Wolin, Richard. "Reason vs. Faith: the Battle Continues." CHRONICLE June 15, 2009.

In 1802 Georg W.F. Hegel wrote an impassioned treatise on faith and reason, articulating the major philosophical conflict of the day. Among European intellectual circles, the Enlightenment credo, which celebrated the "sovereignty of reason," had recently triumphed. From that standpoint, human intellect was a self-sufficient measure of the true, the just, and the good. The outlook's real target, of course, was religion, which the philosophes viewed as the last redoubt of delusion and superstition. Theological claims, they held, could only lead mankind astray. Once the last ramparts of unreason were breached — our mental Bastilles, as it were — sovereign reason would take command and, presumably, human perfection would not be long in coming. Soon legions of skeptics and naysayers emerged to cast doubt on the Enlightenment's presumptuous self-conceit. By making the lowly human intellect the measure of all truth, weren't the philosophes arbitrarily isolating humanity from the possibility of attaining a higher order of truth? Who would really want to inhabit a totally enlightened universe, denuded of mystery, plurality, and sublimity? What if ultimate reality weren't attainable by the prosaic methods of cognition or secular reason? What if, instead, the Absolute had more to do with the faculties of the imagination, intuition, or the unfathomable mysteries of the human unconscious? A cursory glance at the major cultural divide of our day suggests that, in many respects, we haven't gotten much beyond the landmark dispute between faith and reason that separated the leading lights in Hegel's time. For with the notable exception of Western Europe, on nearly every continent, religion seems to have found its second wind. And it would be difficult to deny that this global revival of spirituality has occurred in pointed reaction to the broken promises of enlightened modernity. Nineteenth-century utopians like Charles Fourier speculated that, once industrial society was perfected, rivers and lakes would pulsate with lemonade, public fountains would overflow with salmon, men would learn to fly, and wild beasts would do our hunting. Instead, as we confront on a daily basis the dislocations of Western modernity — teeming cities, urban blight, industrially scarred landscapes, massive pollution, and climate change of eschatological proportions — it seems as though Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West was more clairvoyant than Fourier's odes to universal harmony. Prominent secularization theorists like Peter L. Berger who, as recently as the 1960s, openly conceded religion's demise, are having to radically alter their forecasts. They have had to invent new concepts and categories to describe the phenomenon of religion's unexpected global resurgence. The philosopher Jurgen Habermas now felicitously refers to the advent of a "postsecular society" to characterize religiosity's remarkable staying power. In recent works such as Between Naturalism and Religion (Polity Press, 2008), he questions whether modern societies possess the moral resources to persevere without relying on their religious roots — the Judeo-Christian basis of secular ethics, for example. And Berger himself, who was once secularization theory's most vocal proponent, has expressed his change of heart in a book title, The Desecularization of the World (W.B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999). . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i39/39wolinsecularage.htm.

"Literary Theorists of Late Renaissance Italy," University of Agder, Norway, July 4-5, 2009.

The Kristiansand Renaissance seminar is a research forum for specialists in the Early Modern period in the Nordic countries and beyond. It is part of the activities of the research programme in Early Modern Urban Culture at University of Agder, Kristiansand, which focuses on relations between literary arts and urbanism in Renaissance Europe. The summer 2009 seminar concerns literary theorists of the late Renaissance. The seminar features papers on Castelvetro, Varchi, Fracastoro, Robortello, Tasso and Gaurini. Speakers include: Morten Bartnfs, University of Agder / University of Tromsx Clare Guest, University of Agder Claudia Rossignoli, University of St Andrews Stefano Rota, Swedish Institute in Rome / Libera Universita Maria Santissima Assunta, Rome Matthew Treherne, Univeristy of Leeds.

For further details, contact clare.e.guest@uia.no.

(From Renaissance Lit Blog: http://earlymodern-lit.blogspot.com/)

Claude Levi-Strauss Awarded the James Smithson Bicentennial Medal.

Esteemed French anthropologist and father of structural anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss, was awarded the Smithsonian Institution’s James Smithson Bicentennial Medal last week. Lévi-Strauss was nominated by the National Museum of Natural History for his “fundamental contributions to understanding the human condition and passionate personal engagement in defense of the common humanity and dignity of all peoples.” Read the Smithsonian’s press release here. (From AAA Blog: http://blog.aaanet.org/)

Westmaas, Nigel. "Recognising and Celebrating Guyanese Philosophy." STABROEK NEWS June 8, 2009.

The recent passing of renowned historian, linguist, anthropologist, and philosopher of the first order, Ivan van Sertima, allows for some preliminary musings on the subject of Guyanese philosophy, its tradition and “acceptance.” Amid all the cynicism, emigration and a multitude of other problems bedeviling Guyana after more than a half century of political and social decline, can one safely raise the issue of a Guyanese philosophical tradition? In spite of the skepticism this might attract, it is important, as Rupert Roopnaraine states in his study of Stanley Greaves, “to celebrate the garden over the ashes” and respond to an often overlooked legacy. Guyana possesses a history of philosophical enquiry and output rarely acknowledged, perhaps on account of the guilt and division amplified by our pre and post independence condition (if a situation such as “post-independence” still exists). What exactly is philosophy and can we extend its usage here? To appreciate philosophy’s use we must eliminate the mystique from the term itself. The Concise Oxford Dictionary describes it as 1. Study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and existence/a set of theories of a particular philosopher/the study of the theoretical basis of a branch of knowledge or existence 2. a theory or attitude that guides one’s behaviour. The term “philosophy” then in its broad sense and tradition is very rich and embraces many areas of learning. Evidently, the accreditation “philosophy” has for too long been restricted to the domain of mainstream western philosophers like Socrates, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Herbert Spencer, Arthur Schopenhauer or Karl Marx. While Kant, Marx et al are important philosophers and thinkers who should be read and appreciated, they are not the only source of human thinking and philosophy on a global scale. Many local contributions and bodies of work have been unconsciously disregarded because of probable insecurity on what constitutes philosophy and a lack of confidence in the assertion. But how do we define Guyanese philosophy? . . . Read the rest here: http://www.stabroeknews.com/2009/features/06/08/recognizing-and-celebrating-guyanese-philosophy/. [you may have to keep trying to access the article as the Stabroeknews.com website is very unreliable]

Heinze, Eric. "Imperialism and Nationalism in Early Modernity . . . in Shakespeare's CYMBELINE." JOURNAL OF SOCIAL AND LEGAL STUDIES 18.3 (2009): .

Abstract: the discourses of conquering empire and vassal nation are varied, often internally contradictory. The empire may represent openness and diversity, or militarist brutality. The underling nation may represent autonomy and self-determination, or narrow provincialism. Those discourses spawn ideologies of liberation (‘the empire liberates the nation’; ‘the nation must be liberated from the empire’) and counter-ideologies of oppression (‘the empire oppresses the nation from without’; ‘the empire prevents oppression by dominant national groups of subordinate national groups’). Such concepts are central to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Bound to pay tribute to Caesar Augustus, Britain’s King Cymbeline contemplates a national rebellion against pax romana, whilst at the same time exercising its own dominance over Wales and other conquered territory in the Isles. Parallels to the reign of James I are apparent, where England is embarking upon its ascent to empire, its pax britannica, in the face of Welsh, Scottish or Irish resistance. Several discourses emerge as hallmarks of power politics in early modernity: cosmopolitan empire, oppressive empire, cosmopolitan nation, oppressive nation. Download the paper here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1398703.

Souffrant, Eddy M. Review of Joshua Glasgow's A THEORY OF RACE. NDPR (June 2009).

Glasgow, Joshua. A Theory of Race. London: Routledge, 2009. Joshua Glasgow's A Theory of Race . . . accounts for both the denial that race is biologically real and the relevance of race as a social concept. In seven chapters and an afterword, Glasgow undertakes his exploration of the concept of race and the contemporary literature it has spawned. He enlists the help of some of the prominent race theorists of our time ranging from Kwame Anthony Appiah to Naomi Zack, Linda Martín Alcoff, Jorge Gracia, Michele Moody-Adams, Lucius Outlaw, Anna Stubblefield, Ronald Sundstrom and Paul Taylor, to name but a few of the authors whose views are considered in the text. These authors of race theories help Glasgow explain the race debate and facilitate his goal to have us understand the concept of race and what it entails. From this foundational exposition, Glasgow proceeds to consider the various constituents of, and justifications for, racial discourse. Racial discourse depends on the reality of race. That bond informs any viable theory of race. A sustainable racial discourse is gauged by that basic standard of reality. What if race is not real? What becomes then of racial discourse? Glasgow's innovative approach answers both the problems inherent in my scenarios as they are presented above and the apparent ontological challenge that racial discourse engenders. Glasgow argues that even if there is no biological basis for race and race is an illusion, it does not follow that racial discourse should be eliminated. Instead he proposes to "reconstruct racial discourse . . . to eliminate the biological pretensions of that discourse . . . [and also] to eliminate any racist pretensions" (136). . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16334.

Cfp: "Rethinking 1968," Special Issue of PHAENEX (forthcoming).

