CFP: "Greeks, Romans, Africans," 9th UNISA Classics Colloquium, University of South Africa, Pretoria, October 23-25, 2008.

Contributions are invited on topics related to the reciprocal relationship between Africa and the cultures of Greece and Rome. Papers dealing with ancient authors writing about Africa or with an African connection, historical and archaeological issues, as well as the reception of the classical world in Africa are welcomed. While the colloquium focuses on classical material, we encourage proposals from related fields and of an interdisciplinary nature. Papers are limited to 45 minutes. Please submit abstracts of appr. 200 words via e-mail attachment to Philip Bosman at bosmapr@unisa.ac.za by September 1, 2008. The body of your email should include your name, institution, department, e-mail address, and the title of your paper. If necessary, submissions may also be sent via post to the following address: Department of Classics and World Languages University of South Africa PO Box 392 0003 UNISA, Republic of South Africa.

"Classical Myth and Psychoanalysis," Institute of Advanced Studies, University of London, September 3-6, 2009.

Since Freud published the Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 and utilised Sophocles' Oedipus Rex to work through his developing ideas about the psycho-sexual development of children, it has been virtually impossible to think about psychoanalysis without reference to classical myth. Since that time psychoanalytic theorists of various persuasions have continued to work with myth, viewing it as a resource that is less restrictive than individual literary texts, bound up as they are with issues of authorship and temporality. The mobility of myth offers psychoanalysis an alternative to the culturally specific and provides a framework within which to think through issues such as the redefinition of the personal and the radical alterity at the heart of what is most familiar. This capacity of myth to transcend the context of any particular retelling and to continue to transform the understanding of the present has long been recognised by Classicists for whom it has been a notoriously slippery object of study. Classical myth has more often been interpreted as encoding a loosely conceived ancient mentalité than as evidencing explicitly configured psychological truths, but the tension between its potency in a particular context and its multivalent potential has repeatedly been stressed. And throughout the twentieth century experts on the ancient world have sometimes turned to the insights of psychoanalytic criticism to supplement and inform their readings of classical myth and literature. Just as psychoanalysis has developed a canon of classical myth (e.g. Oedipus, Narcissus, Prometheus, Antigone, Greek tragedy in general) so Classical Studies has developed its own canon of texts that seem to attract psychoanalytically-informed analysis (e.g. Greek Tragedy, philosophy and Roman poetry in particular). In some cases this seems to be because of a perceived 'fit' or coherence between the literary work and the mode of analysis, for example the fragmented articulation of desire in Catullan verse or the glorification of the irrational in Euripides' Bacchae; in others it is inspired by an influential reading of a classical text by a particular critic - an obvious example here is Lacan's analysis of Sophocles' Antigone in the seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. The aim of this conference is to probe the limits of these mutually influencing canons and to explore the potential of texts so far excluded from them. Why is it, for example, that Greek myth and literature continues to attract more attention in this context than their Roman counterparts? Why have certain forms of psychoanalysis tended to dominate whilst others have been almost completely ignored? What constitutes an authoritative version of a psychoanalytic or a classical myth? Are there new forms of criticism of classical myth and literature which will harmonise with developing forms of psychoanalysis as we move forward in the new millennium? Suggested topics for panels include:

• Foundational narratives
• Fantasy and the Past
• Religion Getting the Myth Wrong
• Text and Object
• 'And'
• Group Psychology and the Collective Archetypes
• Colonialism Creativity & the Visual Arts

Invited speakers include:

• Richard Armstrong (University of Houston, Texas);
• Page DuBois (University of California, San Diego);
• Eric Gunderson (University of Toronto);
• Bruce King (Vassar College);
• Michaela Janan (Duke University);
• Jonathan Lear (University of Chicago);
• Paul Allen Miller (University of South Carolina);
• Jill Scott (Queens University, Ontario);
• Robert Segal (University of Aberdeen);
• Sonu Shamdasani (Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London);
• Victoria Wohl (University of Toronto).

Proposals for panels are welcomed as are papers on relevant psychoanalytic or mythic texts. Please send a title and half-page abstract by 1st September 2008 to Vanda Zajko & Ellen O'Gorman, Department of Classics & Ancient History, University of Bristol, BS8 1TB v.zajko@bris.ac.uk; e.c.ogorman@bris.ac.uk. This conference is organised under the aegis of The Bristol Institute for Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/birtha/centres/institute/.

"Reclaiming the World: the Future of Objectivity," University of Toronto, May 23-24, 2008.

The notion of objectivity has come under severe criticism due to developments in the humanities and in the sciences. These criticisms have profound ramifications for how we understand the world, and for how we understand the nature of our own intellectual work. How do we move forward? Should we give up looking for understandings of the world that are dispassionate, a-political, and/or neutral? Or is there some other way of achieving detachment and dispassion, for example, that avoids problems inherent in our classical understanding of objectivity? If neither, what should inspire confidence in our accounts of the world? This interdisciplinary conference will explore the prospects of forging a new and tenable epistemology—one that does justice to the critiques of objectivity, but retains allegiance and accountability to a larger world. Graduate students and post-doctoral fellows are particularly encouraged to submit proposals. Conference webpage: http://research.fis.utoronto.ca/objectivity/index.html.

Jackman, Henry. "Review of Cheryl Misak, ed. THE NEW PRAGMATISTS." NDPR May 14, 2008.

Misak, Cheryl, ed. The New Pragmatists. Oxford: OUP, 2007.

After William James published his Pragmatism in 1907, C.S. Peirce changed the name of his own position from "pragmatism" to "pragmaticism" in order to disassociate himself from what he took to be the overly 'subjective' aspects of James's newly topical view. This tension between Peirce and James persists today, and Cheryl Misak usefully distinguishes the Jamesian strain of "Neo-Pragmatism", most famously associated with Richard Rorty, from what she calls the "New Pragmatism", a position that stands to Neo-Pragmatism as Peirce did to James. Misak considers it characteristic of New Pragmatists to think that "standards of objectivity come into being and evolve over time, but that being historically situated in this way does not detract from their objectivity" (p. 2), but precisely where the lines are between, say, Metaphysical Realism, New Pragmatism and Neo-Pragmatism remains hard to specify, and what a worked out New Pragmatism would look like appears to be different in each of the eight essays in this excellent collection. All of the papers are new with the volume, and in what follows I'll only be able to highlight some themes that run through groups of the essays, along with some differences between the authors involved. Such themes will include (1) the relation of the New Pragmatism to its classical predecessors, (2) just how robust an account of truth and objectivity New Pragmatism can be expected to offer, and (3) whether or not the New Pragmatism should provide an account of truth and objectivity for all of the language or just some subset of it. Unfortunately, much that would be worth discussing must be left out, but I hope to at least give a feel for some of the concerns driving this consistently engaging collection of papers. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13065.

Pellauer, David. "Review of Karl Simms' RICOEUR AND LACAN." NDPR May 13, 2008.

Simms, Karl. Ricoeur and Lacan. London: Continuum, 2007. Simms says he wants to show that there are some real points of similarity between them, even if in the end they are irreconcilable, so one will read on perhaps wondering which way the balance will tip. The first of these points of contact we are told has to do with how both thinkers stand in relation to Descartes and more particularly to the Cartesian cogito, which each questions, but in different ways. The second point of contact has to do with their attitudes toward Freud, although here the gap between them is greater: Simms shows Ricoeur was never able to accept what he called Freud's realism while Lacan could and did, albeit in his own way. A sidelight here is Simms' effort to show that over time Ricoeur came less and less to emphasize this understanding of Freud, to the point even of arguing that Freud himself was not the victim of any vicious kind of naïve realism. For Ricoeur, Simms concludes, the unconscious finally remains relative to conscious awareness, albeit to that of another. This is unlike Lacan who always held that Freud had shown that there was such a thing as an independently existing unconscious, and that it not only existed independently of consciousness but could even be said to think. Simms' third point of comparison between Ricoeur and Lacan is their interpretations of Hegel's master-slave dialectic. For Lacan, "the mutual recognition of the master-slave dialectic is what originates desire as desire for another" (6); for Ricoeur, it has more to do with the birth of the self. It is this way of seeing things that helps Ricoeur argue that both phenomenology and psychoanalysis should be understood as forms of hermeneutics that themselves stand in a dialectical relationship, psychoanalysis serving as something like an archeology of the subject, phenomenology rather tending in the direction of a teleology of selfhood, a new understanding that incorporates the unconscious into an enlarged self-understanding. In a word, then, one organizing structure of this book is to show that Lacan and Ricoeur take up similar themes but they reach quite different conclusions. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13064.

CFP: "Continuity and Innovation: Contemporary Film Form and Film Criticism," University of Reading, September 5-7, 2008.

