem of contemporary life: our loss of the sense that anything could be more worth doing than anything else. Their Wallace tries to apply a Nietzschean solution, inserting significance into the world through individual acts of will. But the attempt fails and despair ensues. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25938-all-things-shining-reading-the-western-classics-to-find-meaning-in-a-secular-age/

Westerman, Richard. Review of David Ingram, ed. CRITICAL THEORY TO STRUCTURALISM. NDPR (August 2011).

2011-09-19T12:52:00.000-04:00

Ingram, David, ed. Vol. 5 Critical Theory to Structuralism: Philosophy, Politics, and the Human Sciences. Vol. 5 of The History of Continental Philosophy. 8 Vols. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010.

According to Hegel, "the history of Philosophy is not a blind collection of fanciful ideas, nor a fortuitous progression," but rather a "necessary development of the successive philosophies from one another, so that the one of necessity presupposes another preceding it." In the end, a history of philosophy narrates the unfolding of "one Philosophy, the contemporary differences of which constitute the necessary aspects of the one principle." Hegel's strictures are perhaps particularly relevant for any history of continental philosophy: though it may be arguable whether the term refers to any coherent school, one thing that unites many of those identified as continental philosophers is that they develop their own ideas in direct engagement with the historical tradition.

Chicago's handsome new eight-volume History of Continental Philosophy is therefore a very welcome addition to the literature: their comprehensive catalogue of the "tradition that has its roots in several different ways of approaching and responding to Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy" will help both the novice and the specialist trace a path through the often-convoluted genealogies of contemporary continental philosophy. Whilst the publishers' website refers to the project as "the most comprehensive reference work to date," the Series Preface suggests an intention to follow Hegel's guidance. There, the series is described as "a coherent and comprehensive account of the continental philosophical tradition." The editors acknowledge that "telling the history of continental philosophy cannot simply take the form of a chronologically organized series of 'great thinker' essays" (pp. vii-viii).

David Ingram takes on the job of editing Volume Five of the collection -- a difficult task, since most of the writers covered in this volume did not treat philosophical problems in isolation, but instead both used philosophical ideas to interpret social and political problems and also tried to answer philosophical questions with reference to the social sciences. As he explains in a comprehensive, clear introduction, "the figures, schools of thought, and themes represented in this volume can best be understood as responses to this chronic crisis of modernity and, more specifically, the liberal state." (p. 1) Ingram rightly highlights the way this practical crisis led to a deeper philosophical scepticism about the value of reason. Hanging over this volume, then, is the fundamental question of disciplinary boundary: how far can normative philosophical arguments be applied to concrete social or political problems, and what is left to philosophy when other disciplines begin to answer some of its central questions? . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25759-critical-theory-to-structuralism-philosophy-politics-and-the-human-sciences/

Beiser, Frederick. Review of Daniel Conway, et al., eds. NINETEENTH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY. NDPR (August 2011).

2011-09-19T12:32:00.000-04:00

Schrift, Alan D., and Daniel Conway, eds. Nineteenth Century Philosophy: Revolutionary Responses to the Existing Order. Vol. 2 of The History of Continental Philosophy. 8 Vols. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011.

Volume 2 of the new eight-volume series The History of Continental Philosophy, which is edited by Alan Schrift and Daniel Conway, is devoted to nineteenth-century philosophy between 1840 and 1900. This volume, like others in the series, is aimed at both specialists and beginners who need an overview and introduction to a specific topic. There can be no question that the volume succeeds, at least to some extent, at its prescribed task. Most of the essays in this volume, especially those by Terrell Carver, F.C.T. Moore, Alastair Hannay and Alan Sica, provide useful introductions to particular thinkers and developments in nineteenth-century philosophy.

Yet it must also be said that the success of this volume is very limited. It provides introductions and surveys only for someone who works within the standard curriculum of nineteenth-century philosophy, i.e., for what is now taught in Anglophone universities and what is now discussed in academic journals. But it does not even begin to supply an accurate or adequate knowledge of philosophy in the nineteenth century. The problem here has nothing to do with the editors themselves, still less with the authors who have written for them, but it has everything to do with the standard curriculum, which adopts assumptions about what is of historical and philosophical significance about the period (1840-1900) that cannot survive serious scrutiny. If our curricula are to be true to history -- if they are to preserve what is actually of greatest historical and philosophical significance in this period -- they stand in need of drastic revision.

All would have been well if Conway and Schrift had self-consciously intended to follow the standard curriculum and if they were quite clear about this in the beginning. They would be above criticism if they made no pretense to provide knowledge of nineteenth-century philosophy itself. Unfortunately, this is not the case. In his introduction to this volume Conway writes that it "charts the most influential trends and developments of European philosophy in the tumultuous period 1840 to 1900" (p. 1). It is just this claim that is problematic. If we take a broad historical perspective of this period, and if we focus especially on German philosophy, which was decisive for the century as a whole, then "the most influential trends and developments" were the following: the materialism controversy, the rise of historicism, and the emergence of neo-Kantianism, especially the formation of the Southwestern and Marburg schools. None of these developments are even mentioned in this volume. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25677-nineteenth-century-philosophy-revolutionary-responses-to-the-existing-order/

Calcagno, Antonio. Review of Alan D. Schrift, ed. POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND CRITICAL THEORY'S SECOND GENERATION. NDPR (August 2011).