The events of 1968 shook the world. On the 40th anniversary of the protests in France, Germany and the United States, the EPTC organized a series of panels to investigate these industrial and student actions, and whether they can serve as a basis for critiquing our current political climate. We want to ask if the philosophical underpinnings of these revolutionary acts have continued relevance today. For example, in France, the French phenomenologist and existentialist, turned Marxist, Jean-Paul Sartre was held up as one of the intellectuals who could provide an intellectual basis for the revolution. Alongside structuralists like Althusser, Sartre was viewed as an intellectual god-father of the movement, not only because of his writings critical of capitalism and the bourgeois system, be they his early writings on existentialism, or his later reformulation of Marxism in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, nor because he linked left-wing activism in the first world with support for the oppressed elsewhere, but because he was willing to lend his name and support to the Maoists against the Gaullist government. Similarly, in Germany, two philosophers, the phenomenologically-inspired and Marxist Herbert Marcuse and the neo-Marxist and member of the Frankfurt School Jürgen Habermas were central figures for the student revolutionaries. As a member of the Frankfurt School’s second generation, Habermas was viewed by the students as safely removed from the alleged post-World War II conservatism of Adorno and Horkheimer. For the first several years following its publication, Habermas’s habilitation thesis, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, was a text central to the student struggle in Germany. Similarly, Marcuse’s texts, Reason and Revolution, Eros and Civilization, and One-Dimensional Man, as well as his occasional writings, were used as rallying cries by the left both in Europe and in the United States. The question we propose for this volume is, what relevance do these philosophers’s works have today, in light of the continued expansion of the capitalist system, and the fact that student leaders like Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Bernard Kouchner, and Joschka Fischer have renounced extra-political activities and joined the political mainstream. We are interested in papers that explore the relevance of the philosophical critiques that inspired the movements of 1968 for present day radical politics, including papers that use the philosophical inspirations behind 1968: (1) To critique global capitalism while providing a positive way forward, (2) To examine American hegemony, (3) To examine possibilities for overturning existing political structures in either the developed or developing world, (4) To examine issues surrounding the environment or environmental justice, (5) Or any other topic, provided that the paper deals extensively with the philosophical ideas of 1968 and their relevance for today’s changed political landscape. Interested authors should submit a copy of their paper in RTF or WORD format to PhaenEx's website (http://www.phaenex.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/phaenex). Queries should be sent to: Kevin W. Gray at kevin-william.gray.1@ulaval.ca. The submission deadline is July 1, 2009.

"Reading Sartre: on Phenomenology and Existentialism," a Series of Three Workshops.

"Sartre on Self and Other," Cardiff University, November 18, 2009: "The Irreal in Non-Representational Painting" – Andreas Elpidorou (Boston) "You Can't Get Something For Nothing: Sartre's Argument for Freedom" – Matt Eshleman (North Carolina Wilmington) "The Transcendental Nature of Sartre's Philosophy" – Sebastian Gardner (UCL) "Imagination and Affective Response" – Robert Hopkins (Sheffield) "Magic in Sartre's Early Philosophy" – Sarah Richmond (UCL) "Sartre on Ethics and Existentialism," Institute of Philosophy, University of London, September 17, 2009: "The Ethics of Authenticity" – Christine Daigle (Brock) "Being Colonized" – Azzedine Haddour (UCL) "The Literary and the Philosophical" – Andrew Leak (UCL) "The Social Dimension of Bad Faith" – Jonathan Webber (Cardiff) "Sartre on Experience and Reality," Cardiff University, July 16, 2009: "Focusing and Positing: the Trouble with Self-Consciousness" – Anthony Hatzimoysis (Athens) "The Ungraceful and the Obscene" – Katherine Morris (Oxford) "Knowledge of Other People" – Tony Stone (London South Bank) "Subjectivity and the Transcendence of the Ego" – Ken Williford (St Cloud) "Shame and Self-Conscious Emotions" – Dan Zahavi (Copenhagen) Further information may be found here: http://www.jonathanwebber.co.uk/reading-sartre.html.

Sellers, Mortimer. "The Influence of Marcus Tullius Cicero on Modern Legal and Political Ideas." CICERONIA (2008).

Abstract: Marcus Tullius Cicero is the father of modern law and politics. Cicero's influence was significant throughout subsequent European history, but never so much nor so directly as in the emergence of modernity and in the development of modern law and constitutional government. The early moderns became faithful apostles of Cicero's thought and ideals because their world and political circumstances were in many ways closer to those of Cicero than to those of any intervening centuries. The influence of Cicero's legal and political ideas on the modern world illustrates the decisive importance that the study of history can have on legal innovation and social change. The modern world would not have developed where it did, when it did, nor as it did were it not for the life and writings of Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Download the paper here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1354102.

Heald, Paul. "The Death of Law and Literature." UGA Legal Studies Research Paper 09-006.

Abstract: thirty years after the publication of James B. White's iconic The Legal Imagination, Law & Literature scholarship has gained no traction in the practice of law. This essay, prompted by a session of teaching Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden to federal judges, explains why our scholarship has no impact, but fiction itself is very influential. Download the paper here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1407698.

Gooch, John C. "Imagining the Law and the Constitution of Societal Order ..."

Abstract: legal scholar and theorist James Boyd White has challenged both lawyers and rhetoricians to imagine the law as a rhetorical and literary process (“Imagining the Law” from the 1997 anthology, The Rhetoric of Law). White contends that members of the legal profession should see law as an activity of speech and imagination that occurs in a social world (“Imagining the Law,” p. 35). He encourages members of the legal profession to look at law in its social context; in other words, instead of thinking of law as a social machine or technical system of regulations and applying its rules in a mechanical way, lawyers should engage the legal profession as an interaction of authoritative texts and as a process of legal thought and argument (“Imagining the Law,” p. 55). By asking members of the legal professional to see law as rhetoric, White encourages them to recognize the socially constitutive nature of language, which runs contrary to a perspective of law as machine or, rather, the law as only a system of rules and regulations. My paper will extend White’s notion of imagining law as rhetorical and literary process. White has analyzed specific court cases as instances of lawyers and judges imagining the law in particular ways. In addition, scholars, particularly from communication and rhetoric, have taken inspiration from his ideas and applied them to the rhetoric of the courtroom (e.g., court testimony, judicial opinions, and narrative in legal discourse). However, I intend to take White’s concept of imagining the law and to apply it to a public address concerning constitutionality and the legal system (as opposed to analyzing transcripts from court cases). The specific case for my paper, the “Crime and the Great Society” (1965) speech from former Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker, reflects Parker’s imagining of the law and of constitutional rights – particularly the rights of the accused. (Based on my research, the speech itself represents an artifact no one has seriously studied.) My paper will show how his speech reflects a vision for the City of Los Angeles; Parker, himself, imagines the law by referencing several authoritative texts and literary works to advance his agenda for societal order in Los Angeles. In the end, Parker asks his audience, the city’s leaders and citizens, to share his vision and his imagination, and, moreover, he constitutes a societal order through his use of language. Such imaginings, however, can adversely affect the very society a rhetorician intends to strengthen if the rhetorician’s words result in negative consequences for citizens’ constitutional rights. Download the paper here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1391668.

Starger, Colin P. "The DNA of an Argument: A Case Study in Legal Logos." JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL LAW AND CRIMINOLOGY (2009).

Abstract: this article develops an original rhetorical framework for analyzing the logic of legal arguments and then applies it to unpack a post-conviction DNA testing controversy currently before the Supreme Court. My framework extends Aristotle's concept of logos by specifying different logical types of proof in legal argument. The Osborne case now before the Court concerns how DNA proof intersects with legal process and the procedural barriers to prisoners' accessing DNA evidence after conviction. After parsing the persuasive dynamics in the federal litigation preceding Osborne, I make a prediction on what argument logic will prevail in the Court. Drawing on the work of Aristotle, neo-Aristotelian argument scholars, and contemporary jurisprudence, I first construct an original taxonomy of logos that distinguishes between modes of proof in legal argument. This taxonomy characterizes prototypical differences in formal, empirical, narrative, and categorical arguments by reference to the logical and rhetorical roles of their constituent premises, inferences, and conclusions. I then use my new vocabulary to frame an in-depth case study of federal-court litigation over post-conviction access to DNA evidence under 42 U.S.C. Section 1983. I describe the history of this discourse, and engage in close readings of two arguments – the concurring opinions of Judge Michael Luttig and Chief Judge Harvie Wilkinson in the Harvey II case – that represent the competing rhetorical poles of the debate. I classify Luttig's argument logos as formal, and Wilkinson's as narrative. After examining all published decisions that have considered the Section 1983 issue since Harvey II, I argue that Luttig's formal logos has successfully persuaded federal courts. I therefore predict that Luttig's logic on the procedural dispute in Osborne will prevail at the Supreme Court. By closely dissecting this argument over DNA, I bring fresh perspective on the rhetorical DNA of a legal argument. Download the paper here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1389504.

Bix, Brian. "Law and Language: How Words Mislead Us."

Abstract: this talk was the Reappointment Lecture for the Frederick W. Thomas Chair in the Interdisciplinary Study of Law and Language at the University of Minnesota. The topic is the way that the words we use in legal doctrinal reasoning can - intentionally and unintentionally - mislead us regarding the proper outcomes of cases and the best development of the law. Connecting to the ideas of the American legal realists Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Felix Cohen, the talk uses examples from Contract Law (assent to terms in electronic contracting cases, waiver of the failure of conditions), Medical Decision-Making (deciding on behalf of incompetent patients), and Family Law (same-sex marriage, child custody, and alimony) to make general points about how we choose words to make our decisions more persuasive or more comfortable, when we should instead be using more transparent (more honest) terminology, in order better to confront the real underlying moral and policy questions. Download the paper here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1376366.

Stern, Simon. "Literary Evidence and Legal Aesthetics." TEACHING LITERATURE AND LAW. Ed. Austin Sarat, et al. New York: MLA, forthcoming.

Abstract: this short essay considers the different ways in which law professors and English professors teach courses in Law and Literature -- particularly the differences in the course materials and the analytic approaches used in understanding those materials. Courses taught on law faculties generally include fewer readings drawn from case law and legal theory. On the other hand, courses taught in English departments are more likely to emphasize similarities between the legal readings and works of fiction or drama. I discuss some of the disciplinary habits that make it difficult for faculty members in each area to come to terms with materials taken from another discipline, but I end by arguing that these barriers are not insurmountable and can even be addressed, to some extent, by focusing on analytical habits already available in the home discipline. Download the paper here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1378337.

