"Foucault Across the Disciplines," University of California, Berkeley, March 1-2, 2008.

Update: Conference organizers are currently at work on a special issue of the journal History of the Human Sciences. This special issue will include select papers from among those presented at the conference. Publication is currently planned for sometime in early 2010. Please email the conference organizer (Colin Koopman at cwkoopman@gmail.com) for further information. Additionally, a second archive is available online on the conference website in the form of audio recordings of the conference proceedings. To listen to these MP3 recordings click on the audio icon next to each presentation title in the conference schedule available at the conference homepage (URL below). Original Post (January 23, 2008): "Foucault Across the Disciplines" will be a national conference providing a forum for assessing and reassessing the tremendous impact of Michel Foucault’s thought across the disciplines over the past half century. This conference will convene an interdisciplinary group of scholars of world and national renown to explore the many ways in which Foucault’s work is being deployed across the disciplines. These cross-disciplinary deployments assume at least two forms: they are challenges to the disciplines that define our academic research formations, and they are critiques of specific disciplinary apparatuses. We hope to establish lines of engagement that will extend innovative research paths beyond the current limits of inquiry. Speakers include: Arnold Davidson, Ian Hacking, Martin Jay, Mark Poster, Paul Rabinow, Jana Sawicki, Hans Sluga, Hayden White, among others. Further information is available here: http://foucaultacrossthedisciplines.googlepages.com/foucault.html.

Kinnaman, Ted. "Review of J. G. Hamann's WRITINGS ON PHILOSOPHY AND LANGUAGE." NDPR (August 2008).

Hamann, Johann Georg. Writings on Philosophy and Language. Ed. Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: CUP, 2007. Although little known among English-speaking philosophers, the 18th-century German Johann Georg Hamann can be credited with originating a number of the most important ideas in the Continental tradition of philosophy of the last two centuries. His early criticism of Kant (for example, in the "Metacritique on the Purism of Reason") introduces the idea that reason is indistinguishable from the particular language in which one reasons, and thus shot through with the same thoroughgoing contingency. His use of pseudonyms and an opaque writing style to unsettle the relation of the author to his texts, and thus to the rational commitments of authorship, foreshadows the use of irony among the early German Romantics, as well as Søren Kierkegaard's own pseudonymous writing. And his charge that pure reason can never truly be pure, and thus universal and necessary, anticipates a long line of antirationalist argument. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13848.

UPDATE: Sowaal, Alice. "Mary Astell." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY August 12, 2008.

Mary Astell (1666–1731) was an English philosopher. She was born in Newcastle, and lived her adult life in London. Her patrons were Lady Ann Coventry, Lady Elizabeth Hastings, and Catherine Jones, and among those in her intellectual circle were Lady Mary Chudleigh, Judith Drake, Elizabeth Elstob, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and John Norris. In addition to a number of pamphlets, she wrote the following books:

• A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II. Wherein a Method is offer'd for the Improvement of their Minds (1694, 1697)
• Letters Concerning the Love of God Between the Author of the Proposal to the Ladies and Mr. John Norris: Wherein his late Discourse, shewing That it ought to be intire and exclusive of all other Loves, is further cleared and justified (1695)
• Some Reflections upon Marriage, Occasion'd by the Duke and Duchess of Mazarine's Case; which is also considered (1700)
• The Christian Religion, As Profess'd by a Daughter Of the Church of England (1705)

Today she is best known for her theories on the education of women and her critiques of Norris and John Locke. . . .

Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/astell/.

Horky, Philip Sidney. "Review of Fritz-Gregor Herrmann's WORDS AND IDEAS: THE ROOTS OF PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY." BMCR (August 2008).