2011-09-19T12:19:00.003-04:00

Schrift, Alan D., ed. Poststructuralism and Critical Theory's Second Generation. Vol. 6 of The History of Continental Philosophy. 8 Vols. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010.

Alan's Schrift's work, as scholar, philosopher and editor, is known for both its acuity and rigour. This volume of his The History of Continental Philosophy is yet another testament to Schrift's ability to gather leading scholars around an important theme, ultimately producing an excellent history of and guide to more recent developments in Continental philosophy. Volume 6: Poststructuralism and Critical Theory's Second Generation consists of 17 entries that commence with the reception of Nietzsche's thought into recent French philosophy and end with a discussion of Rorty among the Continentals, covering a period of Continental philosophy from about 1945 to 2007. The volume is also supplemented with a useful bibliography of major works relevant to the period as well as a chronology that simultaneously lists major philosophical, cultural and political events. This certainly helps situate thinkers, ideas and movements within the context of events in general but also within the broader developments in philosophy, including the Anglo-American and analytic traditions.

The volume opens with a preface by Schrift in which he explains the evolution of Continental philosophy. He notes,

"Continental Philosophy" itself is a contested concept. For some, it is understood to be any philosopher after 1780 originating on the European continent . . . . Such an understanding would make Georg von Wright or Rudolf Carnap . . . a "continental philosopher," an interpretation neither they nor their followers would easily accept. For others, "continental philosophy" refers to a style of philosophizing, one more attentive to the world of experience and less focused on a rigorous analysis of concepts or linguistic usage. (vii)

Rather than focus on a discussion of what constitutes Continental philosophy proper, Schrift maintains that one way to approach the question is to focus on the history of Continental philosophy, thereby avoiding nettling, polemical discussions between analytic and Continental philosophers. What we have, then, is the presentation of the content of a tradition broadly defined. This broad approach is both comprehensive and yields much food for thought about the particular philosophers discussed as well as the tradition as a whole, its past, present and future.

Schrift is not only the General Editor for the History but he also serves as the Editor of the poststructuralism volume. In total, there are eight volumes that constitute the whole History. In his Introduction to the present volume, Schrift sets the stage for poststructuralism, "French" Feminism and second-generation critical thinkers. Though he is mindful that poststructuralism has roots that go deeper than the turbulent years of the 1960s on the Continent, he begins with the theme of conflict and change that mark those years. Key in the development of poststructuralism in France was not only the death of philosophy as the master-discourse, mostly through the structuralists' engagements with the social sciences, but also the death of existentialism, which privileged subjectivity and consciousness. (5) Schrift identifies Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida as laying the groundwork for what would become dominant in the remainder of the twentieth century as Continental philosophy. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25628-poststructuralism-and-critical-theory-s-second-generation/

"Kuhn and Rationality," Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Ghent University, September 23, 2011.

2011-09-19T11:51:00.000-04:00

Kuhn's description of the aggregate dynamics of scientific change rests on a vague and fragmented account of how scientists choose between theories. Criteria of theory choice are not an algorithmic set of rules waiting to be discovered but rather "rules of thumb": vague and conflicting. Theory choice
can therefore never be settled by logic and experiment alone, but relies on "persuasion" and "conversion". And once converted, scientists "dogmatically" stick to their paradigm even when good reasons arise for its rejection. The lack (impossibility?) of rationality on Kuhn's approach is one of the main reasons why Kuhn's philosophy of science failed to gain widespread acceptance despite its intuitive appeal and popularity among practicing cientists. 50 years after the publication of the Structure of Scientific Revolutions the following questions still arise:

- Is an account of Kuhnian rationality impossible or did Kuhn just fail to articulate one?
- In what sense can Kuhnian scientists be said to be rational?
- Can new perspectives (network theory, bounded confidence,...) on rationality clarify Kuhn's claims to rationality?

More information: rogierdelanghe@gmail.com

Adams, David. Review of Hans Blumenberg, PARADIGMS FOR A METAPHOROLOGY and CARE CROSSES THE RIVER. NDPR (August 2011).

2011-09-19T08:35:00.000-04:00

Blumenberg, Hans. Paradigms for a Metaphorology. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010;
Blumenberg, Hans. Care Crosses the River. Trans. Paul Fleming. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010.

The publication in 2010 of two new English translations of books by Hans Blumenberg is cause for celebration. Their nearly simultaneous appearance may be a coincidence -- Paradigms for a Metaphorology was translated by Robert Savage for Cornell and Care Crosses the River was translated by Paul Fleming for Stanford -- but the coincidence could not be more fortunate as the two works complement each other superbly. These relatively brief, stylistically divergent works from opposite ends of Blumenberg's career (1960 and 1986) provide English-language readers with long-overdue access to Blumenberg's reflections on the role of metaphor in philosophical discourse.