Jaschik, Scott. "Auf Widersehen." INSIDE HIGHER ED June 12, 2009.

Last year, German scholars and other advocates for foreign language education were outraged when the University of Southern California eliminated its German department, abandoning a major in the field. It turns out that was just the start of a bad period for German in American higher education. This year, of course, the economic mess has prompted many colleges to kill programs or to draft lists of departments that may be eliminated or scaled back. USC is not alone in rethinking the need for a university to maintain a program in the language.

• At Florida State University, German (which has both bachelor's and master's programs) is on a list of programs for possible elimination, pending adoption of a final budget. The program could get word on its survival (or not) as early as today, following several months of petitions and lobbying on its behalf, and there are rumors circulating that the program may survive.
• The University of Iowa announced this month that it is suspending admissions to its master's and doctoral programs in German for at least two years.
• The University of Arkansas at Little Rock is studying the German studies major for possible elimination.
• The University of Idaho plans to eliminate an undergraduate major and a master of arts in teaching in German.
• Washington State University is planning to eliminate its German major, although there is some talk of continuing to offer first-year German.

Read the rest here: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/12/german.

"Migrations and Diasporas," Sixth Annual Conference, Caribbean Philosophy Association, University of Miami, August 12-15, 2009.

Shifting the Geography of Reason 6. The Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA) invites proposals from scholars in any discipline who aim to "shift the geography of reason" by exploring critical, theoretical, and creative questions about or relating to the Caribbean, its Diaspora, and the "global south" more generally, including the South in the North. We particularly welcome North-South and South-South intersections and/or dialogues. The theme for this meeting deals with migrations and diaspora. While proposals dealing with the broader organizing theme of the CPA ("shifting the geography of reason") will be welcome, the organizers are especially interested in presentations and panels that highlight questions about space, traveling, national and transnational communities, gender and sexuality, and issues of race and identity across migrations and diasporas not only in the Caribbean, but globally. We accept proposals in English, French, and Spanish. The principle goal of the CPA is to support the free exchange of ideas and foster an intellectual community that is truly representative of the diversity of voices and perspectives that is paradigmatic of, but not limited to, the Caribbean. The Caribbean is thus understood not solely as a geopolitical region, but more generally as a trope to investigate certain dimensions of the multiple undersides of modernity. Likewise, philosophy is conceived, not as an isolated academic discipline, but as rigorous theoretical reflection about fundamental problems faced by humanity. Understood in this way, Caribbean philosophy is a transdisciplinary form of interrogation informed by scholarly knowledges as well as by practices and artistic expressions that elucidate fundamental questions that emerge in contexts of "discovery," conquest, racial, gender, and sexual domination, genocide, dependency, and exploitation as well as freedom, emancipation, and decolonization. Reflection about these areas often appears in philosophical texts, but also in a plethora of other genres such as literature, music, and historical writings. The CPA invites theoretical engagements with all such questions, thematic areas, and genres with emphasis on any given discipline or field, but with a common interest in "shifting the geography of reason," by which we mean approaching the Caribbean and the "global south" in general as zones of sustainable practices and knowledges. As stated above, the principal areas of focus in the 2009 conference are migrations and Diasporas. See the CFP here: http://www.temple.edu/isrst/events/documents/CPA09CFP.pdf.

Young, Jeffrey R. "Six Lessons One Campus Learned About E-Textbooks." CHRONICLE June 12, 2009.

Northwest Missouri State University nearly became the first public university to deliver all of its textbooks electronically. Last year the institution's tech-happy president, Dean L. Hubbard, bought a Kindle, Amazon's e-book reading device, and liked it so much that he wanted to give every incoming student one. The university already runs an unusual textbook-rental program that buys thousands of printed books for students who pay a flat, per-credit fee. Mr. Hubbard saw in the gadget a way to drastically cut the rental program's annual $800,000 price tag, since e-books generally cost half the price of printed textbooks. Then the university ran a pilot study with the Sony Reader, a device much like the Kindle (Sony was more responsive to the university's calls than Amazon was). University officials learned some sobering lessons about electronic books. Students who got the machines quickly asked for their printed books back because it was so awkward to navigate inside the e-books (though a newer version of the device works more gracefully). Mr. Hubbard still dreams of lighter bookbags and lower costs, but the university is now moving more slowly — and running tests involving several different types of e-books. Publishers are clamoring to be part of the experiment. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i39/39a01801.htm.

Kirschner, Ann. "Reading Dickens Four Ways." CHRONICLE June 12, 2009.

Hardcover or paperback? Until recently those were our reading options. As with everything else, whether it's ice cream or television, things are much more complicated now. We are way beyond vanilla and chocolate, way beyond the corner bookstore and neighborhood library and into a multiplicity of forms and platforms and technologies and interfaces that could be dispiriting if you are inclined to worry about the death of the book. Do I love books or do I love reading? When my book group picked Little Dorrit, I found myself asking that question. Good old paid-by-the-word Dickens: I figured that it would take me months to finish nearly 1,000 pages. My reading would take place on the New York City subway, in cars and planes, on business trips and vacation, and (my all-time favorite) in bed at the end of the day. I went automatically to my old Penguin paperback, standing ready on the shelf. Never mind its familiar and friendly orange spine — I hesitated. Maybe it would make sense to read the book on the Kindle that my husband bought me last year. Then again, for my daily Manhattan life, I love audiobooks, the best choice for crowded public transportation and a wonderful companion for walking. And now that I use an iPhone, I have been surprised by the ease of reading its crisp, bright screen. I decided to read Little Dorrit four ways: paperback, audiobook, Kindle, and iPhone. It was often maddening to keep finding and losing my place as I switched from format to format. But as an experiment, it taught me a great deal about my reading habits, and about how a text reveals itself differently as the reading context changes. Along the way, I also began to make some predictions about winners and losers in the evolution of books. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i39/39b01601.htm.

Dougherty, Peter. "A Manifesto for Scholarly Publishing." CHRONICLE June 12, 2009.

While university presses grapple with the economic and technological challenges now affecting how we publish our books — the subject of a thousand and one AAUP conference sessions, e-mail-list debates, and news articles — discussion of what we publish seems to have taken a back seat. And understandably so. Why obsess about content if books as we know them are about to become obsolete in favor of some yet-to-evolve form? Has creative destruction spelled the end of books? I believe quite the opposite. Books — specifically scholarly titles published by university presses and other professional publishers — retain two distinct comparative advantages over other forms of communication in the idea bazaar. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i39/39b01001.htm.

"Publisher Appears to Have Accepted Fake Paper From Bogus Center." INSIDE HIGHER EDUCATION June 10, 2009.

It’s an especially bad time for a medical journal to be duped by an author who, say, submits a fake computer-generated research paper from a fake institution he named the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology — or CRAP. And yet that’s exactly what appears to have happened. The deception was the work of Philip M. Davis, a doctoral student in communication at Cornell University who serves as executive editor of the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s Scholarly Kitchen blog. Mr. Davis said he had concocted the plan after receiving numerous “aggressive” unsolicited e-mail messages from Bentham Publishing, which finances its line of 200 open-access scientific journals by charging authors a publication fee. Mr. Davis and the blog’s editor in chief, Kent R. Anderson, submitted two research papers that were created by a computer program at MIT called SCIgen that describes itself as generating random text intended to “maximize amusement, rather than coherence.” One of the papers was rejected by Bentham, and the other — a nonsensical five-page report with footnotes and graphical charts that purported to describe an Internet process called the “Trifling Thamyn” — was accepted after the publisher said it had been peer-reviewed. Mr. Davis reported that an invoice for $800 had been issued by Bentham, without any evidence that the article was actually peer-reviewed. . . . [I thought this sort of thing only happened with so-called Postmodernists and in the Humanities (see the Sokal Hoax)?] Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/news/article/6613/open-source-publisher-is-found-to-have-accepted-fake-paper-from-bogus-center.

Critchley, Simon. "BEING AND TIME, Part 1: Why Heidegger Matters." GUARDIAN June 8, 2009.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was the most important and influential philosopher in the continental tradition in the 20th century. Being and Time, first published in 1927, was his magnum opus. There is no way of understanding what took place in continental philosophy after Heidegger without coming to terms with Being and Time. Furthermore, unlike many Anglo-American philosophers, Heidegger has exerted a huge influence outside philosophy, in areas as diverse as architecture, contemporary art, social and political theory, psychotherapy, psychiatry and theology. However, because of his political commitment to National Socialism in 1933, when he assumed the position of Rector of Freiburg University in south-western Germany, Heidegger continues to arouse controversy, polemic and much heated misunderstanding. The hugely important matter of the relation between Heidegger and politics is the topic for another series of blogs entries. Indeed, to my mind, the nature and extent of Heidegger's involvement in National Socialism only becomes philosophically pertinent once one has begun to understand and feel the persuasive power of what takes place in his written work, especially Being and Time. The task I have set myself in this series of blogs is to provide a taste of the latter book and hopefully some motivation to read it further and study it more deeply. But once you have read Being and Time and hopefully been compelled by it, then the question that hangs over the text, like the sword of Damocles, is the following: how could arguably the greatest philosopher of the 20th century also have been a Nazi? What does his political commitment to National Socialism, however long or short it lasted, suggest about the nature of philosophy and its risks and dangers when stepping into the political realm? . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/05/heidegger-philosophy.

Cfp: "Adorno -- 40 Years On," Centre for Social and Political Thought, University of Sussex, August 6, 2009.