Herrmann, Fritz-Gregor. Words and Ideas: the Roots of Plato's Philosophy. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2007. Starting with Aristotle, there is a long tradition of investigating the origins/first principles (Greek ἀρχαί) of Plato's philosophy. Fritz-Gregor Herrmann innovates in this tradition by investigating the linguistic histories of key terms employed in Plato's philosophy. In this sense, then, the 'roots' of Herrmann's title refer both to the origins of Plato's philosophy, and to the etyma of the words that Plato used. It is a fundamental premise of Herrmann's study that Plato's language and, consequently, his thought grew out of a fertile field of semantic and lexical possibilities ranging from Indo-European roots in pre-Homeric oral traditions to the linguistic practices of his competitors. This premise functions as a gentle exhortation that scholars of ancient philosophy can produce more comprehensive and nuanced understandings of Plato's philosophy when they apply careful philological investigation in the process of reconstructing it. Herrmann's study of the key terms employed in Plato's metaphysics promises to show that Plato did not operate in a vacuum, and, moreover, it highlights Plato's activity of modifying pre-philosophical language to develop a linguistic system that approximates (at worst) or harmonizes with (at best) the concepts with which he was experimenting from the early period through the middle-late dialogue Parmenides, the terminus ante quem for this study. Little further investigation into the post-Parmenides dialogues occurs, although there is a promise of future work on the metaphysics of the Sophist and Statesman, which would be a welcome sequel to this work. The basic argument of Herrmann's study is that key terms in the Phaedo -- those associated with the "Theory of the Forms" by those who attribute such a theory to Plato, including "form", "idea", "being", and "sharing" -- cannot be extricated from traditions of Greek history and culture as demonstrated in pre-Platonic texts of both philosophical and non-philosophical character. . . . Read the rest here: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2008/2008-08-14.html.

Mulligan, Bret, et al. "Review of J. H. D. Scourfield, ed. TEXTS AND CULTURE IN LATE ANTIQUITY." BMCR (August 2008).

Scourfield, J. H. D., ed. Texts and Culture in Late Antiquity: Inheritance, Authority, and Change. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2007.

This is an ambitious collection that merits consideration not only by scholars who specialize in the diverse authors and topics discussed therein, but also by those interested in reception and late antique intellectual culture generally. Introducing the volume, its adept editor J. H. D. Scourfield laments that the "balkanization" of the study of the intellectual culture in late Antiquity has led to an academic climate in which "classical/classicizing, philosophical, and patristic literature may pay each other visits, but still inhabit essentially different territory" (vii). This collection, then, represents an attempt to encourage a move away from this scholarly fragmentation towards "a view of the textual world of late Antiquity which sees it as a single land" (vii). Uniting these sundry essays--which span geography, grammarians, classicizing occasional poetry, Christian cento and paraphrase literature, Neoplatonism, Christian views of the classical tradition, and monasticism--is a common engagement with "texts of special authority", in particular Homer, Virgil, Plato, and the Bible (vii). The topical and methodological diversity typical of an edited volume thus becomes one of the advantages of this collection, which, if not panoptic, nevertheless illustrates the impressive range of reception opportunities available to writers in late Antiquity and provides a sample of the approaches scholars are taking to the field. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2008/2008-08-17.html.

Connell, Sophia M. "Review of Anthony Kenny's PHILOSOPHY IN THE MODERN WORLD." BMCR (August 2008).

Kenny, Anthony. Philosophy in the Modern World. Vol. 4 of A New History of Western Philosophy. Oxford: OUP, 2007. This is the fourth and final volume of Anthony Kenny's (hereafter K.) History of Western Philosophy series. It covers modern philosophy, from 1757 to 1975. In the brief introduction, K. divides readers into two classes: those interested in the history of philosophy for the purpose of aiding contemporary philosophical concerns, and those who take a historical or contextual interest only. He connects these interests to the different sections of the book: Chapters 1-3 will be for the historically minded, and Chapters 4-12 for those interested in philosophy proper (xiii). Chapters 1-3 cover time periods bounded by two thinkers, although as a whole they do not run chronologically: 1. Bentham to Nietzsche; 2. Pierce to Strawson; and 3. Freud to Derrida. Chapters 4-11 follow topic-areas, relating to themes in modern philosophy: 4. Logic; 5. Language; 6. Epistemology; 7. Metaphysics; 8. Philosophy of Mind; 9. Ethics; 10. Aesthetics; 11. Political Philosophy; and 12. God. The themes for the most part carry through all four volumes, providing crucial continuity. This volume, however, leaves out "physics" since, as K. explains, natural philosophy is no longer part of philosophy post-Newton (xiv). This implies, as is the case, that the philosophy of science is largely absent. K. also explains why there is a slight chronological overlap with the last volume in the section on aesthetics (which begins in the early 18th century), which is that the theme has not been included in previous volumes (xiv). . . . Read the rest here: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2008/2008-08-16.html.

