Stern, Sol. "E. D. Hirsch’s Curriculum for Democracy." CITY JOURNAL (Autumn 2009).

The “Massachusetts miracle,” in which Bay State students’ soaring test scores broke records, was the direct consequence of the state legislature’s passage of the 1993 Education Reform Act, which established knowledge-based standards for all grades and a rigorous testing system linked to the new standards. And those standards, Massachusetts reformers have acknowledged, are Hirsch’s legacy. If the Obama administration truly wants to have a positive impact on American education, it should embrace Hirsch’s ideas and urge other states to do the same. Hirsch draws his insights from well outside traditional education scholarship. He started out studying chemistry at Cornell University but, mesmerized by Nabokov’s lectures on Russian literature, switched his major to English. Hirsch did his graduate studies at Yale, one of the citadels in the 1950s of the New Criticism, which argued that the intent of an author, the reader’s subjective response, and the text’s historical background were largely irrelevant to a critical analysis of the text itself. But by the time Hirsch wrote his doctoral dissertation—on Wordsworth—he was already breaking with the New Critics. “I came to see that the text alone is not enough,” Hirsch said to me recently at his Charlottesville, Virginia, home. “The unspoken—that is, relevant background knowledge—is absolutely crucial in reading a text.” Hirsch’s big work of literary theory in his early academic career, Validity in Interpretation, reflected this shift in thinking. After publishing several more well-received scholarly books and articles, he received an endowed professorship and became chairman of the English department at the University of Virginia. Hirsch was at the pinnacle of the academic world, in his mid-fifties, when he was struck by an insight into how reading is taught that, he says, “changed my life.” He was “feeling guilty” about the department’s inadequate freshman writing course, he recalls. Though UVA’s admissions standards were as competitive as the Ivies’, the reading and writing skills of many incoming students were poor, sure to handicap them in their future academic work. In trying to figure out how to close this “literacy gap,” Hirsch conducted an experiment on reading comprehension, using two groups of college students. Members of the first group possessed broad background knowledge in subjects like history, geography, civics, the arts, and basic science; members of the second, often from disadvantaged homes, lacked such knowledge. The knowledgeable students, it turned out, could far more easily comprehend and analyze difficult college-level texts (both fiction and nonfiction) than their poorly informed brethren could. Hirsch had discovered “a way to measure the variations in reading skill attributable to variations in the relevant background knowledge of audiences.” This finding, first published in a psychology journal, was consistent with Hirsch’s past scholarship, in which he had argued that the author takes for granted that his readers have crucial background knowledge. Hirsch was also convinced that the problem of inadequate background knowledge began in the early grades. Elementary school teachers thus had to be more explicit about imparting such knowledge to students—indeed, this was even more important than teaching the “skills” of reading and writing, Hirsch believed. Hirsch’s insight contravened the conventional wisdom in the nation’s education schools: that teaching facts was unimportant, and that students instead should learn “how to” skills. Hirsch gave a lecture on the implications of his study at a Modern Language Association conference and then expanded the argument in a 1983 article, titled “Cultural Literacy,” in The American Scholar. The article caused a stir, not so much in the academy (and certainly not in the ed schools) as among public intellectuals. William Bennett, then chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, encouraged Hirsch to pursue his theme. Education historian Diane Ravitch urged him to get a book out fast and to call it Cultural Literacy as well. Hirsch heeded the advice, and in 1987, the book landed on the New York Times’s bestseller list, where it stayed for 26 weeks, resulting in a dramatic career change for the author. He kept researching and writing about how to improve the “cultural literacy” of young Americans and launched the Core Knowledge Foundation, which sought to create a knowledge-based curriculum for the nation’s elementary schools. A wide range of scholars assisted him in specifying the knowledge that children in grades K–8 needed to become proficient readers. For example, the Core Knowledge curriculum specifies that in English language arts, all second-graders read poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Emily Dickinson, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as stories by Rudyard Kipling, E. B. White, and Hans Christian Andersen. In history and geography, the children study the world’s great rivers, ancient Rome, and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, among other subjects. By the late 1980s, Hirsch had all but abandoned academic literary studies and become a full-time education reformer. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_4_hirsch.html.

Romano, Carlin. "Heil Heidegger!" CHRONICLE REVIEW October 18, 2009.

Faye, Emmanuel. Heidegger: the Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany's greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack? Overrated in his prime, bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now, the pretentious old Black Forest babbler makes one wonder whether there's a university-press equivalent of wolfsbane, guaranteed to keep philosophical frauds at a distance. To be sure, every philosophy reference book credits Heidegger with one or another headscratcher achievement. One lauds him for his "revival of ontology." (Would we not think about things that exist without this ponderous, existentialist Teuton?) Another cites his helpful boost to phenomenology by directing our focus to that well-known entity, Dasein, or "Human Being." (For a reified phenomenon, "Human Being," like the Yeti, has managed to elude all on-camera confirmation.) A third praises his opposition to nihilism, an odd compliment for a conservative, nationalist thinker whose antihumanistic apotheosis of ruler over ruled helped grease the path of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Next month Yale University Press will issue an English-language translation of Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy, by Emmanuel Faye, an associate professor at the University of Paris at Nanterre. It's the latest, most comprehensive archival assault on the ostensibly magisterial thinker who informed Freiburg students in his infamous 1933 rectoral address of Nazism's "inner truth and greatness," declaring that "the Führer, and he alone, is the present and future of German reality, and its law." Faye, whose book stirred France's red and blue Heidegger départements into direct battle a few years back, follows in the investigative footsteps of Chilean-Jewish philosopher Victor Farias (Heidegger et le Nazisme, 1987), historian Hugo Ott (Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu Zeiner Biographie, 1988) and others. Aim? To expose the oafish metaphysician's vulgar, often vicious 1930s attempt to become Hitler's chief academic tribune, and his post-World War II contortions to escape proper judgment for his sins. "We now know," reports Faye, "that [Heidegger's] attempt at self-justification of 1945 is nothing but a string of falsehoods." . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/Heil-Heidegger-/48806/.

"Scientific Philosophy: Past and Future," Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Tilburg University, April 13, 2010.

Various philosophers of the past - and many philosophers of today - believe that there can be real progress in philosophy and that such progress is facilitated crucially by a close interaction between philosophy and the sciences. "Scientific Philosophy" maintains that philosophical theses and arguments should be just as clear and precise as scientific ones; philosophers ought to build theories and models much as scientists do; and the application of mathematical methods as well as input from empirical studies are often necessary in order to gain new insights into old philosophical questions and to progress to new and deeper ones. This workshop will address what Scientific Philosophy is all about, what it has in common with science and where it might diverge from it, what we can learn from its historical successes and failures, and, most importantly, how we should assess its future prospects. The invited speakers include: Michael Friedman, Stanford Christopher Hitchcock, Caltech Volker Peckhaus, Paderborn Organizers: Stephan Hartmann, Tilburg Hannes Leitgeb, Bristol Jan Sprenger, Tilburg There'll be three to four slots for contributed papers. If you are interested in presenting something, please send an extended abstract of up to 1500 words to TiLPS@uvt.nl by 15 January 2010. Decisions will be made by 1 February 2010. There is no registration fee. However, participants have to register by sending an email to TiLPS@uvt.nl by 15 March 2010. For further information, visit: http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/faculties/humanities/tilps/sppf2010/.

Cfp: "The Politics of Peace," Annual Conference, Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology, Messiah College, April 16-17, 2010.

Call for Papers: SCPT's 2010 conference will focus on PEACE. We invite papers that examine the many dimensions of peace from social, political, religious, scientific, theological, and philosophical points of view. We also seek papers dealing with complementary topics such as justice, reconciliation, forgiveness, and peace-making, and that deal with the practical aspects of the above topics. SCPT is an organization that seeks to promote inquiry at the intersection of philosophy and theology, through the study of phenomenology, deconstruction, feminism, Radical Orthodoxy, and other related fields. Keynote Speakers: Catherine Keller (Drew University) William T. Cavanaugh (University of St. Thomas) Only complete papers with a maximum of 3,000 words will be accepted. Papers should be prepared for blind review and sent to peacestudies@messiah.edu. DEADLINE: FREBRUARY 8, 2010 The Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology seeks to promote inquiry at the intersection of philosophy and theology. For more information about SCPT, visit http://www.scptonline.org.

Myers, D. G. "The Never-Ending Journey." COMMENTARY MAGAZINE (October 2009).

• Alexander, Edward. Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe, and Other Stories of Literary Friendship. Somerset, NJ: Transaction, 2009.
• Kimmage, Michael. The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009.

Why the persistent fascination with Lionel Trilling? An English professor, literary critic, and one-book novelist, Trilling continues to generate interest three decades after his death, while his contemporaries—Newton Arvin, Cleanth Brooks, F.O. Matthiessen, Philip Rahv, Yvor Winters—go quietly into obscurity. Two new books by academics of distinction—one with a long career and the other at the outset—wrestle with Trilling’s legacy only three years after Gertrude Himmelfarb named Trilling as the summit of The Moral Imagination in her book of that title three years ago. Just last year, an unfinished novel called The Journey Abandoned appeared in print for the first time and was the occasion of essays everywhere, including in these pages, just as the New York Review of Books reissued The Liberal Imagination, his best-known -volume, in a “classic” edition.

There is something peculiar in this. After all, liberal anti-Communism, the cause Trilling was most closely identified with, is no longer relevant. The Soviet Union outlived him by just a decade and a half, and those who claim the present-day mantle of liberal anti-Communism, like the journalists Peter Beinart and Paul Berman, have had an exceptionally clumsy time of it. There is no liberal anti-Islamism to speak of. Those who now declare themselves liberals (“a word primarily of political import,” Trilling wrote, “but its political meaning defines itself by the quality of life it envisages”) are more impatient to prosecute Bush-administration officials than the war on terror.