The Centre for Social and Political Thought (University of Sussex) is hosting a one-day conference on the 6th August 2009 to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the death of Theodor W. Adorno. Anyone interested in presenting at this event is invited to submit either a paper proposal or abstract (no more than 500 words) to adorno.spt@gmail.com no later than June 30, 2009. Please include with proposals/abstracts your full name, email address, institutional affiliation, and position within institution. We welcome papers on any issue directly related to (or influenced by) Adorno's work - areas of interest may include aesthetics, memory, technology, ethics, politics, ideology, literature, theory/praxis, fetishism, culture and critique, as well as Adorno's legacies, influence and contemporary relevance. Decisions regarding the final programme will be made shortly after the deadline.For any further information, please contact either Simon Mussell mailto:s.p.mussell@sussex.ac.uk? or Chris O'Kane co41@sussex.ac.uk. Visit the conference webpage here: http://adorno2009.blogspot.com/2009/03/call-for-papers-adorno-conference-6th.html. (From www.continental-philosophy.org.)

Mason, Kelby. Review of Robert C. Richardson's EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AS MALADAPTED PSYCHOLOGY. NDPR (June 2009).

Richardson, Robert C. Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. In recent years a range of philosophers have been making a similar charge against evolutionary psychology, that it's neither evolutionary nor psychology -- or, at least, that it isn't good evolutionary or psychological science. David Buller has most forcefully argued that evolutionary psychology is no good as psychology, and now Robert Richardson has provided the corresponding argument against its evolutionary bona fides (Buller 2005). Richardson's main contention is that once we hold evolutionary psychology to the same evidential standards applied elsewhere in evolutionary theory, we should reject its "pretensions" as "unconstrained speculation" (p38). On Richardson's account, doing evolutionary science is hard -- really hard -- and evolutionary psychology has simply failed to provide the kind of evidence that is required. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16331.

CFP: "Hamann and the Tradition," CUNY, Hunter College, March 20-21, 2009.

Update 2: Notes on the conference by Jonathan Gray are available here: http://jonathangray.org/2009/06/10/the-magus-in-new-york/. Update: The conference homepage, including the programme, is here: http://sapientia.hunter.cuny.edu/~german/Conf%20Home.html. Original Post (August 27, 2008): Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of scholarly interest in the work of Johann Georg Hamann, an interest which is spreading among scholars of world literature, European history, philosophy, theology, and religious studies. New translations of work by and about Hamann are appearing, as are a number of books and articles on Hamann’s aesthetics, theories of language and sexuality, and unique place in Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment thought. As such, the time has come to reexamine, in light of recent work, the legacy of Hamann’s writings, which have influenced such diverse thinkers as J. G. von Herder, F. H. Jacobi, J. W. von Goethe, G. W. F. Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, and Walter Benjamin, to name only an obvious few. We invite papers which investigate or problematize in new ways any underappreciated aspect of Hamann’s impact across the centuries, be it upon a thinker or work, a historical tradition, or even an entire branch of knowledge. Especially welcome are papers which promote dialogue among the diverse disciplines to which Hamann’s work speaks. All conference papers should be delivered in English. Please send a one-page abstract by October 1, 2008 to the conference organizer: Lisa Marie Anderson, Assistant Professor Department of German, Hunter College lisa.anderson@hunter.cuny.edu Keynote Speaker: Oswald Bayer, Systematic Theology, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen Author of Vernunft ist Sprache: Hamanns Metakritik Kants; Johann Georg Hamann: Der hellste Kopf seiner Zeit; Zeitgenosse im Widerspruch: Johann Georg Hamann als Radikaler Aufklärer Confirmed Speakers: John Betz, After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann Gwen Griffith-Dickson, Johann Georg Hamann’s Relational Metacriticism Kenneth Haynes, Hamann: Writings on Philosophy and Language Manfred Kuehn, Immanuel Kant: A Biography; Scottish Common Sense in Germany 1768-1800 Johannes von Lüpke, Director, Internationales Hamann-Kolloquium Katie Terezakis, The Immanent Word: The Turn to Language in German Philosophy 1759-1801

Pub: FICHTEANA 17 (2009).

Occasional Newsletter of the North American Fichte Society. Access the issue here: http://home.earthlink.net/~cubowman/fichte/f17.html.

Hindley, Meredith. "The Voracious Pen of Thomas Carlyle." HUMANITIES (March/April 2009).

When Thomas Carlyle sat down in 1834 to write The French Revolution: A History, he wanted to do more than chronicle the mere procession of events. He wanted readers to smell the fear in the streets during the Terror, to taste the decadence of the Bourbon monarchy, to observe the sartorial cavalcade when the Estates-General meets for the first time since 1614, to picture blood spilling from guillotines. To accomplish his task he marshaled the same tools used by novelists—shifting point of view, imagery, and telling details—and borrowed tone and grandeur from Homer, Virgil, and Milton. What sprang forth from Carlyle’s pen was not a dry account of the French Revolution, but a book brimming with passion and philosophy, one that offered a new style of storytelling that influenced a generation of Victorian writers. That Carlyle would produce such a fervent account is somewhat surprising given his dour upbringing. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2009-03/Historian.html.

Stern, Sol. "Pedagogy of the Oppressor." CITY JOURNAL 19.2 (2009).

Like the more famous Teach for America, the New York Teaching Fellows program provides an alternate route to state certification for about 1,700 new teachers annually. When I met with a group of the fellows taking a required class at a school of education last summer, we began by discussing education reform, but the conversation soon took a turn, with many recounting one horror story after another from their rocky first year: chaotic classrooms, indifferent administrators, veteran teachers who rarely offered a helping hand. You might expect the required readings for these struggling rookies to contain good practical tips on classroom management, say, or sensible advice on teaching reading to disadvantaged students. Instead, the one book that the fellows had to read in full was Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. For anyone familiar with American schools of education, the choice wasn’t surprising. Since the publication of the English edition in 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has achieved near-iconic status in America’s teacher-training programs. In 2003, David Steiner and Susan Rozen published a study examining the curricula of 16 schools of education—14 of them among the top-ranked institutions in the country, according to U.S. News and World Report—and found that Pedagogy of the Oppressed was one of the most frequently assigned texts in their philosophy of education courses. These course assignments are undoubtedly part of the reason that, according to the publisher, almost 1 million copies have sold, a remarkable number for a book in the education field. The odd thing is that Freire’s magnum opus isn’t, in the end, about education—certainly not the education of children. Pedagogy of the Oppressed mentions none of the issues that troubled education reformers throughout the twentieth century: testing, standards, curriculum, the role of parents, how to organize schools, what subjects should be taught in various grades, how best to train teachers, the most effective way of teaching disadvantaged students. This ed-school bestseller is, instead, a utopian political tract calling for the overthrow of capitalist hegemony and the creation of classless societies. Teachers who adopt its pernicious ideas risk harming their students—and ironically, their most disadvantaged students will suffer the most. . . . Read the rest here: http://city-journal.org/2009/19_2_freirian-pedagogy.html.

Rogers, Pat. "Cheerfulness Breaks In." NEW CRITERION (June 2009).

Martin, Peter. Samuel Johnson: a Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009. Meyers, Jeffrey. Samuel Johnson: the Struggle. New York: Basic, 2009. As time goes by, it generally softens asperities in the character of men and women from the past. We have quite a cuddly image of Ben Franklin, but to those who met him he could seem truculent and abrasive. Something rather different has happened in the case of Samuel Johnson. He used to be presented as a formidable figure—an overbearing literary potentate, if not a clubroom bore whose table you would avoid in the dining room. People thought him domineering and arrogant, qualities reflected in his nickname “the Great Cham.” Oldstyle British actors gave him a plummy upper-class bark, even though the evidence showed that he spoke with a strong Midlands accent, not too far from the nasal intonation you can hear on the streets of Birmingham today. It has all changed dramatically in the last half-century. In fact, the shift has its roots even further back, in an essay by an outstanding scholar from Berkeley, first published in 1944. Bertrand Bronson’s study “Johnson Agonistes” set the agenda for much of what has come out in recent decades, together with work by other writers emphasizing the “perilous balance” that Samuel maintained in his psychic health. It is not surprising, then, that a sense of internal conflict pervades these new versions of Johnson’s life—the first two, but not the last, of a crop of biographies marking the tercentenary of his birth in this year. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Cheerfulness-breaks-in-4098.

Scruton, Roger. "Farewell to Judgment." AMERICAN SPECTATOR (June 2009).

The sciences aim to explain the world: they build theories that are tested through experiment, and which describe the workings of nature and the deep connections between cause and effect. Nothing like that is true of the humanities. The works of Shakespeare contain important knowledge. But it is not scientific knowledge, nor could it ever be built into a theory. It is knowledge of the human heart. Shakespeare doesn’t teach us what to believe: he shows us how to feel—case by case, person by person, mood by mood. As universities expanded, the humanities began to displace the sciences from the curriculum. Students wished to use their time at university to cultivate their leisure interests and to improve their souls, rather than to learn hard facts and complex theories. And there arose a serious question as to why universities were devoting their resources to subjects that made so little discernible difference to the wider world. What good do the humanities do, and why should students take three or four years out of their lives in order to read books which—if they were interested—they would read in any case, and which—if they were not interested—would never do them the least bit of good? In the days when the humanities involved knowledge of classical languages and an acquaintance with German scholarship, there was no doubt that they required real mental discipline, even if their point could reasonably be doubted. But once subjects like English were admitted to a central place in the curriculum, the question of their validity became urgent. And then, in the wake of English came the pseudo-humanities—women’s studies, gay studies and the like—which were based on the assumption that, if English is a discipline, so too are they. And since there is no cogent justification for women’s studies that does not dwell upon the subject’s ideological purpose, the entire curriculum in the humanities began to be seen in ideological terms. The inevitable result was the delegitimizing of English. Unlike women’s studies, which has impeccable feminist credentials (why else was it invented?), English focuses on the works of dead white European males whose values would be found offensive by young people today. So maybe such a subject should not be studied, or studied only as a lesson in social pathology. . . . Read the rest here: http://spectator.org/archives/2009/06/05/farewell-to-judgment.