Seymour, Benedict. "Blurred Boundaries: Sport, Art and Activity." MUTE 2.8 (2008).

In his autobiography Beyond A Boundary, C. L. R. James remarks the simultaneous birth of modern sport and modern politics in the mid to late nineteenth century: the Football Association was founded in 1863, the first all-professional US baseball team organised in 1869, in 1866 the first athletic association. Around the same time, Disraeli's Reform Bill (1865) introduced popular democracy in England, the slave states were defeated in the American Civil War, the first modern organisation of American labour appeared, and Marx and Engels founded the First Communist International (1864). As Loren Goldner [author of Melville] relates, James saw this historical conjuncture as not only a significant intersection of novel forms of sport and politics, but as a moment in which an intimately related mutation in the aesthetic was occurring. James, who grew up in Trinidad, was well placed to register this transfusion between art and sport, raised as he was on a steady stream of English novels and constant games of cricket. James became fascinated by what he called the "social aesthetic" of cricket: "men from the neighbourhood described by his aunts as 'ne'er-do-wells' were transformed into aristocrats of self-mastery and brilliance at bat in cricket matches." Goldner discerns in this vignette not simply the grace and cooperative activity celebrated in today's paeans to football but an intimation of the sovereignty of the working class, a new social relationship manifest in the "at once collective and highly individualized . . . tensions of men at bat." James was unusual among Marxists in that he attributed a positive value to the working class's passionate interest in 'organised sports and games'. Unlike his comrades, rather than seeing workers as deflected from politics by sport, or believing that workers needed "raising" up to some cultural level set down by the bourgeois radical intelligentsia or avant-garde, James recalled the "ne'er do well" sporting aristocrats of his youth, and refused to accept this one-sided evaluation. James differed from both Lukács "who saw the works of high bourgeois culture, up to the watershed of 1848, as bourgeois society's legacy to the working class" and currents such as the Frankfurt School, "which saw that legacy more in the modernist revolt against classical bourgeois culture", as Goldner succinctly sums it up. For James, not only was sport not a diversion from revolutionary politics but it contained within itself, "a new, higher rationality for the organization of society that superseded the capitalist antagonism between work and leisure," says Goldner. James, like Melville and Marx before him, see in working class labour and leisure a new form of activity which overcomes the very work/leisure, and individual/collective oppositions. James may not have known it at the time, argues Goldner, but in his meditations on working class sport and games as a new social "art" form:

he had reproduced Marx's own fundamental idea of the supersession of the work/labour split in the Grundrisse: "Capital's ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labor beyond the limits of its natural paltriness [Naturbedürftigkeit] and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labor also therefore no longer appears as labor, but as the full development of activity itself..." (Grundrisse, p.325).

Here we should note that capital, rather than simply instrumentalising or subsuming creative activity, is seen as one of its preconditions. The emergence of this "rich individuality . . . as all-sided in its production as in its consumption" derives not from the development of "artistic" activity by isolated bourgeois individuals of genius but from "activity itself" – the identity-in-collectivity of the proletariat whether at work or at play, in the hold of the whaling ship described by Melville in Moby Dick or at the wicket on the patch of grass outside James' childhood home. . . . Read the rest here: http://eurozine.com/pdf/2008-08-07-seymour-en.pdf.

Gray, Neil. "Orientalism Inverted: the Rise of 'Hindu Nation.'" MUTE 2.8 (2008).

