2 Reviews of JOHN STUART MILL: VICTORIAN FIREBRAND by Richard Reeves.

Check out the reviews here: http://www.sundayherald.com/arts/arts/display.var.1907798.0.john_stuart_mill_victorian_firebrand_by_richard_reeves.php and here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml;jsessionid=Q5RM3J0522HJ5QFIQMGSFGGAVCBQWIV0?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/arts/2007/12/20/boree116.xml.

Wasserstein, Bernard. "Oxford's Poetry Revolution." PROSPECT MAGAZINE 142 (January 2008).

Occasionally an event, in itself trivial, captures the essence of a historical moment: the Boston tea party, the first performance of The Rite of Spring, the incarceration of Paris Hilton. In England, such episodes often take place in Oxford: John Henry Newman’s passage from Anglicanism to Rome in the 1840s; the king and country debate at the Union in 1933; the dons’ rejection of Margaret Thatcher for an honorary degree in 1985. The non-election of Yevgeny Yevtushenko as professor of poetry in Oxford in 1968 was one such incident that somehow fused the cultural switchboard of its time. As I played a minor part in stage managing this mixture of opera buffo and grand guignol, it falls to me to act as—an admittedly prejudiced—recording angel. Yevtushenko’s candidacy was my idea. A history undergraduate at the time, I had read a little of his poetry in translation and also his Precocious Autobiography. He struck me as a raw, individualist voice speaking boldly from within the confines of a conformist society. Some of the lines buzzed in my head. But I confess that my main motive for initiating his candidacy was political, though at the time I strenuously denied it to my fellow campaigners, to the press—and to myself. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9970.

Jeffries, Stuart. "Enemies of Thought." GUARDIAN December 21, 2007.

Another academic spat or, so you thought Eagleton v. Amis was awful. . . .

It is probably the most negative book review ever written. Or if there is a worse one, do let me know. "This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad," begins Colin McGinn's review of On Consciousness by Ted Honderich. "It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed. It is also radically inconsistent." The ending isn't much better: "Is there anything of merit in On Consciousness? Honderich does occasionally show glimmers of understanding that the problem of consciousness is difficult and that most of our ideas about it fall short of the mark. His instincts, at least, are not always wrong. It is a pity that his own efforts here are so shoddy, inept, and disastrous (to use a term he is fond of applying to the views of others)." And in the middle, there is nothing to cheer the book's author. Honderich's book is, according to McGinn, sly, woefully uninformed, preposterous, easily refuted, unsophisticated, uncomprehending, banal, pointless, excruciating. What does the man on the receiving end think of this review? "It is a cold, calculated attempt to murder a philosopher's reputation," says Honderich. The review has reignited a feud between the two philosophers that shows how bitter, unforgiving and (to outsiders) unwittingly hilarious academic disputes can be. It certainly makes the bear pit that is journalism seem like sunshine and lollipops by comparison. McGinn is unrepentant. When I ring him in Miami to find out if there is any chance of a rapprochement, he tells me: "It's not like you're hitting someone over the head with a hammer. Ted is not very good at philosophy. That's the problem." So probably not. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2230842,00.html. To read the cause of the hullaballoo (McGinn's review) and Honderich's response, please go to: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2007/12/mcginns-reply-t.html.

Recent Entries at the STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY

Analytic Philosophy:

• Pigden, Charles: Russell's Moral Philosophy
• Tanney, Julia: Gilbert Ryle

Early Modern Philosophy:

• Smith, George: Isaac Newton
• Smith, George: Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
• Look, Brandon: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
• McDonough, Jeff: Leibniz's Philosophy of Physics
• Russell, Paul: Hume on Free Will
• Russell, Paul: Hume on Religion

Overbye, Dennis. "Laws of Nature, Source Unknown." NEW YORK TIMES December 18, 2007.