Shaw, Joshua. Review of Desmond Manderson, ed. ESSAYS ON LEVINAS AND LAW. NDPR (June 2009).

Manderson, Desmond, ed. Essays on Lévinas and Law: a Mosaic. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Essays on Lévinas and Law: a Mosaic is a helpful new collection of essays that apply Emmanuel Lévinas' ideas about ethics to law. The overall quality of the essays contained in this collection is quite good. The book's editor, Desmond Manderson, warns readers in his introduction that the essays are "not intended as an introduction to Lévinas." (5) However, I found this volume to be more accessible than many publications on Lévinas. This accessibility may be due to the fact that several essays apply his writings to concrete cases and problems in law, with the effect that they highlight his philosophy's practical significance. Indeed, Essays on Lévinas and Law is a welcome addition to what seems to be a growing trend in Lévinas scholarship to chart out the practical relevance of his work for political philosophy, normative ethics, and, with this collection, law. The editor, Desmond Manderson, contributes an introduction and also one of the thirteen essays. The essays are organized into five sections, each titled after one of the five Mosaic books. This organization is slightly misleading, however, since it suggests that the collection is more unified than it actually is. The essays were commissioned for a conference held at McGill University in 2006, the "Centennial Conference on Lévinas and Law," which brought together over 100 scholars to explore the significance of Lévinas' philosophy for law. Like other conference-based collections, Essays on Lévinas and Law contains essays on a broad range of topics. Given this breadth, it would be difficult to review each contribution. Let me focus, therefore, on offering a sketch of each section and on elaborating some of the strengths of the collection as a whole. Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16327.

Cfp: IGEL 2010, International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media, Utrecht University, July 7-11, 2010.

Debate about the relevance of both the Social Sciences and the Humanities is getting more pragmatic and businesslike. The Dutch Government, for instance, stresses that these Faculties should focus on making their research more useful and work on making research findings available to society (AWT, 2007). In the United Kingdom we hear similar voices calling for valorization. In its response, the British Academy has warned against evaluating Humanities and the Social Sciences purely on the basis of direct and economic profit. But there is much deliberation about how to define the desired (direct or indirect) impact of alpha and gamma research. A number of scholars reflect on what the social purposes of university research and training should be; some wonder what kind of edification the Humanities provide, and speculate on what graduates of for instance literature might contribute to society (e.g., Nussbaum 1997, Paulson 2001). However, few of the claims are supported by empirical research. IGEL’s unique combination of members from the Humanities (e.g., literary studies, media studies) and the Social Sciences (e.g., sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists) makes it an excellent forum for exchange and cooperation to make our research socially useful. Some use it to work together on testing hypotheses formulated by literary theorists. Others explore the relevance of laboratory studies for complex stimuli like movies and literary texts. Still others study behavior within social institutes in order to inform other disciplines like literary history. Most of these studies have a valorization potential, some more implicit than others. During the 2004 IGEL conference in Edmonton, Sybil Moser made this issue focal point of a discussion in a session about the relevance of empirical research of literature and media to society at large. The 2010 conference follows up on that discussion, inviting keynote speakers and other participants to reflect on the practical implications of their findings, the potential of IGEL research in terms of what it could mean to people working in education, government, and NGO’s. Many of the conference contributions will pertain to studies that are socially relevant. Speakers will reflect on how to make results usable for organizations and individuals outside academia. The sessions and symposia will contribute to a better understanding of the potential functions of literature and media in society, what it means to the lives of individuals, how our research could help to enhance literacy and literary participation, how it might contribute to the conservation of cultural heritage, the accessibility and distribution of ideas, what our research could mean to literary education or to the understanding of learning and persuasion processes. IGEL invites you to send in suggestions for conference papers, symposia, and posters on the following topics and related fields: Literary reading processes (emotion, cognition, personality, etc.); The social role of literature and related media (e.g. film, theatre, Internet, multimedia, virtual reality); Literature and media from an evolutionary perspective; Early literary / media socialization; Pedagogical and educational aspect of literature and the media; The processes of literary/media production, distribution and reception; The role of literary and other cultural institutions: past, present and future; The empirical study of historical reception and historical readers; Historical reception studies; Digital methods of research on literature and the media (corpus studies, hypertext models, etc.). Visit the conference homepage here: http://www2.hum.uu.nl/congres/igel/papers.html.

Reagan, Charles. Review of Paul Ricoeur's LIVING UP TO DEATH. NDPR (June 2009).

Ricoeur, Paul. Living up to Death. Trans. David Pellauer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. This is a strange book requiring a strange review. It is the publication of some of Paul Ricoeur's previously unpublished writing, which he himself did not intend to publish. The first part of the book comes from notes he made in 1995-96 on the topic of death. After they were written, they were left in a folder and he never returned to them again. In the second part of the book are some of the "fragments" he wrote during his last days, mostly brief reflections on topics which preoccupied him such as life and death, Christianity, his faith and his philosophy, the Bible, his friend Jacques Derrida and resurrection. There is a Preface by Olivier Abel, a long-time friend of Ricoeur's and a Postface by Catherine Goldenstein, also a very close friend for his last ten years. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16308.

Pub: PARRHESIA 6 (2009).

Features:

• Cinema as a Democratic Emblem by Alain Badiou, translated by Alex Ling and Aurélien Mondon
• The Desert Island and the Missing People by Vanessa Brito, translated by Justin Clemens
• Althusser and the Concept of the Spontaneous Philosophy of Scientists by Pierre Macherey, translated by Robin Mackay
• 68 + 1: Lacan's année érotique by Jean-Michel Rabaté

Essays:

• The Nihilistic Affirmation of Life: Biopower and Biopolitics in The Will to Knowledge by Keith Crome
• In the Middle by Sean Gaston

Reviews:

• Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life by Danielle Sands
• 'Without wanting to push the analysis further ...': Jean-Michel Rabaté and the Materialities of Theory by Pieter Vermeulen

Visit the journal homepage here: http://parrhesiajournal.org/.

Pub: HISTORY AND THEORY 48.2 (2009).

Original Articles:

• PP. 1-4 "TRUTH AND AUTHENTICITY IN CONTEMPORARY HISTORICAL CULTURE: AN INTRODUCTION TO HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION AND HISTORICAL TRUTH" by CHRISTOPH CLASSEN, WULF KANSTEINER DOI 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2009.00495.x
• PP. 5-24 "ALL THIS HAPPENED, MORE OR LESS: WHAT A NOVELIST MADE OF THE BOMBING OF DRESDEN" by ANN RIGNEY DOI 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2009.00496.x
• PP. 25-53 "SUCCESS, TRUTH, AND MODERNISM IN HOLOCAUST HISTORIOGRAPHY: READING SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF METAHISTORY" by WULF KANSTEINER DOI 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2009.00497.x
• PP. 54-76 "PHOTOGRAPHS, SYMBOLIC IMAGES, AND THE HOLOCAUST: ON THE (IM)POSSIBILITY OF DEPICTING HISTORICAL TRUTH" by JUDITH KEILBACH DOI 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2009.00498.x
• PP. 77-102 "BALANCED TRUTH: STEVEN SPIELBERG'S SCHINDLER'S LIST AMONG HISTORY, MEMORY, AND POPULAR CULTURE" by CHRISTOPH CLASSEN DOI 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2009.00499.x
• PP. 103-121 "DIGITALIZING HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS" by CLAUDIO FOGU DOI 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2009.00500.x
• PP. 122-137 "THE SYNTAX OF OBJECTS AND THE REPRESENTATION OF HISTORY: SPEAKING OF SLAVERY IN NEW YORK" by BETTINA M. CARBONELL DOI 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2009.00501.x

Subscribers may download the current issue here: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118501930/home.

Petrucciani, Stefano. "Rethinking Critical Theory." KRITIKOS 6 (2009).

The philosophical reflections developed by the first and the second generation of the Frankfurt School (through the work of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and Habermas) constitute, in my opinion, a contribution of vital importance to the construction of a critical theory capable of responding to the current challenges of society and politics. However, in order to reconstruct a critical theory for the present times, it is necessary to start from the problems that the Frankfurt tradition left open. With regard to this, my thesis is that the evolution from the first to the second generation of the Frankfurt School, in particular from Adorno to Habermas, can be framed as a passage from a social theory of domination to a normative theory of democracy. I am convinced that, if isolated from each other, both perspectives are insufficient. In my view, Habermas was right in underlining the normative deficit of the critical theory of the first generation, but his normative theory of democracy – developed in Between Facts and Norms and in the following books – lacks a conceptualization of the reality of power as social domination. Despite his awareness of the problem, Habermas failed to embed it into an adequate theoretical framework. Apparently Habermas has also abandoned the attempt, developed in Theory of Communicative Action, of conceptualizing the pathologies of modernity in terms of a “colonization of the life-world.” This account was meant to be a viable alternative to Adorno’s totalizing account of domination, but it seems that Habermas took no interest in developing it further. In my view the separation between a theory of domination and a normative theory of democracy reveals a theoretical problem. Hence, a reconstructed critical theory should aim at the reconciliation of these two dimensions (theory of power and theory of democracy), both fundamental for a critical understanding of the present. However, a concrete development of this theoretical proposal requires broader conceptual tools than those of the critical theory of the Frankfurt school. As far as the theory of power is concerned, it is necessary to undertake a critical confrontation not only with the Marxist tradition, in particular with some neo-Marxist approaches, like the one proposed in recent years by the French scholar Jacques Bidet, but also with other aspects of the contemporary research on power. As far as the normative perspective is concerned, it is important to critically consider the revitalization of normative political theory put forward by John Rawls and by many other scholars. . . . Read the rest here: http://intertheory.org/petrucciani.htm.