What is more, the style of literary criticism practiced by Trilling—and by Irving Howe, whose long friendship with Trilling is lovingly detailed in Edward Alexander’s book Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe—might itself share some of the blame for its current dreadful state. The rise of “literary theory” in the late 70s entailed the “reduction of literature to politics,” Harold Fromm charged in Academic Capitalism and Literary Value (1991), and since then critics have been “more interested in political goals than intellectual activity or aesthetic response.” The same might have been said of Trilling (and Howe).

As a literary man, Trilling was the sworn enemy of the so-called New Critics—his chief rivals to preeminence in the literary criticism of the time—who sought to disconnect literature from an external reality and study poems only in relation to what R. P. Blackmur, one of their more articulate spokesmen, called “the analyzable features of the forms and techniques of poetry.” The effect was to sever literature from any relation to politics.

Trilling believed that withdrawal from politics was unforgivable in an era in which human freedom was threatened by a Soviet totalitarianism that “wants not so much a liberated humanity as a sterilized humanity” and “would gladly make a wasteland if it could call the silence peace.” Intellectual passivity, he warned, was an invitation to violence. Literature had a very immediate connection with politics—though politics did not mean practical arrangements for the improvement of social existence but “the politics of culture, the organization of human life toward some end or other.” The aesthetic effect of the greatest literature was to be found in its “intellectual power,” in the “mind’s success” at confronting social reality. The greatness of literature, in other words, is measured in the level of its engagement with society and therefore with politics. . . .

Read the whole review here: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-never-ending-journey-15249?page=all.

Pub: RHETORIC REVIEW 7.2 (2009).

Contents:

• Sara Newman, review of Carol Berkenkotter, Patient Tales: Case Histories and the Uses of Narrative in Psychiatry;
• Brenda Griffith-Williams, review of Edwin Carawan, ed. The Attic Orators;
• Christopher Coffman, review of Tina Skouen, Passion and Persuasion: John Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther;
• Richard Hunter, review of Casper C. de Jonge, Between Grammar and Rhetoric. Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Language, Linguistics and Literature.

Download the reviews here: http://www.nnrh.dk/RR/june09.html.

"Crises, Corruption, Character and Change," 9th International Conference on Organizational Discourse (ICOD), Amsterdam, July 14-16, 2010.

Contemporary organizing is confronted by seemingly endless ‘crises’ which are routinely projected through apocalyptic metaphor. Over coffee, we can skip-read through today’s ‘ecological catastrophe’, the ‘global financial meltdown’ and ‘the collapse of capitalism’ before ‘getting down to work’. The global financial system appears to be littered with a variety of corrosive mechanisms in the banks, the housing markets and their institutions, the pensions industry and the short-termism of stock-markets. And these ‘crises’ are of such magnitude that we are threatened with recession if not the more ominous possibility of economic depression. Meanwhile, it seems, global warming and its attendant climate change proceed unabated. We are threatened with the inundation of all low-lying land, the collapse of food production across several continents and the fundamental transformation of ocean currents promising flood and drought in equal measure. Fish and bees are disappearing while feel-good eco-friendly products proliferate within a flourishing carbon-offset ‘market’. And the poverty of our political response is breath-taking – the only tangible outcome of the G8 meeting in L'Aquila (July, 2009) was that world leaders were presented with made-to-measure Belstaff parka jackets individually signed by Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. Crises? What crises? All of which suggests that the distance between our discursive projections of the future and our inability to confront those possibilities has, perhaps, never been greater. In the post-whatever world we now inhabit, all appears to be simultaneously terminal and – bizarrely – transient. We can frame this apparent dissociation of human action from its consequences through the analyses of ‘flexible capitalism’ (Sennett) or ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman) which have charted the disorienting and destabilising effects of – in its broadest sense – the emergent ‘post-modern’ social reality. However, the persuasiveness of such abstract analyses apparently remains beyond periphery of policy-makers’ thinking. Hence, the theme for the 9th Conference has a narrative focus on the discursive construction and re-construction of crises, corruption, character and change. At the meta-level, the conference theme is intended to elicit papers which address the discursive construction and re-construction of ‘crises’. In our view, linguistic framing is a fundamental aspect of how ‘crises’ are being manufactured, constituted, projected, perceived and addressed (or finessed) at all levels of organization. Despite the apocalyptic metaphors, it appears that any given ‘crisis’ can re-emerge as a ‘manageable risk’, a ‘market opportunity’ or a case for ‘re-regulation’. Perhaps most problematic is how we have depicted the character of these various crises for their technical and global complexity invariably engenders over-simplified description. In parallel, we appear to be experiencing a persistent growth in corruption. This is manifest in at least two spheres. First, we have seen an increasing prevalence of dissociated institutional practices across organizations which have directly undermined the presumed core processes of those organizations – a phenomenon which has occurred not only in financial institutions but also in the political sphere and across public sector organizing. Secondly, in accounting for and representing such seemingly corrupt behaviour, the first resort is invariably to one or other variety of rhetorical dissimulation – a deeply corrosive process which corrupts the conventional meanings of language. These issues raise further questions regarding the problems of continuity and the scope for change. Is socio-political and institutional change desirable or even feasible? If so, what particular forms of change might be instigated? Should change processes be radical and transformational or orthodox and incremental in nature? What is the role for, and status of, discourse(s) in relation to change (or non-change). How does discourse shape ‘character-formation’ and possible responses to crises and corruption? In keeping with past conferences, we also invite papers which engage with the constructs of character, corruption and change in a more specific sense. Hence, character – corrupt or otherwise – could, for example, be considered as an attribute of individuals ‘getting into character’, of organizations (e.g. culture), or as a loaded social phenomena (i.e. with moral, spiritual and/or ethical overtones). Similarly, we welcome submissions which address corruption in the wider etymological sense of contaminating or altering meaning (e.g. relation to a text). Alternative readings of change which apply to discursive aspects of organizing or organizations are also encouraged (i.e. as socially embedded processes of substitution, conversion, disruption or improvement). Given the Conference theme deliberately constitutes a broad discursive canvas, we expect the precise conference streams to emerge from the papers themselves. However, we also anticipate papers that will organize themselves within the following topics: Sensemaking, Stories and Narrative; Corruption, Disruption and Rhetoric; Discourse, Identity and Temporality; Language, Culture and Ideology; Management Philosophy; Professions, Practices and Ethics; Ethnography and Organizational Life; Crisis, Continuity and Change; Reflexivity in Organizing; Critical Discursive Approaches; Metaphor, Tropes and Symbolism; Text, Talk and Technology; Organizational Identities; Management Discourse; Structures, Networks and Agency; Consumption, Brands and Images; Dramaturgy and Aesthetics; Spirituality and Diversity; Conversation Analytic Approaches Papers are invited on talk and text which address issues of social representation, social construction and social interaction in relation to any aspect of organization or organizing in relation to these themes. Contributions may adopt any epistemological perspective but we are concerned to achieve a balance between empirical studies and conceptual/theoretical contributions. Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/carbs/conferences/icod10/index.html.

Foucault Recordings.

The Media Resources Center of the University of California, Berkeley has recently placed on-line a number of audio recordings of Foucault. These recordings were donated to the library by Professor Paul Rabinow. Please visit: http://blogs.lib.berkeley.edu/cunews.php/2009/10/13/new-foucault-and-lgbt-online-collections

Project Narrative Summer Institute, Ohio State University, June 28 - July 9, 2010.

The Project Narrative Summer Institute (PNSI) is a two-week workshop on the Ohio State University campus that offers scholars who have earned a Ph.D. (or other terminal degree) in any discipline the opportunity for an intensive study of core concepts and issues in narrative theory. Jim Phelan and Robyn Warhol-Down will direct the 2010 institute, which will accept twenty participants and will run from Monday, June 28th to Friday, July 9th. Rationale: "Narrative understanding"; "narrative explanation"; "narrative as a way of thinking"; "narrative as self-construction" : these phrases are now common currency in the conversations of literary critics, historians, philosophers, social scientists, therapists, legal scholars, and even some scientists and medical professionals, as their disciplines reflect on the ubiquity and power of storytelling. This Narrative Turn, with its cross-disciplinary consensus about the importance of narrative, invites investigation into narrative's form and effects, into its production and consumption. What is it about character, plot, ways of telling, and other elements of narrative that make it such a widely-deployed way of organizing and explaining experience and knowledge? More simply, how does narrative work in itself, how does it try to work on audiences, and how do audiences work with and against it? The Project Narrative Summer Institute will explore these questions in conjunction with a group of diverse literary narratives--diverse both in their media and in their cultural origins—and, in so doing, provide insight into essential elements of narrative and narrative theory. Even as the institute explores such theoretical issues as the dynamics of narrative transmission, the architecture of narrative worlds, and the distinction between fictional and nonfictional narrative, it will emphasize the value of establishing two-way traffic between narrative and narrative theory, that is, of recognizing that just as theory informs our understanding of individual narratives, so too do narratives lead us to revise, extend, and on occasion overturn existing theory. Narrative Texts: We will put a range of work in narrative theory (structuralist, feminist, cognitive, rhetorical, and more) in dialogue with the following set of diverse narratives: five short stories by mainstream and multicultural authors--Edith Wharton's "Roman Fever," Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"; Toni Morrison's "Recitatif," Sandra Cisneros's "Barbie-Q," and John Edgar Wideman's "Doc's Story"; one novel, Jane Austen's Persuasion; one graphic narrative (that is, a comics-style text using a sequence of panels with text and image to tell its story), Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: a Family Tragicomic; and one film, Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan's Slumdog Millionaire. Participants should read Persuasion and Fun Home in advance of the institute. Theoretical Texts: Among others, the readings in narrative theory will include foundational work in narratology by Gérard Genette, Gerald Prince, Dorrit Cohn, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Uri Margolin; ethnically centered, queer, and feminist essays by Frederic Luis Aldama, Susan S. Lanser, Susan Stanford Friedman, and Robyn Warhol; work in cognitive narratology by David Herman and Alan Palmer; in neo-marxist theory by Alex Woloch; in rhetorical narrative theory by James Phelan; and in narrative approaches to post-modernism by Brian McHale and Brian Richardson. The deadline for applications is Monday, March 1, 2010. For more information, including application instructions and a syllabus, go to http://projectnarrative.osu.edu/aboutUs/summerinstitute.cfm.

