James the man was ambivalent about the existence of God, and he has been called a humanist. But I think his fascination with what he came to call "the more" – coupled to the fact that in his crises and work alike he was obsessed by spiritual questions – demands that we think of him as a religious person. He described writing the Varieties as "my religious act". He was existentially troubled, intellectually brilliant, linguistically talented, openminded and humane. In short, he is an excellent, even necessary, person to read today if you are interested in matters to do with truth, pluralism, experience and God. This year is the centenary of his death. It's a good moment to explore his thought, as we will do in these blog posts. . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/oct/18/william-james-part-one.
Thursday, December 02, 2010
Hibbs, Thomas S. "Stanley Cavell's Philosophical Improvisations." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION October 10, 2010.
Cavell, Stanley. Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010.
In God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition, the latest in a number of recent books critical of the modern research university, the influential Irish-born philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues that "neither the university nor philosophy is any longer seen as engaging the questions" of "plain persons." These questions include: "What is our place in the order of things? Of what powers in the natural and social world do we need to take account? How should we respond to the facts of suffering and death? What is our relationship to the dead? What is it to live a human life well? What is it to live it badly?" Now in his 80s, MacIntyre is among a small group of philosophers who have sought to address such questions. Other members, about the same age, include the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor and, perhaps especially, the American philosopher Stanley Cavell, whose life both in and out of philosophy is on display in his just-published autobiography, Little Did I Know (Stanford University Press).
In his book, MacIntyre indicts the university for its lack of integration, the disconnections among the disciplines, and the intellectual disregard of one discipline for another. He writes: "In contemporary American universities, each academic discipline is treated as autonomous and self-defining, so that its practitioners, or at least the most prestigious and influential among them, prescribe to those entering the discipline what its scope and limits are. And in order to excel in any one particular discipline, one need in general know little or nothing about any of the others." Returning philosophy to the concern of ordinary human persons and showing how it might speak across disciplinary lines of inquiry are not easy tasks. But the life and career of Cavell testify not just to the possibility of such achievements but also to just how rich the results can be. . . .
Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/Stanley-Cavells-Philosophical/124830/.
In God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition, the latest in a number of recent books critical of the modern research university, the influential Irish-born philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues that "neither the university nor philosophy is any longer seen as engaging the questions" of "plain persons." These questions include: "What is our place in the order of things? Of what powers in the natural and social world do we need to take account? How should we respond to the facts of suffering and death? What is our relationship to the dead? What is it to live a human life well? What is it to live it badly?" Now in his 80s, MacIntyre is among a small group of philosophers who have sought to address such questions. Other members, about the same age, include the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor and, perhaps especially, the American philosopher Stanley Cavell, whose life both in and out of philosophy is on display in his just-published autobiography, Little Did I Know (Stanford University Press).
In his book, MacIntyre indicts the university for its lack of integration, the disconnections among the disciplines, and the intellectual disregard of one discipline for another. He writes: "In contemporary American universities, each academic discipline is treated as autonomous and self-defining, so that its practitioners, or at least the most prestigious and influential among them, prescribe to those entering the discipline what its scope and limits are. And in order to excel in any one particular discipline, one need in general know little or nothing about any of the others." Returning philosophy to the concern of ordinary human persons and showing how it might speak across disciplinary lines of inquiry are not easy tasks. But the life and career of Cavell testify not just to the possibility of such achievements but also to just how rich the results can be. . . .
Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/Stanley-Cavells-Philosophical/124830/.
"Hegel and Hegel's God." THE PHILOSOPHER'S ZONE November 27, 2010.
This week, in another trek through the luxuriant and fascinating jungle that is the thought of one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, we turn to Hegel's god and look at Hegel as a rational mystic. Our guest again is Robert M. Wallace, a philosopher best known for his book Hegel's Philosophy of Reality, Freedom and God, and a man with a keen interest in philosophical mysticism. Liberal theologians during the last century and a half have wanted to articulate a conception of God that could satisfy people's spiritual longings without conflicting with Darwinian evolution and other well-established scientific discoveries. Robert Wallace believes that Hegel had already done this. . . .
Listen here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2010/3077690.htm.
Listen here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2010/3077690.htm.
Kamtekar, Rachana. "Marcus Aurelius." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY November 29, 2010.
The second century CE Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius was also a Stoic philosopher, and his private Meditations, written in Greek, gives readers a unique opportunity to see how an ancient person (indeed an emperor) might try to live a Stoic life, according to which only virtue is good, only vice is bad, and the things which we busy ourselves with are all indifferent. The difficulties Marcus faces putting Stoicism into practice are philosophical as well as practical, and understanding his efforts increases our philosophical appreciation of Stoicism. . . .
Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcus-aurelius/.
Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcus-aurelius/.
Gopnik, Alison. "How Weird is Consciousness?" SLATE November 29, 2010.
Consciousness used to be the crazy aunt in psychology's attic. Behaviorists and cognitive scientists alike practiced denial, but the squeaking floorboards troubled our dreams of a truly scientific discipline. Now, the old lady has been given pride of place in the parlor, with all the respectable scientific furnishing of societies and journals. But let's face it—she's still weird.
In some ways, the scientific study of consciousness has been a great success. We know more than ever about the relationship between specific types of conscious experiences and specific mind and brain states. Discouragingly, though, we are still no closer to solving the Problem of Big-C Consciousness. How is consciousness possible at all? How could the few pounds of gray goo in my skull give rise to my experience of the particular blue tint of the sky? Scientists and philosophers have suggested everything from quantum effects to information integration to brain-wave patterns. Some deny that consciousness exists at all; others argue that consciousness couldn't possibly be the result of just the brain. The scientific organizers of one of the principal consciousness conferences, in fact, deliberately let in woo-woo stuff about altered states and past lives on the principle that we have no idea where the answer might come from.