Update: The conference webpage may be found here: http://www.rdg.ac.uk/ftt/research/ftt-continuityandinnovation.asp. Initial Posting: March 21, 2008: Contemporary film displays both its debt to the established forms and practices of narrative cinema, and to international developments in aesthetic practice and in new technologies that subtly shift the boundaries of cinema's aural and visual field. At the same time, contemporary film criticism negotiates a shifting relationship with its own histories and present - its histories of textual analysis and film theory, and its present landscape of concerns with identity, new delivery and reception contexts, digital remediation, and soon, explored against the backdrop of a volatile socio-historical moment. This conference seeks to consider the critical challenges contemporary film form poses for us as film critics and theorists, in an approach rooted in the detail of the film text itself. In addition, the conference wishes to reflect and engage with the diversity of contemporary aesthetic choices and filmmaking practices. On the one hand, the conference will explore the continuities and innovations in contemporary film style, to move towards an account of contemporary cinema's aesthetic practice and the ways in which these formal elements shape the production of meaning. On the other hand,the conference will provide an important opportunity to explore and extend the continuities and innovations possible in contemporary film criticism. Keynote speakers include Douglas Pye and Adrian Martin. In addition, film practitioners will be discussing their work.We invite papers that attempt to meet these interpretative, analytical and critical challenges through direct engagement with contemporary films. In addition to the familiar pattern of panel discussions and plenaries, theconference will include workshops in which speakers will present frameworks for analysis of the detail of a movie, as an introduction to discussion.Titles of films to be discussed at the conference will be circulated in advance. Proposals for three kinds of presentation are invited: Close readings grounded in detailed analysis (20 minute papers). Discussion of historical, theoretical or critical issues related to the interpretation of contemporary film style (20 minute papers). Workshop introductions, designed to open up issues about a sequence (or sequences), as a prelude to extended debate (workshops will last 90 minutes). The deadline for proposals is 1st April 2008. Please send us your 200-word proposal and brief biography by email to:filmconference@reading.ac.uk. Enquiries should be directed to the conference organisers Lisa Purse and John Gibbs at the same email address.

Runciman, David. "Review of Gertrude Himmelfarb's THE ROADS TO MODERNITY." TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT May 2, 2008.

Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The Roads to Modernity: the British, French and American Enlightenments. New York: Vintage, 2004. Rpt. 2008. The case Himmelfarb wants to make depends on separating out three different 'Enlightenments' — the British, the French and the American. All three were founded on the principle of reason, but only one — the French — turned reason into its own religion, crushing everything else in its path. In Britain, by contrast, reason was “humanised” through the philosophy of, among others, Adam Smith, who made it clear that self-interest was compatible with moral sentiment. This “sentimental” Enlightenment produced a society of tolerant, sceptical individualists, by contrast to the dogmatic and intolerant French. Meanwhile, in America, both rationality and sympathy had to take a back seat to the pressing demands of achieving liberty from the British Crown, and building a new kind of state that could sustain that freedom. The story Himmelfarb tells is a familiar one, and it contains its own share of clichés (she portrays the French philosophes as unfeeling snobs with a weakness for enlightened despotism) but she writes with real grace and her effortless prose brings the history of ideas to life. Gordon Brown, however, is less successful in trying to explain what this story might have to teach people living in Britain today. He says in his introduction that the social virtues of sympathy and benevolence that Himmelfarb identifies at the heart of British Enlightenment thinking “have remained a dominant theme of Britishness ever since”. But this entirely glosses over the lesson Himmelfarb herself draws, which is that the only society in which these virtues are now on prominent display is America. She argues that it was the American experiment with liberty that in the end allowed room for the religious impulses needed to underpin “the passion for compassion”. The Victorians may have had this passion, but during the 20th-century the British people lost it, and though Himmelfarb does not spell it out, it is clear that much of the blame in her eyes lies with the architects of the welfare state. . . . Read the rest here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article3449847.ece.

Gotschall, Jonathan. "Measure for Measure." BOSTON GLOBE May 11, 2008.

We literary scholars have mostly failed to generate surer and firmer knowledge about the things we study. While most other fields gradually accumulate new and durable understanding about the world, the great minds of literary studies have, over the past few decades, chiefly produced theories and speculation with little relevance to anyone but the scholars themselves. So instead of steadily building a body of solid knowledge about literature, culture, and the human condition, the field wanders in continuous circles, bending with fashions and the pronouncements of its charismatic leaders. I think there is a clear solution to this problem. Literary studies should become more like the sciences. Literature professors should apply science's research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof. Instead of philosophical despair about the possibility of knowledge, they should embrace science's spirit of intellectual optimism. If they do, literary studies can be transformed into a discipline in which real understanding of literature and the human experience builds up along with all of the words. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/11/measure_for_measure/.

Miller, Daniel. "Writing on the Wall." NEW HUMANIST 123.3 (2008).

Forty years ago this month, as barriers went up on the streets around Paris, swathes of lyrical slogans started to appear on its walls. “Do not adjust your TV set, there is a fault in reality”; “We don’t want a world where the guarantee of not dying of starvation brings the risk of dying of boredom”; “We are the writing on the wall”. The handiwork of militant students possessed neither of party cards nor of clearly fixed doctrines, the phrases would survive the events and become emblematic of them. For better or worse, May 1968 would go down in history as a revolt of poets. A disproportionate number of these poets hailed from the new university of Nanterre, where they had been the students of the charismatic sociology teacher Henri Lefebvre. A one-time associate of both the Surrealists and the Situationists, a former taxi-driver and a former distinguished resistance fighter (and in the meantime, a still notoriously virile ladies’ man), the roguish Lefebvre had arrived at Nanterre shortly after its 1964 inception, following a stint at the other major centre of late-’60s French student unrest, the University of Strasbourg. . . . Read the rest here: http://newhumanist.org.uk/1780.

Prior, Nick. "Pithy, Polemical and Paradoxical." TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION May 8, 2008.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Political Interventions: Social Science and Political Action. London: Verso, 2008. A leading figure in the radical movements that swept France in the late 1990s, Bourdieu had become synonymous with critical opposition to the vagaries of an increasingly naturalised neoliberal agenda. He would no doubt have balked at the perverse (but predictable) decision to place eulogies from Lionel Jospin and Jacques Chirac alongside pictures of the megaphoned sociologist demonstrating before his occupation of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1998. He was no fan of the media, famously dedicating a whole book, On Television, to an analysis of the unconditional submission of television and journalism to unfettered market pressures. He was, in any case, much more than his public effigy permitted, not least one of the most formidable thinkers of the condition of modernity, its institutions, ideas and experiences. Engaged rather than enraged (curiously, the events of May 1968 seemed to bypass him somewhat), Bourdieu's political interventions span 40 years and are the subject of this fascinating collection of documents. The book is an English translation of Interventions 1961-2001, published in France in 2002. Ordered chronologically and thematically, it spans Bourdieu's early assessments of the Algerian experience during the ruptures of independence through to his damning critique of global economic imperialism. Middle sections document Bourdieu's critique of the education system, his role as adviser to state-ordained reports on pedagogy, diatribes against the collapse of the social welfare state and his vision of the collective European intellectual. All this is punctuated with regular commentary on tumultuous political events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the war in Kosovo, as well as pithy miscellanea, such as his feelings for Jean-Paul Sartre, against whose ideology of the free intellectual Bourdieu set himself. Most deep-thinking scholars are considerably more accessible in informal academic addresses, such as lectures and interviews, and this is certainly the case with Bourdieu, whose monographs can be dense and difficult to grasp. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=401791&c=2.

May, Simon. "Review of Simon Critchley's THE BOOK OF DEAD PHILOSOPHERS." NEW HUMANIST 123.3 (2008).

Critchley, Simon. The Book of Dead Philosophers. London: Granta, 2008. Death awaits us all and yet few philosophers have devoted more than a fraction of their work to it - even those philosophers like Montaigne who hold, with the ancients, that “to philosophise is to learn how to die”. Of these few, almost none in the last hundred years is English-speaking, in part because until very recently Anglo-Saxon philosophers have striven, almost without exception, for systematic, dispassionate and, if possible, timeless descriptions of our ordinary practices – a bent that has left little room for much of life, let alone for death. If an English-speaking philosopher is going to write a book on the subject he had therefore better be very familiar with the so-called 'Continental' tradition of philosophy – with, for example, thinkers like Heidegger for whom awareness of death as a final horizon for all our experiences and practices is essential to an authentic living of life. Simon Critchley is an ideal author for a book of this sort as he is a distinguished philosopher who is deeply interested in such Continental thinkers as Levinas, Blanchot, Derrida and of course Heidegger. . . . Read the rest here: http://newhumanist.org.uk/1794.

Mikkola, Mari. "Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY May 12, 2008.

Feminism is said to be the movement to end women's oppression (hooks 2000, 26). One possible way to understand ‘woman’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks out human females and being a human female depends on various biological and anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many feminists have understood ‘woman’ differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) from gender (being a woman or a man), although most ordinary language users appear to treat the two interchangeably. More recently this distinction has come under sustained attack and many view it nowadays with (at least some) suspicion. This entry outlines and discusses distinctly feminist debates on sex and gender. . . . Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender/.

Paparella, Emanuel. "Emmanuel Levinas’ Challenge to the Modern European Cultural Identity." GLOBAL SPIRAL April 30, 2008.

Modern Western Civilization presents us with a Janus-like face: on one side Renaissance Humanism which begins in Italy in the 14th century with Petrarch, on the other side Enlightenment Rationalism which begins in France in the 17th century with Descartes. After Descartes, there is a dangerous tendency to separate the two cultural phenomena and consider Humanism either anachronistic, or superseded. The inevitable result has been sheer confusion in the area of cultural identity; consequently, at this critical juncture of the new polity called European Union, there is talk of a “democratic deficit,” that democracy that is integral part of Western Civilization. We are in urgent need of cultural guides to show us how to better harmonize the two above mentioned phenomena. One such guide is Emmanuel Lévinas’ humanistic philosophy. In as much as it challenges the Western rationalistic philosophical tradition, it is extremely important for the emergence of a renewed European cultural identity. It explores in depth the threats to the authentic cultural identity of Europe, how modalities of thinking powerfully affect other ideas and shape a whole cultural milieu, sometimes with less than desirable consequences. . . . Read the rest here: http://metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/10408/Default.aspx.

Geuss, Raymond. "Richard Rorty at Princeton: Personal Recollections." ARION: A JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND THE CLASSICS 15.3 (2008).