Livingston, Paul M. Review of Alain Badiou, LOGICS OF WORLDS. NDPR (October 2009).

Badiou, Alain. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II. Trans. Albert Toscano. London: Continuum, 2008. If it is reasonable to hope that the current moment in philosophy may ultimately represent one of transition, from the divided remnants of the still enduring "split" between "analytic" and "continental" philosophy to some form (or forms) of twenty-first century philosophy that is no longer recognizably either (or is both), it seems likely as well that the thought and work of Alain Badiou can play a key role in articulating this much needed transition. One of the central innovations of Badiou's work is that it uses the kind of rigorous formalism characteristic of much good analytic philosophy in its attempt to think through some of the main problems of ontology, metaphysics and political theory that have troubled continental philosophers over the course of the twentieth century. Both in Badiou's 1988 magnum opus, Being and Event and its new sequel, Logics of Worlds, the result is a kind of paradoxical formalism of the limits of formalism itself, striking a sometimes uneasy balance between the inveterate tendency of analytic thought to seek formal solutions for theoretical problems of epistemology and metaphysics, and that of continental thought to seek the solution to what are seen as more-than-theoretical problems of social and political praxis in the kinds of liberation that may occur outside the "closed" regime of all that is calculable or tractable by formal systems. In Logics of Worlds, as in the earlier book, Badiou's overriding aim is to theorize the possibility of radical novelty, or of discontinuous and essentially unforeseeable change, in any of a variety of domains (chiefly those of the "four generic procedures": politics, art, science, and love). To this end, in Being and Event, Badiou developed an elaborate and innovative theory of formal ontology based on mathematical structures, in particular that of mathematical set theory on its standard, ZFC axiomatization. This allowed Badiou to theorize what he there called the "event", the paradoxical occurrence that, by locally suspending the fundamental axioms normally governing the appearance of any object or entity as such, allows essentially new groupings, indiscernible by means of the resources of the existing situation, suddenly to appear and work their transformative effects. In Logics of Worlds, Badiou supplements this earlier "ontological" account of evental change with a comprehensive formal theory of appearance, what Badiou here terms a "phenomenology". Although the underlying apparatus is once again drawn from mathematical formalism, the sociopolitical implications of such possibilities of change are also, once again, very much to the fore. Indeed, in its "Preface", Badiou presents the whole argument of Logics of Worlds as part of an attempt to theorize what escapes the assumptions of contemporary "natural belief", what he sees as the confining dogmas of postmodern relativism and conventionalism (pp. 2-3). Such views, Badiou thinks, can ultimately yield only a monotonous regime of "democratic materialism" that, in seeing all cultures and their claims as on a level, forecloses both any possibility of real development and any effective intervention to produce fundamental change (pp. 2-8). Badiou proposes to replace this axiomatic of contemporary conviction with one that he calls, following Althusser, a "materialist dialectic". The central difference here is Badiou's unhesitating affirmation of what he calls Truths, which are, according to him, generally denied or suppressed in the contemporary orthodoxy of belief (p. 4). Badiou's notion of truth, however, is a heterodox one, not to be understood in terms of any familiar (e.g., correspondence or coherence) notion. For Badiou, the central mark of a Truth is its capacity to break with (or "subtract itself from") an existing regime of knowledge, and so to define a direction of radical transformation which, if followed out, will lead to the substantial re-ordering of basic possibilities of presentation and representation within the existing order (pp. 9-10). This vector of transformation is, for Badiou, always infinite. Thus the punctual articulation of a Truth by means of an evental break with a given situation is always partial, and liable to be taken up again, even after a lapse of centuries or millennia, through the renewal of a faithful tracing of the consequences of a subsequent Event by the agency of what Badiou terms the "subject" (pp. 33-35). Much of this terminology is familiar from Being and Event's theory of radical, evental change, and Badiou's aim here is not so much to alter that theory in any fundamental way as to remedy certain deficiencies he now sees in it. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17765.

Lewis, William. "Louis Althusser." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY October 16, 2009.

Louis Pierre Althusser (1918–1990) was one of the most influential Marxist philosophers of the 20th Century. As they seemed to offer a renewal of Marxist thought as well as to render Marxism philosophy respectable, the claims he advanced in the 1960s about Marxist philosophy were discussed and debated worldwide. Due to apparent reversals in his theoretical positions, to the ill-fated facts of his life, and to the historical fortunes of Marxism in the late twentieth century, this intense interest in Althusser's reading of Marx did not survive the 1970s. Despite the comparative indifference shown to his work as a whole after these events, the theory of ideology Althusser developed within it has been broadly deployed in the social sciences and humanities and has provided a foundation for much “post-Marxist” philosophy. In addition, aspects of Althusser's project have served as inspiration for Analytic Marxism as well as for Critical Realism. Though this influence is not always explicit, Althusser's work and that of his students continues to inform the research programs of literary studies, political philosophy, history, economics, and sociology. In addition, his autobiography has been subject to much critical attention over the last decade. At present, Althusser's philosophy as a whole is undergoing a critical reevaluation by scholars who have benefited from the anthologization of hard-to-find and previously unpublished texts and who have begun to engage with the great mass of writings that remain in his archives. . . . Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/althusser/.

"Art and/or Entertainment," 5th Annual Conference on Philosophy and Popular Culture, University of Southern Denmark, November 6, 2009.

Speakers: Irwin, King’s College, Pennsylvania, USA William Westney, H. C. Andersen Guest Professor, SDU; Texas Tech University, USA Kirsten Frandsen, University of Aarhus Cynthia M. Grund, University of Southern Denmark Jørgen Dines Johansen, University of Southern Denmark Carsten Fogh Nielsen, University of Copenhagen Rikke Schubart, University of Southern Denmark. The conference is free and open to all. For further information please contact: Post.doc. Carsten Fogh Nielsen at carstenfn@hum.ku.dk or Associate professor Cynthia M. Grund at cmgrund@ifpr.sdu.dk Details on the research project 'Philosophy meets Popular Culture' may be found here: www.philpopculture.dk; On Facebook, search for “Philosophy meets popular culture”

Cfp: "Caribbean Enlightenment," Caribbean Discussion Group, University of Glasgow, April 8-10, 2010.

An Interdisciplinary Caribbean Studies Conference. Keynote Speakers: J. Michael Dash, Professor of French, Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University Paget Henry, Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Brown University Nick Nesbitt, Centre for Modern Thought, University of Aberdeen Call for Papers: In a speech widely regarded as instigating the series of events that would lead to the overthrow of the Lescot government in 1946, André Breton's proclamation of Haiti's 'inalienable enthusiasm for liberty and its affirmation of dignity above all obstacles' articulated the enduring revolutionary conviction in the Enlightenment-inspired principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. This artistic, cultural and political expression of a universal right to freedom and self-determination reflects the diverse and complex ways in which Enlightenment ideals have found expression in the Caribbean. From the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804 to The Black Jacobins, surrealism, négritude, and the contemporary writings of such theorists as Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Édouard Glissant, and Wilson Harris, the interrogation of universality has both contributed to the ongoing dissemination and creolization of Enlightenment discourse and has subjected it to a thorough critique. This conference aims to explore the various ways in which the site of the Caribbean, with its writers, artists, revolutionaries, and diverse peoples, has adapted and questioned the legacies of the Enlightenment. Acknowledging the Caribbean's crucial role in the Atlantic world, the Enlightenment's history of empire building and slave rebellions, colonial domination and postcolonial nation-building, the valorization of reason and its role in the division of knowledge will be interrogated against the dissemination of a discourse promoting universal human rights, democracy and equality. This conference seeks to bring together interdisciplinary perspectives on Enlightenment themes, both historical and contemporary, in order to trace the spread of a universalist discourse across the Caribbean. We hope to bring together Anglophone, Francophone and Hispanophone perspectives that explore figurations of the universal within the Caribbean context. Noting the region's national and linguistic divides, this conference will expose the ways in which Enlightenment ideals have been adapted to express the particular experience of the Caribbean peoples. Finally, we pose the question: 'Does the commitment to universalism amount to a totalizing discourse, or can universalism be revisioned'? We invite papers and panel suggestions that deal with any aspect of Caribbean Enlightenment, but which may include: Reason and Rule of Law Revolutions and uprisings Shortcomings of the Enlightenment: slavery and racism Development of 'improvement' in technologies, medicine and language Universal Human Rights, Democracy, Marxism, Self-determination Economics of Caribbean Enlightenment The impact of surrealism Négritude and the universal Appraisals of The Black Jacobins Contemporary Caribbean literature/philosophy and universality 'revisioned' Gendered, gay, racial, and class perspectives on universality Religion and the Caribbean Caribbean thought and 'post-continental' philosophy. Contact: Please send panel proposals and/or paper abstracts (300 words) with a brief biographical statement (150 words) to Dr. Lorna Burns and Michael Morris at caribbeanenlightenment@gmail.com by 1st December 2009. Visit the conference webpage: http://www.gla.ac.uk/faculties/arts/graduateschool/events/caribbeandiscussiongroup/caribbeanenlightenment/.

Romano, Carlin. "Amartya Sen Shakes Up Justice Theory." CHRONICLE September 14, 2009.

