Summer School: 8th Forum on Contemporary Theory, Department of English, University of Pune, June 14-July 10, 2010.

The Forum on Contemporary Theory has been conducting an intensive course in Theory/Praxis since 2003 for the benefit of scholars across disciplines interested in new developments in Theory and their application. The Course includes intensive textual readings in specific areas, supported by seminars and talks on broader but related issues. The Course will be held in the University of Pune from June 14 to July 10, 2010. COURSE OUTLINES The Course is organized around the following topics to be discussed in-depth by the core faculty, supported by public lectures and mini-seminars by the invited scholars. 1) Matters of Life & Death (Faculty: Costica Bradatan) The recent resurgence of the phenomenon of “suicide bombing” has starkly reminded us of the important political functions that a dying body can perform. From the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves in Vietnam in early 1960s to Jan Palach, who did the same thing in Czechoslovakia in 1969, from the Japanese kamikazes during the WWII to today’s suicide-bombers, the ways in which one’s violent death can be turned into an expressive political gesture have been as different as have the ultimate goals sought through such an act. However, despite its persistence and shocking occurrences, this type of voluntary death hasn’t yet received the theoretical treatment it deserves; social and political theorists are still to come up with a comprehensive and interdisciplinary understanding of the dying body as a carrier of political, ideological and religious messages. This course has been born precisely out of the felt need for such a broader understanding of the body and the political functions it can perform in radical situations. The primary theoretical premise on which the course is based is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s insight that the “use a man is to make of his body is transcendent in relation to that body as a mere biological entity.” Drawing on this insight, we will be looking at various practices through which a body can be made to transcend itself. The course is dedicated to exploring the body as the locus of a number of fundamental experiences: the experience of a living (embodied) being, “thrown into the world,” of living in limit-situations (torture, starvation, physical degradation), the experience of finitude and imperfection, of overcoming one’s natural fear of death, finally the experience of self-transcending and re-signification through dying a violent voluntary death. We will be discussing several types of such voluntary death: martyrdom, self-immolation as a form of political protest, suicide-bombing and the kamikaze pilots. In terms of textual resources, we will be analyzing texts on the phenomenology of the body (Merleau-Ponty), on the phenomenology of death and dying (Heidegger, Landsberg and Michelstaedter), as well as scholarly literature on the posthumous significance that a “martyred body” can acquire in radicalized contexts (Girard). We will also examine fiction literature (Lev Tolstoy), literature by Nazi camp survivors such as Primo Levi and Jean Améry, as well as personal diaries left behind by Japanese kamikaze pilots. Finally, in order to make our approach more intuitive and, at the same time, more interdisciplinary, we will be watching and discussing a number of films on the subject by such major directors as Bergman, Pontecorvo, Benigni, and Iñárritu. Course Structure: • Session I: The Body as a Philosophical Problem; the Body and the World; Being-in-the-World. o Readings: Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 77-232; Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 149-224. o Film viewing: 21 Grams (Dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu) • Session II: Death as a Philosophical Problem; Living with Death; Death and (the Quest for) Authenticity; Death, Irony and Humor o Readings: Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 279-311; Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich; Michelstaedter, Persuasion and Rhetoric, pp. 7-57 o Film viewing: The Barbarian Invasions (Dir. Denys Arcand) • Session III: Overcoming the Fear of Death; Self-Transcending; Dying as a Rite of Passage; Death and Meaning o Readings: Plato, Apology; Landsberg, “The Experience of Death”; Michelstaedter, Persuasion and Rhetoric, pp. 61-100 o Film viewing: The Seventh Seal (Dir. Ingmar Bergman) • Session IV: Marked for Death; Torture and Resistance; Scapegoating; o Readings: Améry, “Torture,” pp. 21-40; Girard, The Scapegoat, pp. 1-75 o Film viewing: Agora (Dir. Alejandro Amenabar) • Session V: Dying vs. Death; the Body in the Concentration Camp; Death and Annihilation o Readings: Améry, “At the Mind’s Limits,” pp. 1-20; Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz o Film viewing: Life is Beautiful (Dir. Roberto Benigni) • Session VI: Making the Most of the Dying Body. Various Political Uses of the Body; Narratives of Martyrdom o Readings: Girard, The Scapegoat, pp. 100-148; Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze Diaries; Luke Allnutt, “A True Martyr” o Film viewing: Paradise now (Dir. Hany Abu-Assad) 2) Can Subaltern Studies Speak? A Critical Reading of Three Decades of Discourse on and of Subalternists and Subalternity (Faculty: Arjuna Parakrama) While detractors would admit that the subalternist intervention in colonial historiography and cultural studies was both important and influential, ardent acolytes will concede that there’s been a decline in both interest and interesting new work in the field. This course seeks to examine the ways in which subaltern studies has perceived itself and has been understood by others during the past three decades, in order to better predict its future trajectory. Thus, subaltern theory will be subjected to a discourse study, the assumption being that its reception and reproduction, both complex discursive processes, are (mis)appropriations of power/knowledge in globalised space. Since the public inauguration of Subaltern Studies in the early 1980s, and particularly with Ranajit Guha’s “manifesto” in Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society (1982) this loosely-knit group of Indian historians and cultural theorists enjoyed a two-decade-long wave of popularity in Indian and Anglo-US academe. Many imitations and applications were spawned during this period, even the inner circle of the Subaltern Studies Collective grew to around 15 amidst much soul-searching [See Hardiman 1986], and included adherents in the most prestigious US and Australian universities. Caricature accounts had US graduate students looking for subalterns in every nook and cranny, and the crudest misunderstandings degenerated into celebrations of primitivism and the romanticizing of marginality. To risk a generalization that this course will unpack, at a more serious level the British and US responses to Subaltern Studies have been markedly divergent because each sees different aspects as its core content. While the first response dealt almost exclusively with colonial historiography, this was quickly followed by a literary critical appropriation of Subaltern Studies which gradually became the one of the trendiest methodologies in US English Departments. Throughout this period the definition of the term “subaltern” came under constant scrutiny and regular revision, a discursive arena that will be meticulously mapped in our readings. Subaltern Studies’ origins as a critical engagement with Marxism is well-known. Hence, serious opposition to Subaltern Studies has most consistently come from the traditional left which argues that revolutionary struggle is being diverted to over-nuanced abstractions and obscurantist theory. A related major strand of criticism exemplified by members of the Cambridge School held that the Subalternists have nothing new to offer which either (British) Marxists and/or Indian historians had not discussed earlier. A rising antagonism from within India, including by a few former members of the Collective such as Sumit Sarkar, has critiqued what it perceives as the post-structuralist turn of later subaltern work. However, the early excitement, both pro and con has diminished, and during the last five or so years the output and interest in Subalternity has reached a low ebb, prompting some critics to express the view that it was merely a fad whose heyday was irrevocably past. We will track these changes in terms of their over-arching conceptual ramifications in the context of the global financial crisis and the rise of ethno-nationalist conflict and reconstitution of new social movements. This course seeks to map the trajectory of subaltern studies as well as critical responses to it over the past three decades, in the attempt to theorize future roles for this intellectual movement. Of particular interest in this regard will be the detailed examination of subaltern studies relationship to Marxism and postcolonial theories in the current conjuncture. The unabashedly elite status of subaltern scholars and the disciplinary privileging of India (even within South Asia) will also be scrutinized to identify how this gets played out in their analysis and presentation. As a capstone exercise, participants will be invited to present a preliminary analysis of a contemporary intervention of struggle or resistance that they feel strongly about from a subaltern perspective, which includes the use of alternative sources and methodologies to mainstream research. Course Structure: • Session I: Subaltern Studies and the Critique of Colonial Historiography: New Wine in Old Bottles? o Readings: Selections from Guha, Ranajit Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, Dominance without Hegemony, and Guha and Spivak (eds.) Selected Subaltern Studies. Essays by Chandravarkar, Brass and Bayley in Mapping Subaltern Studies o Creative Expression: La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua [Film by Assia Djebar] • Session II: Subaltern Studies and Marxism: Fellow Travellers or Incommensurable Alternatives? o Readings: Essays by O’Hanlon, Washbrook, Prakash (Response), Lazarus & Varma o Creative Expression: Genesis [Film by Mrinal Sen] • Session III: Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Theory: Orientalism Revisited, Eurocentrism Reinscribed o Readings: Lazarus & Varma, Prakash, Spivak “Can the Subaltern Speak?” o Creative Expression: Kanafani “Men in the Sun” [See Bibliography] • Session IV: The Literary Appropriation of Subaltern Studies: Spivak and Subaltern Sources o Readings: Selections from Spivak, Gayatri In Other Worlds, Other Asias, and the interviews o Creative Expression: Devi, Mahasweta “Draupadi” and “Stanadayini” [English translation by Gayatri Spivak contained in In Other Worlds] • Session V: Synthesizing the Contribution of Subaltern Studies to Present Struggles: Public Debates and Private Wars o Readings: A collection of critical essays and responses from the Economic & Political Weekly in the 1980s and 90s, James C Scott. o Creative Expression: Selected Film Documentaries • Session VI: Whither Subaltern Studies Tomorrow? Subjects, Approaches, Saturation of an Area o Readings: Chatterjee (Selections), Gunawardena, Pandian, Arnold (Selection) o Creative Expression: Abaa (Sri Lankan Film by Jackson Anthony) • Session VII: Participant Presentations and Discussion: How is Subaltern Theory Useful Today? CORE FACULTY Costica Bradatan is Assistant Professor of Honors at Texas Tech University. He has also taught at Cornell University, Miami University, as well as at several universities in Europe (England, Germany, Hungary and Romania). Currently (2009-2010) he is a Solmsen Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research in the Humanities. Bradatan has held research fellowships at, among others, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of California Los Angeles, and the Newberry Library in Chicago. His research interests include Continental philosophy, history of philosophy, East-European philosophy, and philosophy of literature. Bradatan’s most recent book The Other Bishop Berkeley: An Exercise in Reenchantment was published with Fordham University Press in 2006. He is also the author of two other books (in Romanian): An Introduction to the History of Romanian Philosophy in the 20th Century (Bucharest, 2000) and Isaac Bernstein’s Diary (Bucharest, 2001), as well as of several dozens of scholarly papers, essays, encyclopedia entries, book translations and book reviews. He has co-edited (with Serguei Alex. Oushakine) In Marx’s Shadow. Knowledge, Power and Intellectuals in Eastern Europe and Russia (Lexington Books, 2010) and guest-edited two special journal issues: one on “Philosophy as Literature” for The European Legacy (Summer 2009) and another on “Philosophy in Eastern Europe” for Angelaki (forthcoming). Arjuna Parakrama is currently Visiting Professor at the School of Language & Linguistics of the National University of Malaysia. He was Professor of English (Cadre Chair) at Sri Lanka’s oldest and most prestigious university, the University of Peradeniya, from 2004 - 2009. He has also served in the United Nations in Nepal and elsewhere as an expert on (post)conflict development and human rights, and has a parallel existence working with multiply marginalized communities in Sri Lanka’s war-ravaged “border villages”. Professor Parakrama was a Fulbright New Century Scholar in 2007/8, a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council on Ethics & International Affairs (2000/1), a Senior Fellow at the US Institute of Peace (1999/2000) and a Guggenheim Research Grantee (2002). Among his publications are three books, De-Hegemonizing Language Standards (Macmillan, 1995), Language and Rebellion (Katha, 1990) and Collected Poems (2002) and a monograph Social Cleaving: Resistance and Loss within a Bereaved Culture (2004). His current research interests include anti-languages, extra-linguistic value systems embedded within everyday language, collective trauma and social cleaving in (post)conflict societies, and subaltern discourse. For further information, visit the Forum on Contemporary Theory website here: www.fctworld.org.