The roots of Hindu cultural nationalism lie, at least in part, in an inversion of romanticist orientalist epistemologies of the 19th century. This inversion effectively shifted social and political issues from the material to the spiritual plane – serving the needs of both the colonial masters and the privileged elites of Brahminical Hinduism. Sangh Parivar and Hindutva forces exploit this highly constructed mystical carapace as a counterfeit response to contemporary expropriations under neoliberalism. In this they are facilitated by western orientalist perceptions of India as an ‘essentially’ religious civilisation. Augmented by neo-conservative theorists like the execrable Samuel Huntington, contemporary Hindu nationalism acts as a neoliberal alibi, masking the extreme authoritarianism and primitive accumulation strategies of international and local capitalist elites in a supposedly ‘Shining India’. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.metamute.org/en/content/orientalism_inverted_the_rise_of_hindu_nation.

Goldstein, Evan R. "Who Framed George Lakoff?" CHRONICLE REVIEW August 15, 2008.

In the late 1960s, Lakoff joined company with some of Chomsky's students and colleagues and began pushing the noted scholar's landmark theory of generative grammar in more expansive directions, in particular toward the study of meaning. Chomsky maintained that linguistics methodology required that a line be drawn between the meaning of language and the function of language (syntax). Lakoff and his fellow dissidents, who became known as generative semanticists, considered such a distinction arbitrary and wrong-headed. One generative semanticist equated it to a theory of the stomach that ignores digestion. Around the same time, Lakoff began a career-long habit of making incursions into other fields — philosophy and psychology in particular — and incorporating some of those findings into his linguistics scholarship. The tension between the two camps was palpable during a series of famous lectures that Chomsky gave at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology beginning in 1967, in which Chomsky began to challenge the work Lakoff and his colleagues were doing. Chomsky felt the generative semanticists were leading linguistics into areas so tangentially related to language that he questioned whether they were doing linguistics at all. With Lakoff and other dissident linguists often in the audience, Chomsky's lecture hall became a scene of intense, acid-tongued intellectual combat. One illustrative episode, recounted in Randy Allen Harris's The Linguistics Wars (Oxford University Press, 1993), has Lakoff repeatedly interrupting Chomsky to shout, "Noam! Noam! You're wrong!" At another point, Lakoff interjects: "I have been lecturing about these things, and if you are interested, you should come to my class." As Harris, a professor of rhetoric and communication design at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, notes wryly, "the level of gall required for anyone, let alone a junior lecturer, to tell the inventor of the field to attend his classes if he wanted to stay current goes right off the chutzpah meter." Though there remains some debate about how the linguistics wars ended, Chomsky is widely regarded as having retained his place at the center of the discipline. It's his theories that you'll find today in most linguistics textbooks. "When the intellectual history of this age is written, Chomsky is the only linguist whom anybody will remember," says Geoffrey Nunberg, an adjunct professor at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley and a consulting professor of linguistics at Stanford University. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i49/49b00601.htm.

Harrison, William. "The Other Solzhenitsyn." GUARDIAN August 4, 2008.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's anti-Sovietism was heroic and influential, but its other side became clearer upon the Union's collapse. The death of the literary colossus and anti-Soviet dissident has, quite rightly, been greeted with an outpouring of praise for his principled and brave unmasking of the horrors of the Soviet regime. His literary achievements, closely connected with his dissident activities, have also justifiably received much attention. But there is another side to Solzhenitsyn – one which most obituaries have mentioned only in passing, if at all. Solzhenitsyn's analysis of Soviet communism was based on the notion that the Bolsheviks imposed a totalitarian system on Russia that had no basis in Russian history or character. He laid the blame on Marx and Engels and the Bolsheviks. Russian culture, he argued, and particularly that of the Russian Orthodox Church, was suppressed in favour of atheist Soviet culture. Persona non grata in the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn lived in exile in the US from 1974, but found western culture equally to his distaste. His historical writing is imbued with a hankering after an idealized Tsarist era when, seemingly, everything was rosy. He sought refuge in a dreamy past, where, he believed, a united Slavic state (the Russian empire) built on Orthodox foundations had provided an ideological alternative to western individualistic liberalism. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/04/solzhenitsyn.russia.