This may be less dispiriting when you realize we've been here before. The philosopher Patricia Churchland has pointed out that the problem of "Life" in the 19th century was much like the problem of "Consciousness" in the 21st. How could a few molecules ever give rise to breathing, moving, living creatures? The answer turned out to be that it was the wrong question. We now understand a great deal about the many different ways in which complex organisms with a multitude of different properties arise from much simpler chemistry. The Problem of Big-L Life has simply faded away. . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.slate.com/id/2275645/pagenum/all/. . . .
In some ways, the scientific study of consciousness has been a great success. We know more than ever about the relationship between specific types of conscious experiences and specific mind and brain states. Discouragingly, though, we are still no closer to solving the Problem of Big-C Consciousness. How is consciousness possible at all? How could the few pounds of gray goo in my skull give rise to my experience of the particular blue tint of the sky? Scientists and philosophers have suggested everything from quantum effects to information integration to brain-wave patterns. Some deny that consciousness exists at all; others argue that consciousness couldn't possibly be the result of just the brain. The scientific organizers of one of the principal consciousness conferences, in fact, deliberately let in woo-woo stuff about altered states and past lives on the principle that we have no idea where the answer might come from.
This may be less dispiriting when you realize we've been here before. The philosopher Patricia Churchland has pointed out that the problem of "Life" in the 19th century was much like the problem of "Consciousness" in the 21st. How could a few molecules ever give rise to breathing, moving, living creatures? The answer turned out to be that it was the wrong question. We now understand a great deal about the many different ways in which complex organisms with a multitude of different properties arise from much simpler chemistry. The Problem of Big-L Life has simply faded away. . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.slate.com/id/2275645/pagenum/all/. . . .
Friday, November 26, 2010
Cfp: "Reading Michel Foucault in the Postcolonial Present," University of Bologna, March 3-4, 2011.
Neoliberalism is superficially understood as a theory of political economic practices proposing that human well-being can best be advanced by the development of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterized by private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets, and free trade. Less understood, however, is how its claims to be able to develop wealth and freedom became correlated with claims to develop the prosperity and security of life itself. Life, in the form of species existence, rather than human nature, has progressively emerged as a singularly important a priori for liberal political economy. Neoliberalism breaks from earlier liberalisms and traditions of political economy in so far as it pursues the development of economic profitability and prosperity not just with practices for the development of the human species, but with the life of the biosphere.
These correlations of economy, development, freedom, and life in and among neoliberal regimes of practice and representation comprise some of the foundations of its biopolitics. As this symposium will explore, we cannot understand how liberalism functions, most especially how it has gained the global hegemony that it has, without addressing how systematically the category of life has organized the correlation of its various practices of governance, as well as how important the shift in the very understanding of life, from the human to the biospheric, has been for changes in those practices.
Today it is not simply living species and habitats that are threatened with extinction, and for which we must mobilize our care, but the words and gestures of human solidarity on which resistance to biopolitical regimes of governance depends. A sense of responsibility for the survival of the life of the biosphere is not a sufficient condition for the development of a political subject capable of speaking back to neoliberalism. What is required is a subject responsible for securing incorporeal species, chiefly that of the political, currently threatened with extinction, on account of the overwrought fascination with life that has colonized the developmental as well as every other biopoliticized imaginary of the modern age.
While Foucault’s thought has been inspirational in diagnosing this condition of the postcolonial age, his works have too often failed to inspire studies of political subjectivity. Instead they have been used to stoke the myth of the inevitability of the decline of collective political subjects, describing an increasingly limited horizon of political possibilities, and provoking a disenchantment of the political itself. In contrast this symposium will excavate the importance of Foucault’s work for our capacities to recognise how this debasement of political subjectivity came about, particularly within the framework of the discourses and politics of “development”, and with particular attention to the predicaments of postcolonial peoples. Why and how it is that life in postcolonial settings has been depoliticized to such dramatic effect? And, crucially, how can we use Foucault to recover the vital capacity to think and act politically in a time when the most basic expressions of thought and human action are being targeted for new techniques of control and governance?
The immediacy of these themes will be obvious to anyone living in the South of the world. But within the academy they remain heavily under-addressed. In thinking about what it means to read Michel Foucault today this symposium will address some significant questions and problems. Not simply that of how to explain the ways in which postcolonial regimes of governance have achieved the debasements of political subjectivity they have. And certainly not that of how we might better equip them with the means to support life more fully. But that of how life itself, in its subjection to governance, can and does resist, subvert, escape and defy the imposition of modes of governance which seek to remove it of those very capacities for resistance, subversion, flight, and defiance.
This symposium will be the second in a series, the first having been held in Calcutta in September 2010, “The Biopolitics of Development: Life, Welfare and Unruly Populations”. As was established there, the formulation of and response to these questions and problems remains open. The political reception of Foucault’s thought is not monolithic and the debates provoked among the participants at the Calcutta event are far from settled. Hence the demand for a second symposium, this time in Bologna.
Confirmed speakers include Michael Dillon, Sandro Mezzadra, Julian Reid, Judith Revel, and Ranabir Samaddar. We also invite papers on this thematic from anyone else wishing to participate. Contributions analysing the topic of Foucault, political subjectivity and development from the perspective of other postcolonial locations will be particularly appreciated.
Send your abstracts to the organizing committee: Sandro Mezzadra (sandro.mezzadra@unibo.it), Julian Reid (julian.reid@ulapland.fi) and Ranabir Samaddar (ranabir@mcrg.ac.in) by December 31, 2010.
These correlations of economy, development, freedom, and life in and among neoliberal regimes of practice and representation comprise some of the foundations of its biopolitics. As this symposium will explore, we cannot understand how liberalism functions, most especially how it has gained the global hegemony that it has, without addressing how systematically the category of life has organized the correlation of its various practices of governance, as well as how important the shift in the very understanding of life, from the human to the biospheric, has been for changes in those practices.
Today it is not simply living species and habitats that are threatened with extinction, and for which we must mobilize our care, but the words and gestures of human solidarity on which resistance to biopolitical regimes of governance depends. A sense of responsibility for the survival of the life of the biosphere is not a sufficient condition for the development of a political subject capable of speaking back to neoliberalism. What is required is a subject responsible for securing incorporeal species, chiefly that of the political, currently threatened with extinction, on account of the overwrought fascination with life that has colonized the developmental as well as every other biopoliticized imaginary of the modern age.