Cfp: "On Error," Research Group in Continental Philosophy, Goldsmiths College, University of London, October 29-30, 2010.

Is a form of discourse, philosophical or otherwise, conceivable without a relation to error: the errors it considers potentially amendable, the errors it seeks to distinguish itself from, or the errors it inadvertently generates? If this relation is neither uniform nor stable, if the status, value, and identity ascribed to error may vary across disciplines or even within a single philosophical corpus itself, what does this variability express? And what consequences will the transformations in philosophy’s understanding of error have for its procedure in general? This two-day international conference, organized by INC, the Research Group in Continental Philosophy at Goldsmiths, University of London, aims to ascertain the meaning and function of error for philosophical thought today. Researchers are invited to submit original papers of forty minutes* reading time devoted to any aspect of the theme in question. Areas of research may concern (but are not limited to) the following: Error and • Deception, ideology, and false consciousness • Its relation to concept, category, or statement • Methodologies of correction or adaptivity • History (transmission and persistence of problems) • Determinacy and indeterminacy • Accountability • (Un)predictability: the aleatory instant • Reinventions of the truth-error relation (Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Canguilhem, Foucault) • Being wrong or being right: logics of argumentation • Wilful error (dissimulation, méconnaissance, detour, fabulation, etc.) • Psychoanalysis: situating the subject in the “dimension of making a mistake” Submissions: Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words in length, along with your name, department, institution, and email address. Deadline for submissions: 1 June 2010 (You will be informed of our decision by 1 August 2010). Email abstracts to: d.a.smith@gold.ac.uk. For further details: http://www.gold.ac.uk/inc/.

"The Spirit of German Idealism II," Nordic Network for German Idealism, Siemens Stiftung, Munich, May 26-28, 2010.

Also sponsored by the Department of Philosophy, Ludwig-Maximilian University and the Department of Philosophy, Aarhus University. In the period from 2009 – 2011 the Nordic Network for German Idealism (http://www.nngi.org/) is arranging various conferences and workshops for researchers and post-graduate students with interest and expertise in the vast and varied field of philosophy, which takes the philosophies of Kant, Fichte Schelling, Hegel and Kierkegaard as its most crucial point of reference. The papers for the workshop are not restricted with regards to theme, but they should discuss or deal with the philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel or Kierkegaard. Since the general theme for work within the NNGI is Spirit (Geist), we particularly welcome papers that deal with this theme. They may be historically oriented or deal with systematic issues as the authors see fit. The deadline for submission of abstracts is April 15th, 2010. Abstracts should be submitted to the following e-mail address: filamr@hum.au.dk. Further information may be found here: http://nngi.org/?p=287.

Cfp: "Rhetorics of Reason and Restraint: Stoic Speech from Antiquity to the Present," ASHR, Minneapolis, May 27-28, 2010.

Update: The programme has been posted here: http://www.communication.illinois.edu/nogorman/ashrsched.htm. Original Post (October 26, 2009): Annual conference of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric. Set within rhetoric's histories have been consistent cautionary voices, warning rhetors and their audiences of the dangers of rhetorical excesses, enthusiasms, and irrationalities. Stoicism has represented in its ethical ideal, if not always explicitly in its theories, such a cautionary voice—and a major one, influencing directly or indirectly Cicero and Augustine, Lipsius and Hobbes, Wollstonecraft and Lincoln, as well as contemporary ethics of criticism and ideals of public discourse. Plenary speakers at the ASHR Symposium will be Janet Atwill of the University of Tennessee, James Darsey of Georgia State University, and Lawrence Green of the University of Southern California. ASHR invites proposal covering historical as well as more contemporary subjects. Although papers on all aspects of rhetoric's history are invited, we especially welcome submissions that speak to issues related to the theme of Stoicism (e.g. reason, restraint, cosmopolitanism, philosophy's relationship to rhetoric). One-page single-spaced abstracts are due in electronic form (as .doc or .rtf files) to Ned O'Gorman at mailto:nogorman@illinois.edu by 9pm Eastern Daylight Time on November 30, 2009. Abstracts will be competitively reviewed. Authors of accepted abstracts will be notified by December 31, 2009.

Wilson, Robert A. Review of Robert D. Rupert, COGNITIVE SYSTEMS AND THE EXTENDED MIND. NDPR (March 2010).

Rupert, Robert D. Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind. Oxford: OUP, 2009. Once upon a time, empirically-informed, philosophical work on the mind was pretty straightforward. Mental activity went on inside the head, and we were pretty sure that it, along with all the good stuff associated with it -- consciousness, intentionality, mental representation, computation -- could be most readily understood without having to crease our brows too much about how minds were situated vis-à-vis bodies, or vis-à-vis environments. To be sure, the cognitive sciences had renegade, pluralistic strands running through them, and particular disciplinary itches that needed scratching. But there was a sufficiently articulated paradigm in place that at least made designing jacket covers for books in the field relatively easy. Find a picture of a head, such as a representation of a brain, ideally an image a bit attuned to the title or theme of the book, and you're at least well on your way. I failed to understand this simple point during what were politely called "ongoing discussions" over the cover of The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences a dozen years ago. "No, I'm sorry, Professor Wilson", I was informed by way of a solemn conclusion delivered by an exasperated senior editor at the Press, someone whom I imagined had to avert his gaze in embarrassment on my behalf as he typed back curtly, "I am afraid that it has to be a head". Designing jacket covers for books in this neck of the woods is no longer so easy. Heads are not exactly out, but they are no longer strictly required. Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi's The Phenomenological Mind (2008) has a person half-way through exit mode on its cover. Fred Adams and Ken Aizawa's The Bounds of Cognition (2008), for crying out loud, has a cube of green cubes on the cover. Not even a thing that thinks, so far as we know. Rob Rupert's stimulating book continues down this path with quite a beautiful black and white photograph of a grove of aspens in the wilds of Colorado plonked right on the cover. It's enough to start me worrying that in order to understand the field that I work in, I can no longer simply look at jacket covers. In order to write this review in my current state of existential confusion, I have thus had to resort to an old trick of the trade, something I learned in grad school but like most things so learnt, haven't had to use much since. Read. And, somewhat to my initial surprise, especially given the total absence of pictures once one gets beyond the cover of Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind, and the distinct dearth of bad jokes between the sheets, I'm glad I did. Rupert's book is a good read. It is a sustained, systematic, critical examination of the idea that minds are not simply ensconced inside heads, but extend into both bodies and the world beyond the body. As his title suggests, Rupert is focused primarily on the latter of these, the extended mind thesis, a thesis articulated neatly by Andy Clark and David Chalmers a dozen years ago in a paper that, had it been a movie, would have been an instant blockbuster, then a classic, and now be competing with Seinfeld re-runs on cable tv. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=19128.

Cfp: "Embodiment, Intersubjectivity and Psychopathology," University of Heidelberg, September 30-October 2, 2010.

During the last decade, the concept of embodiment has become a key paradigm of interdisciplinary approaches from the areas of philosophy, psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience. The body is no longer merely considered as an interesting input for the brain or mind. The new trend is to link embodiment, cognition and emotion in a deeper way, and this has particular repercussions for understanding our social engagements. This in turn has implications for psychopathology and psychotherapy, because embodied and intersubjective views on mental illness can offer new insights useful for diagnosis and remediation. The conference is aimed at creating an interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of ideas on the themes of embodiment, intersubjectivity and their role in psychopa­thology. It brings together worldwide experts from the fields of developmental psy­chology, philosophy, and psychopathology, in order to advance on some key ques­tions for this research area, among them: · What is embodied intersubjectivity? In how far is our relationships with others mediated by the body? · What is the role that embodied intersubjectivity plays for the development of social cognition? · How can mental illness be conceived from an embodied and enactive point of view? · What is the use of the notion of embodiment for therapy and training? Keynote Speakers:

• Ezequiel Di Paolo, Matthew Ratcliffe, Beata Stawarska, Dan Zahavi(Philosophy)
• Peter Hobson, Vasu Reddy, Colwyn Trevarthen, Ed Tronick (Developmental Psychology)
• Jonathan Cole, George Downing, Giovanni Stanghellini (Neurology, Psychology, Psychiatry)

Cfp: "The Horror, the Humour: Satire and Dark Comedy in a Postmodern World," Lincoln School of Humanities and Performing Arts, October 9, 2010.

This one day comedy symposium sets out to examine the notion of satire and the overlap with Dark Comedy in the 21st Century, with particular reference to the post 1960's so called boom. In the last part of his book, That Was Satire That Was (2000), Humphrey Carpenter declares that 'Everyone is [now] a satirist.' The conference then aims to begin to identify where satire stands in the postmodern world. It asks such questions as: How has the political landscape changed the notion of satire (particularly interesting in this election year)? Are people so cynical with regard to politics that the job of the satirist is harder than ever before? How has the notion of Political Correctness affected the work of the satirist and whether Humphrey Carpenter's declaration that 'Everyone is a Satirist' is justified? This is an interdisciplinary conference and welcomes papers on satire in its many forms from TV and Film Drama to debates around political cartoons whilst also seeking papers on non-western forms of Satire in addition to the Anglo-American. Possible topics could include but are not exclusive to these subjects: * Satire and Politics (in every sense of the term 'Politics') * Satire and Gender * Satire in the Global Context * Satire and Journalism * The Satirist and Fine Art * Satire on Film and Television (including Animation) * Satire in Theatrical Performance * Satire in the Novel * Political Cartoons

Further information is available here: http://www.lincoln.ac.uk/home/conferences/index.htm.

Schliesser, Eric. Review of G. A. J. Rogers, et al., eds. INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY. NDPR (March 2010).