Kitching, Gary. "Paralysed by Postmodernism." THE AUSTRALIAN August 6, 2008.

Kitching, Philip. The Trouble with Theory: the Educational Costs of Postmodernism. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2008. Postmodernism has been fashionable in this way for nearly 30 years now, and has influenced a large number of students in cultural studies, history and the social sciences more generally. I had seen that influence grow in my own discipline (politics), as well as in departments of history and sociology for which I had acted as an external examiner. My impression had been that postmodernism's pedagogical impact at these lower levels in the educational hierarchy was, if anything, even worse than its intellectual impact at higher levels. This is because the ideas became cruder with transmission, and also because students were more likely to be impressed into acceptance of these ideas whether they really understood them or not. And it was often the more serious and committed students, anxious to use ideas to change the world, who were influenced, and damaged, as their high-minded aspirations became "postmodernised". Such was my impression. But I wanted, and needed, some more systematic means to show this was the case, and to examine precisely how such damage occurs. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24096901-25132,00.html.

CFP: "Reason and Faith at the Beginning of the Third Millennium," Babes-Bolyai University, Roumania, October 9-11, 2008.

Organised in collaboration with UNESCO-European Centre for Higher Education (UNESCO-CEPES) and the Italian Cultural Institute of Bucharest. The conference should be seen as a continuation of discussions carried out in: - Bucharest (“Ethical and Moral Dimensions for Higher Education and Science in Europe”, September 2004), - the Vatican (“The Cultural Heritage and Academic Values of the European University and the Attractiveness of the European Higher Education Area”, March/April 2006); and - Cluj-Napoca (“Living in Truth: A Conceptual Framework for a Wisdom Society and the European Construction”, September 2007”). The 2007 conference held in Cluj-Napoca explored and examined the status of values in today’s world, taking into account the ever-growing importance of values in the human existence and in the functioning of the various public institutions. The relevance and importance of the topic of this meeting - Reason and Faith at the Beginning of the Third Millennium - needs to be seen taking into consideration that: a) both on the scientific and cultural European scene the issue has become a keen subject as a consequence of the dissolution of positivism and of the dangers of fundamentalism; b) scientists and philosophers pertaining to the contemporary Enlightenment and seminal theologians jointly accuse “pathologies of reason” and “pathologies of faith” in nowadays civilizations; c) within Judaism, Christianity and Islam there is concern to strengthen the solidarity of faith with the rational approach of ultimate realities; d) in the era of the most rapid expansion of sciences, of the most innovative philosophical hypotheses and the resurgence of religion, the classical perspectives on the relationship between reason and faith necessitate an in-depth re-evaluation within the frameworks/within new frames of reference of a new epoch; The conference will include the following topics for its sessions: 1. Reason and Faith at the beginning of the twenty first century. The expansion of science and the resurgence of religion. 2. Contemporary pathologies. “Pathologies of reason” and “pathologies of faith” in civilizations today. 3. Science and its conditioning. 4. A Re-examination of the classical perspectives on the relationship between reason and faith. 5. Solidarity of faith by rational approaches within the monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). Programe Committee: Andrei Marga, Rector of “Babes-Bolyai” University, amarga@staff.ubbcluj.ro Ladislau Gyémánt, Dean of the Faculty of European Studies, gyemant@zortec.ro Ioan Chirilă, Dean of the Faculty of Orthodox Theology, ichirila@ot.ubbcluj.ro Virgil Bercea, Dean of the Faculty of Greek-Catholic Theology, episcop@egco.ro Nóda Mózes, Dean of the Faculty of Roman-Catholic Theology, mnoda@rocateo.ubbcluj.ro Buzogány Dezsö, Dean of the Faculty of Reformed Theology, buzogany@proteo.hu Titus Beu, Head of the Department of Theoretical Physics, tbeu@phys.ubbcluj.ro Octavian Popescu, Director, Center of Molecular Biology, opopescu@biolog.ubbcluj.ro This announcement also represents a second call for papers that we invite to be submitted [title and 50-80 words abstract] until September 1st, 2008, to the following addresses: Dr. Monica Merutiu, m_merutiu@yahoo.com Ana Elena Moldovan, aeimoldovan@gmail.com.