Blumenberg is one of Germany's most important postwar philosophers, but his presence in the English language has so far been limited. Born in Lübeck in 1920, his studies were interrupted by the war, during which he was persecuted as a Halbjude ("half Jew") and sheltered by the family of his future wife. Following the war he promptly completed his doctoral and postdoctoral dissertations (1947 and 1950), then taught successively at universities in Hamburg, Giessen, and Bochum, landing finally in Münster from 1970 to 1986. Beginning in 1966 he published a series of weighty volumes, three of which were translated into English by Bob Wallace and published by MIT Press in the 1980s: The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Work on Myth, and The Genesis of the Copernican Age. Since his death in 1996, a steady stream of posthumous publications has accompanied the intensified interest in his work in Germany; interest from the Anglophone world is increasing as well, evidenced in part by these two new translations.

Independently of the linguistic turn in France, Blumenberg began highlighting the role of metaphor in philosophical discourse in the 1950s. More than a decade before the appearance of Jacques Derrida's "La mythologie blanche", for example, Blumenberg published "Light as a Metaphor for Truth" (1957),which includes his earliest reference to nonconceptuality (Unbegrifflichkeit), his paradoxical concept for perceptions and experiences that do not lend themselves to representation in precise, univocal concepts and thus invite expression in metaphor, myth, and symbol. Paradigms for a Metaphorology, coming three years later, argues for a broadening of the field of Begriffsgeschichte (the history of concepts) to include the history of metaphors. Metaphors are not merely ornamentation, Blumenberg argues, but are

foundational elements [Grundbestände] of philosophical language, 'translations' that resist being converted back into authenticity and logicality. If it could be shown that such translations, which would have to be called 'absolute metaphors', exist, then one of the essential tasks of conceptual history (in the thus expanded sense) would be to ascertain and analyze their conceptually irredeemable expressive function. (Paradigms, 3)

The first half of Paradigms for a Metaphorology demonstrates this expressive function in several metaphors, such as the powerful truth, the naked truth, terra incognita, the incomplete universe, and the book of nature. The second half begins to demarcate the realm of metaphor with paradigms for a "typology of metaphor histories." The paradigms focus on "transitional phenomena" that illustrate the historical transformations between, and distinct functions of, absolute metaphor, myth, symbol, and concept. This tentative typology involves the discussion of additional metaphors that would become the focus of later, longer works by Blumenberg, including Plato's allegory of the cave and Copernicus's cosmology. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25580-paradigms-for-a-metaphorology-and-care-crosses-the-river/

"Psychology, Emotion, and the Human Sciences," University of Windsor, April 20-21, 2012.

2011-09-19T08:20:00.002-04:00

In Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions [Cambridge, 1999], Jon Elster argues that "with an important subset of the emotions [for example, regret, relief, envy, malice, pity, indignation, ...] we can learn more from moralists, novelists, and playwrights than from the cumulative findings of scientific psychology." Elster then explores the work of both ancient and early modern moral philosophers in order to substantiate his argument.

This symposium will explore Elster's assertions: what can contemporary 'scientific psychology,' barely 150 years old, teach us about the emotions that early modern literary and philosophical inquiry cannot? Does psychology [of various sorts] deserve its status as the discipline of feeling? What can contemporary philosophical work teach us about feeling and emotion? Are there viable ways of bringing historical and contemporary emotional inquiry into contact? What insight can various forms of inquiry bring to the increasingly prominent issue of affective education [the education of emotions, dispositions, and values]? What is the status of emotional inquiry across disciplines?

Possible topics might include, but are not limited to, the following:
- rhetoric and the emotions
- emotion and informal logic
- argument and emotion
- affective education
- emotion in the classroom
- the history of psychology
- neuroscience and emotion
- the passions in history:
- psychoanalysis and emotion
- the sociology of emotion

The organisers are hopeful that participants are aware of, and incorporate, the history of emotion in their respective disciplines or areas of inquiry. Selected papers will be considered for a collection of essays, and all applicants will be informed by 15 November 2011 about their participation in the symposium.

Contact Stephen Pender, spender@uwindsor.ca

"Derrida and the Theologico-Political: from Sovereignty to the Death Penalty," Spindel 2011, Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis, September 29-October 1, 2011.

2011-09-19T08:12:00.000-04:00

Drawing on Derrida’s later seminars on “sovereignty” (published in 2008 and 2010) and “the pardon” (with a particular emphasis on the yet-to-be-published “death penalty” seminars), the speakers of the 30th Annual Spindel Conference will address Derrida's analyses of “the theologico-political” in works of philosophy, political theory, religion, and literature. By theologico-political, Derrida referred to the unacknowledged theological roots of political concepts, modern political institutions, and practices. Putting into question the supposed secularism of the modern nation-state, Derrida’s later writings undertake an extensive study of the relation between sovereignty, the death penalty, and the “theologico-political.” Devoted to detailed and painstaking examinations of major texts of philosophy and literature by Plato, Rousseau, Kant, Schmitt, Heidegger, La Fontaine, Hugo, Camus, and Genet, among others, the seminars enrich the elaboration of the theologico-political in already published works. Featuring some of Derrida’s foremost interpreters and translators, the conference aims to further this exploration.