Rogers, G. A. J., Tom Sorrell and Jill Kraye, eds. Insiders and Outsiders in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. London: Routledge, 2010. Imagine a possible distant future in which the poet-philosopher, Jody Azzouni, is at the core of the undergraduate curriculum. His views on ontology are routinely taught in order to prepare students for the great questions of the day. There are, of course, pesky historians who insist that the neo-scholastic reawakening inaugurated by David Lewis should be represented in the undergraduate curriculum -- they claim persuasively that for about a century Lewis attracted far more attention than Azzouni. (In his contribution to the volume under review Robert Adams calls the focus on possible worlds and the logic of modality the "coming of age of American philosophy" (312).) In his day Lewis attracted the very best graduate students in the leading philosophy department; working out the detailed implications of the various components of his system seemed to dominate philosophy for over a century. Meanwhile, Azzouni, who was by no means unknown in his time, never attracted PhD students. His work seemed to prohibit the parceling out of projects so necessary in an age of shortened PhDs, instant publication, and the division of labor within progressive research programs. Ironically, in the twenty-first century Azzouni was better known as a quirky novelist and feminist poet before he was rediscovered as the thinker who radically transformed philosophy post-Quine. So much for fantasy; it was inspired by the volume under review. Its core insight -- to place five now canonical thinkers of the seventeenth century alongside five significant but now largely untaught and unread thinkers -- is worthy of serious reflection. The five "outsiders" (Gassendi, Digby, Gale, Cudworth, and Malebranche) receive an article each. The five "insiders" (Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, and Leibniz) all receive at least two articles. The volume teaches that it is very hard to say at a given time what philosopher/system will last and what the reasons are for such enduringness. Another thing taught by the volume as a whole is that philosophers can rewrite their history in various ways so that a thinker can become an insider or return to canonical status when s/he was once not. "Analytic" philosophers may need their historical "myths" (Cottingham introducing his views on Descartes, 165), but philosophy will not always be analytic and its future may require different myths or a different attitude toward history. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=19147.

Cfp: "Nature and Human Nature," University of Oxford, September 10-12, 2010.

Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section, British Psychological Society. Mind is part of Nature, not apart from it. To deny this is to make the mind and consciousness alien intrusions into an otherwise mechanistic universe. Consciousness may be a remarkable phenomenon but we will start from the assumption that it is natural, not supernatural. To approach consciousness thus is to be intellectually consistent, aiming to account for the physical, biological and psychological phenomena we encounter without explanatory gaps that require the invention of special forces or substances. From this perspective - that our mental life emerges from, and hence is continuous with, all other living processes - consciousness inquiry becomes an integral part of our ethical domain, and it is easier to recognize that in acting harmfully towards our world we are acting harmfully towards ourselves. The roots of such actions are complex and attempts to uncover them often cite a sense of alienation or disconnection from the natural world. Whatever the case may be, an inquiry into the nature of mind, the nature of nature, and the nature of their interdependence is timely. This conference aims to promote such an inquiry. With this in mind we propose the following three broad themes for the 2010 CEP conference: (1) the nature of human nature, (2) the nature of nature and (3) the nature of their interdependence. Keynote Speakers:

• David Abram, cultural ecologist, philosopher, and founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics.
• Matthijs Cornelissen, physician, psychologist, and founder of the Sri Aurobindo Centre for Consciousness Studies
• Peter Fenwick, neuropsychiatrist, neurophysiologist and Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, Consultant Neuropsychiatrist at the Radcliffe Infirmary Oxford and Honorary Consultant Clinical Neurophysiologist at Broadmoor Hospital

Further information may be found here: http://www.bps.org.uk/conex/events/cep_2010.cfm.

Fish, Stanley. "Pragmatism’s Gift." NEW YORK TIMES March 15, 2010.

Margolis, Joseph. Pragmatism's Advantage: American and European Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010. Like any philosophy pragmatism offers answers to the questions the tradition of philosophical inquiry has been asking since its beginning. What is truth? What is real? How are we to act? What is the source of moral and/or epistemological authority? Pragmatism’s basic move is to declare that the answers to these questions will not be found by identifying some transcendental universal and then conforming ourselves to its normative demands (like “Be ye perfect”). Rather, we must, and can, make do with the “ordinary aptitudes of human beings (ourselves) viewed within a generously Darwinized ecology, without transcendental, revelatory, or privileged presumptions of any kind.” Pragmatism “completely undermines any assurances, empirical or transcendental, that exceed the provisionality of what we may consensually construct (in our own time) as a workable conjecture about the way the world is.” I quote from Joseph Margolis’s new book Pragmatism’s Advantage, which is, he says, that it is among the “very small number of Western philosophical movements … that … never exceed the natural competence and limitations of mere human being.” Why is that an advantage? Because, Margolis asserts, it avoids having to choose between “the alleged necessity of some ineliminable invariance in thought and/or reality” and some wholesale subjectivism or idealism that claims “that the natural world is itself constituted or constructed by the cognizing mind.” On the one hand, no “transcendental faculty” of reason or some other quasi-deity that will guide us infallibly if only we attach ourselves to it (not that there haven’t been any candidates for this honored position; there have in fact been many, too many). On the other hand, no surrender to the “preposterous doctrine” that we just make it all up as we go along. Instead pragmatism, Margolis explains, “favors a constructive (or constructivist) realism … freed from every form of cognitive, rational, and practical privilege … [and] committed to the continuities of animal nature and human culture, confined to the existential and historical contingencies of the human condition, and open in principle to plural, partial, perspectived, provisional, even nonconverging ways of understanding.” Quite a mouthful, but we can make it manageable by asking just what is a “constructive realism”? In the vocabulary pragmatism rejects, “realism” is (among other things) the thesis that (a) the world is independent of us and our thoughts, and (b) therefore our thoughts (or interpretations or calculations) should always be checked against, and evaluated as adequate or inadequate by, that independent and prior world. Pragmatists by and large accept (a), but not (b). They believe with Richard Rorty (a key figure in the revival of pragmatism in the last quarter of the 20th century) that “things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include mental states” — the world, in short, is “out there” — but they also believe that the knowledge we have (or think we have) of the world is given not by it, but by men and women who are hazarding descriptions within the vocabularies and paradigms (Thomas Kuhn’s word) that are in place and in force in their cultures. Those descriptions are judged to be true or false, accurate or inaccurate, according to measures and procedures that currently have epistemic authority, and not according to their fit with the world as it exists independently of any description. If a philosophy doesn’t have a real world payoff, what’s the use of it? While there surely is such a world, our only access to it, Rorty and Margolis say, is through our own efforts to apprehend it. Margolis: “The real world … is not a construction of mind or Mind … but the paradigm of knowledge or science is certainly confined to the discursive powers of the human.” Thus the content of realism — of what the best up-to-date accounts of the world tell us — is constructively determined by the workings of a culture-bound process of hypothesis, experiment, test and calculation that is itself a constructed artifact and as such can change even as it guides and assesses research. In the absence of the alternative pragmatism rejects — something called Mind equipped with something called reason which enables it to describe accurately something called the World (Bacon’s dream) — “realism cannot fail to be constructivist, though reality is not itself … constructed” (Margolis). A constructive realism will still make use of words like “true” and “better,” but these are judgments that a proposition is or is not warranted — has sufficient evidence backing it up — within the prevailing paradigms. (What higher judgment could here be? Kuhn asks.) In the event of a paradigm change — not an event that can be predicted or planned; it takes the form of conversion not demonstration — there will be new canons of evidence and new measures of warrant. Notice how far this is from saying that “anything goes.” At any moment the protocols and procedures in place will enforce a rigor of method and interpretation; it is just that the rigor lives and has its shape entirely within “the existential and historical contingencies of the human situation” and not in a realm of extra-human verification and validation, whether that realm be theological, philosophical or empirical. The implications of the pragmatist argument are at once far reaching and unthreatening. They are far reaching because, as Margolis points out, “If realism takes a constructivist turn, then all the normative features of the sciences (say truth and validity) must be constructivist as well — as … our moral and political norms would be.” These implications are unthreatening because if the pragmatist account is right it is describing what has always been the case. When Margolis announces that there are “no privileged faculties, no preestablished harmony, no exceptionless universals, no assured natural necessities … no escape from the contingencies of whatever we report as ‘given’ within human experience,” he is not ushering in a new age, but describing the necessary condition of all the old ones. It has ever been thus (again, if pragmatism is right), and yet the world’s business has always been done. . . . Read he rest here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/pragmatisms-gift/.

Doxiadis, Apostolos, et al. "Exclusive Claude Lévi-Strauss Cartoon." FINANCIAL TIMES February 27, 2010.

The cartoon is here: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5284373a-1f94-11df-8975-00144feab49a.html.

Farrell, Thomas J. "Who Was Walter Ong and Why is his Thought Important Today?" OPEDNEWS.COM March 12, 2010.

Ong's multivariate thought is important for liberals and conservatives alike to understand in order to get their cultural bearings about the world today. The world today can be understood in terms of Western culture versus all the other cultures in the world. Ong's multivariate account of the development of Western culture can help us understand certain distinctive features about Western culture, features that are not as widely characteristic of non-Western cultures today as they are of Western culture for example, the quantification of thought in modern science and the culture of modern science; the transformed agonistic structures of modern science and modern capitalism; the inward turn of consciousness (David Riesman's inner-directedness) connected with modern science, modern capitalism, modern democracy (as exemplified in the United States), the Industrial Revolution, and the Romantic Movement; and the visualist tendencies that are integral to modernity. Arguably one of the most significant transformations that occurred in emerging modernity involved what Ong styles agonistic structures. In Manliness (Yale University Press, 2006: 230), Harvey C. Mansfield in effect writes about agonistic structures. The title of his book involves the meaning of the Greek term andreia, which means both courage and manliness. In any event, Mansfield makes a telling observation about modernity: "The entire enterprise of modernity . . . could be understood as a project to keep manliness unemployed." Yes, it could. In the history of modern literature, the rise of the mock epic should be understood as showing the waning of the old oral manliness and the code of the hero, as should the later rise of the antihero in literature. In general, the old oral orientation toward the heroic gives way to the inward turn of consciousness toward inner-directedness. Nevertheless, modernity cannot be understood as keeping agonistic structures entirely unemployed, for modern capitalism and modern science employ agonistic structures, as do old warrior religions such as Christianity and Islam. Moreover, in American popular culture today, we find an extraordinary fascination with the agonistic spirit in televised sports and in comics and action movies. For Ong, the corpuscular sense of life is expressed not only in visualist tendencies in ancient Greek philosophy and in modern print culture but also in the oral sense of life as event. But as Plato and Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and Bernard Lonergan and Ong understand the human mind, the human mind transcends the corpuscular sense of life. Even though the prolific conservative Roman Catholic writer Michael Novak gives no evidence of having studied Ong's thought about the corpuscular sense of life in depth, he has studied Lonergan's thought well enough to grasp how the human mind is different from the corpuscular sense of life that Ong writes about. In the introduction to the recent reprinting of his 1965 book Belief and Unbelief: A Philosophy of Self-Knowledge (Transaction Publishers, 1994: xv), Novak sets forth the following critique of the visualist tendencies in Richard Rorty's thought:

Rorty thinks that in showing that the mind is not "the mirror of nature" he has disproved the correspondence theory of truth. What he has really shown is that the activities of the human mind cannot be fully expressed by metaphors based upon the operations of the eye [see Ong's visualist tendencies]. We do not know simply through "looking at" reality as though our minds were simply mirrors of reality. One needs to be very careful not to confuse the activities of the mind with the operations of any (or all) bodily senses [see Ong's critique of the corpuscular sense of life]. In describing how our minds work, one needs to beware of being bewitched by the metaphors that spring from the operations of our senses. Our minds are not like our eyes; or, rather, their activities are far richer, more complex, and more subtle than those of our eyes. It is true that we often say, on getting the point, "Oh, I see!" But putting things together and getting the point normally involve a lot more than seeing," and all that we need to do to get to that point can scarcely be met simply by following the imperative, "Look!" Even when the point, once grasped, may seem to have been (as it were) right in front of us all along, the reasons why it did not dawn upon us immediately may be many, including the fact that our imaginations were ill-arranged, so that we were expecting and "looking for" the wrong thing. To get to the point at which the evidence finally hits us, we may have to undergo quite a lot of dialectical argument and self-correction.

I do not understand Jacques Derrida's thought about phonocentrism and logocentrism well enough to compare his thought with Ong's critique of the corpuscular sense of life, so I will leave it to someone else to undertake constructing a comparison and contrast of their thought. In any event, had Samuel P. Huntington understood Ong's multivariate account of Western cultural history, he could have used Ong's thought to deepen and strengthen his clash-of-civilizations thesis in the 1990s, which seemed to be confirmed by the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Who-Was-Walter-Ong-and-Wh-by-Thomas-Farrell-100312-2.html.

On September 10 and 22, 2009, Prof. Farrell discussed Walter Ong's work on the blog radio talk show Ethics Talk that is hosted by Hope May in philosophy at Central Michigan University. Each hour-long show has been archived and is available for people who missed the live broadcast to listen to:

• Technologizing of the Word Interview
• Ramus, Method & The Decay of Dialogue Interview

Other articles by Prof. Farrell on OpEdNews may be found here: http://www.opednews.com/author/author38575.html.

Moore, Christopher. Review of William Wians, ed. LOGOS AND MUTHOS. BMCR (March 2010).

Wians, William, ed. Logos and Muthos: Philosophical Essays in Greek Literature. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. This book's cover wonders whether literature and philosophy "are in fact two rival forms of discourse mutually opposed to one another." But really its dozen essays take on less programmatic issues. Each submits an early Greek text--frequently the Homeric epics or the Agamemnon, but also archaic poetry and classical tragedy--to the sort of careful reading such texts, by themselves, occasion. As a loosely coordinated collection of readings, a couple of which I would recommend to others, this collection proves satisfactory. As an argument about the position of philosophy in works outside the philosophical canon, it proves less so. The book, according to its editor, means to "explore philosophical dimensions of literary authors." This goal gets haphazardly glossed across the first several pages as, e.g., (i) to "consider philosophical issues and ideas as they arise from or can be applied to literary... texts"; (ii) to "challenge [the] assumption ... that literary texts are somehow lacking when measured against standards of philosophical reasoning and argument"; or (iii) to "demonstrate that the poets... exhibit a high degree of critical self-awareness and reflection on issues more typically associated with ancient philosophers" (1-2). The last of these glosses best reflects the success of the book: the poets come out looking highly well-worth reading by people concerned about their own self-knowledge and all those topics such a concern could entail. The second gloss, about the relative rigor of argument, is never addressed, and struck me as almost by definition impossible (if a philosophical text is called so just because of its preponderance of explicit argument). The first gloss, with no attention to what would make an "issue" philosophical, as opposed simply to what reasonable people would think about, struck me as vacuous. By leaving "philosophy" undefined, or, at best, by treating it as claiming things about knowledge, or identity, or the soul, or the four elements, the book forewent a chance, I think, to ask as seriously as possible what role the appreciation of literature could have played in a classical Greek philosophical life. Assume, for instance, that philosophy is an activity that involves bringing ourselves to have only those commitments (i.e., about truth and value) for which we can find good reasons to maintain. Or assume that it's a practice meant to achieve self-knowledge, whatever self-knowledge might be. From either of those perspectives, the question about the philosophicality of a text would be a question about how that text could contribute to living rationally or to developing self-recognition. Homer's or Aeschylus's occupation with problems of ignorance or fate or virtue could then be judged perspicuous or not, mature or not, persuasive or not, rigorous or not, from some common viewpoint. The analysis of will this text give me a productive site for philosophizing? seems to me often more fruitful (as, in part, the question is answered mainly by trying) than does this text have a high philosophical quotient? In most of the cases developed in this book, the answer to the first question is "yes," and to the second question, so it seems to me, is "I'm still not quite sure what's being asked." . . . Read the whole review here: http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2010/2010-03-38.html. (Thanks for the tip to Ed Brandon.)

Hall, Edith. Review of Peter J. Ahrensdorf, GREEK TRAGEDY AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. NDPR (March 2010).

Ahrensdorf, Peter J. Greek Tragedy and Political Philosophy. Cambridge: CUP, 2009.

This new study of the relationship between religious and political thought in Sophocles consists of three substantial chapters analysing the 'Theban plays', Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone respectively, framed by an Introduction and Conclusion. Ahrensdorf opens his study with the claim that, since the Enlightenment, political theory has tended to sideline the issue of religion. One way of countering this is to consider pre-modern thought about the relationship between religion and political enlightenment. Sophoclean tragedies, and in particular the 'Theban plays', offer a promising arena in which to conduct such an analysis. Ahrensdorf nails his colours to the mast at the beginning of the book: Sophoclean drama, in his view, is both deeply respectful of the power of religion and at the same time politically rationalist. In the Sophoclean world it is, basically, possible to be both respectful of divinity and a rational political agent. According to Ahrensdorf, Nietzsche was therefore quite mistaken in seeing in the Greek tragic hero (and especially in Oedipus) a figure of huge grandeur who only achieves his nobility and wisdom through accepting the utter chaos, mystery, and cruelty of the world, along with the human inability to comprehend the metaphysical forces which govern it. Ahrensdorf argues in his Introduction that the Nietzsche's reading has been predominant ever since the early 20th century, with scholars as diverse as Heidegger, Harold Bloom, Peter Euben and Arlene Saxonhouse acquiescing in Nietzsche's insistence on the anti-rationalism of the Sophoclean tragic hero. He identifies his own position as one that differs from what (he claims) is this post-Nietzschean scholarly consensus. His Sophocles is in fact not a critic of rationalism, but advocates, rather, a 'humane rationalism'. Its vehicle is a model of statesmanship that follows a middle way. It involves neither an extreme rationalism that excludes a religious perspective, nor an extreme anti-rationalism that excludes the power of reasoned argument and self-questioning. A good leader will do a great deal of Socratic inductive reasoning, but leave a substantial place for acknowledging the power of the divine and the unknowable in human life. . . .

Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=19167.

ONLY A GOD CAN SAVE US: MARTIN HEIDEGGER AND THE THIRD REICH, Center for Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center, March 17, 2010.

A film-screening and discussion. Join us for the American premiere of the documentary Only A God Can Save Us, a critical examination of Martin Heidegger’s thought and actions during the Third Reich. Fifteen years in the making, the film reveals how essential elements of Heidegger’s philosophy led him to become an enthusiastic supporter of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist revolution. The film also addresses his long post-war silence about the Holocaust and his reluctance to make a public apology. Following the screening we will host a discussion with filmmaker Jeffery Van Davis and Richard Wolin, Distinguished Professor of History, the Graduate Center.

10th Annual Meeting, Foucault Circle, Morgan State University, April 9-11, 2010.

Visit the website of the Foucault Circle here: http://foucault.siuc.edu/. Download the programme here: http://foucaultblog.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/fc10program.pdf.

Cohen, Martin. "Book of the Week: HEIDEGGER: THE INTRODUCTION OF NAZISM INTO PHILOSOPHY." TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT February 18, 2010.

Faye, Emmanuel. Heidegger: the Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. Heidegger is undoubtedly a genius. You can tell he's a genius because his philosophy is so hard to understand. A word of background first, before we tackle Emmanuel Faye's book. Alasdair MacIntyre, the venerable 20th-century philosopher especially respected for his views on politics and morality, says of Heidegger's key text, Being and Time, that "The great difficulty with Sein und Zeit (which is a far better book than those who have not read it generally allow) is that the perhaps warranted apprehension of traditional philosophical terminology is too often used to permit the invention of a new word". Naturally, not wishing to waste time on those who have not worked through Heidegger, he does not elaborate, but one example springs to mind as part of his discussion of "nothingness". Heidegger tells us that "the Nothing noths". "Noths" being a word Heidegger has made up, it is hard to know what it means. Aside from which, it is hard to understand why he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazis in the 1930s, why he continued to support them during the Second World War, and why he even refused to condemn the ideology afterwards. Fortunately, many philosophers do understand all this. MacIntyre himself has no trouble. He says: "We should not be surprised that Heidegger was for a short period a Nazi, not because anything in Sein und Zeit entails National Socialism but because nothing in Sein und Zeit could give one a standpoint from which to criticise it or any other irrationalism." Equally, Michael Inwood, the Trinity College, Oxford expert in Heidegger's work, opines that the "controversies" over Heidegger's "initial support" for Nazism result from a failure to understand that his stance was rooted in "distaste for technology and industrialised mass society ... rather than with anti-Semitism". As to why Heidegger "failed to speak out after the War in condemnation of the Nazi atrocities", David Farrell Krell, professor of philosophy at DePaul University, Chicago, adds that this had more to do with "a Kierkegaardian contempt for publicity and our media-dominated lives" than anything else. So why step forward into this old controversy - now seemingly settled - Emmanuel Faye, professor at the University of Rouen? Particularly as within France, Heidegger is not only "understood" but much cherished, and the reading of his thoughts obligatory for all high school students as part of the baccalaureate. Over the decades that followed the war, if elsewhere Heidegger's critics kept nibbling away, in France the likes of Sartre, Foucault, Ricoeur, Levinas and so on kept admiring the philosophy. In a newspaper interview in 1987, Jacques Derrida threw down the gauntlet to Heidegger's critics, demanding that they either show substantial links between Heidegger's texts and "the reality of all the Nazisms" or shut up. It is this challenge, in effect, that Faye's book, first published in France in 2005, takes up. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=410395.