While Foucault’s thought has been inspirational in diagnosing this condition of the postcolonial age, his works have too often failed to inspire studies of political subjectivity. Instead they have been used to stoke the myth of the inevitability of the decline of collective political subjects, describing an increasingly limited horizon of political possibilities, and provoking a disenchantment of the political itself. In contrast this symposium will excavate the importance of Foucault’s work for our capacities to recognise how this debasement of political subjectivity came about, particularly within the framework of the discourses and politics of “development”, and with particular attention to the predicaments of postcolonial peoples. Why and how it is that life in postcolonial settings has been depoliticized to such dramatic effect? And, crucially, how can we use Foucault to recover the vital capacity to think and act politically in a time when the most basic expressions of thought and human action are being targeted for new techniques of control and governance?
The immediacy of these themes will be obvious to anyone living in the South of the world. But within the academy they remain heavily under-addressed. In thinking about what it means to read Michel Foucault today this symposium will address some significant questions and problems. Not simply that of how to explain the ways in which postcolonial regimes of governance have achieved the debasements of political subjectivity they have. And certainly not that of how we might better equip them with the means to support life more fully. But that of how life itself, in its subjection to governance, can and does resist, subvert, escape and defy the imposition of modes of governance which seek to remove it of those very capacities for resistance, subversion, flight, and defiance.
This symposium will be the second in a series, the first having been held in Calcutta in September 2010, “The Biopolitics of Development: Life, Welfare and Unruly Populations”. As was established there, the formulation of and response to these questions and problems remains open. The political reception of Foucault’s thought is not monolithic and the debates provoked among the participants at the Calcutta event are far from settled. Hence the demand for a second symposium, this time in Bologna.
Confirmed speakers include Michael Dillon, Sandro Mezzadra, Julian Reid, Judith Revel, and Ranabir Samaddar. We also invite papers on this thematic from anyone else wishing to participate. Contributions analysing the topic of Foucault, political subjectivity and development from the perspective of other postcolonial locations will be particularly appreciated.
Send your abstracts to the organizing committee: Sandro Mezzadra (sandro.mezzadra@unibo.it), Julian Reid (julian.reid@ulapland.fi) and Ranabir Samaddar (ranabir@mcrg.ac.in) by December 31, 2010.
Pub: DECALAGES: AN ALTHUSSERAN STUDIES JOURNAL 1.1 (2010).
- Review of Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism by Matt Bonal
- Recension à Jean-Claude Bourdin (ed.), Althusser: une lecture de Marx by Andrea Cavazzini
- "On the Cultural Revolution" by Anonymous (tr. Jason E. Smith) [Attributed to Louis Althusser]
- "Sur la révolution culturelle" by Anonyme [Attribué à Louis Althusser]
- "El Materialismo Tardío de Althusser y el Corte Epistememológico" by Giorgos Fourtounis (Tr. Aurelio Sainz Pezonaga)
- "Escatologia à la cantonade: Althusser oltre Derrida" by Vittorio Morfino
- "On the Emptiness of an Encounter: Althusser’s Reading of Machiavelli" by Filippo Del Lucchese (tr. Warren Montag)
- "Il riconoscimento delle maschere: Soggettività e intersoggettività in Leggere «Il Capitale»" by Cristian Loiacono
- "Zizek y Althusser: Vida o muerte de la lectura sintomática" by Mariana de Gainza
- "El Althusser Tardío: ¿Materialismo del Encuentro o Filosofía de la Nada?" by Warren Montag (tr. Aurelio Sainz Pezonaga)
- "Mil Fisuras. Arte y Ruptura a partir de Althusser" by Aurelio Sainz Pezonaga
Pub: Bruno Latour, ON THE MODERN CULT OF THE FACTISH GODS.
Latour, Bruna. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.
On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods continues the project that the influential anthropologist, philosopher, and science studies theorist Bruno Latour advanced in his book We Have Never Been Modern. There he redescribed the Enlightenment idea of universal scientific truth, arguing that there are no facts separable from their fabrication. In this concise work, Latour delves into the “belief in naive belief,” the suggestion that fetishes, objects invested with mythical powers, are fabricated, and that “facts” are not. Mobilizing his work in the anthropology of science, he uses the notion of “factishes” to explore a way of respecting the objectivity of facts and the power of fetishes without forgetting that both are fabricated. While the fetish-worshipper knows perfectly well that fetishes are man-made, the Modern icon-breaker inevitably erects new icons. Yet Moderns sense no contradiction at the core of their work. Latour pursues his critique of critique, or the possibility of mediating between subject and object, or the fabricated and the real, through the notion of “iconoclash,” making productive comparisons between scientific practice and the worship of visual images and religious icons.
For further information, visit: http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=2836.
On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods continues the project that the influential anthropologist, philosopher, and science studies theorist Bruno Latour advanced in his book We Have Never Been Modern. There he redescribed the Enlightenment idea of universal scientific truth, arguing that there are no facts separable from their fabrication. In this concise work, Latour delves into the “belief in naive belief,” the suggestion that fetishes, objects invested with mythical powers, are fabricated, and that “facts” are not. Mobilizing his work in the anthropology of science, he uses the notion of “factishes” to explore a way of respecting the objectivity of facts and the power of fetishes without forgetting that both are fabricated. While the fetish-worshipper knows perfectly well that fetishes are man-made, the Modern icon-breaker inevitably erects new icons. Yet Moderns sense no contradiction at the core of their work. Latour pursues his critique of critique, or the possibility of mediating between subject and object, or the fabricated and the real, through the notion of “iconoclash,” making productive comparisons between scientific practice and the worship of visual images and religious icons.
For further information, visit: http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=2836.
Cfp: "Freedom," Annual Conference, International Hegel Association, Stuttgardt, June 22-25, 2011.
As every six years, the International Hegel Association will hold its traditional conference in Stuttgart in June 2011, bringing together philosophers from all over the world to discuss central issues of Hegel's thought in the context of contemporary research. In 2011, the overarching topic will be "Freedom".