Derrida's Seminars

From the beginning of his teaching career at the Sorbonne in 1960 to his last seminars at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 2003, Jacques Derrida completely wrote out all his lectures and seminars. Presented over twelve to fifteen weeks a year, these seminars, in addition to the scores of books that he published during his lifetime, amount to some 14,000 printed pages in 43 volumes. They thus constitute an invaluable addition to the already existing corpus. A decision was made by Derrida’s heirs to edit and publish these seminars. These heretofore unpublished seminars will appear in reverse chronological order, published by Editions Galilée in France and the University of Chicago Press in the English-speaking world. Information about the seminars can be found at http://derridaseminars.org.

Roundtable

A special roundtable discussion will be held following the individual paper presentations. Presenters Kamuf, Bennington, Naas, Oliver, Dutoit, and Rottenberg will participate in the roundtable.

http://www.memphis.edu/philosophy/spindel_2011.php

"Thinking Feeling: Critical Theory, Culture, Feeling," University of Sussex, May 18-19, 2012.

2011-09-19T08:01:00.000-04:00

‘Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic’ (Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia)

As the recent UK riots indicate, there is no escaping the fact that economics provokes, amongst other things, strong feelings. Whether we like it or not, a neoliberal language of economics now pervades and colours our inner ‘private’ emotional lives; the government’s emerging plans to compile
a ‘happiness index’ is a clear example of how a rhetoric of ‘feeling’ can be co-opted by capital. More than ever, then, it is important we do not simply accept ‘feeling’ as a spontaneous or natural phenomenon, but instead subject it to genuinely critical scrutiny. Are some feelings static, essential and ahistorical, or can we trace their genealogies? Are feelings entirely subjective and individual, or are they actually objective and social? If they are social, whose feelings are they?

By placing contemporary cultural and literary theory (especially as it deals with ‘affect’) alongside the tradition of Critical Theory, this conference asks what might be at stake politically, aesthetically and even experientially in the recent turn towards a discourse of feeling. With its roots in Hegel, Marx and Freud, Critical Theory has always been concerned with the role of feeling, in all its senses. Meanwhile, literary theorists and practitioners as diverse as Georges Bataille, Raymond Williams and Eve Sedgwick have also focused on relations between culture, society and felt experience.

The conference will therefore set out to utilise these approaches for a critique of modern and contemporary culture. Contributors are encouraged to engage notions of feeling as they relate to particular cultural practices, objects or texts, and are also invited to use recent work on the emotions to rethink aspects of the Marxist theoretical tradition. We welcome proposals from all relevant fields, including philosophy, literary studies, visual culture, music theory, art history, sociology, political economy, psychology, etc.

Possible topics may include but are not limited to the following:

The intersection of emotion and economics in contemporary life, literature, film or art; the genealogy of feeling; feeling and revolutionary potential; the political economy of feeling; rhetoric and feeling; the commodification of emotion; culture and ‘modern’ moods (guilt, cynicism, ecstasy, indifference, anxiety, melancholia, depression, shame, boredom, paranoia, rage, paralysis, joy, (un)happiness, etc.)

Abstracts of 200-250 words should be sent to Dr Doug Haynes, University of Sussex: d.e.haynes@sussex.ac.uk (please mark the subject heading as ‘Thinking Feeling’)

Seeskin, Kenneth. Review of Michael Fagenblat, A CONVENANT OF CREATURES. NDPR (August 2011).

2011-09-12T13:37:00.001-04:00

In the Preface to this rich and thought-provoking study, Fagenblat raises a good question: "Another book on Emmanuel Levinas?" But it does not take long for the reader to see that this volume is definitely needed. According to Fagenblat, Levinas's fundamental project was to develop a post-Heideggarian account of ethics, which means an account that retains the binding nature of our most basic ethical intuitions. In Fagenblat's words:

Levinas sought to restore a new sense of an unconditional ethical imperative that could not be dismissed as merely abstract, formal, ahistorical, inauthentic, and ontologically inadequate. He did this by developing a phenomenology of the moral imperative that was derived not from the fact of Reason but from the face of the Other. (p. xix)

Against Heidegger and much of twentieth-century philosophy, Levinas was firmly convinced, as Fagenblat puts it (p. 14), that ethical judgment is exercised over history and not simply within history.

The problem is that for Levinas, the face of the Other is completely transcendent and thus cannot be captured by description, explanation, or narration. As Fagenblat rightly observes (p. xx), it can only be respected or desired, loved or hated. That is why Levinas thinks ethics is first philosophy: it is the source of all meaning and intelligibility and cannot be derived from anything more basic. I will postpone the question of what type of ethics this approach produces until later. For the present, the important point is that, according to Fagenblat, Levinas reaches this conclusion not by conducting an exercise in pure phenomenology but by drawing on sources from Jewish tradition. What results is in fact "a coherent philosophy of Judaism" (p. xxii).

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25724-a-covenant-of-creatures-levinas-s-philosophy-of-judaism/

Cfp: Kogler, Hans-Herbert, et al., eds. "Contemporary Advances in Hermeneutics." COSMOS AND HISTORY forthcoming.

2011-09-12T13:32:00.000-04:00

Submissions are invited for a special issue on contemporary advances in hermeneutics. While contributions on the hermeneutics of nature are of particular interest, papers on advances in any area of hermeneutics are welcome. Although the emphasis is on contemporary advances, this could
include the rethinking of established theorists and positions. Papers exploring the relationship between hermeneutics and other philosophical approaches or traditions of thought will also be considered.