On another one of our visits to the Elizabethtown Water Company, Dick described to me a new undergraduate course he wanted to give. It was to be called “An Alternative History of Modern Philosophy” and would sketch a continuous conversation from the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century without once naming any of the standard canonical figures. This would be a history of philosophy without any reference to Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, or J. S. Mill. I don't recall in all detail how the alternative story was to run, but I do remember very vividly that it was to start from Petrus Ramus. Dick had an extremely low opinion of Descartes as a philosopher, thinking of him as no more than a minor disciple of Petrus Ramus. I also remember that some of the high points were to be Paracelsus, the Cambridge Platonists, Thomas Reid, Fichte, and Hegel. I think the course was to end with Dewey, although I may be making that up. I thought this was a wonderful suggestion, for reasons, to be sure, that were probably rather different from those that motivated Dick, but there was one aspect of his prospective course that slightly bothered me, although I don't think I would at that time have been able to formulate my disquiet at all clearly. There was, as I would now formulate it, a slight unclarity in the conception of the course in that it conjoined two different views of the history of philosophy that Dick had not yet fully dissociated. On the one hand, there was a kind of debunking view of the canon as an unwarranted form of hero worship, singling out some one philosopher, often for highly adventitious reasons, and inappropriately attributing to him certain ideas, theses, arguments, or methods as his unique, original contribution, when these were actually invented by someone else, were minor variations of well known motifs, or were ideas that weren't in fact invented by anyone because they were “in the air” at the time. Descartes didn't “invent” the idea that the analytic method was the key to philosophy; Petrus Ramus did that (or perhaps: “no individual did that, because the idea was ‘in the air'”). So why read Descartes rather than Ramus? This view still seems to assume that we know what the key questions and the major developments in philosophy are, that it is unquestionably important to understand and assimilate these questions and issues in themselves and in their genesis if one wanted to understand philosophy at all, and that the only question is to whom these major developments were correctly to be attributed. The other idea is that at certain times in the past people called a certain kind of thinking and a resulting body of written work “philosophy” which from the point of view of the present seems highly eccentric in subject-matter or method. There is no such thing as a universal set of philosophical questions or issues; Paracelsus wasn't remotely interested in asking or answering questions like those we find “philosophical,” still lots of people at the time thought his work a paradigm of what a philosopher should be doing. The assumption here would be that the longer and more deeply one reflected on this fact, the more one would see that “philosophy” at different times and places referred to different clusters of intellectual activities, none of which formed a natural kind and none of which had any “inherent” claim to a monopoly on the “proper” use of the term “philosophy.” Doing a history in which Paracelsus figured centrally but not Descartes, could be seen as a part of trying to give a history, not so much of philosophy, as of historically differing conceptions of what philosophy was. Dick did not confuse these two things, and in fact I learned how to distinguish them clearly only from his 1984 paper, “The Historiography of Philosophy” (in Philosophy in History, Cambridge 1984). Rather, he was consciously relaxed about doing both as part of the same project, whether a book or a course of lectures. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.bu.edu/arion/Geuss.htm.

Davidson, Roger. "Thinkers: Face to Face." NEW HUMANIST 123.3 (2008).

Emmanuel Levinas spoke scathingly of the “stupidity” and “pathos” of any endeavour to relate his life meaningfully in a linear narrative. In his book Difficult Liberty, he briskly recounts a rough sequence of events that coloured his personal and intellectual development: reading Pushkin, Tolstoy, and the Hebrew Bible during his childhood in Lithuania; the Bolshevik Revolution; philosophical studies in Freiburg; captivity during the Second World War; distinguished professorships at Poitiers, the Sorbonne, and so on. Nevertheless, these loose threads were bound together by a single cataclysmic theme: “This disparate inventory,” he concluded, “…is dominated by the presentiment and the memory of the Nazi horror.” Nor was his most abstract philosophical thought unaffected. As circumstance would have it, the most profound intellectual influence of his life, the German thinker Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), would also happen to be a Nazi who saw himself as no less than the official philosopher of the Third Reich, at whose hands Levinas would remain imprisoned for five years while the systematic murder of his people was carried out across Europe. Despite his outward scepticism regarding biography, then, Levinas’s writings tell the extraordinary story of his quest to think his way free of Heidegger, and to bring human ethics back to the forefront of philosophy. . . . Read the rest here: http://newhumanist.org.uk/1785.

Heckman, Davin. "Unraveling Identity: Watching the Posthuman Bildungsroman." CTHEORY.NET May 7, 2008.

I have been puzzling lately over a genre of film which is hard to situate: films which deal with forgetting and remembering, in which we ride shotgun with protagonists who are just as interested in character development as we are. While the genre itself has not been fully mapped out, potential candidates for inclusion include Abre Los Ojos (1997), Vanilla Sky (2001), Memento (2000), Minority Report (2002), The Bourne Identity (2002), Paycheck (2003), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and, most recently, A Scanner Darkly (2006). I call this genre the "Posthuman Bildungsroman." The Bildungsroman label is commonly applied to "coming of age" tales or novels of education. For reasons discussed below, this common usage is not entirely accurate, but taken in the larger context of Western Literature such usage makes sense. The traditional questions associated with Western Literature can be summarized in this way: What is a story? An account of change. What is a good story? An account of change that all people can relate to. The assumption is that in order to be sufficiently engaging, change must center on "the human." And in practice, "the human" has overwhelmingly been depicted as an individual. Outside of non-modern folk tales, children's stories, religious texts, and legends, there is little room in this essentialist construct for distributed cognition, nonhuman characters, and environmental agents. Philosophy, literature, and the self grow together/merge under the common characterization of the Bildungsroman. The result is a tradition of "good stories" about the formation of an identity that is rooted in interior personal growth. In the Posthuman Bildungsroman, the individual is present not as the expression of a coherent self, but as the central problem of the story. Rather than triumph over external obstacles through force of will, the will itself is formed through the effects of outside forces. The story remains a tale of growth and education, but the end of this process is an attempt to stabilize the subject and construct a coherent representation of the self that is consistent with the expectations of its cultural milieu (or, perhaps, the genre). . . . Read the whole article here: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=594.

"Symposium on Kelly Oliver's THE COLONISATION OF PSYCHIC SPACE." SYMPOSIA 4.1 (2008).

Oliver, Kelly. The Colonisation of Psychic Space: a Psychoanalytic Social Theory Of Oppression. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004. Extract Commentaries by: Shannon Winnubst, Stacy Keltner Reply by Kelly Oliver Further information is here: http://web.mac.com/shaslang/SGRP/Symposia.html.

Hitchings, Henry. "One Language Fits All." FINANCIAL TIMES May 3, 2008.

What is the future of English? Here are a few statements that I’ve recently read, heard or overheard. “If you don’t speak English, you can’t feel part of the world.” “English isn’t much more than an ugly symbol of white supremacy.” “All this unchecked immigration is turning a once-beautiful language into some sort of mongrel.” “English is popular because it’s so accommodating.” “True English keeps getting diluted.” “In the future, we are all going to speak just one language, and it’s our one.” As such anecdotal evidence suggests, statements about language are typically freighted with political judgments. People characteristically identify their own language as precious – an embodiment of their heritage, a measure of their prosperity. They see other languages as rivals or dangerous intruders. And native users of English are particularly proud in their awareness that the language of Shakespeare, Adam Smith and The Simpsons is becoming the world’s sovereign tongue. Yet popular thinking about the language tends to be myopic. Books, articles and news items on the subject usually take one of three forms. First, there is the lament, which bemoans, for example, the decline of the semi-colon or the proliferation of split infinitives and so-called greengrocers’ apostrophes. The most celebrated recent example is Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Then there is the archaeological approach, in which the history of the language is quarried. Contributions to this field are sometimes historical (Melvyn Bragg’s The Adventure of English) or more concerned with philology (Nicholas Ostler’s brilliant Empires of the Word). Third, and with more than a nod to this archaeological school, there is the curatorial method, in which linguistic oddities are individually displayed like museum pieces. Did you know that “kit” once denoted a wooden vessel used for carrying fish, or that “clone” comes from the Greek word for a twig? There have been numerous recent books in this vein, and the form also thrives on the internet. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4be29966-17db-11dd-b98a-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1.

Wolfe, Alan. "The Forgotten Philosopher." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION May 9, 2008.

Reeves, Richard. John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand. Atlantic Books, 2007. Contemporary academic philosophy is riven by a great divide: Either you adhere to a Continental perspective identified with Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger that addresses big speculative subjects like the Essence of Being, or you identify with the British and American analytic school that puts a priority on rigorous logic, language, and meaning. What, then, are we to make of John Stuart Mill, who belongs to neither? . . . Read the answer here: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=dw4rvknzddf3f4p8kygv0m69k36t1jyf.

Griffiths, Eric. "Dante, Primo Levi and the Intertextualists." TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT May 7, 2008.