Vallier, Robert. Review of Brett Buchanan's ONTO-ETHOLOGIES. NDPR (June 2009).

Buchanan, Brett. Onto-Ethologies: the Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze. Albany: SUNY Press, 2008. In the last few years Continental philosophy, in various guises, has rediscovered life. Phenomenologists direct their attention to the lifeworld, and to the phenomena of life and living beings. Some poststructuralists "deconstruct" the difference between organic and inorganic, while others concern themselves with germinal and viroid life and propose various biophilosophies, and still others talk about life as that to which 'biopower' is directed. And most evidently, if we take recent book catalogues as an index, there is a great deal of interest in animality (here I don't refer to animal rights or ethics, which have also given rise to much reflection and debate, but rather the question of animal being) to think about the animal in itself, and about the original difference between animal and human being, thus in some way clarifying the special status of the latter which many, since Aristotle, have determined to be both rational and political. What so much -- it would be unfair to say all -- of this resuscitated interest has in common is a striking disregard for the sciences of life, all too easily dismissing them as predicated on an unreflected and non-philosophical concept of life, which, the standard narrative goes, is inevitably reduced to some form of (neo-)vitalism, (neo-)mechanism, or (neo-)finalism. That may or may not be true as a criticism of the life-sciences, but it certainly should not constitute an excuse to avoid a careful reading of and thoughtful engagement with their theoretical research and experimental findings, which seems so often to be symptomatic of this return to life. It is precisely in this regard that Brett Buchanan's Onto-Ethologies marks a difference. As suggested by the subtitle ("The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze"), Buchanan endeavors to show how the theoretical findings of the properly experimental work of one particular scientist -- the important Swiss biologist, Jakob von Uexküll, sometimes called "the father of ethology" -- made their way into and helped to shape the itineraries of three major Continental philosophers. This alone makes it a valuable contribution to the growing body of literature on life-philosophy generally, and animality in particular. Given that it is written with a great deal of clarity and attention to detail, the book will certainly repay careful study. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16305.

Cfp: Readings of Difficult Freedom, North American Levinas Society and Société Internationale de Recherches Emmanuel Levinas, Toulouse, July 5-9, 2010

First published in 1963, with a second edition in 1976, Difficile Liberté, Essais sur le judaïsme is considered Levinas' most accessible book and an excellent introduction to his work. This collection of essays, which appeared in a variety of journals (L'arche, Information juive, L'esprit, Evidences, etc.) reflects the society, culture and philosophy of France from the 1950s to the 1970s. While closely linked to this era (end of World War II, the discovery of the horror of the concentration camps, Stalinism, the founding of the State of Israel) Difficile Liberté is by no means a collection of circumstantial writings. In Difficile Liberté Levinas defines post-Holocaust Judaism, and sets out the requirements and need for Jewish thought and education in an authentic but critical dialogue with modern society. These considerations are frequently interspersed with references to writers and thinkers who influenced Levinas such as Claudel, Heidegger, Hegel, Spinoza, S. Weil, Gordin and Rosenzweig, but more often to sacred texts, the Bible and the words of the Sages of Israel which Levinas continually emphasized the need to study. Does Levinas' modernity paradoxically lie in his appeal to Jews to return to these old "worm-eaten tractates" ("the Jew of the Talmud should take precedence over the Jew of the Psalms")? These articles are still innovative, sharp, concise and overarching; the style is sometimes lyrical – Levinas rarely wrote in such a strident, argumentative way, blending conviction and stupefaction. The key to what unites Levinas' work – the link between his philosophical writings and his specifically Jewish dimension – may just be found in Difficile Liberté. Beyond the obligatory analysis of the title (taken from the last few words of the article "Education and Prayer") this conference aims not only to place the essays in Difficult Freedom in their historical context and within the trajectory of Levinas' thought, but more importantly to examine them afresh – with the wonderment and questions they still elicit today. Diachronic and synchronic analyses of the articles in Difficle Liberté will help situate them with respect to Levinas' other works. Issues such as the following could be explored: Phenomenology, Ethics, the Holocaust, Israel, the Talmudic Readings, Levinas' views of science and technology, Levinas' relationship to Heidegger, Rozensweig, Bergson, French philosophers and writers, Levinas' relationship to Christianity, Levinas the educator, etc. Further information may be found here: http://www.sirel-levinas.org/.

Monti, Martino Rossi, et al. Review of OBJECTIVITY by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. IRIS 1 (April 2009): 277-288.

Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone, 2008. “These were little plates of ice, very flat, very polished, very transparent, about the thickness of a sheet of rather thick paper [...] but so perfectly formed in hexagons, and of which the six sides were so straight, and the six angles so equal, that it is impossible for men to make anything so exact.” With these words René Descartes describes, in his treatise Les Météores (1635), some snowflakes observed with the naked eye. Not long before, Johann Kepler had celebrated the beauty and perfect symmetry of snowflakes in a short treatise entitled Strena Seu de Nive Sexangula (1611 – A New Year’s Gift of Hexagonal Snow). Since then, those who have described and drawn snowflakes, from Robert Hooke to the nineteenth-century English meteorologist James Glaisher, have seen them as absolutely perfect forms, marvelous expressions of invariable mathematical relations. Everything that appeared asymmetrical or irregular, whenever noted, was labeled as an “exception” or declared inessential. There was a sort of blindness or annoyance towards the irregularities of nature. The human eye, as St. Augustine had remarked, is “irritated” by asymmetry (De vera religione, XXX, 54). Around Christmas 1892, in Berlin, the photomicrographer Richard Neuhauss, under the direction of the meteorologist Gustav Hellmann, took a series of photographs of snow crystals. Accustomed to the “absolute regularity” and “perfect symmetry” of the snowflakes drawn by earlier scientists, Hellmann and Neuhauss were met with a disappointing sight: the crystals appeared irregular, imperfect. Only the cold and ruthless precision of the photographic camera had been able to give them a faithful image of how nature really was. As Hellmann wrote: “despite the icy hardening of the surroundings, these are natural pictures, warm with life” (151 – my italics). The snowflakes reproduced by Hellmann and Neuhauss were not ideal forms or “types,” produced by abstracting from all the particularities and imperfections of single flakes observed in nature. They were not the ideal snowflake, but this or that snowflake. This is just one example – enriched by a few details – of the history of the birth of what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison call “scientific objectivity” or “mechanical objectivity.” In Objectivity the authors provide us with many others, no less interesting and stimulating, always anchored to the world of scientific images (the scientific atlases published from the eighteenth century to the present time). The idea of scientific objectivity – this is the main thing this book shows – has a history. But there is more: the book also shows that science has not always been defined in terms of objectivity. In fact, for Daston and Galison, only around the mid-nineteenth century – with positivism the rage – did the idea begin to emerge that in order to represent a scientific object faithfully one had to eliminate all subjective interferences: “to be objective is to aspire to knowledge that bears no trace of the knower – knowledge unmarked by prejudice or skill, fantasy or judgment, wishing or striving. Objectivity is blind sight, seeing without inference, interpretation, or intelligence” (17 – my italics). Up to that moment, quite another kind of “epistemic virtue” had prevailed: that which, let us say, an eighteenth-century botanic atlas sought to represent was not an array of specimens – unique in their singularity – but, on the contrary, the ideal form, the type of each species. In order to grasp such a primary form, the naturalist had to perform a sort of platonic purification: through tenacious and tireless observation, he had to discard everything he judged inessential and accidental, in order to extract the universal from the particular. Far from being passive, the naturalist had to exercise his intelligence actively in order to abstract the perfect form from the chaos of multiplicity. Daston and Galison call this epistemic virtue “truth-to-nature.” According to the authors, both these virtues – truth-to-nature and objectivity – were strongly connected to the philosophies and theories of knowledge of their time. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hsdept/bios/docs/objectivity_iris_09.pdf.

Fodor, Jerry. "Where is my Mind?" LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS February 12, 2009.

Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford: OUP, 2008. If there’s anything we philosophers really hate it’s an untenable dualism. Exposing untenable dualisms is a lot of what we do for a living. It’s no small job, I assure you. They (the dualisms, not the philosophers) are insidious, and they are ubiquitous; perpetual vigilance is required. I mention only a few of the dualisms whose tenability we have, at one time or other, felt called on to question: mind v. body; fact v. value; knowledge v. true belief; induction v. deduction; sensing v. perceiving; thinking v. behaving; denotation v. connotation; thought v. action; appearance v. reality . . . I could go on. It is, moreover, a mark of an untenable dualism that a philosopher who is in the grip of one is sure to think that he isn’t. In such a case, therapy can require millennia of exquisitely subtle dialectics. No wonder philosophers are paid so well. So, for example, you might have thought that the distinction between, on the one hand, a creature’s mind and, on the other, the ‘external’ world that the creature lives in is sufficiently robust to be getting on with; and that commerce between the two, both in perception and in action, is typically ‘indirect’, where that means something like ‘mediated by thought’. But plausible as that may seem, the thesis of Andy Clark’s new book, Supersizing the Mind, is that the mind v. world dualism is untenable. The best way through Clark’s book is to start by reading the foreword by David Chalmers and the paper by Clark and Chalmers that is reprinted as an appendix. These are short, informal presentations of the so-called ‘Extended Mind Thesis’ (EMT), of which the rest of the book is an elaboration and discussion. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n03/fodo01_.html.

Noe, Alva. "You are not Your Brain: Interview with Gordy Slack." SALON.COM March 25, 2009.