Speakers include (as of November 2010): David Bakhurst, Harald Bluhm, William Bristow, Daniel Brudney, Hauke Brunkhorst, Thomas Buchheim, Andrew Chitty, Giuseppe Duso, Dina Emundts, Franck Fischbach, Lisa Herzog, Gunnar Hindrichs, Axel Honneth, Stephen Houlgate, Rahel Jaeggi, Jean-Francois Kervégan, Andrea Kern, Rudolf Langthaler, Charles Larmore, Cardinal Karl Lehrmann, Marcus Llanque, Steven Lukes, Scott Meikle, Francesca Menegoni, Christoph Menke, Fred Neuhouser, Andrew Norris, Angelica Nuzzo, Claus Offe, Philip Pettit, Terry Pinkard, Michael Quante, Birgit Recki, Paul Redding, Peter Rohs, Michael Rosen, Sebastian Rödl, Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch, Sally Sedgwick, Martin Seel, Ludwig Siep, Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, Robert Stern, Holm Tetens, Dieter Thomä, Peter van Inwagen, R. Jay Wallace, David Wellbery and Marcus Willaschek.
There will be 12 panels on: Freedom and First Nature; Freedom and Second Nature; Freedom and Determinism; Social and Individual Freedom; Freedom as Autonomy; Republican Freedom; Freedom and the Market; Freedom and Law; Liberation; Hegel's Philosophy of Right; Aesthetic Freedom and Religion of Freedom. Additionally, there will be a panel dedicated to discussion about translating Hegel chaired by Jean-Pierre Lefebvre. There will also be an opportunity for younger scholars to present their work in three panels chaired by Andreas Arndt, Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Beatrice Longuenesse.
For further information, visit: http://www.hegel2011.de/.
Speakers include (as of November 2010): David Bakhurst, Harald Bluhm, William Bristow, Daniel Brudney, Hauke Brunkhorst, Thomas Buchheim, Andrew Chitty, Giuseppe Duso, Dina Emundts, Franck Fischbach, Lisa Herzog, Gunnar Hindrichs, Axel Honneth, Stephen Houlgate, Rahel Jaeggi, Jean-Francois Kervégan, Andrea Kern, Rudolf Langthaler, Charles Larmore, Cardinal Karl Lehrmann, Marcus Llanque, Steven Lukes, Scott Meikle, Francesca Menegoni, Christoph Menke, Fred Neuhouser, Andrew Norris, Angelica Nuzzo, Claus Offe, Philip Pettit, Terry Pinkard, Michael Quante, Birgit Recki, Paul Redding, Peter Rohs, Michael Rosen, Sebastian Rödl, Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch, Sally Sedgwick, Martin Seel, Ludwig Siep, Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, Robert Stern, Holm Tetens, Dieter Thomä, Peter van Inwagen, R. Jay Wallace, David Wellbery and Marcus Willaschek.
There will be 12 panels on: Freedom and First Nature; Freedom and Second Nature; Freedom and Determinism; Social and Individual Freedom; Freedom as Autonomy; Republican Freedom; Freedom and the Market; Freedom and Law; Liberation; Hegel's Philosophy of Right; Aesthetic Freedom and Religion of Freedom. Additionally, there will be a panel dedicated to discussion about translating Hegel chaired by Jean-Pierre Lefebvre. There will also be an opportunity for younger scholars to present their work in three panels chaired by Andreas Arndt, Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Beatrice Longuenesse.
For further information, visit: http://www.hegel2011.de/.
Cfp: "Italian Social Theory from Antonio Gramsci to Giorgio Agamben," 8th Annual Social Theory Forum, University of Massachusetts, Boston, April 13-14, 2011.
We invite proposals addressing the span of modern Italian social theory, including but not limited to thinkers such as Galvano Della Volpe, Norberto Bobbio, Paolo Virno, Giovanni Arrighi, Antonio Negri, and Umberto Eco. Relevant themes may include: hegemony, culture wars, neo-Gramscianism and international relations, globalization, shifts in global capitalism; biopolitics, homo sacer, immigration, ethnicity and the war on terror, resistance, state sovereignty and power, nationalism, propaganda and agitation, Negri’s theory of “exodus”; technology experience, social media, digital labor, and Agamben’s “bare life.” Conference organizers also welcome topics bearing on the relevance of Italian Social Thought for the understanding of cultural studies, semiotics, textual analysis, linguistics, structuralism, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism in contemporary scholarship and scientific research.
For further information, email: SocialTheoryAbstracts@libraryofsocialscience.com.
For further information, email: SocialTheoryAbstracts@libraryofsocialscience.com.
Monday, November 22, 2010
Joll, Nicholas. "Contemporary Metaphilosophy." INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY November 17, 2010.
What is philosophy? What is philosophy for? How should philosophy be done? These are metaphilosophical questions, metaphilosophy being the study of the nature of philosophy. Contemporary metaphilosophies within the Western philosophical tradition can be divided, rather roughly, according to whether they are associated with (1) Analytic philosophy, (2) Pragmatist philosophy, or (3) Continental philosophy.
The pioneers of the Analytic movement held that philosophy should begin with the analysis of propositions. In the hands of two of those pioneers, Russell and Wittgenstein, such analysis gives a central role to logic and aims at disclosing the deep structure of the world. But Russell and Wittgenstein thought philosophy could say little about ethics. The movement known as Logical Positivism shared the aversion to normative ethics. Nonetheless, the positivists meant to be progressive. As part of that, they intended to eliminate metaphysics. The so-called ordinary language philosophers agreed that philosophy centrally involved the analysis of propositions, but, and this recalls a third Analytic pioneer, namely Moore, their analyses remained at the level of natural language as against logic. The later Wittgenstein has an affinity with ordinary language philosophy. For Wittgenstein had come to hold that philosophy should protect us against dangerous illusions by being a kind of therapy for what normally passes for philosophy. Metaphilosophical views held by later Analytic philosophers include the idea that philosophy can be pursued as a descriptive but not a revisionary metaphysics and that philosophy is continuous with science.