If you can make your way past the living statues and knots of wannabe writers supposing themselves to be Joyce and Hemingway deep in conversation outside Les Deux Magots, you come, next door but one, to 4 place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where enlightenment or something like it really did strike twice. It was there on March 22, 1895, that the Lumière brothers unveiled a prototype of their Cinématographe before a select audience of technical experts and entrepreneurs. In Salle C of the same imposing edifice, a biggish room with rows of tables at which the eager sat in groups of five or so facing Professor Barthes, Julia Kristeva, concerned with “the validity of scientific method in the domain of the ‘human’ sciences”, disclosed in 1966 the term 'intertextualité.' Neither Kristeva nor the Lumières foresaw how their devices would catch on. The brothers dismissed their invention as “without any future” and turned their minds to dressings designed to heal burns. Less than a decade after her presentation, Kristeva was complaining that intertextuality had been “frequently understood in the banal sense of ‘source-criticism’ of a particular text” (La révolution du langage poétique, 1974), which was not what she had meant at all. She introduced the term while sketching out Bakhtin’s account of the irreducibly dialogical nature of utterance, quoting from his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics: “if semantic and logical relations are to become dialogical they have to be embodied . . . they must enter another sphere of existence: they become discourse . . . and acquire an author, that’s to say some one whose utterance they are”. She glossed this “dialogical” quality as designating “language taken up in practice by an individual”. Bakhtin thought any linguistics which concentrates on language as a supra-individual system (Saussure’s langue) and on signs considered as decontextualized items inevitably neglected this quality, because dialogism arises, and contributes to how we make sense, only in a concrete, historical world containing specific agents (the realm of Saussure’s parole). For example, a Bakhtinian might say, nothing formulable as langue in the two sentences “I got some anti-depressants from the doctor this morning” and “Mary’s coming to stay for a fortnight”, nor in their formal conjunction, would justify understanding an implicit “because” between them. However, when uttered in rapid succession by an individual whom the interlocutor knows to be disposed to gloom in Mary’s presence, the “because” clearly transpires. To miss it might actually be to miss the utterance’s drift. . . .
Read the rest here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3886607.ece.

Sidorsky, David. "Sidney Hook." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY May 8, 2008.

The philosophical career of Sidney Hook was characterized by the length and constancy of his commitment to the philosophy of John Dewey. Hook was a leading interpreter and proponent of Deweyan pragmatic naturalism from his years as Dewey's graduate student at Columbia in the 1920s through the six decades of his philosophical teaching and writing until his death in 1989. He identified with the attribution given to him as “Dewey's bulldog.” . . . Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sidney-hook/.

CFP: "Rhetoric and Argumentation in the Beginning of the 21st Century," University of Coimbra, October 2-3, 2008.

The research unit 'Linguagem, Interpretação e Filosofia' ('Language, Interpretation and Philosophy') of the 'Fundação Portuguesa para a Ciência e a Tecnologia-FCT' (the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) is holding an international conference to commemorate the publication in 1958 of The New Rhetoric: a Treatise on Argumentation by Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca and Stephen Toulmin's The Uses of Argument. The aim of this conference, along with the study of the impact of these books on rethoric and contemporary theories of argumentation, is to take stock of the current state of these disciplines. For more information, please visit: http://www1.ci.uc.pt/lif/paginas/index.php?nIDPagina=85.

PUB: Morrey, Douglas, ed. "Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Nancy," FILM-PHILOSOPHY 12.1 (2008).

For the contents, visit: http://www.film-philosophy.com/.

"Reality or Fiction?," Sapientia University, Cluj, Romania, September 26-28, 2008.

Ever since the appearance of film certain theorists hailed in the moving image its ability to document reality, while others have been talking about the power of the movies to create a perfect illusion of reality. The history of the moving image itself is said to be rooted in the contrasting poetics of the Lumière brothers’ portrayal of everyday life and Méliès’s most escapist travels in fantasy. The debate was kept alive, from opposite directions, by the first avant-gardists who undertook to dismantle the filmic illusion and later by the neorealists and their theorist, André Bazin, who asserted the realist ontology of the image as a norm. Nowadays the question of “reality and fiction” has gained actuality by the ever multiplying media forms of the moving image. Classical movie theatre experience has been replaced by a cinema based on new digital technologies from Dolby stereo sound to computer graphics in order to provide an overwhelming audiovisual experience which engulfs its viewers. Television, with its own genres specially linked to reality, has become part of our everyday life, home video or interactive 3D computer games, or even mobile phones have become media for our daily consumption of moving images. In the meantime the theoretical debate about the double-sided effect of the movies was given further twists by new methodologies in ecological and cognitive film theory as well as cultural theories and visual anthropology. New modes of filmmaking appeared which were dubbed as docu-fiction or fictional documentary, elements of reality and elements of fiction were brought together either by re-editing ‘found’ footage or by integrating genuinely or seemingly documentary images within a fictional framework. Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005) may exemplify the first, and Béla Tarr’s early works as well as his Satantango (1994) the second tendency. The present conference aims to provide a platform for a basically interdisciplinary approach to the relationship of reality and fiction in moving images. The purpose is to bring together film theorists in various disciplines, historians of film and visual media and visual anthropologist as well as filmmakers who grapple with a similar problem of integrating reality and fiction. Visit the conference homepage here: http://kv.sapientia.ro:80/nfmk/eng/.

Sreedhar, Susanne. "Review of Patricia Springborg, ed. CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO HOBBES' LEVIATHAN." NDPR May 7, 2008.

Springborg, Patricia, ed. Cambridge Companion to Hobbes's Leviathan. Cambridge: CUP, 2007. The 350th anniversary of the publication of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan has occasioned a number of critical anthologies. In the space of three years, four such collections have appeared; The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes's Leviathan is the latest. Given this recent flurry of publications, one might wonder what niche another volume could fill. In answer to such a question, Patricia Springborg, the editor, identifies three deficiencies in the existing literature on Leviathan: a general lack of attention to the context in which Hobbes wrote, a pronounced tendency to ignore the second half of Leviathan. and an unfortunate separation between the Anglophone and Continental traditions of Hobbes scholarship. With this Cambridge Companion, Springborg hopes to redress these deficiencies by collecting essays that address Hobbes's theology and ecclesiology, provide a historical context for Hobbes's views, and focus on the significance of Leviathan for continental political thought. The volume is divided into five sections: four that parallel the four parts of Leviathan ('Of Man', 'Of Commonwealth', 'Of a Christian Commonwealth', and 'Of the Kingdom of Darkness'), and a fifth focusing on its reception. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13029.

"France Noire -- Black France: the Poetics and Politics of Blackness," Paris, June 6-7, 2008.

In Memoriam: Aimé Césaire, Michel Fabre, and Ousmane Sembène. The last few years have seen an extraordinary flowering of Black consciousness in France. Individuals and collectives have organized around questions pertaining to the memory of slavery, 'race' and anti-black racism, the Black condition, and what it generally means to be Black in contemporary French society. At the same time, there has been a new wave of scholarship on Blacks in Europe and a (re)theorizingof 'blackness' in the African diaspora relative to European society and history. Paris, in particular, has always been a center of Black life worldwide, from the Négritude movement of the past to the myriad formations of Black empowerment specific to this moment. On June 6 and 7, 2008, a gathering of leading international scholars will meet in Paris to examine what we identify here as 'Black France,' that is, the Black presence and condition in French society. Madame Christiane Taubira, the esteemed member of the French Parliament whose very name is now synonymous with legislation that recognizes slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity --The Taubira Law -- will deliver the keynote address as the prelude to an exciting and stimulating series of discussions. We encourage all those interested in the African diaspora and French society to join us for what will be an historic event. The programme may be viewed here: http://history.berkeley.edu/faculty/Stovall/conference/.

BBC Radio 4: "1968 -- Philosophy in the Streets."

Nick Fraser recalls the intellectual revolution of May 1968 that spread from the academy to the streets of Paris, and from Paris to the world. Contributors include key philosophers and thinkers, former activists and writers. Please visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/pip/topbf/ to listen.

PUB: REVISTA CUBANA DE FILOSOFIA 11 (2008).

Revista cubana de filosofia (http://revista.filosofia.cu:80/default.php.) is available free of charge as an Open Access journal online. Content is fully accessible (in Spanish).

Current Issue: No. 11. Enero - Mayo 2008.

Artículos y Ensayos:

• De la vida como autopoiesis a la vida como fundamento último de la ética (José Ramón Fabelo Corzo)
• La identidad nacional y el socialismo en Cuba. Conflictos en el fortalecimiento de una articulación natural y necesaria en un mundo interdependiente y cambiante? (Orlando Cruz Capote)

Filosofando...

Qué Filosofía enseñamos? Conversando con Franz Hinkelammert (Georgina Alfonso González)

A Debate:

• Reflexiones en torno al pensamiento marxista de Ludovico Silva (Lino Morán Beltrán)Héctor Mujica: apuntes para el debate del socialismo en Venezuela (Johan Méndez-Reyes, Lino Morán-Beltrán)

Irwin, Robert. "Edward Said's Shadowy Legacy." TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT May 7, 2008.

So many academics want the arguments presented in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) to be true. It encourages the reading of novels at an oblique angle in order to discover hidden colonialist subtexts. It promotes a hypercritical version of British and, more generally, of Western achievements. It discourages any kind of critical approach to Islam in Middle Eastern studies. Above all, Orientalism licenses those academics who are so minded to think of their research and teaching as political activities. The drudgery of teaching is thus transformed into something much more exciting, namely “speaking truth to power”. . . . Read the rest here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3885948.ece.

Ruse, Michael. Chapter 1 of DARWINISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS. Cambridge: CUP, 2008.

"If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law." D. C. Dennett (1995) This is the judgment of the philosopher Daniel Dennett about the English naturalist Charles Robert Darwin, who discovered the theory of evolution through natural selection, published in 1859 in his Origin of Species, the work that provides the ongoing framework for evolutionary studies today. It is a judgment with which I concur. Many do not. Most obviously, there are the many American evangelical Christians who take the words of the Bible absolutely literally and who hence assert that the world and its denizens were created by God, miraculously, some six thousand years ago, in the space of a week. Recently, these “Creationists” have been joined by believers of a more sophisticated ilk, the so-called Intelligent Design theorists, who argue that no natural account of origins can be adequate, and hence that all histories must make space for special interventions by some form of thinking being. These are people at one end of the religious spectrum, yet even those toward the other end – those who argue that Genesis must be interpreted metaphorically and that God did create according to laws of evolution – tend nevertheless to suppose that blind laws need help, that they need special pushes, to create the wonderful world of life and to alleviate the harshness of the Darwinian process. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521728249&ss=exc.