Submission deadline: 30 November 2011;
For author guidelines and submission instructions, visit http://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal.

Pub: "Language and Education." HERMENEIA (2011).

2011-09-12T11:38:00.000-04:00

Download the essays here: http://hermeneia.ro/.

Elridge, Richard. Review of Raymond Barfield, THE ANCIENT QUARREL BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND POETRY. NDPR (September 2011).

2011-09-12T11:33:00.000-04:00

Barfield, Raymond. The Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry. Cambridge: CUP, 2011.

Barfield undertakes to survey, compare, and assess i) various conceptions of what he regards as poetry's founding influence on philosophy, centered in poetry's expressions of wonder and of experiences of the divine, and ii) philosophy's various self-definitions against that influence, via resistance, counterargumentation, and appropriation. The project is carried out in 12 chapters, each on one or two major figures from the history of philosophy: Socrates-Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus-Augustine, Boethius, Dionysius, Thomas, Vico, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Dilthey, Nietzsche-Heidegger, and Bakhtin. In each chapter, the focus is on how the various philosophers discussed specifically comment on, resist, accept but refigure, or argue about poetry's putative insights.

One way to get a feel for the project is to note what it is not. It is not philology. The individual chapters make little use of the massive secondary literatures on the philosophers discussed, and they are not intended to advance our understanding of details of individual arguments and positions by unpacking ambiguities, comparing and reconciling difficult passages, tracing detailed lineages of arguments, motifs, and images, and so forth. It is not philosophy of literature. There is no mention of or engagement with the works of philosophers such as Stanley Cavell, Martha Nussbaum, Cora Diamond, Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Frank Farrell, or myself, no Derrida or Gadamer or Adorno or Benjamin from the European tradition, and no Abrams, Bloom, de Man, Hartman, or Hillis Miller among critics. In various ways these philosophers and critics, and others, have thought about literature in relation to epistemology and moral philosophy, focusing on how literary works might be forms of knowing or might contribute to moral understanding. It is not philosophical reading of literature. Only one paragraph from one literary work, Steinbeck's Sea of Cortes, is discussed specifically, very briefly.

The unvoiced primary reason why Barfield does not engage with these traditions of philological scholarship and philosophy of/and literature is that he does not share their initiating assumption that the existence of God or the divine cannot just be taken for granted, but must at the very least be argued about. While some of the figures mentioned above are not strict secularists, they nonetheless all take pains to engage with secular audiences by beginning from general questions about the nature and importance of literature as a potential form of knowledge, without taking for granted that literary production is motivated by the divine or that it registers something about a divine object.

Barfield's stance is different. His governing assumption is that we are, all of us, as long as we are not too busy or cowardly or dull or distracted, always already engaged in "the human search for the truth about the world, about ourselves, and about the divine" (2); "human consciousness . . . lives most fully among the poetical limits of life -- portents, history, stories, the gods" (2). Poets are then, at least initially, the ones most in touch with and able to give expression to this human search and to the situation of consciousness. Poets, or at least poets as Heidegger receives them, "utter the holy in the middle of darkness, sensing and singing clues about that which eludes a benighted age" (251), and Barfield largely works within this Heideggerian framework, though without at all privileging Heidegger's vocabulary. Poetry is primal, formal, finished, and seductive in being in touch with the initiating conditions of human existence, including the divine; philosophy in contrast is belated, open, skeptical, unfinished, and difficult (25). . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25802-the-ancient-quarrel-between-philosophy-and-poetry/

5th Sydney-Tilburg Conference on the Progress of Science, Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science, April 25-27, 2012.

2011-09-12T11:20:00.000-04:00

This year is the 50th anniversary of Thomas S. Kuhn’s seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which forcefully questioned the idea that science makes steady, rational progress towards truth. After half a century his challenge is everything but outdated. Look at the failure of economic science in the financial crisis, or the fierce debate about whether string theory is just a mathematical gimmick, unable to connect to empirical data. At the same time, however, the scientific enterprise appears to be more dynamic than ever, with an explosion of publications and new subdisciplines emerging by almost the hour. Philosophy of science has changed too. The abstract account of ‘method’ which Kuhn criticized have been replaced by efforts to model how science proceeds, exploring, for example the epistemic benefits and drawbacks of division of scientific labor. What is more, scientometric data and a wealth of case studies are readily available to empirically test theses about what progress in science means today. In this conference, will revisit this classical question in the philosophy of science in the light of current developments and invite contributions on both historical and systematic aspects of the progress of science. We particularly encourage work on progress in the special sciences, the emergence of new disciplines, and empirically informed reassessments of classical positions.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Heather Douglas (Waterloo), Paul Hoyningen-Huene (Hannover), Theo Kuipers (Groningen), and Michael Weisberg (Philadelphia)

Contact: tilps@UVT.NL.

"The Politics of Interpretation and the Interpretation of Politics," Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, September 23-24, 2011.