Noë, Alva. Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang / Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009. For a decade or so, brain studies have seemed on the brink of answering questions about the nature of consciousness, the self, thought and experience. But they never do, argues University of California at Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë, because these things are not found solely in the brain itself. In his new book, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness," Noë attacks the brave new world of neuroscience and its claims that brain mechanics can explain consciousness. Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Francis Crick wrote, "You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." While Noë credits Crick for drawing popular and scientific attention to the question of consciousness, he thinks Crick's conclusions are dead wrong and dangerous. Noe's conversational style is gentle, attentive and easygoing. But, in true philosopher fashion, he also picks his words deliberately, as if stepping off the path of right thinking would result in some tragic plummet into the abyss of illogic. . . . Read the whole interview here: http://www.salon.com/env/atoms_eden/2009/03/25/alva_noe/.

Strawson, Galen. "Up and Coming." TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT May 28, 2009.

Analytic philosophers of mind are heavily into the body. They’re forever in flight from something they call "Cartesianism". There's a pouring forth of books and papers explaining that the mind or self is essentially embodied, essentially environmentally embedded, "ecological", "enactive", elementally earthy, endogenously "extended" beyond the bounds of the skull and even the body. Much of this is good and sensible; for an overview see for example Shaun Gallagher’s How the Body Shapes the Mind (reviewed in the TLS, January 27, 2006), or Evan Thompson's Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind (to be reviewed in a future issue of the TLS). Philosophy, though, tends to careen from one extreme to another, and many think that the "extended mind" hypothesis, according to which your diary and mobile phone are quite literally part of your mind, goes too far. . . . Read the rest here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6377644.ece.

Gessen, Keith. "Eternal Vigilance." NEW STATESMAN May 28, 2009.

Throughout the 1940s, George Orwell was formulating the ideas about language and politics that found their ultimate expression in Nineteen Eighty-Four. His essays from this period are a plain-spoken pleasure, despite their contradictions By 1940, George Orwell had behind him four conventional “social” novels and, more significantly, three books of documentary reportage, each one better than the last, culminating in his classic account of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia. Gradually in the others but culminating in Homage, Orwell perfected his signature “plain” style, which so resembles someone speaking honestly and without pretence directly to you, and he had more or less settled on his political opinions: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” So he said in 1946. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/06/orwell-essays-64257-spain.

McCrum, Robert. "1984: the Masterpiece that Killed Orwell." THE OBSERVER May 10, 2009.

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." Sixty years after the publication of Orwell's masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, that crystal first line sounds as natural and compelling as ever. But when you see the original manuscript, you find something else: not so much the ringing clarity, more the obsessive rewriting, in different inks, that betrays the extraordinary turmoil behind its composition. Probably the definitive novel of the 20th century, a story that remains eternally fresh and contemporary, and whose terms such as "Big Brother", "doublethink" and "newspeak" have become part of everyday currency, Nineteen Eighty-Four has been translated into more than 65 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, giving George Orwell a unique place in world literature. "Orwellian" is now a universal shorthand for anything repressive or totalitarian, and the story of Winston Smith, an everyman for his times, continues to resonate for readers whose fears for the future are very different from those of an English writer in the mid-1940s. The circumstances surrounding the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four make a haunting narrative that helps to explain the bleakness of Orwell's dystopia. Here was an English writer, desperately sick, grappling alone with the demons of his imagination in a bleak Scottish outpost in the desolate aftermath of the second world war. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/10/1984-george-orwell.

Cfp: "Translegality," Law and Literature Association of Australia and Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand, December 2–5, 2009.

What is this era if not one of transformation, both good and bad - of boom becoming bust; tension, becoming truce; climate, catastrophe; despair, the “audacity of hope”? Unless, of course, it is an era in which these differences are transcended, their sublation promising a new synthesis, a law of hybridity that blurs binaries, collapses boundaries. Trans(l)egalité enacts, as well as engages with, this twinned, yet conjoint thematic, being, itself, a unique institutional merger: that is, the collaborative coming together, for the purposes of this event, of the LLAA and LSAANZ, the former addressing “Transformation”, the latter, “Transcendence”. Despite this (seeming) reinscription of dualism, LLAA and LSAANZ are united by, and in their shared explication of the topos of “trans”, exploring its manifold meanings: from the micro- to the macro, from the trans-body to the trans-planetary. In so doing, this trans-conference holds out the prospect of a new trans-discipline, blending the semiotic and the socio-legal: namely, the jurisprudence of trans(l)egalité. Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.griffith.edu.au/conference/translegality.

Weber, Barret. "On Leo Strauss's Legacy." TELOS SCOPE May 25, 2009.

Zuckert, Catherine, and Michael Zuckert. The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.

Smith, Stephen. Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.

Strauss's challenge both to philosophical relativism and to historicism remains as incisive today as when it was first enunciated. But the repercussions of Strauss's work move well beyond an immanent critique of Weber and the methodology of the social sciences. His legacy remains and pushes us to ask difficult questions about how we understand the emergence of European tyranny in the twentieth century, and about how we live in relation to such events, which Hannah Arendt argued destroyed all prior categories of thought.[5] Nassar Behnegar, author of Leo Strauss, Max Weber, and the Scientific Study of Politics (2003), argues that "Strauss turned away from the 'value free' social science of his time, which could not understand Hitler's and Stalin's regimes as tyrannies, and turned towards classical political philosophy out of a desire for a genuine social science."[6] Due to many factors—some of his own making, especially in regard to his striking anti-liberal leanings, and also others basically beyond his control—Strauss's role in the remaking of political and social science is not widely appreciated today. His writings represent a serious controversy primarily for political reasons with those philosophers and social critics who have encountered him in one forum or another. Just the mention of Strauss today can stir animosity and resistance to actually reading his texts, which are allegedly tainted with justifications of inequality and elitism. At least as far as his philosophical insights are tied to his controversial "political" legacy as a so-called "neo-conservative," perhaps the neo-conservative theorist of our time, his deep and positive impact on philosophy and the social sciences risks being lost in the context of various claims that attempts to directly associate him with the protracted war in Iraq, the "war on terror" more generally, or the Bush Administration and its history of "noble lies" in the name of democratic freedoms. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=307.

O'Grady, Jane. "Can a Machine Change Your Mind?" OPEN DEMOCRACY May 25, 2009.

"Can a machine read your mind?" – the title of a recent (February 2009) article in the Times -- is meant to be sensational but is similar to hundreds of other articles appearing with increasing frequency, and merely repeating a story that has been familiar for the last 50 years. ‘It’s just a matter of time’ is the assumption behind such articles – just a matter of time before the gap between physical brain-stuff and consciousness is bridged. The Times article plays up the social interest angle of its story by describing experiments in which people’s brain activity is taken as proof of their guilt or innocence of crimes, or in which a computer ‘could tell with 78 per cent accuracy’ which of a number of drawings shown to volunteers was the one they were concentrating on. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/can-a-machine-change-your-mind.

Carroll, Joseph. "What is Literary Darwinism? An Interview with David DiSalvo." NEURONARRATIVE February 27, 2009.

If you’ve heard the term “Literary Darwinism,” you may have been tempted to lump it in with the list of schools of thought conjoining evolutionary thinking with, well, almost everything. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll admit I did the same. But the simple fact that this field has in the last couple of decades attracted a diversity of credible thinkers, from the sciences and literary studies alike, urged me to take a closer look. After all, there aren’t many fields featuring in their ranks both preeminent scientists like E. O. Wilson and renowned authors like novelist Ian McEwen. The closer look led me to the work of the field’s most respected thinkers, among them Joseph Carroll. Joseph Carroll, professor of English at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, wrote the book on Literary Darwinism, literally. Literary Darwinism (2004) and, before it, Evolution and Literary Theory (1995), are considered the foundational texts in the field. No article is written about Literary Darwinism that doesn’t quote Carroll, and no anthology in the field is complete without his contribution (notably, The Literary Animal [2005]) He recently spent some time with Neuronarrative discussing what Literary Darwinism is all about, addressing a few of the main criticisms levied against it, and envisioning what the future may hold for evolutionary thinking and literary study. . . . Read the rest here: http://neuronarrative.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/what-is-literary-darwinism-an-interview-with-joseph-carroll/.

Derek Walcott Withdraws from Poetry Post at Oxford.

Updates: May 28, 2009: The poet Derek Walcott’s candidacy for a prestigious post at the University of Oxford drew such bitter criticism this month that the Nobel Prize winner withdrew from consideration. But the University of Alberta had no such second thoughts about appointing him to a three-year term as the university’s first distinguished scholar in residence, a post he will assume this fall. . . . (http://chronicle.com/news/article/6545/u-of-alberta-expects-no-scandal-from-appointing-controversial-poet-derek-walcott) May 25, 2009: Adding another twist to an unusually contentious episode, Ruth Padel announced today that she would not take up the post of professor of poetry at the University of Oxford. . . .(http://chronicle.com/news/article/6525/scandal-over-oxford-poetry-post-takes-new-twist-as-ruth-padel-resigns) Original Post (May 13, 2009): Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott has quit the race to become Oxford Professor of Poetry after becoming embroiled in a sex smear campaign. Walcott, the front-runner for the post, announced today to the Evening Standard his decision to stand down as a candidate. His withdrawal follows a campaign against him before Saturday's election. Documents including an allegation of sexual harassment dating back to 1982 were sent anonymously to Oxford academics who, with graduates, vote on the position. . . . See:

• London Evening Standard: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23689480-details/Nobel+winner+quits+Oxford+poetry+race+over+sex+claims/article.do;
• Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/12/walcott-oxford-poetry-professor;
• Times: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6256746.ece.