Sohail, Khalid. "Charles Darwin and the Evolution of the Human Mind." SECULAR WEB (N.D.).

Charles Darwin, a great biologist and philosopher, offered a scientific and secular explanation of the process of human evolution and challenged the traditional religious beliefs of his time. His ideas were so provocative that they were either completely rejected or seriously challenged by the clergy, the traditional organizations, and the conservative institutions of the nineteenth century. While Darwin's admirers and followers got involved in bitter public debates with the representatives of the church, Darwin quietly did his scientific work and continued to light the candles of science and reason in the dark alleys of blind faith. In the last couple of centuries there has been an increasing awareness of his biological theories but still his psychological and sociological theories about human evolution have remained relatively unnoticed. Maybe that is why his book The Origin of Species, that focused on the biological dimension of evolution, is discussed far more than his book The Descent of Man. The latter book, published in 1881, the year before his death, discussed his psychosocial theories of evolution. As a student of human psychology and a practicing psychotherapist, I am amazed at the insights Darwin had about the evolution of the human mind. He wanted to show that the human brain, like the human body, had also evolved from the lower animals, and that the observations of animal behavior can help us understand the similarities and differences between human and animal minds, especially those of mammals. While comparing humans to animals Darwin shared his observation that "the embryo of man closely resembles that of other mammals" (Descent, p. 9) that is why when we compare the human body with the bodies of animals we see striking similarities. . . . Read the rest here: http://secweb.infidels.org/?kiosk=articles&id=783.

Larner, Jesse. "Who's Afraid of Friedrich Hayek? The Obvious Truths and Mystical Fallacies of a Hero of the Right." DISSENT (Winter 2008).

Right wingers love Friedrich Hayek. The Austrian-British economist is revered by true believers at the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the National Review, and the Weekly Standard. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher cited his ideas as central to the social revolutions they hoped to spark. Antigovernment ideologues admire him as one of those few who kept Adam Smith’s fires burning during the dark reign of John Maynard Keynes in the West; his most famous book, The Road to Serfdom, has sold more than 350,000 copies in the United States alone. And the modern right has enlisted Hayek as a political weapon: Why can’t those loony lefties acknowledge the simple and obvious truths that he understood? . . . Hayek was a surprise, in several ways. He’s nowhere near as extreme as his ideological descendants. He admits that there are a few rare economic circumstances in which market forces cannot deliver the optimum result, and that when these occur, the state may legitimately intervene. He recognizes such a thing as the social interest and will even endorse some limited redistributionalism—he goes so far as to suggest that the state ensure a minimum standard of living, an idea that surely embarrasses the good folks at Cato. Politically, Hayek is not the cynic I had braced for. Plainly, transparently—and in stark contrast to many modern conservative intellectuals—he is a man concerned with human freedom. One of the unexpected things in Road is that he writes with passion against class privilege. Hayek is by no means as rational and irrefutable as the right would have it. Indeed, he is often eccentric. He is a romantic, a serious deficit in a social theorist. Many of his arguments rest on a reductionist idea of socialism, and his conception of the sources of law can only be called mystical. But Hayek is not merely an eccentric mystic. In Road, first published in 1944, he makes a powerful and far-ranging critique of state control of economic life. At least as far as he takes the argument in this book, there isn’t much that thoughtful modern liberals or even democratic socialists who understand the power of markets would necessarily object to—although they might feel that there is more to the story than Hayek acknowledges. . . . Read the rest here: http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=992.

"Law and Politics, Nature and Revelation: Leo Strauss in the European-American Conversation," Tilburg University, May 29-30, 2008.

Although more than three decades have passed since his decease, the political philosopher Leo Strauss continues to remain in ‘the odor of controversy’. The conference aims to address this issue from a fresh and largely unexplored angle. With the publication of Strauss’s collected works, a great number of early writings, some of which were unknown, have become available (Gesammelte Schriften, edited by H. and W. Meier, Vol. 1-3, 1996-2001). These writings reveal Strauss making a number of important scholarly discoveries with profound philosophical impact, developing a distinct voice as a thinker, and trying to make himself heard in the intellectual clamour of the Weimar years. Moreover, they throw additional and intriguing light on several of the core themes of his thought: reason and revelation, ancients and moderns, as well as philosophy and politics. When the war forced him to flee Europe in 1938, the midst of his life and academic trajectory, Strauss found hospitable refuge in the United States, where he was challenged to find his bearings anew. There, he embarked on an impressive career that was as influential as it was controversial: since his death in 1973, the debate surrounding his work never completely subsided, and a recent flare-up occurred when he was accused of having been a godfather to the neo-conservative movement. In the light of this turbulent reception, the publication of the early writings offer an excellent opportunity to Strauss scholars and interpreters to discuss the question of how the European half of Strauss’s life and thought relates to the American half. The conference seeks to address this topic through a variety of subsidiary questions, such as the following:

• How should we assess the value of Strauss’s European work for the understanding of his American work (and vice versa)?
• To what extent did Strauss’s passage to the United States compel him to reorient his work as a scholar and as a political philosopher?
• To what extent does the early work shed additional light on Strauss as a Jewish thinker?
• Does the early work allow us to reconstruct what might have been Strauss’s contribution to what is called the ‘Weimar conversation’ concerning law, politics and religion?
• To what extent does the early work invite us to reconsider existing interpretations of Strauss’s position vis-à-vis contemporaries such as Max Weber, Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt and Alexandre Kojève?
• How does the early work allow us to address the critical reception of Strauss as the putative godfather of American neo-conservatism?

Participation in the conference is free of charge, but we kindly ask that you register online.

Further details are here: http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/faculties/humanities/dphil/strauss/.

"Littérature et Vérité," Département de Philosophie, Université de Genève, 14 mai, 2008.

Matin, salle U159, Dufour:

• 9h30-10h15 Jean Marie Schaeffer (Paris) De quelques régimes de vérité (et de fausseté) littéraire
• 10h15- 12h 30 Carola Barbero (Turin) Pleurer et croire: une réponse au paradoxe de la fiction

Après-midi, salle A123, Bastions

• 14h - 15h15 Stelios Virvidakis (Athènes), La critique littéraire a-t-elle besoin de la notion de vérité?
• 15h30-16h45 Patrizia Lombardo (Genève), “la vérité, l'âpre vérité”
• 17h- 18h15 Maurizio Ferraris (Turin), Pleurer et rire vraiment

Le colloque est gratuit et ouvert à tous. Further details are here: http://www.unige.ch/lettres/philo/evenements/2008/LitteratureEtVerite.html.

McLemee, Scott. "Becoming Richard Rorty." INSIDE HIGHER ED May 7, 2008.

Gross, Neil. Richard Rorty: the Making of an American Philosopher, 1931-1982. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Neil Gross’s book . . . is not exactly a biography of its subject, who died last year. Rather, it is a study of how institutional forces shape an intellectual’s sense of personal identity, and vice versa. . . . Influenced by recent work in sociological theory – but with one eye constantly on the archive of personal correspondence, unpublished writings, and departmental memoranda – Gross reconstructs how Rorty’s interests and intellectual commitments developed within the disciplinary matrix of academic philosophy. He takes the story up through the transformative and sui generis work of Rorty’s middle years, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Consequences of Pragmatism (1982). This includes a look at Rorty’s complicated and unhappy relationship with his colleagues at Princeton University in the 1970s. “I find it a bit terrifying,” he wrote in a letter at the time, “that we keep turning out Ph.D.’s who quite seriously conceive of philosophy as a discipline in which one does not read anything written before 1970, except for the purposes of passing odd examinations.” . . . Read the rest here: http://insidehighered.com/views/2008/05/07/mclemee.

Tindall, Gillian. "Review of Seymour-Jones' GLUED TOGETHER BY THEIR LIVES." LITERARY REVIEW (April 2008).

Seymour-Jones, Carole. Glued Together by their Lies: a Dangerous Liaison. Thomaston, ME: Century Press, 2007. Let me put my cards on the table. On many occasions, both in France and in England, I have heard or read women of my own generation, the generation of the daughters that Simone de Beauvoir did not have, say what an important book her Le Deuxième Sexe was to them in youth, how it shaped their thinking. I listen uncomprehendingly. To me, this, Beauvoir's most famous work, is a baggy, old-fashioned French academic thesis, groaning under the weight of piled-up examples of all kinds and dates. Many of its assertions were already out-of-date in even mildly liberal circles long before it was written. Yet in spite of its over-copiousness it has huge gaps in coverage and central areas of obtuseness. To believe, as Beauvoir apparently did all her life, that 'a woman is not born but made' is already a substantial handicap. A worse one, however, was her complete inability, remarked upon even by her most sympathetic contemporaries, to understand maternity as anything but a stultifying trap. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/tindall_04_08.html.

Mansfield, Harvey C. "Timeless Mind." CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS (Winter 2007).

• Sheppard, Eugene R. Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: the Making of a Political Philosopher. Waltham, MA: Brandeis UP, 2006.
• Tanguay, Daniel. Leo Strauss: an Intellectual Biography. Trans. Christopher Nadon. New Haven: Yale UP, 2007.