2011-09-12T11:00:00.001-04:00

Within the last fifty years, interpretation has become one of the most important intellectual paradigms of humanities and social sciences scholarship. Theories about law and literature, philosophy and political thought, history and theology all rely on textual interpretation. Issues such as the role of intentions in the interpretation of texts, the question of whether texts determine, or constrain, interpretations of them, and how much, if any, contextual information is required for their understanding, concern all those disciplines, and call for cross-disciplinary collaboration and exchange. Finally, the simultaneous proliferation of certain interpretive approaches such as ‘hermeneutics’, ‘deconstruction’, and ‘feminist (re)readings’ of texts across disciplinary divides has shown the permeability of these boundaries, and has thus made this call for collaboration even more pertinent.

This conference will provide a setting in which distinguished proponents and critics of some of the prevalent interpretive approaches currently used in humanities and social sciences research are able to engage, for the first time, in a rigorous debate about the advantages and costs of each approach, and to discuss the political assumptions that inform them, as well as aims that drive them.

One of the primary goals will be to evaluate the validity of each interpretive method in reference to the readings it produces when applied to texts. Some of the key questions in this respect include: What is it that each method can or cannot claim to be able to show? To what extent do these methods succeed both in theory and in practice? Do they prevent or improve our understanding of texts? A second focus of the conference is to shed light upon the political dimension of interpretive enterprises and to decode their ideological presuppositions. There has virtually been no interdisciplinary exchange about the question of whether these approaches are ideologically sustained, and if so, whether ideologically charged approaches in turn induce interpreters to systematically ignore some aspects of texts, whilst emphasizing others. Here, consequences will be drawn for the interpretation of politics, widely construed.

In order to address these questions properly, the conference will be structured around panels of up to four presenters each on ‘Strauss and Esoteric Reading’, ‘Contextualist Approaches’, ‘Hermeneutics’, ‘Deconstruction’, ‘Feminist Interpretations’, and ‘Philosophy, Law & Interpretation’. In so doing, the conference seeks to create a workshop environment in which individual methods are considered as what they are—the results of methodological disputes between different schools of interpretation rather than unconnected monolithic blocs.

Contact: jens.olesen@POLITICS.OX.AC.UK

Pub: Ashley Woodward, ed. INTERPRETING NIETZSCHE.

2011-09-12T10:40:00.002-04:00

Woodward, Ashley, ed. Interpreting Nietzsche: Reception and Influence. London: Continuum, 2011.

Contents:

Introduction: Whose Nietzsche? Ashley Woodward \ 1. Loewith’s Nietzsche J. Harvey Lomax \ 2. Jasper’s Nietzsche Leonard Ehrlich and Edith Ehrlich \ 3. Heidegger’s Nietzsche Sean Ryan \ 4. Bataille’s Nietzsche Yue Zhuo \ 5. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche David Rathbone \ 6. Deleuze’s Nietzsche Jonathan Roffe \ 7. Klossowski’s Nietzsche Ashley Woodward \ 8. Müller-Lauter’s Nietzsche Ciano Aydin \ 9. Kofman’s Nietzsche Duncan Large \ 10. Strauss’ Nietzsche Mathew Sharpe and Daniel Townshend \ 11. Derrida’s Nietzsche Carolyn D’Cruz \ 12. Irigaray’s Nietzsche Joanne Faulkner \ 13. Vattimo’s Nietzsche Robert Valgenti \ 14. Nehamas’s Nietzsche Mark Tomlinson \ Notes on Contributors \ Bibliography \ Index.

"Left and Right: the Great Dichotomy Revisited," University of Minho, Braga, Portugal, March 23, 2012.

2011-09-12T10:37:00.000-04:00

Ever since the French Revolution, the terms 'left' and 'right' have been used to frame and explain the political positioning of parties, voters and public policies. Although many thinkers claim that this dichotomy is exhausted and no longer provides an adequate understanding of contemporary political divisions, 'left' and 'right' remain central in political debate. But is the content of these terms really understood by all political actors? What does each individual or group recognize as 'left' and 'right'?

It is true that other classifications of political cleavages have been suggested, but none seems to have replaced the traditional division between left and right. Many people have thought that an opposition between materialist and post-materialist orientations or between libertarian and authoritarian values could cut across left and right. However, these new oppositions seem to have been absorbed, at least partly, by the old dichotomy. But is this really the case? Are there, in fact, no other sets of terms that might provide a clearer division of the political spectrum? The standard most commonly used to distinguish left from right has been the concern with equality. But is this social-economic criterion actually the best? Particularly at a time when very divisive “new politics” issues arise? And even if one accepts the validity of the traditional criterion, how can we describe and explain the approaches from left and right on equality issues?

Furthermore, there is more than one ideology within each side of the political spectrum – there is not only one left, there are several lefts, and the same is true about the right. If we accept that there is something that unifies these several lines within each side of the political divide, what, then, separates different views of the left or the right and allows us to distinguish between them? Which are the political values that are shared by the different ideologies on the left and on the right and which are those that keep them apart?

Contact BOTH Ana Rita Ferreira (arita_ferreira@yahoo.com) and João Cardoso Rosas (rosas@ilch.uminho.pt) by November 30, 2011.

Cfp: Cauchi, Mark, et al. eds. "Kierkegaard at Year Two Hundred." Special Issue of THE EUROPEAN LEGACY, forthcoming 2013.