Cfp: "Transcultural Memory," University of London, February 5-6, 2010.

Sponsored by the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths' College, and Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies. Conference organizers: Lucy Bond, Rick Crownshaw and Jessica Rapson (Goldsmiths); Katia Pizzi and Ricarda Vidal (Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies). Venue: Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London Keynote speakers: Astrid Erll (University of Wuppertal) Andrew Hoskins (University of Warwick) Dirk Moses (University of Sydney) Michael Rothberg (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Discussant: Susannah Radstone (University of East London) Skeptical reactions to the rise of memory studies have focused on the viability of concepts such as "collective" memory. Can societies really remember collectively? More to the point, can individuals really remember what they have not directly witnessed or experienced? Is to speak of collective memory simply to speak of ideology or political fantasy? The concept of cultural memory has overcome this binary opposition between the individual and the collective, attending to their reciprocal relationship and the cultural grounds on which their mediation takes place (Assman). How, though, does memory work when events are remembered across and between cultures? In an age of globalization, is it still possible to speak of local and national memory, or do the local and national always exist in implicit and explicit dialogue with the transnational? Holocaust- and memory studies have begun to address these questions in tracing the globalization of Holocaust memory as a trope by which other modern atrocities are shaped and remembered, and, of course, the Holocaust has been incorporated into national memories in order to forget indigenous genocides and shore up ideals of nation (Huyssen and Patraka). Conversely, theories of vicarious witnessing have posited an ethical dimension to the remembrance of events across cultural boundaries. The ideas of "prosthetic" and "post" memory conceive of the remembrance of events not witnessed by those born afterwards or elsewhere, and of mass- mediated memory as something that does not wholly belong to (and define) the familial, ethnic or national group (Hirsch and Landsberg). (The idea of witnessing across cultural borders has not been without controversy in the academy.) Recent innovations in comparative historiography (Moses, Stone, Moshman), laying vital groundwork for developments in memory studies, have sought to remove the "conceptual blockages" in comparing modern atrocities, moving beyond notions of the Holocaust’s uniqueness that might inscribe a hierarchy of suffering across modernity, eliciting the structural continuities and discontinuities between atrocious events – between genocide and colonialism. Just as Moses has configured modernity in terms of a racial century, so in sociology and literary studies race has constituted an overarching narrative that brings together diverse modern spheres of both culturally creative and violent activity and identification (Cheyette and Gilroy). In postcolonial studies, concepts such as trauma have enabled a spatial rather than linear approach to the experiences of colony and postcolony (Durrant). In philosophy, conceptions of ‘bare life’ have allowed an international consideration of state sovereignties and their biopolitical regimes (Agamben). In architectural and urban studies, city development and its architecture is found to articulate a globalised vernacular, which has implications for spaces and places of memory and memorialisation. All of these disciplines find that it is increasingly difficult and problematic to isolate representations of past, which in turn calls attention to the need for the comparative study of memory as it takes an increasingly transcultural form – as Rothberg’s recent ground-breaking work on the multi-directionality of memory has shown. The conference organizers invite abstracts on the subject of transcultural memory from across the disciplines – English and Comparative Literary Studies, History, Cultural Studies, Architectural Studies, Cultural Geography, Film Studies, Media Studies, Politics, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, the Visual Arts, and so on – but recognize that the study of memory will often involve an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach. Conference papers might address but are not limited to how concepts of transcultural memory might relate to: - new directions/new paradigms in trauma studies - testimony studies - new media - new technologies of historical documentation and archivization - memory as performed and embodied; memory and the senses - conceptions of race - citizenship - ‘bare life’ - postwar, post-event, post-epochal ‘structures of feeling’ (e.g., post-1918, -1945, -1968, -1989 and -9/11) - the recent interest in the perspective of perpetrators - memory and gender - memory and religion - colonial, postcolonial, and transatlantic studies - the study of museums, monuments, and memorials, as well as the practical implications for heritage industries, memorialization and urban planning - issues of law, justice and reparations - legal definitions of genocide - slavery - the relationship between genocides and other modern atrocities - memory and terrorism - the social implications of natural catastrophes and disasters Abstracts (no more than 400 words) by July 21st, to: transculturalmemory@gmail.com.

Pub: JOURNAL FOR CRITICAL ANIMAL STUDIES 7.1 (2009).

Contents: Introduction, Richard J. White, Chief Editor http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/JCAS/Journal_Articles_download/issue_9/JCAS%20VII%20Issue%201%20MAY%20ISSUE%20Introduction%20pgs%204-8.pdf "The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: Putting Theory into Action and Animal Liberation into Higher Education" by Steven Best http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/JCAS/Journal_Articles_download/issue_9/JCAS%20VII%20Issue%201%20MAY%20ISSUE%20The%20Rise%20of%20Critical%20Animal%20Studies%20pgs%209-52.pdf "Bend or Break: Unraveling the Construction of Children and Animals as Competitors in Nineteenth-Century English Anti-Cruelty Movements" by Monica Flegel http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/JCAS/Journal_Articles_download/issue_9/JCAS%20VII%20Issue%201%20MAY%20ISSUE%20Unraveling%20the%20Construction%20of%20Children%20and%20Animals%20pgs%2053-73.pdf "From War Elephants to Circus Elephants: Humanity’s Abuse of Elephants" by Mike Jaynes http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/JCAS/Journal_Articles_download/issue_9/JCAS%20VII%20Issue%201%20MAY%20ISSUE%20From%20War%20Elephants%20pgs%2074-106.pdf "Mythologies and Commodifications of Dominion in The Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan" by Lisa Jackson-Schebetta http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/JCAS/Journal_Articles_download/issue_9/JCAS%20VII%20Issue%201%20MAY%20ISSUE%20Mythologies%20and%20Commodifications%20pgs%20137-161.pdf "Rituals of Dominionism in Human-Nonhuman Relations: Bullfighting to Hunting, Circuses to Petting" by Roger Yates http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/JCAS/Journal_Articles_download/issue_9/JCAS%20VII%20Issue%201%20MAY%20ISSUE%20Rituals%20of%20Dominionism%20pgs%20132-171.pdf "The Quest for a Boundless Ethic: a Reassessment of Albert Schweitzer" by Norm Phelps http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/JCAS/Journal_Articles_download/issue_9/JCAS%20VII%20Issue%201%20MAY%20ISSUE%20The%20Quest%20for%20a%20Boundless%20Ethic%20pgs%20172-193.pdf Book Review: Redemption: the Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No-Kill Revolution in America, Winograd, Nathan J. (Almaden Books 2007); Reviewed by Adam J. Kochanowicz http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/JCAS/Journal_Articles_download/issue_9/JCAS%20VII%20Issue%201%20MAY%20ISSUE%20Book%20Review%20pp%20194-201.pdf Visit the journal homepage here: http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/JCAS/current.htm.

Cfp: "Darwin's Impact on Science, Society and Culture: a 21st Century Reassessment," Catholic University of Portugal, September 10-12, 2009.

The Centre of Philosophical and Humanistic Studies of the Faculty of Philosophy is organizing an International Congress to celebrate two remarkable anniversaries: the birth of Charles Darwin and the publication of his major work, Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Needless to say, the world changed dramatically after Darwin, and we are still coming to terms with the Darwinian revolution, as well as its impact on virtually every domain of human culture. We will reassess this impact especially on science (Biology, Genetics, Artificial Life, Psychology and Linguistics), philosophy (Anthropology, Ethics, Epistemology, Aesthetics), and religion (Christianity, Islam, Budhism, Hinduism and other religious faiths). The reception of Darwinism in the different countries and cultures will also be a major issue that is to be addressed in the Congress. Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.congressos.facfil.eu/congress/c/26/darwins-impact-on-science-society-and-culture.

Wilberding, James. Review of Pauliina Remes' PLOTINUS ON SELF. NDPR (May 2009).

Remes, Pauliina. Plotinus on Self: the Philosophy of the 'We'. Cambridge: CUP, 2007.

One's 'self,' like one's 'true love,' might seem prima facie to be the kind of term whose very meaning demands its own uniqueness. Of course we can speak of someone having 'another (and another) true love,' but we can't do so without diminishing the sense of the phrase. Used often enough one might suspect that it refers to nothing more than someone whom one really likes or desires. So what are we to make of someone like Plotinus who suggests that each one of us has two selves -- an embodied self and an immaterial self? This is the question that Remes sets out to tackle in her recent book, in which she aims to demonstrate that Plotinus does have a coherent and unified conception of the self that has an important role to play in his metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. This is a rich book that discusses far more than could be covered in a single review, and in what follows I shall focus on what I take to be some of its central theses on the unity of selfhood. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16265.

Pub: DELEUZE STUDIES 3.1 (2009).

Articles: "The Image of Thought" by Jean-Clet Martin, 1-25. "Deleuze on Intensity Differentials and the Being of the Sensible" by Marc Rolli,26-53. http://www.eupjournals.com/doi/abs/10.3366/E1750224109000476 "The Idiocy of the Event: Between Antonin Artaud, Kathy Acker and Gilles Deleuze" by Frida Beckman, 54-72. http://www.eupjournals.com/doi/abs/10.3366/E1750224109000488 "Violently Oscillating: Science, Repetition and Affective Transmutation in Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz" by Elena del Rio 73-96. http://www.eupjournals.com/doi/abs/10.3366/E175022410900049X "If Not Here, Then Where? On the Location and Individuation of Events in Badiou and Deleuze" by James Williams, 97-123. http://www.eupjournals.com/doi/abs/10.3366/E1750224109000506 "Speranza, the Wandering Island" by Ronald Bogue, 124-134. http://www.eupjournals.com/doi/abs/10.3366/E1750224109000518 Download the issue here: http://www.eupjournals.com/toc/dls/3/1.