These two books on Leo Strauss—two more!—cover the development of Strauss's thought. They differ in two obvious ways. Daniel Tanguay is sympathetic to Strauss and might reasonably be called a Straussian, a particularly supple and elegant one. He works from within Strauss's thought, neither taking him for granted nor rejecting his premises. Eugene Sheppard is an intellectual historian who as such rejects the possibility of the "timeless mind" that Strauss accepts, and who therefore writes from a perspective outside Strauss. But he is not unfriendly to him, and thanks him for having "widened my own horizons." The other difference is over Strauss's conservatism. Tanguay thinks it to be merely "circumstantial," and to hold otherwise he regards as a "fundamental error." Sheppard, however, believes that conservatism is the key to Strauss and says so repeatedly. Strauss came to America "an obscure conservative immigrant," and there acquired his "American persona" as a conservative. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1505/article_detail.asp.

Murray, Charles. "The Age of Educational Romanticism." NEW CRITERION (May 2008).

This is the story of educational romanticism in elementary and secondary schools —its rise, its etiology, and, we have reason to hope, its approaching demise. Educational romanticism consists of the belief that just about all children who are not doing well in school have the potential to do much better. Correlatively, educational romantics believe that the academic achievement of children is determined mainly by the opportunities they receive; that innate intellectual limits (if they exist at all) play a minor role; and that the current K-12 schools have huge room for improvement. Educational romanticism characterizes reformers of both Left and Right, though in different ways. Educational romantics of the Left focus on race, class, and gender. It is children of color, children of poor parents, and girls whose performance is artificially depressed, and their academic achievement will blossom as soon as they are liberated from the racism, classism, and sexism embedded in American education. Those of the Right see public education as an ineffectual monopoly, and think that educational achievement will blossom when school choice liberates children from politically correct curricula and obdurate teachers’ unions. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-age-of-educational-romanticism-3835. The entire issue on Education is available for download here: http://www.newcriterion.com/currentissue.cfm.

Nussbaum, Martha. "Stages of Thought." NEW REPUBLIC May 7, 2008.

Philosophers often try to write about Shakespeare. Most of the time they are ill-equipped to do so. There is something irresistibly tempting in the depth and the complexity of the plays, and it lures people who respond to that complexity with abstract thought, even if for the most part they are utterly unprepared, emotionally or stylistically, to write about literary experience. Such philosophers see profound thought in Shakespeare, not wrongly. But armed with their standard analytic equipment, they frequently produce accounts that are laughably reductive, contributing little or nothing to philosophy or to the understanding of Shakespeare. To make any contribution worth caring about, a philosopher's study of Shakespeare should do three things. First and most centrally, it should really do philosophy, and not just allude to familiar philosophical ideas and positions. It should pursue tough questions and come up with something interesting and subtle--rather than just connecting Shakespeare to this or that idea from Philosophy 101. A philosopher reading Shakespeare should wonder, and ponder, in a genuinely philosophical way. Second, it should illuminate the world of the plays, attending closely enough to language and to texture that the interpretation changes the way we see the work, rather than just uses the work as grist for some argumentative mill. And finally, such a study should offer some account of why philosophical thinking needs to turn to Shakespeare's plays, or to works like them. Why must the philosopher care about these plays? Do they supply to thought something that a straightforward piece of philosophical prose cannot supply, and if so, what? . . . Read the rest here: http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=e1bd6ffa-c648-4d40-8efd-.40dd1b31b444

CFP: "Otherness and the Arts," University of Aarhus, August 8-9, 2008.

"Nobody - that's my name" (Homer, The Odyssey, VIIII).

The Delphic injunction to know thyself, to understand oneself as self, entails alienating self-reflection and the awareness that the limits of any entity, hence its individuation, are determined by what lies outside these borders - otherness. But where is this division between the I and other located? How is this schism constructed? Or can this schism even be discerned? Instead, the injunction of the Arts articulates an inverse yet more immediate approach to the problem of knowing thyself. It entails an understanding of oneself as other: the boundary between "I" and "that which I am not," necessary for our constitution as subjects, dissolves in our Homeric hero's proclamation "Nobody - that's my name."

Invited keynote speakers:

• Luce Irigaray (video conference)
• Thomas Hylland Eriksen, University of Oslo
• Svend Erik Larsen, University of Aarhus
• Eugene O'Brien, University of Limerick
• Ann McCulloch, Deakin University

The conference is open to scholars and students of all disciplines. Those wishing to participate in the conference are invited to submit an abstract of no more than 300 words to othernessconference@gmail.com by Thursday, 15 May, 2008. The convenors will let the proponents know whether their proposals have been accepted no later than 15 June, 2008. Papers may be given in English with citations in any language, and are limited to 20 minutes. Selected papers will be eligible for publication in a peer reviewed academic journal, and possibly a hard copy edited essay collection. More information may be found here: http://www.othernessandthearts.org/conference/.

CFP: "Philosophizing in/on Eastern Europe," ANGELAKI (late 2009).

Over the last several years European Union has welcomed a number of new member countries, most of which used to belong to the "Eastern bloc." While, thanks to the influence of mass-media, tourism, immigration, etc., Western Europe has come to acquire some general geographic knowledge about these countries, comparatively relatively little is known about what happens there in terms of production of knowledge and cultural artifacts, in terms of intellectual debates and marketplace of ideas. Although all of them are now part of the same "European family," there is comparatively little knowledge in the countries of the Western Europe about the cultural physiognomy of the East-European newcomers. The intellectual traffic between East and West within Europe seems to be most often one-way traffic: it is as if ideas and intelligence can only move eastwards, as though from East westwards almost nothing (intellectually valid) is to be expected or desired. As such, the face of the "new Europe" that the West most often sees is that of "le plombier polonais." The originality of thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek, Julia Kristeva, Tzvetan Todorov, Jan Patočka, Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran or Leszek Kołakowski, who have at different times made a significant contribution to the shaping of the Western intellectual discourse, is somehow taken for granted, and the character of the world they have come from is passed over in silence. They come from nowhere - out of nothing. No significant attention is being paid to their complex backgrounds, to the specificity of their cultural origins, to the unique blend of intellectual challenges and ethical concerns that shaped their thinking, strengthened their personalities and, in the end, made them who they are. The special issue we are proposing addresses precisely this situation in an attempt to bridge this gap of intellectual communication between Eastern and Western Europe. Its plan is to map out the complex intellectual landscape, the major intellectual debates and their historical origins, as well as the current marketplace of philosophical ideas in the countries of the Eastern Europe. This issue aims at offering insights into the recent (or not so recent) history of "the East-European mind" and its many facets, as well as into what takes place philosophically right now in these places. It also seeks to point to the specific contributions that East-European thinkers might have to the shaping of a new, more comprehensive European intellectual project. More importantly, this special issue will pay special attention to what connects these countries, giving them as it does a certain "family resemblance." One important thing that these East-European newcomers to the EU have in common - despite their many cultural, linguistic, political and social differences - is the fact that all of them shared, not long ago, the same historical failure: the failure of the Communist project of Soviet inspiration. Whether you are in Prague or Budapest, Riga or Bucharest, Sofia or Warsaw, you cannot help noticing the traces of this major historical event: they are everywhere, in the public discourse as well as in the private conversations, in the ways people articulate their thoughts, in the language itself. For people living in Eastern Europe simple words such as "freedom," "human rights," "Communism," "capitalism," "left" and "right," "poverty" and "inequality" mean something different from what they do for someone who has been living in Western Europe. Much of what happens intellectually and philosophically in these places is deeply marked by the haunting memory of this historical failure of grand proportions, with its accompanying sense of immense collective suffering, frustration and bitterness. That being said, it might be precisely this failure, frustration and bitterness, that place the East-Europeans - somehow paradoxically - in a philosophically interesting and potentially creative position. It is exactly the point that Václav Havel made in a speech in 1990. For him, the failed Soviet system left behind "a legacy of countless dead, an infinite spectrum of human suffering, profound economic decline, and above all enormous human humiliation. [.] At the same time, however unintentionally, . it has given us something positive: a special capacity to look, from time to time, somewhat further than someone who has not undergone this bitter experience. A person who cannot move and live a normal life because he is pinned under a boulder has more time to think about his hopes than someone who is not trapped in this way. [.] We too can offer something to you: our experience and the knowledge that has come from it." The philosophizing that takes place in Eastern Europe is highly relevant today not only because it has gained some privileged access to the topics of historical failure and frailty, collective suffering and trauma, but also because it comes to bear a special relationship with the notions of hope and political renewal, ethical openness and the reinvention of the human. We invite submissions dealing with the history and the current state of philosophy and the philosophically minded disciplines in the countries of the Eastern Europe, some aspects of which have been pointed to above. Interdisciplinary approaches (combining, for example, philosophy, critical theory and intellectual history) are particularly encouraged. Submission Guidelines: Deadline for submissions: May 1, 2009 Length: 5000-7000 words You can submit your contributions to: bradatan@hotmail.com (with "For the Angelaki issue" in the subject line). Please allow at least 4-6 months for the review process and editorial decisions. Receipt of materials will be confirmed by email in a matter of days. Unless otherwise stated in this Call for Papers, the Instructions for Authors on the journal's webpage are adopted for this issue: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=0969-725x&linktype=44.

CFP: "Architecture and Phenomenology," FOOTPRINT: JOURNAL OF THE DELFT SCHOOL OF DESIGN 3.