Sen, Amartya. The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009. Suppose three children—Anne, Bob, and Carla—quarrel over a flute. Anne says it's hers because she's the only one who knows how to play it. Bob counters that he's the poorest and has no toys, so the flute would at least give him something to play with. Carla reminds Anne and Bob that she built the darn thing, and no sooner did she finish it than the other two started trying to take it away. Intuitions clashing yet? Need something more complex to tingle your justice antennae—perhaps a puzzler from game theory? The example is Amartya Sen's, from the Nobel-Prize-winning economist's just-published The Idea of Justice (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press), his magnum opus on a line of work he's long addressed and now thoroughly re-examines: justice theory. And what a growth industry it's been since John Rawls revived the subject with his classic, A Theory of Justice (1971), and colleague Robert Nozick made its core principles into an Emerson Hall battle with his libertarian Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). Since Rawls, one hardly ranks as a political theorist without a whack at the J-word. Sen's stepping into the fray should keep things hopping, but justice theory is one subsidiary of philosophy that never really suffers a bad century. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/Amartya-Sen-Shakes-Up-Justice/48332.

Herta Muller Wins Nobel Prize in Literature 2009.

The German author Herta Müller has won the 2009 Nobel prize for literature for works inspired by – and often portraying – life under Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship in her native Romania. The Swedish Academy, which awards the £895,000 prize, hailed Müller, 56, as a writer who "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed". Müller was born in a German-speaking village near Timisoara in western Romania but fled the country with her husband in 1987, two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Christmas coup which saw Ceausescu deposed and executed in Romania. She has long been considered a candidate for the award and the permanent secretary of the Academy, Peter Englund, paid tribute to her today as a "great artist of words" who combined a fantastic language with extreme precision. . . . Read the rest here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6866020.ece.

Robin, Corey. "The First Counter-Revolutionary." THE NATION September 30, 2009.

Revolution sent Thomas Hobbes into exile; reaction sent him back. In 1640 parliamentary opponents of Charles I such as John Pym were denouncing anyone "preaching for absolute monarchy that the king may do what he list." Hobbes had recently finished writing The Elements of Law, which did just that. After the king's top adviser and a theologian of unlimited royal power were both arrested, Hobbes decided it was time to go. Not waiting for his bags to be packed, he fled England for France. Eleven years and a civil war later, Hobbes fled France for England. This time, he was running from the royalists. As before, Hobbes had just finished a book. Leviathan, he would later explain, "fights on behalf of all kings and all those who under whatever name bear the rights of kings." It was this seeming indifference about the identity of the sovereign that was now getting him into trouble. Leviathan justified, no, demanded, that men submit to any person or persons capable of protecting them from foreign attack and civil unrest. With the monarchy abolished and Oliver Cromwell's forces in control of England and providing for the people's safety, Leviathan seemed to recommend that everyone, including the defeated royalists, profess their allegiance to the Commonwealth. Versions of that argument had already gotten Anthony Ascham, ambassador for the Commonwealth, assassinated by royalist exiles in Spain. So when Hobbes learned that clergymen in France were trying to arrest him--Leviathan was also vehemently anti-Catholic, which offended the Queen Mother--he slipped out of Paris and made his way back to London. It's no accident that Hobbes fled his enemies and then his friends, for he was fashioning a political theory that shredded longstanding alliances. Rather than reject the revolutionary argument, he absorbed and transformed it. From its deepest categories and idioms he derived an uncompromising defense of the most hidebound form of rule. He sensed the centrifugal pulses of early modern Europe--the priesthood of all believers, the democratic armies massing under the banner of ancient republican ideals, science and skepticism--and sought to convert them into a single centripetal force: a sovereign so terrible and benign as to make any challenge to such authority seem not only immoral but also irrational. Not unlike the Italian Futurists, Hobbes put dissolution in the service of resolution. He was the first and, along with Nietzsche, the greatest philosopher of counterrevolution, a blender avant la lettre of cultural modernism and political reaction who understood that to defeat a revolution you first must become the revolution. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091019/robin/single.

Dalrymple, Theodore. "The Cult of Insincerity." NEW ENGLISH REVIEW (October 2009).

The other day – well, on Saturday, 5th September, to be exact – I opened Le Monde to the page called ‘Debates.’ The page was devoted to prisons in France, where conditions are acknowledged by almost everyone to be very bad. The prisons are overcrowded; there is much violence between prisoners; the staff, according to Dr. Dominique Vasseur, who wrote a best-selling book about her time as a doctor working in the largest prison in Paris, are callous and often corrupt. If her book is to be trusted – and no one, I think, has suggested that she was lying or grossly exaggerating – prisons in France are far worse than those across the Channel, which themselves are by no means always model institutions. Prison reform is an honourable cause; and while I don’t agree with Churchill, that a nation’s level of civilisation can be gauged by the way in which it treats its prisoners, I have always opposed the brutality that can so easily pervade what Erving Goffman called ‘a total institution.’ In the prison in which I worked, I insisted to the staff that their ascendancy over the prisoners must be moral rather than merely physical; and that, while they could be sometimes stern, they must always be fair. Moreover, they should always remember that, in prison, small things become large; and therefore, if they have promised something to a prisoner, they must always fulfil their promise. For otherwise the prisoner will be eaten up by a sense of grievance, and there is nothing like grievance to prevent a man from examining his own responsibility for his situation. But half the page of Le Monde was taken up with a plea for the greatest reform of prison of all: total abolition. It was written by a teacher of philosophy at a lycee, one of the elite state schools of the country; and if it were not for the fact that many young people tend to believe exactly the opposite of what their teacher teaches them, I would have said that he must be a corrupter of youth. It is odd that a man who presumably has spent a large part of his life on abstract questions should show such little capacity for critical thought. In him, at any rate, the Cartesian spirit is dead. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/48714/sec_id/48714.

McWhorter, John. "What Should African American Students Learn?" THE NEW REPUBLIC October 1, 2009.

My point is that the typical African-American Studies department holds front and center a particular lesson: that racism is more influential in American life at present than one might initially think, and always has been. Urban history? Blacks were penned into segregated districts and then factory jobs available to modestly educated men were moved to China. Politics? Radicalism has been most interesting, whether or not it was the source of most black success. Performance? Most resonant in how it Spoke Truth to Power. Is that all we are? Is that all we have been? Is it irrelevant to cover how black people have triumphed against the obstacles? Especially since so many have trumphed that today there are more middle class black people than poor ones? Is the main relevance of the fact that we have a black President--ahem!!!!--that his election didn’t mean, as if anyone thought it did, that there did not remain some racist idiots here and there? It’s time that African-American Studies departments let go of the sixties imperative to defend blacks as eternal victims of racism. Black people can do their best even under imperfect conditions--and if that reality is irrelevant to an African-American Studies curriculum, then we must question the value of said curricula to those whom they purport to speak up for: real people in this real world. . . .

Gray, John. "Behind the Myth." LITERARY REVIEW (October 2009).

Service, Robert.  Trotsky: a Biography. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Trotsky has always been something of an icon for the intelligentsia, and it is not hard to see why. He fitted the perception that dissenting intellectuals like to have of themselves. Highly cultured, locked in struggle with a repressive establishment, a gifted writer who was also a man of action, he seemed to embody the ideal of truth speaking to power. The manner of his death solidified this perception, which has shaped accounts of his life ever since.

Trotsky was a charismatic leader whose appeal extended across the political spectrum. When Trotsky was on the run from Stalin, H L Mencken offered to give him his own library (Trotsky refused because he did not want to be indebted to a reactionary). The Bishop of Birmingham signed a petition on Trotsky's behalf, and he was invited to become rector of Edinburgh University. Maynard Keynes tried to secure asylum for him in England, a campaign supported even by the power-worshipping Stalin-lover Beatrice Webb. Literary notables like Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy joined the chorus of adulation. A hero-martyr in the cause of humanity, Trotsky deserved the support of every right-thinking person.

This has never been a terribly plausible view of the man who welcomed the ruthless crushing of the Kronstadt workers and sailors when they demanded a more pluralist system of government in 1921, and who defended the systematic use of terror against opponents of the Soviet state until his dying day. Introducing a system of hostage-taking in the Civil War and consistently supporting the trial and execution of dissidents (Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, liberal Kadets, nationalists and others), Trotsky never hesitated to endorse repression against those who stood in the way of communist power. This much has long been clear, but the full extent of Trotsky's role in building Soviet totalitarianism has not been detailed - until now. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/gray_10_09.html.

Wade, Nicholas. "Evolution All Round." NEW YORK TIMES October 8, 2009.

Dawkins, Richard.  The Greatest Show on Earth: the Evidence for Evolution.  New York: Free Press, 2009.

The theory of evolution really does explain everything in biology. The phenomena that Darwin understood in broad brush strokes can now be accounted for in the precise language of DNA. And though biological systems have attained extraordinary levels of complexity over the passage of time, no serious biologist doubts that evolutionary explanations exist or will be found for every jot and tittle in the grand script.

To biologists and others, it is a source of amazement and embarrassment that many Americans repudiate Darwin’s theory and that some even espouse counter­theories like creationism or intelligent design. How can such willful ignorance thrive in today’s seas of knowledge? In the hope of diminishing such obscurantism, the prolific English biology writer Richard Dawkins has devoted his latest book to demonstrating the explanatory power of evolutionary ideas while hammering the creationists at every turn.

Dawkins invites the reader to share the frustration of an imaginary history teacher, some of whose students refuse to accept that the Roman Empire ever existed, or that Latin is the mother tongue from which the Romance languages evolved. Instead of concentrating on how Western culture emerged from the institutions of the Roman state, the teacher must spend time combating a school board that insists he give equal time to their alternative view that French has been spoken from time immemorial and that Caesar never came or saw or conquered. This is exactly analogous to the plight of the biology teacher trying to acquaint students with the richness of modern biology in states where fundamentalist opponents of evolution hold sway.

Dawkins has a nice sense of irony, deployed without mercy on the opponents of evolution. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/books/review/Wade-t.html?pagewanted=all.

Cfp: "Cultures of Differences: National, Indigenous, Historical," Annual Conference, International Association of Philosophy and Literature, University of Regina, May 24-30, 2010.