Goldstein, Rebecca: Two Pieces on Spinoza.

Goldstein, Rebecca. Betraying Spinoza: the Renegade Jew Who Gave us Modernity. New York: Schocken, 2005. On Betraying Spinoza California Literary Review March 30, 2007 (interview):

Spinoza’s system, as laid out in The Ethics, presents one of the most ambitious projects in all of Western philosophy. He attempts to deduce not only what the world is like (very different from the way it presents itself to us through our senses), but what our emotional life consists in and where our true happiness and salvation lies–and all of this, he claims, to answer with absolute certainty, not relying on any speculations or inferences or even empirical observation, but rather on rigorous proofs that yield a sort of mathematical necessity. So what is the world like according to Spinoza? It’s one infinite matrix of logical connections that is infinitely self-aware (which means that everything that happens happens necessarily). And what does our emotional life consist in? Our emotional life has got an internal logic of its own, all motivated by each thing’s attempt to persist and to flourish in its own being. And what does our happiness and salvation consist in? It consists in our each seeing, through the operation of our reason, the necessity of all things, deducing the nature of reality and seeing ourselves with complete objectivity in relation to the whole infinite sweep of things. Seeing one’s self with uncompromising objectivity through pure reason, Spinoza argues, effects such a substantial change in the very identity of one’s self that one emerges from the process as if almost remade. In the light of objectivity the personal differences between us shrivel up into near non-existence. The Ethics can be seen as one long argument for a conclusion that is still radical today (how much more so in the seventeenth-century when people were all defined in terms of such group identities as religion and class), namely: to the extent that we are rational we all partake in precisely the same identity. Obviously, such an ethical viewpoint also has political consequences, anti-authoritarian and pro-democratic. . . .

A View of the Truth: Spinoza's Faith in Reason International Herald Tribune July 31, 2006:

Spinoza's reaction to the religious intolerance he saw around him was to try to think his way out of all sectarian thinking. He understood the powerful tendency in each of us toward developing a view of the truth that favors the circumstances into which we happened to have been born. Self-aggrandizement can be the invisible scaffolding of religion, politics or ideology. Against this tendency we have no defense but the relentless application of reason. Reason must stand guard against the self-serving false entailments that creep into our thinking, inducing us to believe that we are more cosmically important than we truly are, that we have had bestowed upon us - whether Jew or Christian or Muslim - a privileged position in the narrative of the world's unfolding. Spinoza's system is a long argument for a conclusion as radical in our day as it was in his: that to the extent that we are rational, we each partake in exactly the same identity. Spinoza's faith in reason as our only hope and redemption is the core of his system, and its consequences reach out in many directions, including the political. Each of us has been endowed with reason, and it is our right, as well as our responsibility, to exercise it. Ceding this faculty to others, to the authorities of either the church or the state, is neither a rational nor an ethical option. . . .

Feingold, Dena A. "Summer Reading: Acclaimed Novelist Brings Philosopher Spinoza to Life." WISCONSIN JEWISH CHRONICLE (July 2008).

Goldstein, Rebecca. Betraying Spinoza: the Renegade Jew Who Gave us Modernity. New York: Schocken, 2005. The provocative title of the book, Betraying Spinoza, refers to Goldstein’s professed goal of revealing the life of Spinoza as a person — a pursuit that Spinoza himself would have deemed worthless. Spinoza was the ultimate rationalist, who believed that the goal of existence was, in Goldstein’s words, “rational objectivity.” That is, again in Goldstein’s words: “all the accidents of one’s existence, the circumstances into which one was born — including one’s own family history, one’s racial, religious, cultural, sexual or national identity — appear as naught and the lingering emotional attachments to such accidents are only evidence of impartial rationality and obstacles in the way of achieving a life worth living.” And so, in delving into the story of Spinoza’s life and speculating about its meaning and the influences that his Jewish upbringing had on his thinking, Goldstein sees herself as betraying what Spinoza was all about. But, in so doing, she has written a masterful piece. . . . Read the rest of the review here: http://www.jewishchronicle.org/article.php?article_id=10238.