Collini, Stefan. "A Life in Politics: NEW LEFT at 50." GUARDIAN Februar 13, 2010.

New Left Review at 50: no balloons, of course, and definitely no party games. The very idea of "celebration" smacks of consumerist pseudo-optimism. Mere chronology is, after all, an untheorised concept. We should see it as not so much an ­anniversary, more an over-determined conjuncture. It is hard not to be intimidated by New Left Review. At times, the journal can seem like an elaborate contrivance for making us feel inadequate. One's relation to it conjugates as an irregular verb: I wish I knew more about industrialisation in China; you ought to have a better grasp of Brenner's analysis of global turbulence; he, she, or it needs to understand the significance of community-based activism in Latin America. For many Guardian readers (and others), the journal functions like a kind of older brother whom we look up to – more serious, better informed, better travelled, stronger, irreplaceable. Well, maybe a tiny bit solemn at times (we could draw lots for who gets the job of telling Perry Anderson to lighten up), and perhaps when we were out of touch for longish stretches, life seemed a bit easier. But then we meet up and it's a case of respect at first sight, all over again. It hasn't always been like this: even older brothers had rocky periods in their youth – misguided enthusiasms, failed relationships, moody withdrawals. Some readers may remember times when NLR seemed hell-bent on sectarian purism, theoretical slavishness and a wilful opacity. It has been through several changes of identity in the past 50 years, and memories of some of these earlier phases may hamper the efforts that it has made recently to reach out to a more diverse readership. But there is a lot in that history to be proud of. The journal has, in its own unbending fashion, registered and responded to huge changes in the world during this half-century, and in doing so has made a stock of ideas available well beyond the ranks of those who may at any point have shared its particular form, or forms, of Marxism (an allegiance that has itself modulated, perhaps even attenuated somewhat, over the decades). Some things about the journal, however, don't change. What other publication would take out a full-page advertisement in a national newspaper announcing its "quinquagenary issue"? NLR has been accused of many things, but never of populist dumbing-down. The biography of the review cannot be reduced to a formula: its experience so far has been too rich and too contradictory. But it would be fair to say that a journal that began life hoping to animate and express organised popular movements on the left soon became a more emphatically theoretical enterprise, albeit with certain Leninist or Trotskyist longings held in reserve. Then, in the 1980s, it began to interpret its intellectual task in more expansive terms, and since 2000 it has been self-consciously a "journal of ideas" – on the left, to be sure, but distant from radical movements in the present or any worked-out political blueprint for the future. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/13/new-left-review-stefan-collini.

Furedi, Frank. "Turning Peer Review into Modern-Day Holy Scripture." SPIKED Februry 23, 2010.

Suddenly, the esoteric system of peer review has hit the headlines. The Lancet, a leading British medical journal, has acknowledged that it made a serious error in publishing a study suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and autism and bowel disease. Earlier this month, a group of leading stem cell researchers wrote an open letter pointing out the systematic abuse of peer review by a small cabal of scientists, whom they accuse of using their position to slow down the publication of the findings of their competitors. Then there is the scandal surrounding the leaked emails of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in England, and the dubious data published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which further exposes a worrying trend towards the corruption of peer review. Peer review is a system that subjects scientific and scholarly work to the scrutiny of other experts in the field. Ideally it ensures that research is only approved or published when it meets the standards of scientific rigour and its findings are sound. At its best, peer review guarantees that it is disinterested science which informs public discussion and debate. When established through peer review, the authority of science helps to clarify disputes and injects into public discussion the latest findings and research. Peer reviewing depends on a community of experts who are competent and committed to impartiality. It depends on the commitment and collaboration of scientists and scholars in a given field. However, the individuals who constitute a ‘community of experts’ also tend to be preoccupied with their own personal position and status. Often, the colleagues they are reviewing and refereeing are their competitors and sometimes even their bitter rivals. The contradiction between working as a member of an expert community and one’s own personal interests cannot always be satisfactorily resolved. Unfortunately, even with the best will in the world, peer reviewing is rarely an entirely disinterested process. All too often the system of peer review is infused with vested interests. As many of my colleagues in academia know, peer reviewing is frequently carried out through a kind of mates’ club, between friends and acquaintances, and all too often the question of who gets published and who gets rejected is determined by who you know and where you stand in a particular academic debate. Peer reviewing cannot remain immune to the preoccupations, agenda and interests of the individuals who carry it out. Even when they have the best intentions, academics and scientists can overlook errors and become blind to the importance of a new but maverick contribution. They are ordinary mortals who have their fair share of prejudices, and are often no less petty or self-centred than other people can sometimes be. Nevertheless, peer reviewing has traditionally, at least, been the most effective way of exercising quality control over the proposals and output of the scholarly and scientific communities. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8227/.

"Where's Your Argument? Informal Logic, Critical Thinking and Argumentation," Manchester Metropolitan University, April 12-13, 2010.

DAY ONE: issues in the study of Informal Logic and Argumentation

• what is the difference between a good argument and a bad argument?; what's the difference between rhetoric and argument?; is there a difference between legitimate persuasion and propaganda?
• an opportunity to participate in discussion with some of the leading authors writing on these crucial questions.

DAY TWO: the role of argument and rhetoric in policy and politics

• do you have a right to your own opinion?; is the Spin Doctor's art a noble one?
• an opportunity to inoculate yourself against political rhetoric, in time for the General Election!

Speakers:

• Frans van Eemeren, "The Pragma-Dialectical Approach to Argument"
• Lars Hertzberg, "The Grammar of Inference"
• Don S. Levi, "The Informality of Logic"
• Michael Loughlin, "The 'Evidence Based Medicine' Debate"
• Steven Poole, "Unspeak"
• John Powell, "Criteria for Good Argument"
• Rupert Read, "'Reframing' and 'Unspeak' or Politics Without Propaganda?"
• Jamie Whyte, "Bad Thoughts and Worse Policies"

Visit the conference website here: http://www.cheshire.mmu.ac.uk/ids/home/news/whereisyourargument.php.

Wolfe, Alan. "In Defence of a Common Culture." CHRISTIANITY TODAY February 4, 2010.

Hirsch, E. D. The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. E.D. Hirsch is a great American, a scholar who cares deeply about the youth of this country, what they are taught, and how likely they are to become engaged and thoughtful citizens. Hirsch describes himself as having enjoyed a "comfortable life as a conference-going literary theorist" before realizing that the failure of American schools to offer students actual content rather than faddish pedagogical innovations was not only turning young people into cultural illiterates but also was preventing those at the bottom of the ladder from improving their prospects in life through education. The founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation and the author of the controversial Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987), Hirsch was adopted by the Right early in the culture wars. But his actual political sympathies are more in line with Albert Shanker, the longterm leader of the New York City teacher's union (to whose memory the present book is dedicated). Hirsch's new book is called The Making of Americans, and while he describes it as both departing from and building upon his previous work, it does more of the latter than the former. Disappointingly there is little new to be learned; anyone who has already read Diane Ravich's Left Back will not glean more history and, indeed, anyone who has read Hirsch's previous books will pretty much know the contours of the argument. Still this book is valuable because it offers a clearly written, highly accessible, and brief statement of the issues that have guided Hirsch for the past two or three decades. Reading William Bennett from the Right or almost any product of a major school of education from the Left, one could be forgiven for thinking that the American school wars were a battle between progressive educators seeking to teach students about the wonders of race, ethnicity, and gender on the one hand and old-fashioned disciplinarians worried about the seductions of relativism and hedonism on the other. The most important contribution Hirsch makes to the way we think about educating our youth is to get us out of using terms such as Left and Right. All wars eventually end, even culture wars. It is time to take the ideology out of our educational battles, a task for which E.D. Hirsch is particularly suited. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.christianitytoday.com/global/printer.html?/bc/2010/janfeb/defensecommonculture.html.

Cohen, Patricia. "Descartes Letter Found, Therefore It Is." NEW YORK TIMES February 24, 2010.

It was the Great Train Robbery of French intellectual life: thousands of treasured documents that vanished from the Institut de France in the mid-1800s, stolen by an Italian mathematician. Among them were 72 letters by René Descartes, the founding genius of modern philosophy and analytic geometry. Now one of those purloined letters has turned up at a small private college in eastern Pennsylvania, providing scholars with another keyhole into one of the Western world’s greatest minds. The letter, dated May 27, 1641, concerns the publication of Meditations on First Philosophy, a celebrated work whose use of reason and scientific methods helped to ignite a revolution in thought. The document, experts say, reveals just how much Descartes tailored his writings to answer his contemporary critics. Frequently suspected of heresy, Descartes sent copies of his arguments to well-known theologians to gauge their opinions and answer their objections within his text. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/books/25descartes.html.

Grafton, Anthony. "Britain: the Disgrace of the Universities." NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS BLOG March 9, 2010.

British universities face a crisis of the mind and spirit. For thirty years, Tory and Labour politicians, bureaucrats, and “managers” have hacked at the traditional foundations of academic life. Unless policies and practices change soon, the damage will be impossible to remedy. As an “Occasional Student” at University College London in the early 1970s and a regular visitor to the Warburg Institute, Oxford, and Cambridge after that, I—like many American humanists—envied colleagues who taught at British universities. We had offices with linoleum; they had rooms with carpets. We worked at desks; they sat with their students on comfy chairs and gave them glasses of sherry. Above all, we felt under constant pressure to do the newest new thing, and show the world that we were doing it: to be endlessly innovative and interdisciplinary and industrious. British humanists innovated too. Edward Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, Frances Yates and Peter Burke, and many others formulated new ways of looking at history for my generation. But British academics always admitted, as we sometimes did not, that it is vital to preserve and update our traditional disciplines and forms of knowledge: languages, precise interpretation of texts and images and objects, rigorous philosophical analysis and argument. Otherwise all the sexy interdisciplinary work will yield only a trickle of trendy blather. There was a Slow Food feel to British university life, based on a consensus that people should take the time to make an article or a book as dense and rich as it could be. Good American universities were never exactly Fast Food Nation, but we certainly felt the pressure to produce, regularly and rapidly. . . . Read the rest here: http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/437005501/britain-the-disgrace-of-the-universities.

Ruse, Michael. "Philosophers Rip Darwin." CHRONICLE REVIEW March 7, 2010.

Fodor, Jerry A., and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. What Darwin Got Wrong. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2009.