For more information, visit: http://www.iapl.info/. 

"Crisis of Meaning," a Day of Φιλο-ΣοΦια (Philo-Sophia): Friendship and Philosophical Discussion, Murdoch University, November 27, 2009.

The Murdoch Philosophy Program, in conjunction with the Krishna Somers Foundation, the Murdoch School of Social Sciences and Humanities and the Faculty of Arts and Education, invites abstracts of 250 words for twenty-minute papers in any field of philosophy, or related disciplines.

In choosing Crisis of Meaning as the theme of this year’s Colloquium, we hope to encourage contributions from a range of disciplines that consider philosophical questions relating to the nature of meaning and truth, and their significance in human lives.

Papers might examine the theme along broad philosophical lines, for example, in terms of humanistic compared with scientific forms of meaning, historical and timeless understandings of meaning, phenomenology, hermeneutics, language and interpretation, the meaning of meaning itself, philosophy and truth. Papers might also approach the theme as a question, exploring, for example, the notion that every generation sees itself as having a crisis of meaning (or of circumstance), asking what it means to think of something as a crisis and whether this idea is especially appropriate in particular contexts or whether it is an essential part of the human condition.

Alternatively papers might offer a philosophical examination of a currently perceived crisis, whether philosophical, social, political, psychological, etc., in contexts such as ‘ethics’, ‘the good life’, ‘sustainability’, ‘education’, ‘welfare’, ‘rationality’, ‘communication’, ‘depression’, etc.

Contact:

Dr Lubica Ucnik, Philosophy Program, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Murdoch University, Western Australia 6150 (L.Ucnik@murdoch.edu.au).

Bennett, Drake. "Thinking Literally." BOSTON GLOBE September 27, 2009.

WHEN WE SAY someone is a warm person, we do not mean that they are running a fever. When we describe an issue as weighty, we have not actually used a scale to determine this. And when we say a piece of news is hard to swallow, no one assumes we have tried unsuccessfully to eat it. These phrases are metaphorical--they use concrete objects and qualities to describe abstractions like kindness or importance or difficulty--and we use them and their like so often that we hardly notice them. For most people, metaphor, like simile or synecdoche, is a term inflicted upon them in high school English class: “all the world’s a stage,” “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” Gatsby’s fellow dreamers are “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Metaphors are literary creations--good ones help us see the world anew, in fresh and interesting ways, the rest are simply cliches: a test is a piece of cake, a completed task is a load off one’s back, a momentary difficulty is a speed bump. But whether they’re being deployed by poets, politicians, football coaches, or realtors, metaphors are primarily thought of as tools for talking and writing--out of inspiration or out of laziness, we distill emotions and thoughts into the language of the tangible world. We use metaphors to make sense to one another. Now, however, a new group of people has started to take an intense interest in metaphors: psychologists. Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to the structure of thought. By taking these everyday metaphors as literally as possible, psychologists are upending traditional ideas of how we learn, reason, and make sense of the world around us. The result has been a torrent of research testing the links between metaphors and their physical roots, with many of the papers reading as if they were commissioned by Amelia Bedelia, the implacably literal-minded children’s book hero. Researchers have sought to determine whether the temperature of an object in someone’s hands determines how “warm” or “cold” he considers a person he meets, whether the heft of a held object affects how “weighty” people consider topics they are presented with, or whether people think of the powerful as physically more elevated than the less powerful. What they have found is that, in fact, we do. Metaphors aren’t just how we talk and write, they’re how we think. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/27/thinking_literally/?page=full.

Pub: Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri, COMMONWEALTH.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. By Negri and Michael Hardt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009. When Empire appeared in 2000, it defined the political and economic challenges of the era of globalization and, thrillingly, found in them possibilities for new and more democratic forms of social organization. Now, with Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri conclude the trilogy begun with Empire and continued in Multitude, proposing an ethics of freedom for living in our common world and articulating a possible constitution for our common wealth. Drawing on scenarios from around the globe and elucidating the themes that unite them, Hardt and Negri focus on the logic of institutions and the models of governance adequate to our understanding of a global commonwealth. They argue for the idea of the “common” to replace the opposition of private and public and the politics predicated on that opposition. Ultimately, they articulate the theoretical bases for what they call “governing the revolution.” Though this book functions as an extension and a completion of a sustained line of Hardt and Negri’s thought, it also stands alone and is entirely accessible to readers who are not familiar with the previous works. It is certain to appeal to, challenge, and enrich the thinking of anyone interested in questions of politics and globalization. Further details are here: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/HARCOM.html.

Cfp: Freedom and Power in the Caribbean: the Work of Gordon Lewis, Centre for Caribbean Thought, University of the West Indies, Mona, September 30-October 2, 2010.

Note the revised dates above.

The VIIth Caribbean Reasonings Conference is hosted in association with Africana Studies at Brown University and the Institute of Caribbean Studies, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. Professor Gordon K. Lewis, (1919 – 1991) taught for many years at the University of Puerto Rico and wrote path-breaking books on the Caribbean’s history, politics and intellectual development. Texts such as Puerto Rico: Freedom and Power in the Caribbean (1963), The Growth of the Modern West Indies (1968), and Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: the historical evolution of Caribbean society in its ideological aspects (1983), exemplify the breadth of his interests as well as the range and quality of his output. Lewis’ work transcended the region’s linguistic fragmentation and was consistent with the view that “No one could really claim to be a full practitioner in Caribbean Studies until he came to write ultimately, on the Caribbean as a whole.” (Main Currents in Caribbean Thought, (1983) Maingot, introduction vi). This conference in 2010 will reopen inter-territorial networks to enable studies across language barriers, a goal the Centre for Caribbean Thought has articulated and continues to realize since 2001 through several conferences and the “Caribbean Reasonings” book series with Ian Randle Publishers. It will also seek to introduce the seminal work of Gordon K. Lewis to a new generation of young scholars, interested in moving beyond constricting national barriers, in order to study the region in its entirety.
There is limited space on the conference programme for individual papers and panels, thus we are suggesting that proposals that fall within the following broad categories will be given serious consideration:

• Critical examination of Gordon K. Lewis’s scholarship, particularly The Growth of the Modern West Indies; Main Currents in Caribbean Thought; Puerto Rico: Freedom and Power in the Caribbean; and Grenada: the Jewel Despoiled.
• Critical work on the present state and the future of social sciences research in the Caribbean, with particular emphasis on pan-Caribbean research and inter-disciplinary studies.
• Critical exploration of the state of Caribbean Thought in the contemporary period beyond Lewis’ assessment in Main Currents in Caribbean Thought
• The state of politics in the Caribbean, forty years beyond The Growth of the Modern West Indies.
• The existential condition of Caribbean Intellectuals and intellectualism in the 21st century. Reflections on the Grenada Revolution and Lewis’s assessment of its collapse in Grenada: the Jewel Despoiled.
• Critical reflection on the state and status of Puerto Rico, beyond Lewis’ analysis in Puerto Rico: Freedom and Power in the Caribbean.
• Critical analysis of the state and future of Pan Caribbeanism and integration movements. Sports, culture and the future of Caribbean unity.

Abstracts should be sent as a Word attachment to Beverley Sutherland Lewis at: cct@uwimona.edu.jm.
Visit the conference webpage here: http://myspot.mona.uwi.edu/cct/gordon-lewis-conference-2010-call-papers-and-panels.

Johnson, Peter. Review of Fred Inglis, HISTORY MAN. NDPR (October 2009).

Inglis, Fred. History Man: the Life of R. G. Collingwood. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009. Philosophical biography is as old as philosophy. In the third century Diogenes Laertius wrote wittily and informatively about the lives of philosophers, sometimes telling us about their work, sometimes about their often inglorious attempts to live a philosophic life. In our world few professional philosophers live, or even aspire to live, in the manner of a Socrates or an Aristotle, and even fewer, one suspects, would regard their lives as exemplary if they did. For most contemporary philosophers teaching philosophy in large modern universities, work is about much the same as a day at the office. Moreover, philosophers in our world make use of the work without needing to know a great deal about the life. Journals abound with articles on almost every philosophical topic imaginable. Routinely, philosophers, like scientists or historians, successfully exploit this material while remaining largely ignorant of the lives of those who produce it. And, yet, philosophical biography flourishes. Few major philosophers have not received the full biographical treatment. We should note that word major, for it acts as an assumption and a warning. The assumption is not only that major work in philosophy warrants a biography of the philosopher, but that the life will illuminate the work in ways that reflection on the work alone will fail to do. The warning arises from the assumption, since it is sometimes necessary to remind biographers that what makes a major philosopher is precisely the work alone. What uniquely attracts attention is the quality of the argument, the clarity and precision of the insight, the sustained demolition of a point of view or the spirit in which the philosophy is expressed, or, perhaps, some combination of all these. Even when an original philosophical voice explains what motivates it to do philosophy, or tells us why we should think philosophy worthwhile, we are listening in a different key. Philosophers sometimes write their own biographies. One such is R. G. Collingwood's An Autobiography, rightly considered a classic of its kind. In general, Collingwood had little time for biography. He thought it intrusive, vulgar and, even when well written, a form of writing that panders to the worst of readers' motives. Biography seeks the artist behind the art, the philosopher behind the philosophy, and in doing so peddles the illusion that it is the life which explains the work. Collingwood insists that his work stands apart. The Preface to Collingwood's Autobiography tells us exactly how it should be read -- "the autobiography of a man whose business is thinking should be the story of his thought" -- that is, the story of his philosophy as he saw it from the perspective of 1938, of how his ideas emerged and developed and how his search for a rapprochement between philosophy and history and theory and practice came to shape his intellectual life. We can be pretty sure that Collingwood would not have encouraged a biography. It may be, too, that at least a small motive for Collingwood writing his autobiography is that it spared him the attentions of a biographer. If there is any truth in this then Collingwood's ruse proved successful for some seventy years at least, until this year with the appearance of Fred Inglis's History Man: The Life of R. G. Collingwood, a work which gives Collingwood exactly the kind of scrutiny that, one suspects, he would have welcomed least. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17725.