The pragmatists, like those Analytic philosophers who work in practical or applied ethics, believed that philosophy should treat ‘real problems’ (although the pragmatists gave ‘real problems’ a wider scope than the ethicists tend to). The neopragmatist Rorty goes so far as to say the philosopher should fashion her philosophy so as to promote her cultural, social, and political goals. So-called post-Analytic philosophy is much influenced by pragmatism. Like the pragmatists, the post-Analyticals tend (1) to favor a broad construal of the philosophical enterprise and (2) to aim at dissolving rather than solving traditional or narrow philosophical problems.
The first Continental position considered is Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl believed that his phenomenological method would enable philosophy to become a rigorous and foundational science. Still, on Husserl’s conception, philosophy is both a personal affair and something that is vital to realizing the humanitarian hopes of the Enlightenment. Husserl’s existential successors modified his method in various ways and stressed, and refashioned, the ideal of authenticity presented by his writings. Another major Continental tradition, namely Critical Theory, makes of philosophy a contributor to emancipatory social theory; and the version of Critical Theory pursued by Jürgen Habermas includes a call for ‘post-metaphysical thinking’. The later thought of Heidegger advocates a postmetaphysical thinking too, albeit a very different one; and Heidegger associates metaphysics with the ills of modernity. Heidegger strongly influenced Derrida’s metaphilosophy. Derrida’s deconstructive approach to philosophy (1) aims at clarifying, and loosening the grip of, the assumptions of previous, metaphysical philosophy, and (2) means to have an ethical and political import. . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.iep.utm.edu/con-meta/.
The pioneers of the Analytic movement held that philosophy should begin with the analysis of propositions. In the hands of two of those pioneers, Russell and Wittgenstein, such analysis gives a central role to logic and aims at disclosing the deep structure of the world. But Russell and Wittgenstein thought philosophy could say little about ethics. The movement known as Logical Positivism shared the aversion to normative ethics. Nonetheless, the positivists meant to be progressive. As part of that, they intended to eliminate metaphysics. The so-called ordinary language philosophers agreed that philosophy centrally involved the analysis of propositions, but, and this recalls a third Analytic pioneer, namely Moore, their analyses remained at the level of natural language as against logic. The later Wittgenstein has an affinity with ordinary language philosophy. For Wittgenstein had come to hold that philosophy should protect us against dangerous illusions by being a kind of therapy for what normally passes for philosophy. Metaphilosophical views held by later Analytic philosophers include the idea that philosophy can be pursued as a descriptive but not a revisionary metaphysics and that philosophy is continuous with science.
The pragmatists, like those Analytic philosophers who work in practical or applied ethics, believed that philosophy should treat ‘real problems’ (although the pragmatists gave ‘real problems’ a wider scope than the ethicists tend to). The neopragmatist Rorty goes so far as to say the philosopher should fashion her philosophy so as to promote her cultural, social, and political goals. So-called post-Analytic philosophy is much influenced by pragmatism. Like the pragmatists, the post-Analyticals tend (1) to favor a broad construal of the philosophical enterprise and (2) to aim at dissolving rather than solving traditional or narrow philosophical problems.
The first Continental position considered is Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl believed that his phenomenological method would enable philosophy to become a rigorous and foundational science. Still, on Husserl’s conception, philosophy is both a personal affair and something that is vital to realizing the humanitarian hopes of the Enlightenment. Husserl’s existential successors modified his method in various ways and stressed, and refashioned, the ideal of authenticity presented by his writings. Another major Continental tradition, namely Critical Theory, makes of philosophy a contributor to emancipatory social theory; and the version of Critical Theory pursued by Jürgen Habermas includes a call for ‘post-metaphysical thinking’. The later thought of Heidegger advocates a postmetaphysical thinking too, albeit a very different one; and Heidegger associates metaphysics with the ills of modernity. Heidegger strongly influenced Derrida’s metaphilosophy. Derrida’s deconstructive approach to philosophy (1) aims at clarifying, and loosening the grip of, the assumptions of previous, metaphysical philosophy, and (2) means to have an ethical and political import. . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.iep.utm.edu/con-meta/.
"The Mystery of Hegel." THE PHILOSOPHER'S ZONE. November 20, 2010.
His thought was hugely influential and hugely difficult. The philosopher Bertrand Russell once described him as the single most difficult philosopher to understand. He was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Though he enjoyed relative fame during his lifetime, in the decades after his death in 1831, according to one writer, Hegel's ideas were treated with "a mixture of contempt, horror and indifference." But something happened during the 20th century that brought Hegel back into sight for philosophers and thinkers. This week on The Philosopher's Zone find out what that was.
Listen here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2010/3071671.htm.
Listen here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2010/3071671.htm.
Save Philosophy at Howard University.
The Department of Philosophy at Howard University is in danger of being shut down. The administration is poised to fold this BA and MA degree granting department into an interdisciplinary program offering only core and service courses. This will mark the end of the only graduate degree program in philosophy at an HBCU; it will weaken the university’s commitment to the kind of humanistic self-examination that underwrote the US black freedom movement; and it will repudiate the legacy of philosophy at Howard, a legacy forged by the likes of Alain Locke, one of the central figures in the Harlem Renaissance. Please help us encourage Howard’s president to strengthen philosophy rather than abolish it.
For more information, visit the SAVE PHILOSOPHY AT HOWARD website here: http://savehowardphilosophy.wordpress.com/.
For more information, visit the SAVE PHILOSOPHY AT HOWARD website here: http://savehowardphilosophy.wordpress.com/.
Cfp: Fifth Annual Meeting, philoSOPHIA: a Society of Feminist Philosophy in the Continental Tradition, Vanderbilt University, May 5-8, 2011.
We welcome project proposals of works in progress that engage continental feminist theory and work done on major figures and themes from the continental feminist tradition, as well as feminist work inspired by continental philosophy more generally. We also strongly encourage interdisciplinary and innovative approaches that combine theoretical perspectives and situated reflections.
Visit the conference website here: http://www.philosophiafeministsociety.org/Conferences.html.