Last year was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The anniversary was marked by conferences the world over. I will not tell you how many I attended; ecologically sensitive readers of The Chronicle might start whining about carbon footprints and that sort of thing. Let me just say that I found myself going no fewer than three times through the Quad City International Airport, in Moline, Ill. Moline! I mention this as background to the publication of a new book by Jerry A. Fodor, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a professor of cognitive science at the University of Arizona. The title of the book, What Darwin Got Wrong (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), tells you their opinion of the old English naturalist and of his theory of evolution through natural selection. If Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini were an isolated case, one could dismiss their book with a grimace (if you were a biologist), or welcome them with a cheer (if you were a creationist). But in the philosophical community, there is an increasingly vocal cadre of eminent philosophers harboring doubts about Darwin. To understand their critique, we must first put the clock back a year, to the beginning of the celebrations. . . .

Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/What-Darwins-Doubters-Get/64457/.

Dirda, Michael. "The Stories of Heinrich von Kleist." BarnesandNobleReview.Com February 5, 2010.

Kleist, Heinrich von.

• Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist. Trans. Peter Wortsman. Archipelago, 2009.
• Selected Writings of Heinrich von Kleist. Ed. and trans. David Constantine. Indianopolis: Hackett, 2004.
• The Marquise of O and Other Stories. Trans. David Luke and Nigel Reeves. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.

Kleist's ironies are . . . what make his fiction so appealing to modern sensibilities. By contrast, the writer's attractively doomed and abbreviated life is nothing if not Romantic. The scion of an old Prussian military family, Kleist was by all accounts nervous and maladroit in society, hypochondriacal, a restless traveler, deeply ambitious (he hoped to unseat Goethe as the leading German author), and, ultimately, a suicide at 34. Reading Kant, he explained, had undermined his faith in Enlightenment reason, and most of his life was as unsettled as the Napoleonic era he lived through. Thus, while Kleist writes with surprising frankness about the darker reaches of eros, his own sexuality remains enigmatic. Before breaking off his engagement to a suitable young woman, his letters allude to some kind of mysterious impairment to happiness; later he flirts seriously with a cousin old enough to be his mother. Even more seriously, he seems to have suggested double-suicide to more than one female acquaintance -- and eventually found in the cancer-ridden Henriette Vogel the partner he was looking for. He shot her, then himself. . . .

Read the rest here: http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Library-Without-Walls/The-Stories-of-Heinrich-von-Kleist/ba-p/2158.

Bole, William. "Table Talk: a Celebrated Thinker has Friends to Dinner." BOSTON COLLEGE MAGAZINE (Winter 2010).

Richardson, W. J. Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963. Some years back there circulated an urban legend surrounding a Jesuit philosophy professor named William Richardson. The story went that Richardson, a student at the time, was defending his doctoral dissertation on Martin Heidegger—one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th century—and the young Jesuit was being challenged on essential points of his Heideggerian interpretation, when a man stood up in the back of the lecture room and said simply, “I think he’s right.” And that man was Heidegger. . . . Bill Richardson’s philosophical life is as storied as it has been abundant, with legends made and, one Thursday evening in October, remade. That night, he welcomed three philosopher friends to St. Mary’s for a conversation over dinner that was an intimate affair except for the cameras, lights, tripods, and microphones wired to each of the four participants. There to capture the dialogue was a video crew hired by another three philosophers, young academics who studied with Richardson at Boston College and are producing a documentary about the man and the theorist. The three eminent guests who found their way to the small dining room in a corner of the Jesuit residence were Boston College philosophy professors Jeffrey Bloechl and Richard Kearney, together with Thomas Sheehan, who teaches at Stanford University. In an interview later on, Sheehan said of Richardson, “He was the one who established the paradigm that we still follow to this day for understanding Heidegger.” . . . Read the rest here: http://bcm.bc.edu/issues/winter_2010/linden_lane/table-talk.html.

Dunbar, Max. "The Intense Humming of Evil." 3AM MAGAZINE February 7, 2010.

Faye, Emmanuel. Heidegger: the Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. When the Nazis achieved power in 1933 they were not satisfied with mere control of the state. Fascist ideology spread through the fields of law, medicine and culture as a totalising virus. The universities were no exception. The campus was subject to the purge or worse of dissent, the narrowing of curricula and the book-burning ceremonies that still resonate as a symbol of anti-intellectualism in its worst and truest form. Writers and thinkers still alive after the fall of the regime were confronted with that ultimate question: what did you do in the war? Academic supporters of Nazism could see several ways to postwar respectability. They could plead indulgence. It must have be easy in the mid-thirties to get caught up in the propaganda whirl of it all: tomorrow belongs to me! Alternatively, one could plead cowardice or pragmatism. Many had to make compromises to spare themselves and to protect family and friends. The mistake is to see fascism as strictly a yob phenomenon that addresses the short-term frustrations of the poor and ignorant. The mistake is to believe that it cannot possibly appeal to educated men and women. Yet even before Hitler’s takeover there were true believers inside the academy’s lustrous gates. No one now remembers Schmitt, Wolf and Rosenberg but Martin Heidegger continues to be read, studied and quoted. And yet, as Emmanuel Faye shows in his devastating study, the rector of Freiburg held a fervent and unblinking commitment to Nazism. He was the writer at the book burnings. He raised not a word of protest when a government decree dismissed his former teacher and assistant; he had complained that the universities had been ‘Jewified’ under Weimar, and organised his study sessions as outdoor ‘work camps’ in a creepy homage to the horror that was coming. Heidegger rejected the abstract pursuits of art and humanities. Authentic existence could only be experienced through confict and struggle; the lectures fairly drip with blood and soil. He justified racial selection, eugenics and dictatorship. Reading Faye’s book, I had two thoughts going through my mind. How the fuck did he get away with this? And: Why did anyone take this guy seriously? It’s not the case that a romance with totalitarianism corrupted Heidegger’s philosophy. Heidegger’s philosophy was structured around his support for Nazism. There was nothing else. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-intense-humming-of-evil/.

Horowitz, Irving Louis. "Assaulting Arendt." FIRST THINGS (February 2010).

The honorable tradition of criticism carries with it a displeasing aspect. This is especially the case in the higher academic circles. Reputations are too frequently made when pygmies stand on the shoulders of giants and when iconic and sometimes heroic figures are symbolically cut down to size. The theory is that, if the critic saws off the legs of those who have managed to stand tall for generations, the midgets can win handily in face-to-face combat with the dead. This is not to deny that even the most talented are sometimes in error; criticism is a useful art. It is, however, a derivative art. Criticism finds acceptance in a culture that measures success by small errors rather than by large-scale successes. The recent critique of Hannah Arendt is a case in point. The most comprehensive assault to date, some thirty-five years after her death, is also the most recent. Bernard Wasserstein, professor of modern European Jewish history at the University of Chicago, comments on Arendt in the Times Literary Supplement in October 2009 under the title “Blame the Victim: Hannah Arendt Among the Nazis.” He offers not just a selective summary of “the historian and her sources” but also an umbrella of charges and allegations from other prominent figures over the past half century. One of the most infamous is that of my good friend Walter Laqueur—a significant figure in his own right. Wasserstein spares us the need to pick through the emotive rubble that has plagued Arendt’s career, stitching together a picture of her as either a gullible reader of neo-Nazi literature or a closet Jewish anti-Semite in need of intellectual detoxification. In summary, but not in any way an exaggeration, Wasserstein claims the following: • The success of Arendt’s earlier work is owed more to the way it locked on to mid-twentieth-century Western guilt over imperialism and the continued strengthening of the Cold War than to The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt’s conception of the dynamics of historical change is little more than a confused mishmash of the structural, the social-psychological, and the conspiratorial. • Her works display a deep ignorance of political economy, diplomacy, and military strategy. Furthermore, she had little grasp or even interest in the mechanics of the political process in the states about which she wrote. • Rather than examine hard evidence, she deals in trifles and inflates them into richly colored balloons of generalization. At a time when superior historians were rejecting and becoming disenchanted by the idea of totalitarianism, her work in this area did not explain the generalization. • Her comparisons of Nazism and communism were sporadic and uneven, and she hardly dealt with Italian fascism as predecessor of these test cases of totalitarianism. The concept was incorporated into the vernacular of the 1960s and 1970s only because it served the useful ideological purposes of the Cold Warriors at the time. • The burden of her later work is blaming Jewish victims rather than anti-Semitic perpetrators. In her inversion of victims and victimizers, her bile knew no ethnic boundaries or rationalizations. • There was always a special edge to her criticism of her own Jewish people. She swallowed sometimes in whole cloth the poisonous anti-Semitism hatched in the Weimar period, much of which was shrouded in the Nazi literature of the age. The ferocity of his critique blinds Wasserstein to several uncomfortable facts. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/01/assaulting-arendt.

21st International Congress of Historical Sciences, University of Amsterdam, August 22-28, 2010.

The next congress of the International Committee of Historical Sciences (ICHS) will be jointly organized by four organizations:

• the Netherlands National Committee: Koninklijk Nederlands Historisch Genootschap (KNHG)
• Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA)
• Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB)
• International Institute of Social History (IISH).

The International Congress of Historical Sciences takes place every five years. This Congress provides an ideal venue for extensive reports, papers, debates, exchanges, and meetings reflecting historical research in action. It is the meeting place for the global community of historians. In recent years the Congress has been held in Madrid (1990), Montreal (1995), Oslo (2000), and Sydney (2005). Visit the conference website here: http://www.ichs2010.org/.

"Ten Rules for Writing Fiction." GUARDIAN February 20, 2010.

Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don'ts. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one.

Alpaugh, David. "The New Math of Poetry." CHRONICLE REVIEW February 21, 2010.

It's hard to figure out how much poetry is being published in America. When I suggested to Michael Neff, founder of Web del Sol, that anyone can start an online journal for $100, he pointed out that anyone can start one via a blog for nothing. If current trends persist, the sheer amount of poetry "published" is likely to double, quadruple, "ten-tuple" in the decades ahead. Who is writing all this poetry? In quieter times, the art's only significant promoters were English professors who focused on reading poetry for its own sake. Today colleges across America have hundreds of programs devoted to teaching men and women how to actually write the stuff. Those in charge of undergraduate and M.F.A. programs have cast themselves in the role of poetry-writing cheerleaders who are busy assuring tens of thousands of students that they are talented poets who should expect their work not only to be published but to win awards as well. The notion that writing and performing "poetry" is the easiest way to satisfy the American itch for 15 minutes of fame has spilled out of our campuses and into the wider culture. You can't pick up a violin or oboe for the first time on Monday morning and expect to play at Lincoln Center that weekend, but you can write your first poem in May and appear at an open mike in June waving a "chapbook" for sale. The new math of poetry is driven not by reader demand for great or even good poetry but by the demand of myriads of aspiring poets to experience the thrill of "publication." The new math is stunning. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Math-of-Poetry/64249/.