Root, Damon W. "The Unfortunate Case of Herbert Spencer." REASON MAGAZINE July 29, 2008.

In 1944, historian Richard Hofstadter published Social Darwinism in American Thought, an aggressive and widely influential critique of the libertarian philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) and his impact on American intellectual life. In Hofstadter's telling, Spencer was the driving force behind 'social Darwinism,' the pseudo-scientific use of evolution to justify economic and social inequality. According to Hofstadter, Spencer was little more than an apologist for extreme conservatism, a figure who told "the guardians of American society what they wanted to hear." The eugenics movement, Hofstadter maintained, which held that humanity could improve its stock via selective breeding and forced sterilization, "has proved to be the most enduring aspect" of Spencer's "tooth and claw natural selection."A hit upon publication, the book helped make Hofstadter's name, doing much to secure him his prominent perch at Columbia University, where he taught until his death in 1970. But there's a problem with Hofstadter's celebrated work: his claims bear almost no resemblance to the real Herbert Spencer. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.reason.com/news/show/127794.html.

Weaver, Stewart. "Review of Mark Francis' HERBERT SPENCER AND THE INVENTION OF MODERN LIFE." H-NET REVIEW (July 2008).

Francis, Mark. Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2007. We remember Herbert Spencer, if we remember him at all, as the man who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" and made free and unfettered competition a social and moral law. "Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man," Spencer wrote in Social Statics, the book that made him famous on its appearance in 1851, and in the hands of such admirers as Andrew Carnegie this "right to ignore the state," as Spencer called it, became the philosophical justification for unrestrained, laissez-faire capitalism.[1] Imperialists too eventually latched on to Spencer and found in his immutable law of organic progress justification for colonial conquest and political subjugation of lesser nations and peoples. These are heavy historical burdens to bear, and needless to say they do not withstand close scrutiny of what Spencer actually wrote and said. In what the publisher's flyer trumpets as "the first comprehensive biography in over thirty years," Mark Francis sets out to sweep the clichés and caricatures away and recover the subtlety and nuance, as well as the intellectual and historical contexts, of Herbert Spencer's thought. His hope is that his painstakingly thorough archival research together with his sustained immersion in nineteenth-century philosophical and scientific literature "will permanently change existing discussions of Spencer's philosophy, and create new interpretive patterns where none existed" (p. viii). This is probably hoping for too much. Caricatures are stubborn things and in many other cases--Adam Smith comes to mind--have proved surprisingly resistant to the most careful and extended work of re-interpretation. But for those who have the patience for it, this remarkable work of scholarship will disclose a very different Spencer from the one they thought they knew. It is indeed, as one of the dust-jacket blurbs says, "the book on Spencer for the present and next generation." . . . Read the review here: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=198191217439630.

White, James Boyd. "Establishing Relations between Law and Other Forms of Thought and Language." ERASMUS LAW REVIEW 1.3 (2008 ): .

Abstract: The law does not, and could not, exist in an intellectual or linguistic vacuum. No one believes that the law is or should be impervious to other languages, other bodies of knowledge. In this sense the argument about the 'autonomy' of law is an empty one: law cannot be, should not be, perfectly autonomous, unconnected with any other system of thought and expression; yet it plainly has it own identity as a discourse, it own intellectual and linguistic habits, which it is our task as lawyers to understand and develop. It follows that an essential topic of legal thought is the proper relation between law and other forms of thought and expression - a topic that is important, difficult and full of interest. In this paper, Professor White compares three ways in which the law is related to other fields: translation (as in the use of expert testimony), disciplinary imperialism (as in law and economics), and comparison of modes of thought and expression (as in law and literature). Download the paper here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1142827.