Visit the conference website here: http://www.philosophiafeministsociety.org/Conferences.html.
"Beyond Aftermaths: Contemporary (Post-)Postmodernism in the Shadow of the Twentieth Century," University of Groningen, December 20-21, 2010.
Keynote Speakers:
• Hans Bertens (University of Utrecht)
• Frank Ankersmit (University of Groningen)
In the new millennium, the high tide of postmodernism has passed away. Indeed, writers, artists and thinkers are increasingly extending their scope beyond postmodernism’s voids and silences. These endeavors are arguably most striking when they deal with the traumas and cataclysms of the twentieth century. This conference aims to create a forum for discussing recent intellectual and artistic attempts to find new means of confronting the catastrophes of the twentieth century – means that challenge the received postmodern paradigms of aftermaths. As such, it intends to raise such questions and issues as whether we are – after over forty years of deconstruction – heading towards a re-construction of some of the truths and certainties that have been questioned or abandoned in the wake of twentieth-century catastrophes. And what could reconstruction possibly entail? The rehabilitation of narratives that no longer annul, or reflect upon, themselves? A substitution of irony and relativism with a ‘new sincerity’ or a ‘new seriousness’? Or escapes from unspeakable realities into the playful realm of fantasy, fabulation and mythmaking? And do these projects actually mark a step beyond the aporia of postmodern thought, or do they signal rather a restoration of values and beliefs that have long been thought to be untenable?
A number of hand-picked philosophers, historians, and literary critics address these issues from a variety of angles. Key note speaker Hans Bertens argues that in recent metafictional novels like Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and others, a more representational mode is gaining ground. The postmodern impulse, he suggests, is still alive and well, but it has taken on a more sedate appearance. In the second key note lecture, Frank Ankersmit explores the fate of History in the context of an imminent ecological crisis. If myth deals with the transition from Nature to History, History marks man’s ultimate triumph over the domain of Nature. But what happens to History, Ankersmit wonders, when Nature announces its firm and final decision to abolish it? What happens to historical awareness when the impending rule of nature makes the future weigh heavier upon us than the past?
Visit the conference website here: http://www.rug.nl/let/onderzoek/onderzoekinstituten/icog/beyondAftermaths/index.
• Hans Bertens (University of Utrecht)
• Frank Ankersmit (University of Groningen)
In the new millennium, the high tide of postmodernism has passed away. Indeed, writers, artists and thinkers are increasingly extending their scope beyond postmodernism’s voids and silences. These endeavors are arguably most striking when they deal with the traumas and cataclysms of the twentieth century. This conference aims to create a forum for discussing recent intellectual and artistic attempts to find new means of confronting the catastrophes of the twentieth century – means that challenge the received postmodern paradigms of aftermaths. As such, it intends to raise such questions and issues as whether we are – after over forty years of deconstruction – heading towards a re-construction of some of the truths and certainties that have been questioned or abandoned in the wake of twentieth-century catastrophes. And what could reconstruction possibly entail? The rehabilitation of narratives that no longer annul, or reflect upon, themselves? A substitution of irony and relativism with a ‘new sincerity’ or a ‘new seriousness’? Or escapes from unspeakable realities into the playful realm of fantasy, fabulation and mythmaking? And do these projects actually mark a step beyond the aporia of postmodern thought, or do they signal rather a restoration of values and beliefs that have long been thought to be untenable?
A number of hand-picked philosophers, historians, and literary critics address these issues from a variety of angles. Key note speaker Hans Bertens argues that in recent metafictional novels like Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and others, a more representational mode is gaining ground. The postmodern impulse, he suggests, is still alive and well, but it has taken on a more sedate appearance. In the second key note lecture, Frank Ankersmit explores the fate of History in the context of an imminent ecological crisis. If myth deals with the transition from Nature to History, History marks man’s ultimate triumph over the domain of Nature. But what happens to History, Ankersmit wonders, when Nature announces its firm and final decision to abolish it? What happens to historical awareness when the impending rule of nature makes the future weigh heavier upon us than the past?
Visit the conference website here: http://www.rug.nl/let/onderzoek/onderzoekinstituten/icog/beyondAftermaths/index.
Cfp: "Passionate Minds: Knowledge and the Emotions in Intellectual History," 11th International Conference, Society for Intellectual History, University of Bucharest, May 26-28, 2011.
The centrality of the emotions in all areas of human thought, action and expression has lately begun to be recognized and investigated with increasing interest within a variety of disciplines, from cognitive science and the philosophy of emotions to literary and anthropological studies. One central insight of such explorations is that the view of the separation and even opposition between cognition and affectivity is an unjust representation of the complexity of the life of both individuals and communities. Intellectual historians have also become sensitive to the issue and are in fact in a privileged position to bring to the fore the variety and richness of the approaches to the interplay of knowledge and the emotions in the history of thought.
This conference aims to address the topic of the interplay of emotions and cognition as it bears on historical views of epistemology, logic, psychology, theology, medicine, moral philosophy or aesthetics, on approaches to education and the transmission of knowledge, as well as on the dynamics of intellectual communities. We invite panels and individual papers that address any aspect of this theme with reference to any historical period, as well as relevant methodological and historiographic questions. There will also be general sessions devoted to other proposed intellectual historical topics.
Visit the conference website here: http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/isih/?page_id=38.
This conference aims to address the topic of the interplay of emotions and cognition as it bears on historical views of epistemology, logic, psychology, theology, medicine, moral philosophy or aesthetics, on approaches to education and the transmission of knowledge, as well as on the dynamics of intellectual communities. We invite panels and individual papers that address any aspect of this theme with reference to any historical period, as well as relevant methodological and historiographic questions. There will also be general sessions devoted to other proposed intellectual historical topics.
Visit the conference website here: http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/isih/?page_id=38.
Pub: RHETORICAL REVIEW 8.2 (2010).
- Lois Peters Agnew, Outward Visible Propriety: Stoic Philosophy and Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorics (Jon Viklund);
- Robert J. Penella, ed. Rhetorical Exercises from Late Antiquity: a Translation of Choricius of Gaza’s Preliminary Talks and Declamations (David Westberg);
- James M. Wilce, Language and Emotion (Sara Newman).