For the third issue of Footprint (http://www.footprintjournal.org/issues/current) we are calling for papers that take accountof current discussions in philosophy and architecture on phenomenology withrespect to space, place, location. Papers which deal with the late work on‘topology’ in Heidegger, and the issue of perception and ‘inner spatiality’ inthe work of Merleau-Ponty are of immediate interest. We hope also to have papers which deal with Brentano’s work on space. A furthertopic of special interest is the critique, provided by Heidegger andMerleau-Ponty, of Descartes, and of functionalism in general. The re-reading ofAristotle by Heidegger with regard to public space, and the development of thisin the work of Arendt is also of interest. Papers are welcome on the work ofarchitects who have deployed insights from the philosophical area of researchfor their work. Examinations of the research of Casey, Malpas, Dreyfus andothers including Ihde would be a welcome addition to the issue, either in theform of short notices or reviews. Articles will be peer reviewed, and the issue is expected to be available atthe beginning of October. All papers and correspondence should be sent to theeditors, Patrick Healy, Brendan O'Byrne, e-mail P.E.Healy@tudelft.nl and marked issue no.3. The deadline for submissions is the 15th of June 2008. Papers shouldbe between 6-8000 words,please see 'Guidelines for Authors' through the link here: http://www.footprintjournal.org/paper_submission.

Hall, Stuart. "The Life of Raymond Williams." NEW STATESMAN February 21, 2008.

(First published February 5, 1988.) I first met him in Oxford in the mid-1950s when a number of us, looking for a way out of the impasse of the elitism of F. R. Leavis’s reading of English literary traditions, were given by him, and read with mounting excitement, the early chapters of what was to become Culture and Society. Thereafter, our paths continually crossed. He became a contributor to and a key figure in the early New Left. In 1966, he took the lead in drafting the May Day Manifesto, an attempt to formulate a socialist alternative to Harold Wilson’s grimly technocratic vision. Intellectually, his work dominated the development of cultural studies. He was a founder member of the Socialist Society. I never had the privilege of being taught by him, but he was the most formative intellectual influence on my life. I often had the uncanny feeling that we had stumbled unawares on to the same line of thinking — only he had given it, already, so lucid and compelling a formulation. However, it is through his work and writing that he influenced several generations across the world, and it is by this that future generations will measure him. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.newstatesman.com/200802210055.

Adler, Jeremy. "Novalis and Philo-Sophie." TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT April 16, 2008.

• Novalis. Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia. Trans. and ed. David W. Wood. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.
• Novalis. The Birth of Novalis: Friedrich von Hardenberg's Journal of 1797, with Selected Letters and Documents. Trans. and ed. Bruce Donehower. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.

The success of the French Encyclopédie and its place in the Enlightenment has tended to obscure the role of encyclopaedism in German culture. Yet the ideal of universal knowledge has been a potent force in Germany, shaping the way the nation defined itself ever since the seventeenth century. Novalis played a key part in this debate, not least in seeking to redefine what he called “total science” – his name for encyclopaedism – as a means to achieve cultural renewal. Yet he was sentimentalized after his early death as the dreamy poet of the Blue Flower, and while this ensured his posthumous appeal, it resulted in the comparative neglect of his philosophy. His contribution to German idealism was only fully revealed, a century and a half after his death, by the editors of the critical edition of his works, a literary monument forty years in the making (reviewed in the TLS, October 13, 2000). The edition showed the full extent of the unpublished journals and notebooks, including hundreds of jottings and aphorisms, often circling round a plan for a Romantic encyclopaedia. The new image of Novalis, not unlike that of Coleridge brought about by the editing of his Notebooks, led to a wider revaluation, in which the Romantic dreamer has given way to the incisive philosopher. Now, two centuries after his death, the new material is at long last becoming available in English. . . . Read the rest here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3757477.ece.

Tavris, Carol. "It's All in the Behavioural-Genetics." TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT April 16, 2008.

What a difference a century makes. One hundred years ago, Sigmund Freud’s answer to Daniel Nettle’s question – “What makes you the way you are?” – would have begun with your unconscious mind: the unique pattern of fantasies, defences, and instinctual conflicts that create your neurotic insecurities and self-defeating habits. These unconscious mechanisms would, in turn, have been profoundly influenced by your parents, who overpunished you or underappreciated you, who told you too much about sex or not enough. You can’t do much about your personality, though you can tweak it a bit with years of psychoanalysis. Today, personality researchers almost uniformly agree that the things that make you the way you are consist of a combination of your genes, your peers and the idiosyncratic, chance experiences that befall you in childhood and adulthood. Your parents influence your relationship with them – loving or contentious, conflicted or close – but not your “personality”, that package of traits we label extroverted or shy, bitter or friendly, hostile or warm, gloomy or optimistic. Your genes, not your parents, are the reason you think that parachuting out of planes is fun, or, conversely, that you feel sick to the stomach at the mere idea of doing such a crazy thing voluntarily. You can’t do much about your personality, though you can tweak it a bit with cognitive therapy. . . . Read the whole article here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3757737.ece.

Kemp, Gary. "Croce's Aesthetics." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY May 4, 2008.

The Neapolitan Benedetto Croce (1860–1952) was a dominant figure in the first half of the twentieth century in aesthetics and literary criticism as well as philosophy generally, but his fame did not last, in either Italy or the English speaking world. He did not lack promulgators and willing translators into English; H. Carr was an early example of the former, R. G. Collingwood was both, and D. Ainslie did the latter service for most of Croce's principal works. But his star rapidly declined after the Second World War. Indeed it is hard to find a figure whose reputation has fallen so far and so quickly; the fact is somewhat unfair not least because Collingwood's aesthetics is still studied, when it is mostly borrowed from Croce. The causes are a matter for speculation, but two are likely. First, Croce's general philosophy was very much of the preceding century. As the idealistic and historicist systems of Bradley, Green, and Joachim were in Britain superseded by Russell and Ayer and analytical philosophy, Croce's system was swept away by new ideas on the continent—from Heidegger on the one hand to deconstructionism on the other. Second, Croce's manner of presentation in his famous early works now seems, not to put too fine a point on it, dismissively dogmatic; it is full of the youthful conviction and fury that seldom wears well. On certain key points, opposing positions are characterized as foolish, or as confused expressions of simple truths that only waited upon Croce to articulate properly. Of course, these dismissals carry some weight—Croce's reading is prodigious and there is more insight beneath the words than initially meets the eye—but unless the reader were already convinced that here at last is the truth, their sheer number and vehemence will arouse mistrust. And since the early works, along with his long running editorship of the journal La Critica, rocketed him to such fame and admiration, whereas later years were devoted among other things to battling with while being tolerated by fascists, it's not surprising that he never quite lost this habit. . . . Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/croce-aesthetics/.

Quentin Meillassoux at CRMEP, Middlesex University

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University: Quentin Meillassoux (Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris) will speak on the topic "Time without Becoming" on May 8 at 5.30 pm.

CFP: "Rhetoric in Society 2," Leiden University, January 21-23, 2009.

Update (May 1, 2008): Introduction: The classical rhetoricians already knew the truth: power is the preserve of those who know how to use words. The theory of rhetorical tools was invented in order to advise a speaker to persuade an audience of the legitimacy of a legal or political stance or to praise or blame the famous. Constraints of time, prejudice and sheer noise could interfere with the speech event, and so the orator had to know how to attract and keep attention. No communication without rhetoric: Nowadays, we know that rhetoric pervades any discourse. There is no communication without rhetoric. The need for rhetorical theory is therefore even more urgent, not only because we want to know how to reach an audience that is overloaded with stimuli, but because we want the audience to be capable of critically evaluating what is addressed to them. In a society with ever increasing amounts of information and with media whose significance cannot be overestimated, we need to know about the mechanisms playing a role in gathering, making and reporting of information and opinions, and how it is processed by an audience. Extended perspectives and genres: in order to meet these objectives it is necessary that the study of rhetoric be enriched with perspectives and insights from related disciplines such as argumentation theory, discourse analysis, text linguistics and cognition as well as communication and information theory. This recognition has resulted in a vast body of theoretical discussions on the relation between rhetoric, argumentation and discourse as well as in the emergence of empirical research of different kinds, and in many analytical studies in which persuasive means in a speech event have been established. Twenty-first century rhetoric: the traditional genres have been extended to all kinds of other discourse events, from public relations texts and advertisements to mediated discourse, organizational communication and scientific texts. Nowadays developments in new media and the impact on society of e-mail, e-zines, digital discussion fora, blogs, civil journalism and the use of internet in all parts of daily life have thrown new light on the tasks and functions of rhetoric and persuasion. Original Post (December 27, 2007): The conference aims at presenting and discussing different approaches to rhetoric. The conference welcomes contributions within a wide range of subjects, from modern applications of classical approaches, rhetorical criticism, argumentation studies, communication studies, to journalism studies and new media studies. We welcome contributions on the role of rhetoric and argumentation in written and oral discourse and genres, on topics such as: public deliberation, controversies, legal decision-making, spin, hyphenate writing, social change, political campaigning, social movements, public relations, publicity, advertising, management, corporate internal communication, art and literature, visual rhetoric and public media discourse.

The conference subject falls under four headings:

• Rhetoric in Journalism and New Media
• Rhetoric in Political Discourse
• Rhetoric in Organisational Discourse
• Rhetoric in Legal Discourse

Keynote speakers:

• Joel Best is Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware, Newark DE. From the theoretical perspective of social construction, Best has published many articles and more than ten books about the rhetoric of media in society, for example Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern about Child-Victims (1990), Random Violence: How we Talk about New Crimes and New Victims (1999) and – his latest book – about the way society constructs his own major problems: Social Problems (2007). http://www.udel.edu/soc/faculty/vita/jbestF06.pdf.
• Daniel J. O'Keefe is Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois, USA). His publications concern rhetoric, communication, and argumentation theory, with a special focus on persuasion theory and meta-analysis of persuasion effects research. He has received many awards for his publications and teaching, including the Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division Distinguished Scholar Award. O'Keefe is the author of Persuasion: Theory and Research (Sage Publications, 1990; 2nd ed. 2002). http://www.dokeefe.net/
• Ineke Sluiter is Professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Leiden. Her interests concern rhetoric, cultural identity, ancient ideas on language and literature, ancient values and norms and free speech. She has dealt with these subjects in many publications, in which she often draws lines between the classical past and the present, as is reflected in titles like 'Communicating Cynicism: Diogenes’ Gangsta Rap'. Her presentation for the prestigious annual Dies Lecture for the university's 430th anniversary was also devoted to this theme. http://leidsewetenschappers.leidenuniv.nl/show_en.php3?medewerker_id=63

Abstracts Deadline for abstracts is 15th June 2008, 12.00 a.m. Central European time. Contributions are accepted in English only. Please send your abstract in max. 300 words edited in MS Word to InfoRhetoricLeiden@let.leidenuniv.nl. The abstract should include a title, a research question, an indication of the theoretical framework, methodology, results and conclusion. The academic committee will review the abstracts. Before September 15 you will hear whether your proposal has been accepted.