Duncan, Stewart. "Review of Samantha Frost's LESSONS FROM A MATERIALIST THINKER." NDPR (August 2008).

Frost, Samantha. Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. Samantha Frost's book discusses Hobbes's work by looking at his materialism and its connections to ethics and politics. Though she does argue, as the title suggests, that Hobbes can help us understand ourselves, much of the book is given over to the prior task of understanding Hobbes's views. The book falls roughly into three parts. Chapters 1 and 2 consider materialism about the mind, chapters 3 and 4 focus more on determinism and its ethical implications, and chapter 5 is about power. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13807.

UPDATE: Markie, Peter. "Rationalism v. Empiricism." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY (August 2008).

The dispute between rationalism and empiricism concerns the extent to which we are dependent upon sense experience in our effort to gain knowledge. Rationalists claim that there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience. Empiricists claim that sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge. Rationalists generally develop their view in two ways. First, they argue that there are cases where the content of our concepts or knowledge outstrips the information that sense experience can provide. Second, they constuct accounts of how reason in some form or other provides that additional information about the world. Empiricists present complementary lines of thought. First, they develop accounts of how experience provides the information that rationalists cite, insofar as we have it in the first place. (Empiricists will at times opt for skepticism as an alternative to rationalism: if experience cannot provide the concepts or knowledge the rationalists cite, then we don't have them.) Second, empiricists attack the rationalists' accounts of how reason is a source of concepts or knowledge. . . . Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/.

"Collingwood and Toulmin," Mind and Society 14, University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University, September 4-6, 2008.

Provisional Program: Thursday 4th September Evening – arrival, drinks and a meal (venues to be announced) Friday, 5th September 9.00 – 9.45: Professor Ivan Leudar, Psychology, Manchester University, Is psychology history? What can R. G. Collingwood do for Psychology today? 9.45 - 10.15: Discussion and Coffee 10.15 - 11.00: Dr Giuseppina D'Oro, Philosophy, Keele University, Re-enactment, Simulation and Folk-psychology 11.00 - 11.30: Discussion and Coffee 11.30 – 12.15: Professor Alan Costall, Psychology, Portsmouth University, Psychology as history: Frederic Bartlett and the myth and promise of 'Cambridge psychology' 12.15 – 12.45: Discussion and Coffee 12.45 - 2.15: Lunch 2.15 - 3.00: Professor John Pickstone, CHSTM, Manchester University, Collingwood, Whewell and Ways of Knowing: reflections on historicism and idealism in the study of science. 3.00 - 3.30: Discussion and Coffee 3.30 - 4.15: Michael Lynch, Cornell To be confirmed 4.15 – 5.00: Discussion and Coffee 5.00-5.45: General Discussion, 6.30 - Drink reception, Conference Dinner Saturday 6th September 9.00 – 10.00: Professor James Connelly, Politics, Hull University, From anthropology to metaphysics: Collingwood, culture and civilization. 10.00 – 10.30: Discussion and Coffee 10.30 - 11.15: Professor Baudouine Dupres, Institute of Social Sciences and Policy, Louvain "The Judge, the Spirits and the Law: Devil Possession, Personal Agency and Mind/Body Dichotomy in an Egyptian Courtroom" 11.15 - 11.45: Discussion and coffee 11.45 -12.30 Professor Wes Sharrock, Social Science, Manchester University, Perennial arguments about intelligibility and rationality in the philosophy of the social sciences. 12.30 - 13.00: Discussion and coffee 13.00 - 14.30: Lunch 14.30 – 15.15: Professor Mathieu Marion, Philosophy, Montreal University, Toulmin on Collingwood and Relativism: a Rejoinder. 15.15 - 15.45 Discussion and Coffee 15.45 - 17.45 Meeting Plenary - discussant Uffe Juul Jensen, Copenhagen University 18.00 Conference closes. Enquiries to Ivan Leudar: ivan.leudar@manchester.ac.uk.