Ricciardi, Alessia. Review of Marcus Pound, ZIZEK. NDPR (October 2009).

Pound, Marcus. Žižek: a (Very) Critical Introduction. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008. Since the end of the 1980s, the American academic world has had to face Slavoj Žižek's repeated, and at times repetitive, critical assaults on identity politics, multiculturalism, and post-Marxism. Žižek has increasingly advocated in his work a return to the notion of modern subjectivity that was initially spelled out by the German idealists and then recuperated and transfigured by Lacan; together, their contributions comprise the strategic knot of the Slovenian philosopher's theoretical framework. His latest salvo against the supposedly widespread liberal assumptions of contemporary culture has taken the form of a revival of religion, particularly of Christianity, in The Fragile Absolute: or why is the christian legacy worth fighting for? (2000), On Belief (2001), and The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (2003). In the course of these writings, Žižek has moved from using Christianity as a reservoir of illustrative examples for his philosophical forays to engaging directly with its theological core, ultimately arriving at a position he describes as that of a "Pauline materialist". As a follower of Saint Paul, Žižek takes pride in grappling with religion in its institutional, dogmatic aspects, unlike, say, Levinas who in his eyes insists on reducing it to empty notions such as "Otherness". In line with Hegel's Christology, Žižek insists that Christianity ought to help bring about an end to the God of transcendence and "the beyond", thus enabling us, as a Lacanian would say, "to traverse the fantasy" of the Christian desire for the Divine (and the Judaic desire for God) in favor of love. Christianity becomes for Žižek something akin to a successful analysis and finds its defining moment in the Hilflösigkeit or helplessness experienced by the abandoned Christ on the cross. In fact, according to Lacan, this feeling characterizes the end of an effective analysis. Building on this insight, Žižek rejects the reading of Christ's sacrificial death as perverse and instead emphasizes the redemptive possibilities of Christian faith. What in his view requires further thought is Christianity's reliance on "violent love", which nevertheless accords with the spirit of a radical event, namely the crucifixion. Žižek opposes this spirit to the poetics of harmony and compassion espoused by Eastern religions such as Taoism and Buddhism that have become fashionable in Western culture and function as a mere supplement of capitalism. Žižek's engagement with Christianity raises a host of questions starting with the meaning of his notion of a religious suspension of the ethical, a concept that, notwithstanding its Kierkegaardian pedigree, can be confusing in his work. The most urgent questions are raised by his insistence on an organic relationship between religion and politics. Unlike the Leftist Hegelians, in particular Feuerbach and Marx, who criticized Christianity from a philosophico-political point of view, Žižek seems to believe that in breaking with the logic of desire for a transcendent divinity, Christianity opposes the logic of capitalism through its insistence on love as opposed to the desire that drives perpetual consumption. Although not entirely new, the use of Christianity in support of a Marxist agenda is certainly controversial, as is Žižek's adoption of Hegel's polemic in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, which views other religions, in particular Judaism, as less perfect antecedents of Christianity. By helping to preserve spiritual and political conviction from the attacks of both contemporary skeptics and fundamentalists, Christianity becomes pivotal to Žižek's theory. Given this background, Marcus Pound's discussion of Žižek's work in light of Christianity is an interesting project that helps to highlight the growing importance of questions of faith in orienting Žižek's thought toward a "materialist theology." . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17745.

Read, Jason. Review of Antonio Negri and Cesare Casarino, IN PRAISE OF THE COMMON. NDPR (October 2009).

Negri, Antonio, and Cesare Casarino. In Praise of the Common: a Conversation on Philosophy and Politics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. In Praise of the Common is a difficult book to categorize; neither a collection of interviews nor a collection of essays, it combines both formats, becoming in the end something unique. It is also a book that not only became something different than was initially intended, but which also explicitly states this difference. The book was conceived as a series of interviews that would address the historical background of Antonio Negri's thought, the tumultuous period of political action and philosophical reflection of the Italian sixties and seventies that remains largely unknown in the Anglo-American world despite the popularity of Empire and Multitude. However, as these conversations developed they became less about the past, less a matter of one person interviewing another about his experiences, and more about the present and future. The interview became a conversation. Unlike an interview, a conversation is determined less by an asymmetry between the one who knows and the one who asks than by the production of some common understanding. In Casarino's terms, "Conversation is the language of the common" (1). The shift in the tenor of the conversation also shifted the structure of the book: it is a collection of these conversations framed by three essays, two by Casarino and one by Negri. The shift in the structure of the book is also a shift in its content, from the reflection on a singular experience to a discussion of not only a common frame of reference, but ultimately the common itself. It is at this point that the shift from provocation to completion becomes more than just a trivial matter and becomes a philosophical problem in its own right. How does something singular become common? How does a specific moment, a particular historical experience, become something that can communicate, exceed its location in time and place in order to become something universal? This is both what the book attempts to answer, and what it enacts through its interplay of essay and conversations. At the center of these essays and conversations is the concept of the common. This term has a long history: its origins predate modernity, as it initially referred to commonly held lands that were the basis of agrarian life, but this has not prevented it from being the term utilized to make sense of the networks of knowledge and communication at the center of contemporary production, and ultimately the capacity to think and communicate. In each case it is a matter of not only that which makes production possible, from pastures to code to language, but that which cannot be possessed, and thus must circulate in order for there to be production. Casarino and Negri's discussion does not focus on this history, but on the current meaning of the term, in relation to their respective works and overlapping political histories, and in doing so it reveals that its conceptual and semantic dimensions are perhaps as deep as its historical levels. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17685.

Doris, John M. Review of Anthony Appiah, EXPERIMENTS IN ETHICS. NDPR (October 2009).

Appiah, Anthony. Experiments in Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. The past decade has witnessed a remarkable expansion of work at the intersection of philosophical ethics and the human sciences. As evinced by the recent profusion of surveys and anthologies treating the new -- or newly revitalized -- fields going under such names as experimental philosophy, empirically informed ethics, and moral psychology, there is now a large and thriving literature, covering an extensive range of topics: responsibility, free will, moral judgment, rationality, motivation, character, innateness, evaluative diversity, altruism, well-being, intentionality, intuitions, and emotion (Andreou 2007; Doris and Stich 2005, 2006; Doris et al. forthcoming; Knobe and Nichols 2008; Nahmias et al. forthcoming; Sinnott-Armstrong 2007 a, b, c). With the publication of Anthony Appiah's shrewdly argued and beautifully written Experiments in Ethics, those wondering over what the fuss is about have an engaging entree to the issues. Appiah's goal is not so much to advance a new theory, but rather to demonstrate that the recent empirical turn demands attention. In some circles, empirically infused approaches to ethics have been regarded as irrelevant or confused, but Appiah's study makes such recalcitrance look seriously underinformed. However, Appiah does not mean to discredit conventional philosophical practice. Instead, he advocates a kind of methodological pluralism, where ethical reflection draws on both the conceptual tools long familiar in analytic philosophy and the empirical insights provided by experimentalists working within and without philosophy departments. Experiments in Ethics consists of one introductory chapter and a final methodological chapter, bookending three substantive chapters on issues where the empirical turn has been highly visible: character, intuition, and diversity. It would be unreasonable to expect from what Appiah modestly calls his "little book" a comprehensive survey of the field, or even a comprehensive treatment of the topics included, but Appiah's sensitive examination of the material he does discuss both advances our thinking on the issues and gives a sense of why the wider field is worth thinking about (1). . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17705.

"Historical Epistemology," Institute of Philosophy, Leuven University, December 10-12, 2009.

Historical epistemology is now a blooming field of study, bringing history and philosophy together in strikingly new ways. Historians of science understand historical epistemology as both a theoretical underpinning of their work and a heuristic tool. Some of them aim at uncovering the historically situated conditions of a field of knowledge or of scientists’ objects of inquiry. Others study fundamental scientific concepts, which organize knowledge at different historical periods, along with the contingent conditions for their permanence or transformation. The philosophically most challenging version of historical epistemology is perhaps the one that focuses on our epistemological concepts themselves. Rationality, objectivity or observation now seem to be subject to historical and/or social determinants; it is claimed that the meaning of these central epistemological categories has undergone significant changes in history. Furthermore, it has been argued that it is possible to differentiate historical styles of reasoning, each with a distinct point of origin, evolution and sometimes also an endpoint in history. What can this tell us about the epistemic concepts we use today? What can it tell us about our present epistemological norms? What is the relation between historical epistemology and social epistemology? Are there limits to historicizing epistemology? Analytic epistemologists, for example, reflect upon our intuitions about epistemological concepts such as knowledge, truth, certainty, probability, rationality and objectivity, abstracting these concepts away from the historical contexts they have had. But history might have crucially shaped not only the meaning of epistemic concepts but also our intuitions about them. There is a widespread agreement among the participants in this debate that there is a need to historicize epistemology. There are broad differences, however, about how to elaborate such an approach concretely. Furthermore, many professional philosophers are only now starting to engage with the new challenges and possibilities historical epistemology poses them. This interdisciplinary conference aims at bringing together historians of science and philosophers in order to clarify some of the methodological, historiographical and conceptual issues that come to the fore when history and epistemology are combined. Further information may be found here: http://lipss.wordpress.com/.

McRobbie, Angela. "Book of the Week: FRAMES OF WAR." TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION June 25, 2009.