Yes, it’s a lawful universe. But what kind of laws are these, anyway, that might be inscribed on a T-shirt but apparently not on any stone tablet that we have ever been able to find? Are they merely fancy bookkeeping, a way of organizing facts about the world? Do they govern nature or just describe it? And does it matter that we don’t know and that most scientists don’t seem to know or care where they come from? Apparently it does matter, judging from the reaction to a recent article by Paul Davies, a cosmologist at Arizona State University and author of popular science books, on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. Dr. Davies asserted in the article that science, not unlike religion, rested on faith, not in God but in the idea of an orderly universe. Without that presumption a scientist could not function. His argument provoked an avalanche of blog commentary, articles on Edge.org and letters to The Times, pointing out that the order we perceive in nature has been explored and tested for more than 2,000 years by observation and experimentation. That order is precisely the hypothesis that the scientific enterprise is engaged in testing. David J. Gross, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., and co-winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, told me in an e-mail message, “I have more confidence in the methods of science, based on the amazing record of science and its ability over the centuries to answer unanswerable questions, than I do in the methods of faith (what are they?).” Reached by e-mail, Dr. Davies acknowledged that his mailbox was “overflowing with vitriol,” but said he had been misunderstood. What he had wanted to challenge, he said, was not the existence of laws, but the conventional thinking about their source. There is in fact a kind of chicken-and-egg problem with the universe and its laws. Which “came” first — the laws or the universe? . . .

Tallis, Raymond. "Parmenides." PROSPECT MAGAZINE 142 (January 2008).

Alfred North Whitehead famously described the European philosophical tradition as "a series of footnotes to Plato." Whether or not this is fair to the thinkers that followed Plato, it is a gross injustice to those that preceded him. Pre-eminent among these was Parmenides. Elizabeth Anscombe's riposte that Plato might be regarded as "Parmenides's footnote" is not as perverse as it seems. While Plato's dialogues are among the supreme philosophical works of the western tradition, it was Parmenides who established the implicit framework of their debates.Plato acknowledged that Parmenides had "magnificent depths." But there is more to Parmenides than this: in his thought, human consciousness had a crucial encounter with itself. This was, I believe, a decisive moment in the long awakening of the human species to its own nature. From this self-encounter resulted the cognitive self-criticism, the profound critical sense that gave birth to the unfolding intellectual dramas of metaphysics and science that have in the last century or so approached an impasse. Compared with Socrates, through whom Plato ventriloquised his own thoughts in a series of dramatised dialogues, Parmenides remains a shadowy figure. Pretty well all we know of him is that he was a handsome patrician, born in Elea in southern Italy "of a rich and honourable race" (in Hegel's words), and that he flourished in the first part of the 5th century BC. It took another genius, Nietzsche, to make Parmenides live as a human being. . . . Read the entire article here: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9972.

"The Armchair Revolutionary: Tim Adams Interviews Terry Eagleton." GUARDIAN December 16, 2007.

Terry Eagleton, one of Britain's most abrasive public intellectuals, has added to that reputation of late through his ongoing feud with Martin Amis over Islam. And now he has written a book that sees Jesus as a Palestinian insurgent. But, after a lifetime of baiting the establishment, the academic world has had enough of him. Why would that be, asks Tim Adams. . . . Read the interview here: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2228092,00.html.

Foucault Spring School, KU Leuven, March 17-21, 2008.

The work of Michel Foucault has gained an increasing popularity in a number of sub-disciplines of the social sciences and the humanities in general. Despite its popularity, a profound knowledge of this work often remains a weakness of many researches who focus mainly on the empirical application of this theory. To counter this issue, the Foucault Graduate School aims at creating a space which allows for an in-depth reading and discussion of a number of key texts of Michel Foucault. To accommodate this process, three leading Foucault-scholars will give a public lecture and a Master class. . . . More information here: http://soc.kuleuven.be/ceso/springschool/index.php?action=home.

Kazin, Michael. "Confronting a Father's Legacy." CHRONICLE REVIEW December 21, 2007.

On Native Grounds: an Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature made the 27-year-old Kazin a phenomenon in the English-speaking world of letters. The sprawling account of major writers from the Gilded Age through the Great Depression broke with the hermetic New Criticism then on the rise among literature professors. He framed each author's work within his or her particular environment of time, place, and sentiment while also narrating the tension between a Whitman-like ethos of democracy and a Menckenesque scorn of the foolish masses. The method, inspired by Vernon L. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought, allowed him to evaluate Upton Sinclair and the anonymous authors of the Works Progress Administration guidebooks alongside Wharton, Dreiser, and Faulkner. The result was a saga of the national culture festooned with keen judgments and wit. Reviewers more than praised the book; they paid tribute. Trilling called it "not only a history but a moral history." Howard Mumford Jones considered it the best study ever written about the nation's literature. From Britain, Harold Laski declared that Kazin was "among the six best critical minds America has had since Emerson." . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=GWWwpfkbp842hjzFzxbSgRfhr5h8rqwn.

Crace, John. "Is Criticism Dying, or is That Just Your View?" GUARDIAN December 18, 2007.