Proceedings Proceedings will be digitally published after the conference on the conference website and cd. A selection of the proceedings will be published in book form. Fees € 200,- (including lunches, coffee, tea and other drinks (‘borrel’) Special rate for undergraduate students: € 10,- per day (lunch not included)

The first and successful edition of Rhetoric in Society was organized by Aalborg University (Denmark), November 21-24, 2006. See http://diskurs.hum.aau.dk/rhetorics2006/

Academic Committee

• Prof. dr. Ton van Haaften (Speech Communication, Faculty of Arts Leiden University)
• Dr. Henrike Jansen (Speech Communication, Faculty of Arts Leiden University)
• Dr. Jaap de Jong (Journalism and New Media, Faculty of Arts Leiden University)
• Dr. Willem Koetsenruijter (Journalism and New Media, Faculty of Arts Leiden University)

For more information, please visit: http://www.rhetoricinsociety.nl/.

"Transatlantic Reverberations: Prospects of Pragmatic Humanism," University of Lodz, September 27-30, 2008.

The term "humanism" has been used by F.C.S Schiller to describe his own brand of pragmatism, and by William James to express the basic goal of pragmatist movement. This goal was to call attention to the richness and plurality of human experience, and to attack serious challenges facing civilization from a pragmatic perspective, free of the modern infatuation with certainty and abstract theory. Thus, classical pragmatists took up some of the intellectual goals of Renaissance humanists such as Erasmus and Montaigne. Today the interest in Pragmatic Humanism is revived by eminent thinkers on both sides of the ocean who urge that we abandon modern interest in certainty, epistemic foundations, and purely theoretical problems and return to practical philosophizing sensitive to local problems facing particular communities in particular historical contexts. While these thinkers do not form a homogenous movement, they share several substantive and methodological interests: to study rationality and knowledge from the vantage point of pragmatics or rhetoric of discourse; to see intellectual activities as embodied in specific systems of beliefs, institutional settings, oral traditions, and cultural practices; to view basic philosophical problems in a social-historical context; and to revive interest in philosophy as a form of experience and an art of living. Papers are invited from all fields of philosophy, especially these dealing with current philosophical problems from a pragmatist perspective and those that address the issue of rapprochement of American pragmatism (and neo-pragmatism) and various trends in contemporary European philosophy. Publication of a selection of papers from Pragmatic Humanism Forum is envisaged. Please send paper proposals and abstracts to Mateusz Oleksy at oleksy@filozof.uni.lodz.pl by May 30, 2008. Visit the conference website here: http://www.trans2008.pl/?page=humanism.

"Maurice Blanchot et la Philosophie," l'Université de Paris X – Nanterre, 13 au 15 Mai, 2008.

For the full programme, please visit: http://www.mauriceblanchot.net/blog/index.php/2008/01/23/198-colloque-international-maurice-blanchot-et-la-philosophie-13-au-15-mai-2008-universite-paris-10-nanterre.

Davis, Natalie Zemon. "The Quest of Michel De Certeau." NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOK May 15, 2008.

Whether writing about madness and mysticism in the seventeenth century, South American resistance movements in the past and present, or the practice of everyday life in the twentieth century, Certeau developed a distinctive way of interpreting social and personal relations. In contrast to those who described societies by evoking what he called their homogeneities and hegemonies—what unified and controlled them—Certeau wanted to identify the creative and disruptive presence of "the other"—the outsider, the stranger, the alien, the subversive, the radically different—in systems of power and thought. He found it not only in the ways people imagined figures distant from themselves (as in Michel de Montaigne's famous essay on the "Cannibals" of the Amazon), but also in behaviors and groups close to home, in the ever-present tensions at the heart of all social life, whether in schools, religious institutions, or the mass media. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21375.

Frost-Arnold, Greg. "Review of Alan Richardson, et al., eds. CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO LOGICAL EMPIRICISM." NDPR May 1, 2008.

Richardson, Alan, and Thomas Uebel, eds. Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism. Cambridge: CUP, 2007. For much of the second half of the 20th Century, the primary role logical empiricism played was that of the argumentative foil. The 'received view' on a given topic (especially in philosophy of science, logic, or language) was frequently identified with some supposedly dogmatic tenet of logical empiricism. However, during the last twenty-five years, scholars have paid serious, sustained attention to what the logical positivists, individually and collectively, actually said. Early scholarship on logical empiricism had to engage in heavy-duty PR work: why should anyone study the now-discarded mixture of blunders and implausibilities collected under the label 'logical empiricism'? However, thanks to the efforts of the pioneers, people studying the logical empiricists today need not articulate an extended apologia for their chosen subject of study -- rather, they can simply get on with their work. Many of the best fruits of these recent labors are on display in Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism (CCLE), edited by Alan Richardson and Thomas Uebel. The quality of the fourteen chapters ranges from high to quite high. The only substantive unevenness between chapters is in purpose and scope: certain chapters are introductory survey articles, while others read like journal articles -- though most contributions lie somewhere between these two extremes. In this review, I first discuss certain leitmotivs running through the Companion, and then briefly discuss each chapter. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13005.

Riera, Gabriel. "Review of Antonio Calcagno's BADIOU AND DERRIDA." NDPR May 2, 2008.

Calcagno, Antonio. Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and their Time. London: Continuum, 2008. Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and their Time brings together two major thinkers for whom the question of the political is the question of our century. Some common features between these two philosophers are evident: for both philosophy is an act of resistance (with all the richness and ambiguity that resonates in this term); they approach the political as a field in which to wage war against the sovereign One. For Derrida, the central question which governs the deconstruction of the political is the question of the One that produces violence and protects itself from the other, while for Alain Badiou, insofar as the One is the result of an operation of counting (the counting-as-one) of multiplicities, it closes off any possibility of thinking the event, that which suddenly comes to the impersonality of Being, that which exceeds Being qua Being and thus demands a process of subjectivation and fidelity to the event's truth. Badiou's ontology, not unlike Derrida's deconstruction of the sign and its radical re-conceptualization of writing, is a war machine against the metaphysics of the One, the only possible way to treat politics, according to Badiou, as one of the four conditions of philosophy. They both subscribe to a "militant political critique without end" [Jacques Derrida, Rogues] of normative theoretical and institutional discourses and practices. For both, Derrida and Badiou, the political cannot be simply conceived as consensus building or as simple management of the economy. Antonio Calcagno engages in a detailed examination of the relationship between politics and time through the works Derrida and Badiou. This is the first book that brings together the two leading French thinkers, and it does so in view of positing a theory of the relationship of time and politics able to account for both political undecidability (Derrida) and decidability (Badiou). Whether this theory is viable, especially since Badiou is being mobilized to achieve a certain "overcoming" of "the Derridean aporia of the double bind" [2], is a matter of debate. Contemporary philosophy has taught us to pause when coming across a desire to achieve any overcoming too hastily; Heidegger's is the case that comes to mind. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13023.

Kenneally, Christine. "When Language Can Hold the Answer." NEW YORK TIMES April 22, 2008.

In stark form, the debate was: Does language shape what we perceive, a position associated with the late Benjamin Lee Whorf, or are our perceptions pure sensory impressions, immune to the arbitrary ways that language carves up the world? Naming, Dr. Lupyan concluded, helps to create mental categories. . . . Read the whole article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/science/22lang.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin.

Schaefer, David Lewis. "Robert Nozick and the Coast of Utopia." NEW YORK SUN April 30, 2008.

In 1971, a previously obscure Harvard philosophy professor, John Rawls, published a book that ultimately brought him acclaim as “America’s greatest political philosopher.” In the book, A Theory of Justice, Rawls set forth an account of justice in the form of two principles, ordaining respectively that people’s “equal basic liberties” — such rights as freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the right to vote — should be maximized, and that inequalities in social and economic goods other than liberty are acceptable only if they promote the welfare of the “least advantaged” members of society. (He termed the latter the “difference principle.”) Three years after the appearance of Theory, a departmental colleague of Rawls, Robert Nozick, published a libertarian response, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which argued that nothing more than a “minimal state” devoted to protecting people against crimes like assault, robbery, and fraud could be morally justified. Nozick’s book was far more concise than Rawls’s Theory, and Anarchy, State, and Utopia did not go unnoticed: It won the 1975 National Book Award and was later listed by the Times Literary Supplement as one of the 100 most influential books of the 20th century. Anarchy remains a staple of the syllabus in courses on political theory, where it is usually juxtaposed with selections from Rawls to suggest that Rawls’s welfare-state liberalism and Nozick’s libertarianism represent the full spectrum of possibilities for contemporary liberal democracies. Nonetheless, Nozick’s reputation and influence in the academy — to say nothing of his name recognition in the broader world of law and politics — have never rivaled those of his colleague. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nysun.com/sports/reconsiderations-robert-nozick-and-coast-utopia.