Butler, Judith. Frames of Life: When is Life Grievable?. London: Verso, 2009. To propose that Judith Butler is one of the world's leading thinkers - a feminist philosopher whose writing has influenced a wide domain of disciplinary fields inside the academy as well as political culture in the outside world - is hardly contentious. We are, many of us, deeply indebted to a body of work that has illuminated issues at the very core of life, death, sexuality and existence. The tone of Butler's work conveys a modesty within urgency, a truly delightful need for precision, for caution as to how we proceed when intervening in matters upon which so much is at stake. In the case of her latest book, the issues explored are: lives that can be grieved and those deemed insufficiently alive to merit the privilege of memorialisation and grief in death; the Iraq War; the media and "embedded reporting"; photography and suffering; the instrumentalisation of feminist and sexual freedoms as a means of demonising Muslim culture; torture and the pornographic pictures from Abu Ghraib prison; and, finally, the possibilities of a new progressive Left coalitional politics of "precarity". While recent books by Butler - a trilogy of reflections that began with Precarious Life (2004) followed by Giving an Account of the Self (2007) and now Frames of War - may seem far removed from her earliest and still best-known books Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993), there is nevertheless a clear thread of continuity. Her early work drew on Michel Foucault and the linguist J. L. Austin to argue that the seemingly indisputable fact of the sex with which we are born is instead a fictional coherence, a kind of ordering of organs into a duality of gender (male and female) for the sake of "normative heterosexuality". Rather, there is no fact of sex, no beginning with a sex that is then simply expressed as masculinity or femininity. Instead there is a compelled performance, and sanctions for those who do not or are unable to comply. Not being able to live within such dualities condemns vulnerable gay, lesbian or transgender people to threats to their lives, to their viability as subjects. Often their lives are considered not worth grieving, as was the case in the early days of Aids. Since then, Butler has also examined the way in which nation states such as France condemn to pariah status those gay and lesbian people who wish to have or adopt children. Eminent people across the media talk authoritatively of this desire as an imported American monstrosity against which French culture must be protected. Human vulnerability and the fragility of the lives of those condemned to such profound marginalisation compel Butler to reflect on the ways in which a politics able to "secure conditions for livable lives and do so on egalitarian grounds" could develop. In Frames of War Butler, cognisant of the power of grief and the political potential unleashed through rituals of remembrance, develops a theory of grievability. This concerns the lives of those whom we do not know, who are culturally different from or "other" to us, and for whom we often do not have the resources or the capacity to grieve when they endure losses because their suffering has no visibility, no public or legitimate face. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=407098.

"C. Wright Mills: Taking It Big," CUNY Graduate Center, October 16-17, 2009.

A Conference in Honour of the Fiftieth Anniversary of C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination. Plenary (Oct 16): 5:30: Reception (Recital Hall Lobby) 6:30 to 8:00: Patricia Hill Collins, Stanley Aronowitz and Craig Calhoun Friday October 16th 10:00 to 12:00: On Class and Power -- Presenter: Jerry Watts; Respondent: TBA 1:00 to 3:00: Mills’ Social Psychology -- Presenter: Lynn Chancer; Respondent: Eli Zaretsky 3:15 to 5:15: On Intellectuals -- Presenter: Russell Jacoby; Respondent: John Summers Saturday Oct 17th 10:00 to 12:00: On Culture -- Presenter: Marshall Berman; Respondent: Harvey Molotch 1:00 to 3:00: Social and Political Theory -- Presenter: Stephen Bronner; Respondent: David Harvey 3:15 to 5:15: Politics and Political Writings -- Presenter: Stanley Aronowitz; Respondent: Andy Greenberg For further information, email: greenbergandrew@gmail.com.

Cfp: "Global Caribbean(s): Interrogating the Politics of Location in Caribbean Literature and Culture," University of Miami, March 4-6, 2010.

Hosted by the Caribbean Literary and Cultural Studies Program, Department of English.

There is a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship in Caribbean Studies that is focused on investigating the processes of globalization and ensuing social, cultural and political impact in the Caribbean. “Diaspora” is, more often than not, the critical lens through which many of these considerations are viewed and explored. Caribbean artists, writers and cultural critics have approached the question of location through global routes with an eye to examining the social, aesthetic, political, economic, and historical impact of diaspora on the region, while also considering regional currents that flow into, and even collide, in diasporic communities. Yet even as we are faced with economic and cultural opportunities of globalization we are also confronted with drawbacks that include loss of sovereignty and exploitative labor practices. Within the region, linguistic, political and cultural barriers persist and discussions of routes and intra-Caribbean flows remain under-theorized as nationalist agendas continue to dominate. Paradoxically, there are increasing concerns from critics in the region and in diaspora about the seemingly one-sided nature of critical exchanges about Caribbean literature and culture. There is no doubt that global flows have long since been one of the defining historical and cultural paradigms of the Caribbean. However, there is an urgent need for continued dialogue about the power dynamics that shape these paradigms and the cultural artifacts produced in the cross currents of these “global flows.” With this in mind, we invite papers that consider some of the following questions: Can we resituate our understanding of “location” as an indeterminate, or even shifting, locus of cultural inscription and what is at stake in such an effort? Can Caribbean culture (both local and global), be politically viable as a tool for social change given its increased popularity globally? In other words, can Caribbean popular culture be both commodified and transgressive? How has the Caribbean region reshaped its discourses of location, citizenship and “belonging” in response to new patterns of migration, supranational entities including NGO’s and corporations? Have the evolving exigencies of economic shortages contributed to new cultural trends and artifacts globally? How has the heightened emphasis on “green energy” and environmental policies impacted rural, tourist and industrial locations in the Caribbean?

Papers can also address, but are not limited to, the following topics: Caribbean Studies and the Politics of Location Can We Be at Home, While Abroad? Caribbean Studies Scholars in the U.S. Academy South / South Dialogues in Caribbean Studies The sacred, the erotic, and the semiotics of the body Queering Time and History in Caribbean Literature S/exile: Queer Sexuality and the Limits of Asylum Queering the Subject: Sex, Gender, and Queer Politics Global (re)configuration of sexual identities Global places, local spaces: CARICOM and the Politics of Regional Migration Global Environmentalism and Caribbean Conservationist Movements Border Clash: Sovereignty, Natural Resources and National Borders Return to Sender: Diaspora, Deportation and Discourses of Criminality National/Natural Disasters and The Politics of Immigration As Far as the Eye/I Can See: Caribbean Visual Culture in the Global Market Locating the Caribbean through Popular Culture You Know You are West Indian If … : Locating Regionalism Through Humor Digital Diasporas: Internet Expressions and Performances of Caribbean Identity Presentation proposals should be 250-500 words in length, in either Spanish or English, and should include name, academic affiliation and contact information. Panel proposals and alternatives such as dramatic performances and film screenings are also invited. Further information about plenary speakers will be disseminated as it becomes available. All proposals must be submitted electronically to cariblocationsconf@as.miami.edu. Deadline for proposals: November 30th, 2009 For further information and to register online please visit http://www.as.miami.edu/cls/.

McWatt, Mark. "Landscape and Identity." An Interview with Lucy Evans. KAIETEUR NEWS September 27, 2009.

Sometimes you think in terms of the Guyanese mindset or the Guyanese identity, usually in terms of the Guyanese problem, in terms of the racial polarisation and the political problems. But I always think of that too as part of a regional thing, and part of a process of growth and development out of colonialism towards whatever it is we’re headed towards – towards being members of an international community. I think here, too, Wilson Harris has been very helpful, because he has suggested that all those boundaries and fences are in a sense artificial, and that the mind, the creative imagination, quite easily leaps over them, and finds correspondences in sometimes strange and originally exotic cultures.I suppose to some extent this exists in other writers too. Someone like Kamau Brathwaite can pick up on the African influences, perhaps because he has visited and lived in Ghana for a number of years. And Walcott can hark back to the Homeric epics. He can feel quite comfortable in the imaginative world that they depict, and he is able somehow to import that into his own experience and, as it were, continue that epic tradition in a poem like Omeros. In a sense, this negates the need for an obsessive concern with national identities, and what’s happening in particular countries.When I said that I had this idea of a Caribbean audience, it’s just in the sense that you have to have some kind of idea of readership, not in terms of any set notions or principles of identity. Just that these are the people closest who might be reached by what you say. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2009/09/27/landscape-and-identity/.

Invitation to the Seminar of Luce Irigaray, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, June 14-19, 2010.

Since 2003, Luce Irigaray has held an annual seminar for researchers doing their PhD on her work. The seminar offer the opportunity to receive personal teaching from Luce Irigaray and to exchange ideas, methods and experiences with other participants. The seminar was hosted by the University of Nottingham during the first three years (see Luce Irigaray: Teaching edited by Luce Irigaray with Mary Green, and published by Continuum, London & New York, 2008), by the University of Liverpool the fourth year, by Queen Mary, University of London, the fifth year and by the Goodenough College of London the sixth year. In 2010, it will be hosted by Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, in Ireland. The framework of the seminar is this: a group of fifteen researchers doing their PhD on the work of Luce Irigaray stay one week on the university campus. The schedule includes: a presentation by each researcher of the aspect of their PhD which most focuses on the work of Irigaray, the discussion of this presentation by the group, comments from Luce Irigaray herself and her answers to questions raised by each participant. Also included are sessions devoted to the explanation of key-words or key-thoughts chosen by the participants. Personal meetings with Luce Irigaray are organised on the last day. The participants pay for their travel, but receive hospitality from the university. The seminar is conducted in English. The participants in the seminar come from different regions of the world; they belong to different cultures, traditions and fields of research – Philosophy, Gender Studies, Religious Studies, Literature, Arts, Critical and Cultural Studies, etc. The themes of their research include, for example: the treatment of personal or cultural traumatic experience; the resources that various arts can offer for dwelling in oneself and with the other(s); the maternal order and feminine genealogy; the interpretation and embodiment of the divine today; the contribution of sexuate difference to personal and social development; new perspectives in philosophy etc. In each of these fields, diverse domains, approaches and methods are represented. To date, participants have come from Australia, Vietnam, Korea, India, Sri Lanka, South Africa, New Zealand, Canada, Latvia, Spain, Italy, Ireland and from different regions and universities of the U.S.A. and of the U.K. Beyond the multicultural teaching which results from such a gathering, the participants learn to live together and to share in difference during the time devoted to the work, and also during meals, walks, personal meetings etc. The atmosphere of the seminar is intense but friendly and joyful, and its outcome highly successful for both the research and the life of each participant. If you are interested and would like to participate in such a seminar please send, as soon as possible, a CV, a PhD abstract (1 page) and a presentation of the issues and arguments of your PhD that most focus on the work of Luce Irigaray (5-6 pages) to Luce Irigaray (by mail: 15, rue Lakanal, 75015 Paris, France). After receiving this material, Luce Irigaray will tell you if you can participate in the seminar of 2010. You will be contacted for further practical information by Marita Ryan at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick after the selection of the candidates.