Pub: Terry Eagleton, THE TASK OF THE CRITIC.

Eagleton, Terry, and Matthew Beaumont. The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue. London: Verso, 2010. The Task of the Critic is a comprehensive volume of interviews, covering both Terry Eagleton's life and the development of his thought and politics. Erudite and anecdotal, Matthew Beaumont's - Senior Lecturer in English at UCL - keen questions track the course of Britain's most esteemed and formidable literary theorist. Chapters cover his childhood in Salford to his undergraduate years and early academic life, as well as his developing ideas on subjects as diverse as Politics and Aesthetics; New Left and the Church; Marxism and Feminism; Death and Love. Lively and insightful, this collection will appeal not only to those with an interest in Eagleton himself, but to all those interested in the evolution of radical politics, modernism, cultural theory, the history of ideas, sociology, semantic inquiry and the state of Marxist theory. His outspoken views on everything from the Establishment: Oxbridge is "full of people who were there largely because they could not conceivably be anywhere else, as some people can only be in top-security psychiatric institutions", to the Monarchy, which reportedly prompted Prince Charles to call him "that dreadful Terry Eagleton" are discussed, expanded and explained in context. For further information, visit: http://www.versobooks.com/books/cdef/ef-titles/eagleton_task_of_the_critic.shtml.

Pub: Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Gregory Elliot, A MARXIST PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, and Gregory Elliot. A Marxist Philosophy of Language. Chicago: Haymarket, 2009. The purpose of this book is to give a precise meaning to the formula: English is the language of imperialism. Understanding that statement involves a critique of the dominant views of language, both in the field of linguistics (the book has a chapter criticising Chomsky’s research programme) and of the philosophy of language (the book has a chapter assessing Habermas’s philosophy of communicative action). 
The book aims at constructing a Marxist philosophy of language, embodying a view of language as a social, historical, material and political phenomenon. Since there has never been a strong tradition of thinking about language in Marxism, the book provides an overview of the question of Marxism in language (from Stalin’s pamphlet to Voloshinov's book, taking in an essay by Pasolini), and it seeks to construct a number of concepts for a Marxist philosophy of language. 
The book belongs to the tradition of Marxist critique of dominant ideologies. It should be particularly useful to those who, in the fields of language study, literature and communication studies, have decided that language is not merely an instrument of communication. Further information is here: http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/A-Marxist-Philosophy-of-Language.

Cfp: "Rhetoric in Society III," Department of Applied Language Studies, Lessius University College, Antwerpen, Belgium, January 26-28, 2011.

Keynote Speakers: Gunther Kress Christopher W. Tindale Jef Verschueren Rethinking Rhetoric: Since Aristotle, the study of rhetoric has focused on the persuasive aspect of discourse in the political, forensic, and ceremonial domains. Rhetoric deals with doxa, the shared opinions and reasons people consider plausible and acceptable in a specific situation. It involves decisions taken by participants in public discourse on the basis of common deliberation and free choice in domains in which there can be no absolute truth, e.g. as in social and political life. Nowadays, we have come to realize the importance of rhetoric in all forms of discourse. There is no communication without some form of rhetoric. Rhetoricians examine how people use arguments and language in order to convince or persuade an audience. But there is a lot more to rhetoric than that. It comprises more than sets of advice; in fact it is an art. It is the art of discovering what is persuasive in a given situation. This inventiveness points to how rhetoric has a heuristic function as well. It appeals to our creativity in our search for relevant questions and answers to specific matters. And as our discourse and arguments develop in interaction with other discourses (Voloshinov / Bakhtin), the hermeneutic aspect of rhetoric should not be overlooked. There is no rhetoric without analysis, interpretation and theoretical reflection. The art of speaking and writing “well” can be considered a cornerstone of our cultures and our educational systems. Interdisciplinary Research: The conference Rhetoric in Society aims to present and discuss different approaches to rhetoric. It will address this basic question: in what ways can the study of rhetoric function and provide an insight into our postmodern world? Consequently, what can it claim about discourse in the public domain, how is it related to empirical sciences, what can it say about the ever increasing amount of information and opinion that pervades our lives? Conversely, it can also be asked in what way actual language and communication theories and disciplines draw on ancient rhetoric. Contributions to the conference will cover a wide range of both themes and theories. They will cover a broad spectrum of academic fields and thus favour interdisciplinary research not only within the fields of rhetoric, rhetorical criticism, rhetorical citizenship, argumentation studies, pragmatics, critical discourse studies, text linguistics, art and literature, but also the fields of communication studies, journalism studies, political, social and educational studies, history and philosophy. We welcome papers or panel proposals on the role of rhetoric and argumentation in written and oral discourse and genres, on topics such as: public deliberation, controversies, legal decision-making, spin, hyphenated writing, social change, political campaigning, social movements, public relations, publicity, advertising, management, corporate internal communication, art and literature, visual rhetoric and public media discourse. The core themes of the conference are: Rhetoric in journalism and new media Rhetoric in political discourse Rhetoric in organizational discourse Rhetoric in legal discourse Rhetoric in education Rhetoric in visual communication Theoretical, historical and (inter)cultural perspectives on rhetoric Visit the conference website here: http://www.lessius.eu/tt/ris/.

Doherty, Thomas. "The Death of Film Criticism." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION February 28, 2010.

"It sucks," decrees an Internet movie critic, sharing the most common aesthetic reaction in contemporary film criticism. In the viral salon of bloggers and chat-roomers, the finely tuned turns of phrase crafted by an earlier generation of sharp-eyed cinema scribes have been winnowed to a curt kiss-off. In cyberspace everyone can hear you scream. Just log on, vent, and hit send. The transfer of film criticism from its print-based platforms (newspapers, magazines, and academic journals) to ectoplasmic Web-page billboards has rocked the lit-crit screen trade. Whether from the world of journalism (where the pink slips are landing with hurricane force) or academe (which itself is experiencing the worst job market since the Middle Ages), serious writers on film feel under siege, underappreciated, and underemployed. The ballast of traditional credentials—whereby film critics earned their bones through university degrees or years at metropolitan dailies—has been thrown overboard by the judgment calls of anonymous upstarts without portfolio but very much with a DSL hotline to Hollywood's prime moviegoing demographic. In film criticism, the blogosphere is the true sphere of influence. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Death-of-Film-Criticism/64352/.

Harley, Diane, et al. ASSESSING THE FUTURE LANDSCAPE OF SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION. UC, Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education, 2010.

The authors argue that the continued dominance of traditional modes of publication, such as the peer-reviewed journal article and the university press monograph, may force scholars to ignore the "'opportunities' afforded by new technologies, including those falling into the Web 2.0 category." Read the rest by downloading the whole document here: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0kr8s78v.

Menand, Louis. "The PHD Problem." HARVARD MAGAZINE (November-December 2009).

Menand, Louis. The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. New York: Norton, 2010. Bass professor of English Louis Menand is a literary critic and intellectual and cultural historian—author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Metaphysical Club and a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He is also a scholar of his discipline (he co-edited the modernism volume in the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism) and of the very notion of the academy itself (Menand edited The Future of Academic Freedom, 1997). His new book, The Marketplace of Ideas, to be published in December by W.W. Norton, is informed in part by his recent service as faculty co-leader in the development of Harvard College’s new General Education curriculum, introduced this fall (the book is dedicated to his colleagues in that protracted task). In this work, Menand examines general education, the state of the humanities, the tensions between disciplinary and interdisciplinary work, and, in chapter four, “Why Do Professors All Think Alike?” The following excerpts, from the third and fourth chapters and his conclusion, probe the professionalization of a research-oriented professoriate and the practice and consequences of contemporary doctoral education, and the resulting implications for liberal-arts colleges, universities, and the wider society. . . . Read the rest here: http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/11/professionalization-in-academy. See also:

• "Author Menand on Reforming American Universities." National Public Radio January 18, 2010 (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122702647);
• Lewis-Kraus, Gideon. "The Opening of the Academic Mind: How to Rescue the Professoriate from Professionalisation." Slate January 17, 2010 (http://www.slate.com/id/2241555/);
• McClay, Wilfred M. "The Conundrum on Campus." Wall Street Journal January 14, 2010 (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704281204575003251630833606.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion).

Humanities Resource Center Online: Humanities Enjoy Strong Student Demand but Declining Conditions for Faculty.

The humanities continue to play a core role in higher education and student interest is strong, but to meet the demand, four-year colleges and universities are increasingly relying on a part-time, untenured workforce. Those are among the findings from the Humanities Departmental Survey, conducted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a consortium of disciplinary associations. The survey includes data collected from English, foreign language, history, history of science, art history, linguistics, and religion departments at approximately 1,400 colleges and universities. It is the first comprehensive survey to provide general cross-disciplinary data on humanities departments. . . . The full results are available on the Academy’s Humanities Resource Center Online at http://www.humanitiesindicators.org/.

Pub: KRITIKE 3.2 (December 2009).

Contents:

• Editorial: In this Issue of KRITIKE: an Online Journal of Philosophy by Paolo A. Bolaños

Articles:

• "Against Alienation: the Emancipative Potential of Critical Pedagogy in Fromm" by Rafael D. Pangilinan
• "A Critical Pragmatism: Marcuse, Adorno, and Peirce on the Artificial Stagnation of Individual and Social Development in Advanced Industrial Societies" by Clancy Smith
• "The Copernican Revolution in Pragmatism? Dewey on Philosophy and Science" by Tracy Ann P. Llanera
• "Iterability and Différance: Re-tracing the Context of the Text" by Roland Theuas S. Pada
• "Kant and the Turn to Romanticism" by Vinod Lakshmipathy
• "The Experience of Consciousness: the Architectonic of the Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre" by Ronnie Mather
• "The Open" by Saitya Brata Das
• "From Brokenness of Death to Refigured Forgiveness: Reflections on Ricoeur's Fault, Narrativity, and Capable Human Being" by Jonathan Ray Villacorta
• "Foucault and Ethical Subjectivity" by Wendyl M. Luna

Denkbild:

• "Time Traveler: On Critical Theory in the Philippines Part II (A Philosophical Fiction)" by F. P. A. Demeterio

Book Review:

• James, George G. M., Stolen Legacy: the Egyptian Origins of Western Philosophy by Kristian Urstad

Download the papers by visiting the journal's homepage here: http://www.kritike.org/.

Kaufmann, David. "A Skeptic's Skeptic." TABLET January 20, 2010.