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Epstein, Joseph. "T. S. Eliot and the Demise of the Literary Culture." COMMENTARY MAGAZINE (November 2010).
No one writing in the English language is likely to establish a reigning authority over poetry and criticism and literature in general as T.S. Eliot did between the early 1930s and his death in 1965 at the age of 77. Understatedly spectacular is the way Eliot’s career strikes one today, at a time when, it is fair to say, poetry, even to bookish people, is of negligible interest and literary criticism chiefly a means to pursue academic tenure. Literary culture itself, if the sad truth be known, seems to be slowly but decisively shutting down.
The fame Eliot achieved in his lifetime is unfathomable for a poet, or indeed any American or English writer, in our day. In 1956, Eliot lectured on “The Function of Criticism” in a gymnasium at the University of Minnesota to a crowd estimated at 15,000 people. “I do not believe,” he remarked afterward, “there are fifteen thousand people in the entire world who are interested in criticism.” Eight years earlier, in 1948, he won the Nobel Prize in literature. In later years, when he went into the hospital, which he did with some frequency, suffering from bronchitis and heart troubles, news of his illnesses appeared in the press or over the radio both in England and America; and so too did news of his second marriage, in 1957, at the age of 69, to his secretary, a Miss Valerie Fletcher, 38 years younger than he. He lectured often and everywhere, so much so that Lyndall Gordon, his most penetrating biographer, wrote that his “face acquired a sort of exposed reticence from the habit of looking down from a lectern into rows upon rows of eyes.” Eliot was the equivalent in literature of Albert Einstein in science in that everyone seemed to know that these men were immensely significant without quite knowing for what.
An immitigable highbrow, Eliot was concerned about the slackening of high culture and the diminishing quality of education—concerns that have proved prophetic. The poetry on which his reputation as a leading figure of the modernist avant-garde was based was not easily comprehended. “Poets, in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult,” he wrote, but he also wrote that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood,” which seems to have been the case with his. His criticism, much of which began as lectures, always came from on high. This was not a man who wrote or spoke down to his audience, ever. Which makes all the more curious his widespread fame. . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/t-s--eliot-and-the-demise-of-the-literary-culture-15564.
The fame Eliot achieved in his lifetime is unfathomable for a poet, or indeed any American or English writer, in our day. In 1956, Eliot lectured on “The Function of Criticism” in a gymnasium at the University of Minnesota to a crowd estimated at 15,000 people. “I do not believe,” he remarked afterward, “there are fifteen thousand people in the entire world who are interested in criticism.” Eight years earlier, in 1948, he won the Nobel Prize in literature. In later years, when he went into the hospital, which he did with some frequency, suffering from bronchitis and heart troubles, news of his illnesses appeared in the press or over the radio both in England and America; and so too did news of his second marriage, in 1957, at the age of 69, to his secretary, a Miss Valerie Fletcher, 38 years younger than he. He lectured often and everywhere, so much so that Lyndall Gordon, his most penetrating biographer, wrote that his “face acquired a sort of exposed reticence from the habit of looking down from a lectern into rows upon rows of eyes.” Eliot was the equivalent in literature of Albert Einstein in science in that everyone seemed to know that these men were immensely significant without quite knowing for what.
An immitigable highbrow, Eliot was concerned about the slackening of high culture and the diminishing quality of education—concerns that have proved prophetic. The poetry on which his reputation as a leading figure of the modernist avant-garde was based was not easily comprehended. “Poets, in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult,” he wrote, but he also wrote that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood,” which seems to have been the case with his. His criticism, much of which began as lectures, always came from on high. This was not a man who wrote or spoke down to his audience, ever. Which makes all the more curious his widespread fame. . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/t-s--eliot-and-the-demise-of-the-literary-culture-15564.
Garvey, James. "Hacker's Challenge." THE PHILOSOPHER'S MAGAZINE October 25, 2010.
So long as people read Wittgenstein, people will read Peter Hacker. It’s hard to imagine how his work on the monumental Analytical Commentary on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations could possibly be superseded. He spent nearly twenty years on that project (ten of them in cooperation with his friend and colleague Gordon Baker), following in Wittgenstein’s footsteps, and producing a large number of important articles and books on topics in the philosophy of mind and language along the way. Nearer the end than the beginning of a distinguished career as an Oxford don, at a time of life when most academics would be happy to leave the lectern behind and collapse somewhere with a nice glass of wine, Hacker is in the middle of another huge project, this time on human nature. He also seems keen to pick a fight with almost anyone doing the philosophy of mind.
This has a much to do with his view of philosophy as a contribution to human understanding, not knowledge. One might think that philosophy has the same general aim as science – securing knowledge of ourselves and the world we live in – even if its subject matter is more abstract and its methods more armchair. What is philosophy if not an attempt to secure new knowledge about the mind or events or beauty or right conduct or what have you? According to Hacker, philosophy is not a cognitive discipline. It’s something else entirely.
“Philosophy does not contribute to our knowledge of the world we live in after the manner of any of the natural sciences. You can ask any scientist to show you the achievements of science over the past millennium, and they have much to show: libraries full of well-established facts and well-confirmed theories. If you ask a philosopher to produce a handbook of well-established and unchallengeable philosophical truths, there’s nothing to show. I think that is because philosophy is not a quest for knowledge about the world, but rather a quest for understanding the conceptual scheme in terms of which we conceive of the knowledge we achieve about the world. One of the rewards of doing philosophy is a clearer understanding of the way we think about ourselves and about the world we live in, not fresh facts about reality.”
His account of the nature of philosophy is Wittgensteinian through and through. It’s a conception of philosophy which regards philosophical problems as confusions in language rather than deep mysteries encountered in the world. The job of the philosopher is to make these conceptual errors clear to us and in so doing help us out of our muddles. Philosophical questions aren’t solved; they’re dissolved. There is knowledge here, in a sense, but it’s not the sort of knowledge most philosophers think they are pursuing.