Pacini, David S. Review of David Walsh, THE MODERN PHILOSOPHICAL REVOLUTION. NDPR (September 2009).

Walsh, David. The Modern Philosophical Revolution: the Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. It is arguable that the advance of science and technology, together with the global expanse of the languages of political and moral rights, are hallmarks of the modern spirit. To these, David Walsh proposes a third, and presumably equally momentous, trait: the philosophical revolution that has prioritized the horizon of existence within which we find ourselves. Not a sometime insight, as others have argued, but, on Walsh's reading, a sustained course of inquiry, the shift of perspective to our meditative participation in existence portends the only viable mode of philosophizing. He sets out the case for this claim in The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence, the crown jewel of an unintended trilogy on the problem of 'modernity'. The first volume, After Ideology (1990), a study of the crisis evoked by totalitarianism, turns on the claim that the truth of the modern world can only be articulated from within it. From such a perspective, good and evil are the imprescriptable boundaries of our existence. The second volume, The Growth of the Liberal Soul (1997), addresses the underlying question posed by After Ideology: how could various invocations of liberal principles and claims of rights -- both natural and human -- sustain a consensus in the absence of a coherent overarching intellectual framework? Walsh argues that beneath the superficial incoherence lies an inward coherence that is manifest in existence. In other words, what may not work in theory appears to work in practice. Both After Ideology and The Growth of the Liberal Soul recast this point philosophically, arguing that existence is prior to all formulations of it. The agenda for The Modern Philosophical Revolution is to bring into view the philosophical logic of the insight that existence precedes thought. In this latest volume, Walsh launches a magnificent elegy over the course of some four hundred and sixty nine pages to the priority of existence essaying eight philosophers from Kant to Derrida. In keeping with his own maxim that philosophy can only be conducted from within, Walsh thinks through the philosophical accomplishments of Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and Kierkegaard by way of a close re-reading of their works. Not surprisingly, this is a tome for neither the faint-of-heart nor the philosophically untutored; the level of argumentation places fierce demands upon its reader, presupposing, as it does, a deep knowledge of the figures under consideration. Yet persistence does not go without reward: what first appears as exegetical readings of the eight philosophers under consideration quickly proves to be a highly nuanced set of meditations. And it is these meditations on the works of each thinker that permits Walsh to advance his own thesis. In what follows, I propose (1) to chart briefly the course of his thesis; (2) to bring into view the underlying meditational form that foregrounds his pivotal claims about necessity; and (3) to puzzle over this underlying thesis about necessity in relation to Kierkegaard. Although to pursue an interpretation of Walsh's The Modern Philosophical Revolution in this way runs the risk of distortion, it also holds out the prospect of casting the principal moves of Walsh's argument in bold relief. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17625.

"The Idea of Europe: Memories and Postcoloniality," Utrecht University, October 29-30, 2009.

THE IDEA OF EUROPE: Memories and Postcoloniality is a two-part event to discuss how Europe can be rethought from a postcolonial and postsecular perspective. The first day brings together memory thinking, heritage practice and postcolonial theory to explore challenges and potentialities in the making of a new European memory which can account for its multicultural past. The second day discusses from different intellectual traditions and perspectives the idea of Europe as an imagined and actual space. It focuses in particular on the relationship between ‘Occidentalism, Orientalism, and the idea of a postcolonial Europe’ which requires a further understanding of the contemporary postsecular climate both within and beyond Europe’s borders. Thursday 29 October, 2009 "The Ethics of European Memory: what is to be done?" Chair: Ann Rigney (Utrecht University, on behalf of Culture and Identities) Keynote Speaker: Luisa Passerini (Prof. Cultural History, Turin University, Italy) Discussion Speaker: Luisa Passerini, Irit Rogoff (Prof. Cultural History, Turin University, Italy & Prof. of Visual Cultures, Goldsmith University, UK) Friday 30 October, 2009 "Occidentalism, Orientalism, and the Idea of a Postcolonial Europe" Chair: Sandra Ponzanesi (Utrecht University, on behalf of AHRC, UK) Keynote Speakers: Avishai Margalit (Kennan Professor, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton University/ Schulman Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem) and Paul Gilroy (Anthony Giddens Professorship in Social Theory, London School of Economics, UK) Respondents: Max Silverman & John McLeod (Professor of French, University of Leeds & Reader in Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures, University of Leeds) Discussion Speakers: Luisa Passerini & Simon Glendinning (Prof. Cultural History, Turin University, Italy & Reader in European Philosophy, London School of Economics, UK).

Cfp: "The Transfiguration of the Present: Reflections on Historical Distance," Centre for Metahistory, University of Groningen, January 28-29, 2010.

The distinction between past and present is a neglected problem in the theory of history. How does the present present transform into a past present? Is contemporary history a contradictio in terminis? Why can’t we make our Zeitgeist visible? What kind of historical estrangement is needed for achieving ‘distance’? What does ‘historical distance’ mean in the first place? The relevance of the work of Frank Ankersmit to the answering of these questions will be discussed during an international conference at Groningen (Netherlands) by a variety of well-known speakers, including Mark Bevir, Hans Kellner, Jörn Rüsen, Aviezer Tucker, and John H. Zammito. Please register before December 15, 2009 by e-mail to m.r.b.wubbolts@rug.nl. Further information can be found on: http://www.rug.nl/let/onderzoek/onderzoekinstituten/icog/tekstenActiviteitenKalender/2010_01_28-29_Transfiguration?lang=en.

Pub: WORLD PICTURE (Summer 2009).

Table of Contents:

• Sara Ahmed, Happiness and Queer Politics
• Linda M. Austin, John Stuart Mill, the Autobiography, and the Paradox of Happiness
• Richard Dienst, Happiness on a World Scale
• Alexander García Düttmann, A Second Life: Notes on Adorno's Reading of Proust
• James Gordon Finlayson, The Work of Art and the Promise of Happiness in Adorno
• Jason McGrath, Communists Have More Fun! The Dialectics of Fulfillment in Cinema of the People's Republic of China
• Adam Phillips in conversation with Jane Elliott and John David Rhodes, The Value of Frustration
• Brian Price, On Compromises
• Keston Sutherland, Happiness in Writing

Visit the journal homepage here: www.worldpicturejournal.com.

Cfp: "The Empire of Idealism," R.G. Collingwood Society Conference, Monash University Conference Centre in Prato, Italy, July 19-22, 2010.

Philosophical Idealism dominated British and British Empire universities from the 1880s to the 1920s. At this time the influence of Idealism could also be found in America through figures such as Josiah Royce, and in Italy in the writings of Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile. As a body of thought Idealism was socially and politically engaged and inspired reform across fields such as education, social welfare, politics and international relations. The conference aims to explore not only the major figures of Idealism but also the social, educational and political influence of Idealism from the 1880s to the mid twentieth century in Britain, Australia, Canada, the United States, South Africa, New Zealand, India, and Italy. Papers would be particularly welcome on R. G. Collingwood's relationship to Idealism, or to any of the above issues or people. Abstracts of no more than 500 words to be sent by 15 December 2009 to the conference organisers: Associate Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Macquarie University, Sydney (mhughesw@humn.mq.edu.au) or Dr Ian Tregenza. Macquarie University, Sydney (ian.tregenza@mq.edu.au).

Cfp: 44th Annual Meeting, Heidegger Circle, SUNY Stony, Manhattan Campus, May 7-9, 2010.

Convenors: Bob Crease (rcrease@notes.cc.sunysb.edu) and Tim Hyde (Timothy.Hyde@stonybrook.edu). Papers on any aspect of Heidegger’s thought will be considered. Some preference will be given to papers that discuss volumes of the Gesamtausgabe published within the last decade and to papers that extend or challenge Heidegger’s philosophy. i) No more than 4000 words. ii) Prepared for blind review. iii) .doc, .rtf, or .pdf formats only, please. iv) Submitted to HeideggerCircle2010@gmail.com v) Volunteers to moderate or comment are welcome. Deadline: February 1st, 2010 For more details, visit: http://www.heideggercircle.org/2010.html.

Cfp: "Exploring the Narrative Landscape: Issues, Investigations and Interventions," Narrative Matters 2010, St. Thomas University, 2010.

Fifth Biennial Conference on Narrative Approaches and Perspectives Across the Human Sciences to be held at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Narrative.

In recent years, the influence of the narrative turn has been felt in diverse fields. In literature, psychology, education, journalism, health care,history, social work, theology, the arts, and many other areas, scholars and practitioners have been actively exploring the storied complexity of human experience. This conference considers the question of where the narrative turn has taken us, and where it is leading us from here: what challenges and possibilities can narrativists anticipate in their various disciplines, and what directions are their inquiries and activities taking?

Like its predecessors in 2002 and 2004 (and succeeding conferences in 2006 and 2008), Narrative Matters 2010 will be a unique experience in which theorists, researchers, practitioners, and students from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines will have the opportunity to enjoy conversation and together explore the importance of narrative in countless aspects of human life.

We welcome proposals for individual papers (20 minutes plus ten minutes for questions and answer), panels (90 minutes), and posters.

Visit the conference webpage here: http://w3.stu.ca/stu/sites/cirn/conference.aspx.