Mikics, David. Who Was Jacques Derrida? An Intellectual Biography. New Haven: Yale UP, 2010. In Who Was Jacques Derrida?, David Mikics provides a lucid, polemical intellectual biography of the French philosopher. He is also settling accounts. In the 1970s and 1980s, Derrida, who died six years ago at 73, was the most important and most polarizing figure in the humanities in America. His brand of thought, deconstruction, dominated classrooms, conferences, articles, and books. Derridian deconstruction was a heady brew of high philosophical discussion and counterintuitive assertion, all spiced up by Derrida’s trademark labyrinthine style, which was easy to parody but hard to surpass. Mikics was in the thick of it. Now a professor of English at the University of Houston, he earned his doctorate at Yale when it was the mother ship of literary theory in America. In the mid-’80s he was a follower of Derrida, drawn in by the Frenchman’s bracing skepticism. In many ways, Who Was Jacques Derrida? serves as an explanation of Mikics’s own rejection of skepticism, of his disillusionment with disillusion itself. Philosophical skepticism aims to demonstrate that our attempts to make unequivocally valid claims about the world are ultimately misguided. To put it simply, Derrida’s writings from the 1960s to the 1980s sought to show that the history of Western thought tried and failed to nail down the essences of things because things do not have essences to speak of. A subtle dialectician, he argued that there was nothing as unstable as the notion of a stable identity and nothing less knowable than what appears directly before us. For those who hated him, Derrida was a mountebank, a sloppy thinker and even sloppier writer whose antics did nothing but muddle what should be clear. To those who loved him—and his defenders were as ferocious as his detractors—he offered a whole new way of thinking. According to Mikics, both sides were wrong. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/books/23952/.

"Phenomenology and the Vulnerable Body: the Experience of Illness," Department of Philosophy, University of Hull, May 6-7, 2010.

This workshop brings together an interdisciplinary set of speakers to look at the experience of bodily vulnerability and consider its implications for the understanding of embodiment and selfhood. The resources of phenomenology will be put into conversation with accounts of the lived experiences of those living with illness, pain or other kinds of bodily vulnerability. Contributions will be made from, philosophers, health practitioners, medics and others. Papers:

• Fredrik Svenaeus, "Illness as unhomelike being-in-the world: Heidegger and the phenomenology of medicine"
• Katherine J. Morris, "Living the ambiguity of diagnosis: a case study"
• Matthew Ratcliffe, "Phenomenology of Depression"
• Lisa Folkmarson Käll, "Pain Embodied in Expressive Space"
• Havi Carel, "The Phenomenology of Illness"
• Deborah Padfield, "Bodies in Pain" (including slides of her work)
• Jack Wilson, "Sartre: Illness and the experience of the body"
• Carol Eastwood, "Towards a Phenomenology of Endometriosis"
• Minae Inahara, "The Sound of Pain: Embodied Subjectivity and Onomatopoeic Expressions in Japanese"
• Patricia McGettigan, "Falling: from the perspective of patients"
• Julie Jomeen, "Women's lived experience of their pregnant bodies"
• Michael Gillan Peckitt, "Limping After Leder and House"
• Annabel Howe, "'I’ve been playing in the house of ages': Dementia, Advance Decisions and Embodied Experience"
• Lesley Jones & Robin Bunton, "Wounded or Warriors , deafness, technology and the body"
• Diane Pitt, "The Role of Phenomenology in Clinical Diagnostics: the Experience of Women with Heart Disease"
• Anthony Wilde, "Levinas and the Vulnerable Body"
• Stephen Burwood, "Torture"

Visit the conference website here: http://www2.hull.ac.uk/fass/humanities/philosophy/research/centre-for-research-into-embod/workshops-and-conferences/phenomenology-of-ilness-may.aspx.

"From Structure to Rhizome: Transdisciplinarity in French Thought, 1945 to the Present: Histories, Concepts, Constructions," April 16-17, 2010.

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University. In the final decades of the twentieth century, the ‘great books’ of postwar French theory transformed study in the humanities in the Anglophone world. These books were all, in one way or another, transdisciplinary in character. Yet their reception has primarily taken place in an array of specific disciplinary contexts, isolated from a broader understanding of the intellectual dynamics, forms, significance and innovative potential of transdisciplinarity itself. This conference aims to redress this situation. Each speaker will reflect on the transdisciplinary functioning of a single concept in French thought since 1945, with respect to a founding text, a particular thinker or a school of thought. Speakers:

• Éric Alliez (CRMEP, Middlesex University) 'Rhizome'
• Etienne Balibar (University of Paris X/Irvine UC) 'Structure'
• Andrew Barry (Oxford University) 'Network'
• Tom Conley (Harvard University) 'Writing'
• François Cusset (University of Paris X) 'Theory'
• Patrick Guyomard (University of Paris VII) 'Object a'
• Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond (University of Nice) 'Science'
• Alain de Libera (EPHE, Paris/University of Geneva) 'Subject'
• Peter Osborne (CRMEP, Middlesex University) 'Transdisciplinarity'
• Michèle Riot-Sarcey (University of Paris VIII) 'History'
• Stella Sandford (CRMEP, Middlesex University) 'Sex'

Visit the conference website here: http://www.web.mdx.ac.uk/crmep/EVENTS/Transdisciplinarity.htm.

Protevi, John. Review of Catherine Malabou, PLASTICITY AT THE DAWN OF WRITING. NDPR (February 2010).

Malabou, Catherine. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction. Trans. Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. This translation of a 2005 French text will be of great interest to readers of Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida. Catherine Malabou is the author of a number of major works treating this trio, which may come to replace the vaunted "Three H's" (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger) with their own grouping, "HHD," as it were. If you are in search of a quick label, you could say Malabou presents a "post-deconstructive" reading, but as with all such labels, that would do scant justice to the richness of her work. The book has the form of an intellectual autobiography, though it is not really about Malabou the person, but about the concepts of our era, or more strikingly still, about the "materiality of existence and [the transformations of] its ontological meaning" (81). Malabou uses the figure of the "transformative mask," drawn from Lévi-Strauss, to discuss the relations among the figures and concepts she studies, those that inform our ontology as expressed by HHD (4). A transformative mask is split along the vertical axis, allowing the two halves to fold in to meet along the dividing line, and to fold out to reveal another mask -- which can itself be similarly split and concealing -- underneath. The first masks combine HHD with Freud and Lévi-Strauss in various conjunctions, and the final confrontation is between philosophy and the neurosciences (4). With this relation of philosophy and one of its others, Malabou argues that "plasticity" has come to replace "writing" as the "motor scheme" of our epoch (13, 31, 57). We will return to this claim at the conclusion of the review. Malabou begins by opposing two notions of negation, a dialectical one in which presence is re-formed after a temporal sojourn, and a deconstructive one in which resolution is endlessly deferred in the "spacing of a pure dislocation" (5). This opposition is not fixed but subject to a continuous circulation of mutual transformation. So then a further question must be posed: is the "space of confrontation" between the two forms of negation (dialectical and deconstructive) itself dialectical or merely a juxtaposition? That is, is the relation of temporal resolution and spatial dislocation temporal or spatial? Does it head toward re-formation of presence or are form and presence threatened with "explosion"? (6) A further twist, however: the second option, irresolvable conflict and exploded form, can itself be seen as both temporal differentiation (the final re-formation is endlessly deferred) and as the pure synchronicity of difference (at any one time, at all times, the elements of thought and being are separated). I will not continue, but Malabou is able to produce a few more embeddings along these lines; these are beautiful passages -- as is the entire work -- demonstrating her complete mastery of dialectic and deconstruction, making them both object and method of themselves and each other. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=19007.

Bruns, Gerald. Review of Leslie White, RADICAL INDECISION. NDPR (March 2010).

Hill, Leslie. Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism. Notre Dame: U. of Notre Dame P, 2010. As a rule literary criticism is not a thing of any philosophical interest, at least not in English-speaking contexts. It is true that occasionally philosophers in the analytic tradition have written about literature, but only under the pretext of doing moral philosophy, meanwhile adhering faithfully to Aristotle's principle that literature means narrative conceived as a form of cognition (mimesis) and rational deliberation (plot). Lexis, sometimes translated as "diction," is not part of the definition of literature. Donald Davidson once broke ranks by writing about James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, arguing that one can learn to read the Wake, despite its Babel-like confusion of tongues, much the way an anthropologist can get the hang of the discursive practices of an alien culture. Davidson's assumption that the language of Finnegans Wake is still chiefly a form of mediation leaves much unsaid, but his pragmatic approach to what is singular and irreducible in linguistic experience could just as well be applied to any refractory modernist artwork (one of Duchamp's Readymades, for example), where the idea is not so much to understand something as it is to respond to the kind of aporia that T. W. Adorno describes in his Aesthetic Theory:

The better an artwork is understood, the more it is unpuzzled on one level, the more obscure its constitutive enigmaticalness [konstitutiv Rätselhaftes] becomes. It [the Rätselcharakter of the work] only emerges demonstratively in the profoundest experience of art. If a work opens itself completely, it reveals itself as a question and demands reflection; then the work vanishes into the distance, only to return to those who thought they understood it, overwhelming them for a second time with the question, "What is it?"

Leslie Hill is a literary critic, not a philosopher, but as a Professor of French Studies at Warwick University in England he is situated at an interesting, if possibly fatal, crossroads: on the one side is a venerable British tradition that thinks of criticism in terms of the elucidation and evaluation -- which is to say the elevation -- of literary monuments (F. R. Leavis); on the other there is recent French intellectual culture, where the boundaries between philosophy and literature are often indeterminate, meaning particularly that the writing of both philosophy and criticism is nothing if not "modernist" in its embrace of nondiscursive forms of language, a practice reflected in Hill's own elliptical prose, with its recurrent play of chiasmus and oxymoron ("the readability of any text is made both possible and impossible only by the impenetrable shadow of the unreadable" [336]). One recalls Jürgen Habermas's objection to the way Derrida and his American followers in literary studies leveled "the genre distinction between philosophy and literature," and his argument that the task of criticism is to translate "the experiential content of the work of art into normal [i.e. communicative] language." Hill will have none of Habermas. His book consists of three extensive monographs on Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida, and, although he nowhere refers to Adorno, his aim is to show how their engagement with literature converts what we think of as criticism into something like the aporetic experience (what Hill calls "radical indecision") that occupies such a definitive place in Adorno's aesthetics. This conversion is not just a break with the past; it opens criticism to a time that, as Derrida would say, is "still to come," a time marked by interruption, reserve, and interminability. One thinks of John Cage's line that defined the impasse that avant-garde or experimental art spent the better part of the last century expanding in multiple directions: "I have nothing to say, and I am saying it." The work of art is no longer an object to be housed in a museum or repertoire; it is an event to be lived through as a kind of limit-experience in which we confront, in Maurice Blanchot's elusive conception, "a meaning for the meaning of words that, while determining that meaning, also surrounds this determination with an ambiguous indeterminacy that wavers between yes and no.". . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=19027.