2011-09-12T09:11:00.001-04:00

“Whatever one generation learns from another, no generation learns the essentially human from a previous one. In this respect, each generation… has no other task than what each previous generation had, nor does it advance further….” Kierkegaard, from the Epilogue to Fear and Trembling

“The present age is essentially… devoid of passion, flaring up in superficial, short-lived enthusiasm and prudentially relaxing in indolence.… [W]e must say of the present age that it is going badly.” Kierkegaard, from “The Present Age,” in Two Ages

This special issue of The European Legacy, to be published in 2013, is dedicated to celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Kierkegaard (1813-1855) by posing two questions: first, the relevance of his thought for, and the challenge that he directs to, the single individual in the present age; second, the challenge that the present age directs to the thought of Kierkegaard. In light of these questions, it is worth recalling Kierkegaard’s conception both of the present age and of the single individual. For Kierkegaard, because all generations share the same task, each age, and each individual in each age, is like every other in that they must take upon themselves, singularly and distinctly, the tasks of their time. The present age thus encompasses the history in which single individuals respond to the issues and debates that distinguish their time by establishing as its most fundamental priority what Kierkegaard calls, in Fear and Trembling, the essentially human – what he also calls faith, love, the neighbor, God: the absolute relation to the absolute. Yet, according to Kierkegaard, the present age and the single individual are characterized by their already having shunned their essentially human task, by their being divided against themselves, alienated from themselves, in their superficiality and indolence. The present age, for Kierkegaard, is thus an age of despair in which the single individual who goes badly must engage in what he describes as the task of coming historically into existence as the genuine contemporary – the task of loving God and neighbor.

How, then, do we assess the pertinence today of Kierkegaard’s assessment of and prescription for the present age – both his own and ours? From what standpoint do we even pose the question of the relevance of Kierkegaard at year two hundred? In asking about the ways in which Kierkegaard’s thought challenges us today, must we not also ask about the ways in which, or the principles in light of which, we respond to Kierkegaard? At issue is what it would mean, today, to be a genuine contemporary – of Kierkegaard, of the present age, of ourselves.

For this special issue of The European Legacy we invite contributions on a wide range of issues that examine the implications of Kierkegaard’s thought for debates, issues, and questions that are central to the challenge of the single individual in the present age. Topics might include, but are not limited to, the following:

· the relationship between Kierkegaard’s critique of the present age and contemporary critics of the present age;
· the relationship between Kierkegaard’s concept of single individuality and contemporary questions of pluralism, cosmopolitanism, and globalization;
· the relationship between, on the one hand, what Kierkegaard explicates as Christian ideals, concepts, and values, and, for example, on the other hand, deconstructive, postmodern, feminist, and LGBTQ approaches to the problems of the present age;
· the relationship between the religious and the secular, between the divine and the human, between faith and reason;
· the relationship between ethics and divine command;
· the relationship between art and the indirect communications of the religious imagination;
· the relationship between truth as subjectivity and truth as alterity.

Proposals of one single-spaced page in length should be submitted either to Mark Cauchi (mcauchi@yorku.ca) or to Avron Kulak (akulak@yorku.ca) by January 1, 2012.

Pub: Stephen Greenblatt, THE SWERVE.

2011-09-12T08:58:00.000-04:00

Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: Norton, 2011.

One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.

Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius—a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.

The copying and translation of this ancient book-the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age-fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393064476/ref=pe_143810_21068080_snp_dp

Wilson, Robert A., and Lucia Foglia. "Embodied Cognition." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY July 25, 2011.

2011-08-15T12:19:00.000-04:00

Cognition is embodied when it is deeply dependent upon features of the physical body of an agent, that is, when aspects of the agent's body beyond the brain play a significant causal or physically constitutive role in cognitive processing.

In general, dominant views in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science have considered the body as peripheral to understanding the nature of mind and cognition. Proponents of embodied cognitive science view this as a serious mistake. Sometimes the nature of the dependence of cognition on the body is quite unexpected, and suggests new ways of conceptualizing and exploring the mechanics of cognitive processing.

Embodied cognitive science encompasses a loose-knit family of research programs in the cognitive sciences that often share a commitment to critiquing and even replacing traditional approaches to cognition and cognitive processing. Empirical research on embodied cognition has exploded in the past 10 years. As the bibliography for this article attests, the various bodies of work that will be discussed represent a serious alternative to the investigation of cognitive phenomena.

Relatively recent work on the embodiment of cognition provides much food for thought for empirically-informed philosophers of mind. This is in part because of the rich range of phenomena that embodied cognitive science has studied. But it is also in part because those phenomena are often thought to challenge dominant views of the mind, such as the computational and representational theories of mind, at the heart of traditional cognitive science. And they have sometimes been taken to undermine standard positions in the philosophy of mind, such as the idea that the mind is identical to, or even realized in, the brain. . . .

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/

Twelfth Annual Meeting, Foucault Circle, Canisius College, March 30-April 1, 2012.

2011-08-15T12:13:00.000-04:00

Papers on any aspect of Foucault's work, and studies, critiques, and applications of Foucauldian thinking, are all welcome. We will aim for a diversity of topics and perspectives in the program selection.