“By doing philosophy you come to realise things about the structure of our conceptual scheme that you would never have realised otherwise. Realization is indeed a dawning of knowledge. But the knowledge here is not knowledge of the world we live in. It is knowledge of the structure of our conceptual scheme. It very often looks like “metaphysical knowledge” of reality – as it were knowledge of the scaffolding of the world. But it’s no such thing. The world doesn’t have scaffolding. Rather, in doing philosophy, we come to realise the character of the grammatical and linguistic scaffolding from which we describe the world, not the scaffolding of the world.”
“The main barrier is the scientism that pervades our mentality and our culture. We are prone to think that if there’s a serious problem, science will find the answer. If science cannot find the answer, then it cannot be a serious problem at all. That seems to me altogether wrong. It goes hand in hand with the thought that philosophy is in the same business as science, as either a handmaiden or as the vanguard of science. This prevailing scientism is manifest in the infatuation of the mass media with cognitive neuroscience. The associated misconceptions have started to filter down into the ordinary discourse of educated people. You just have to listen to the BBC to hear people nattering on about their brains and what their brains do or don’t do, what their brains make them do and tell them to do. I think this is pretty pernicious – anything but trivial.”
In the last decade Hacker has turned his attention from the philosophy of language to the philosophy of mind, dealing with what he sees as a whole raft of conceptual confusions in cognitive neuroscience. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, which he co-authored with the neurophysiologist M. R. Bennett, works through a number of tangles in detail. As we talk about some of them, I begin to see that there is a straight line from his Wittgensteinian thoughts about the nature of philosophy to his work on the mind. . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1583.
This has a much to do with his view of philosophy as a contribution to human understanding, not knowledge. One might think that philosophy has the same general aim as science – securing knowledge of ourselves and the world we live in – even if its subject matter is more abstract and its methods more armchair. What is philosophy if not an attempt to secure new knowledge about the mind or events or beauty or right conduct or what have you? According to Hacker, philosophy is not a cognitive discipline. It’s something else entirely.
“Philosophy does not contribute to our knowledge of the world we live in after the manner of any of the natural sciences. You can ask any scientist to show you the achievements of science over the past millennium, and they have much to show: libraries full of well-established facts and well-confirmed theories. If you ask a philosopher to produce a handbook of well-established and unchallengeable philosophical truths, there’s nothing to show. I think that is because philosophy is not a quest for knowledge about the world, but rather a quest for understanding the conceptual scheme in terms of which we conceive of the knowledge we achieve about the world. One of the rewards of doing philosophy is a clearer understanding of the way we think about ourselves and about the world we live in, not fresh facts about reality.”
His account of the nature of philosophy is Wittgensteinian through and through. It’s a conception of philosophy which regards philosophical problems as confusions in language rather than deep mysteries encountered in the world. The job of the philosopher is to make these conceptual errors clear to us and in so doing help us out of our muddles. Philosophical questions aren’t solved; they’re dissolved. There is knowledge here, in a sense, but it’s not the sort of knowledge most philosophers think they are pursuing.
“By doing philosophy you come to realise things about the structure of our conceptual scheme that you would never have realised otherwise. Realization is indeed a dawning of knowledge. But the knowledge here is not knowledge of the world we live in. It is knowledge of the structure of our conceptual scheme. It very often looks like “metaphysical knowledge” of reality – as it were knowledge of the scaffolding of the world. But it’s no such thing. The world doesn’t have scaffolding. Rather, in doing philosophy, we come to realise the character of the grammatical and linguistic scaffolding from which we describe the world, not the scaffolding of the world.”
“The main barrier is the scientism that pervades our mentality and our culture. We are prone to think that if there’s a serious problem, science will find the answer. If science cannot find the answer, then it cannot be a serious problem at all. That seems to me altogether wrong. It goes hand in hand with the thought that philosophy is in the same business as science, as either a handmaiden or as the vanguard of science. This prevailing scientism is manifest in the infatuation of the mass media with cognitive neuroscience. The associated misconceptions have started to filter down into the ordinary discourse of educated people. You just have to listen to the BBC to hear people nattering on about their brains and what their brains do or don’t do, what their brains make them do and tell them to do. I think this is pretty pernicious – anything but trivial.”
In the last decade Hacker has turned his attention from the philosophy of language to the philosophy of mind, dealing with what he sees as a whole raft of conceptual confusions in cognitive neuroscience. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, which he co-authored with the neurophysiologist M. R. Bennett, works through a number of tangles in detail. As we talk about some of them, I begin to see that there is a straight line from his Wittgensteinian thoughts about the nature of philosophy to his work on the mind. . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1583.
Scialabba, George. "The Critic as Radical." THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE November 1, 2010.
Simone de Beauvoir wrote of the 20th-century conservative thinker: “Gloomy or arrogant, he is the man who says no; his real certainties are all negative. He says no to modernity, no to the future, no to the living action of the world; but he knows that the world will prevail over him.” That T.S. Eliot at least partly resembled this portrait he himself acknowledged. As he wrote to a friend in 1921: “Having only contempt for every existing political party, and profound hatred for democracy, I feel the blackest gloom.”
In daily life, Eliot was neither gloomy nor arrogant but serene and gracious, generous and humble. At the height of his fame, his courtesy even to the callow and importunate was legendary. Yet however Eliot achieved this extraordinary equableness, he doubtless saw himself as a man whose vocation was to say no, to stand athwart history strenuously wielding negative certainties. Why, exactly, did Eliot loathe modernity and what did he hope to conserve against its advance? . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.amconmag.com/blog/the-critic-as-radical/.
In daily life, Eliot was neither gloomy nor arrogant but serene and gracious, generous and humble. At the height of his fame, his courtesy even to the callow and importunate was legendary. Yet however Eliot achieved this extraordinary equableness, he doubtless saw himself as a man whose vocation was to say no, to stand athwart history strenuously wielding negative certainties. Why, exactly, did Eliot loathe modernity and what did he hope to conserve against its advance? . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.amconmag.com/blog/the-critic-as-radical/.
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