The meetings typically begin with an informal welcoming reception on Friday evening. There will be morning and afternoon paper sessions on Saturday, followed by dinner and a business meeting. The conference will conclude with paper sessions on Sunday morning. Each speaker will have approximately 35 minutes for paper presentation and discussion combined—papers should be a maximum of 3000 words (15-20 minutes, preferably 15).

In conjunction with our meeting in Buffalo, a city in which Foucault conducted research on the prison, this year's conference will include a session dedicated to discussing documents from the GIP (le Groupe d’information sur les Prisons, a French prison reform organization that Foucault co-founded). English translations of the texts will be available.

http://foucault.siuc.edu/cfp.htm

McAteer, John. "Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Early of Shaftesbury." INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY July 29, 2011.

2011-08-15T12:01:00.003-04:00

Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) was an English philosopher who profoundly influenced 18th century thought in Britain, France, and Germany. As a part of an important social circle of English Freethinkers along with early deists such as John Toland, Matthew Tindal, and Anthony Collins, Shaftesbury’s work had a significant influence on French deists such as Voltaire and Rousseau. He also corresponded with some of the most important thinkers of his day, including Locke, Leibniz, and Bayle. Shaftesbury was most influential in the history of English language philosophy through his concept of the moral sense which heavily influenced Hutcheson, Butler, Hume, and Adam Smith; and Shaftesbury was influential in Germany through his concept of enthusiasm which recovered (intuitive) reason from mere (discursive) reasoning and influenced the Romantic idea of the creative imagination as found in German thinkers such as Lessing, Mendelssohn, Goethe, Herder, and Schiller.

Although Shaftesbury was enormously influential in the 18th century, his prestige declined in the 20th century, primarily due to the rise of analytic philosophy which defined philosophy such that Shaftesbury’s work seemed more like literature or rhetoric than proper philosophy. Those trained in analytic philosophy continue to have trouble reading Shaftesbury, largely because he self-consciously rejects systematic philosophy and focuses more on rhetoric and literary persuasion than providing numbered premises. Shaftesbury is interested as much in moral formation as he is in moral theorizing, though his work does contain some, albeit intentionally veiled, discussion of theoretical concerns.

As Shaftesbury saw it, Hobbes had set the agenda of British moral philosophy (a search for the grounding of universal moral principles), and Locke had established its method (empiricism). Shaftesbury’s important contribution was to focus that agenda by showing what a satisfactory response to Hobbes might look like but without giving up too much of Locke’s method. Shaftesbury showed the British moralists that if we think of moral goodness as analogous to beauty, then (even within a broadly empiricist framework) it is still possible for moral goodness to be non-arbitrarily grounded in objective features of the world and for the moral agent to be attracted to virtue for its own sake, not merely out of self-interest.

In his most influential works, Shaftesbury thinks of moral judgment as self-reflection. First we have motives, and then we reflect on those motives resulting in a feeling of moral approval or condemnation. The process is the same when evaluating other agents: we reflect on their motives and feel approval or condemnation. In Shaftesbury’s aesthetic language, the state of having the morally correct motives is the state of being “morally beautiful,” and the state of approving the morally correct motives upon reflection is the state of having “good moral taste.” Shaftesbury argues that the morally correct motives which constitute moral beauty turn out to be those motives which are aimed at the good of one’s society as a whole. This good is understood teleologically. Furthermore Shaftesbury argues that both the ability to know the good of one’s society and the reflective approval of the motivation toward this good are innate capacities which must nevertheless be developed by proper socialization. . . .

http://www.iep.utm.edu/shaftes/

Jensen, Anthony K. "Johann Wolfgang von Goethe." INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY August 7, 2011.

2011-08-15T11:33:00.001-04:00

Goethe defies most labels, and in the case of the label ‘philosopher’ he did so intentionally. “The scholastic philosophy,” in his opinion, “had, by the frequent darkness and apparent uselessness of its subject- matter, by its unseasonable application of a method in itself respectable, and by its too great extension over so many subjects, made itself foreign to the mass, unpalatable, and at last superfluous” (Goethe 1902, 1: 294). But it is nothing exceptional for a philosopher to disdain the character of what is passed along under the name philosophy by professional academics. If Diogenes, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Sartre, or Rorty, can be considered philosophers, then it may even be a rule that to reject the appellation is a condition of having earned it. That said, Goethe is certainly not a philosopher in the sense made popular in his day: a builder of self-grounding systems of thought. Neither is he a philosopher by today’s most common definitions: either a professional analyzer of arguments or a critic of contemporary cultural practices. The paradigm under which Goethe might be classified a philosopher is much older, recalling the ancient and then renaissance conception of the polymath, the man of great learning and wisdom, whose active life serves as the outward expression of his thinking.

In terms of influence, Goethe’s upon Germany is second only to Martin Luther’s. The periods of his dramatic and poetic writing –Sturm und Drang, romanticism, and classicism— simply are the history of the high-culture in Germany from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. Philosophically, his influence is indelible, though not as wide-reaching. His formulation of an organic ontology left its mark on thinkers from Hegel to Wittgenstein; his theory of colors challenged the reigning paradigm of Newton’s optics; and his theory of morphology, that of Linnaeus’ biology. . . .

http://www.iep.utm.edu/goethe/