It's tough being a serious critic in these relativist times and many thought John Carey, emeritus Merton professor of English literature at Oxford University and distinguished literary critic, who has twice chaired the Booker prize judging committee, had done for the profession completely with his 2005 book, What Good Are the Arts?, in which he argued that there are no objective aesthetic standards. Two years on, Carey stands by what he wrote. "There are only opinions," he says, "albeit some more informed than others. The idea of evaulation - what I like is better than what you like and my feelings are more important than yours - is just illogical. You cannot know the state of another person's consciousness, so you can't make those judgments. I also got taken to task for apparently suggesting that literature was different - that it responded to the rationality of criticism in a way that no other art form did. But I never said any such thing. I made it clear that my ideas on literature were mine alone, and that I was writing from a personal perspective." None of this went uncontested by other academics and one of the first out of the blocks was Justin O'Connor, chair of cultural industries at Leeds University, with a lengthy critique in the journal Critical Quarterly. "There is clearly a hierarchy of the good and not so good in the arts," he insists, "and it's established by the critics. People's everyday experience leads them to make judgments, and together we make collective judgments. Pure relativism is absurd; regardless of whether you like Ian McEwan's novels, you have to accept that his judgments on literature carry more weight, simply because he is a practitioner, engaging with writing every day. . . . Read the rest of the article here: http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,2228866,00.html.

Bauerlein, Mark. "What We Owe the New Critics." CHRONICLE REVIEW December 21, 2007.

When Garrick Davis told me he had assembled an anthology of New Criticism, I reached across the table and shook his hand. Davis is the founder of the Contemporary Poetry Review (http://www.cprw.com/), an online magazine that covers the poetry scene inside academe and out, and he had wanted to compile a selection of essays by that loose cohort of academics from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s who had advanced a formalist study of literary language and tried to erect a discipline upon it. Davis came to literary study through Practical Criticism (I.A. Richards), Seven Types of Ambiguity (William Empson), The Well Wrought Urn (Cleanth Brooks), The Verbal Icon (W.K. Wimsatt Jr.), Language as Gesture (R.P. Blackmur), and other midcentury classics, and he remains a devotee. The New Critics taught him to focus on a poem's verbal detail -- not its historical context or political/psychological/philosophical ideas, but its metaphors, ironies, and ambiguities. In graduate school in the 90s, he never succumbed to the postmodernist insight on the impossibility of meaning and objectivity and closure, and the blandishments of various political criticisms left him cold. That makes him, of course, a throwback. For most graduate students interested in literary theory of any kind in the 80s and 90s, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, et al. were a passion. Students might have felt a thrill when they read Hegel on tragedy or Nietzsche on nihilism, but the latest thinkers had an added aura of the new. They bore the romantic air of radicalism, and if they were the revolutionaries, then their predecessors were the ancien régime, quaintly obsolete. As the literary theorist Peter Brooks put it a few years ago, "The coming to America of continental 'theory' in the 1970s created a new avant-garde of sorts — a genuine one, I think." It changed fields in the humanities so quickly and sweepingly that it joined the ranks of other great paradigm shifts in the career of thought, this one given momentous titles such as The Poststructuralist Turn. In a few short years, the whole vocabulary of criticism changed, and so did the idols. Students flocked to Cornell University, the Johns Hopkins University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and Yale University to hear the most up-to-date purveyors. When the "theory turn" happened, those who didn't participate suddenly sounded old-fashioned and out of it, and younger scholars and students took the lead. They emulated the radical-reader pose, as in Wlad Godzich's introduction to the second edition of Paul de Man's Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism: "Caution! Reader at Work!" They savored the breathless, adventuresome phrasings of Derrida's Of Grammatology, absorbed the transvaluation of bourgeois values in Foucault's Discipline and Punish, and overlaid their own prose with melodrama and historic import (proclaiming about "criticism in crisis," "ideological unmasking," "the posthuman," etc.). And the more disciples credited grand theorists with breakthrough insight and radical rethinking, the more the New Critics faded into the past. . . . Read the entire review here: http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=NDGc5mxYcYrCcwct6yppBZFdW58s8B9M.

Hauerwas, Stanley. "The Virtues of Alasdair MacIntyre." FIRST THINGS (October 2007).

Born in Scotland in 1929, MacIntyre began teaching at Manchester University in 1951. He came to the United States in 1969 to teach at Brandeis University, and he has held in the years since a large number of academic appointments, including stints at Boston University, Wellesley, Vanderbilt, Yale, Duke, and Notre Dame. His books began with Marxism: An Interpretation in 1953 and have continued in a steady flow, including The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis in 1958, A Short History of Ethics in 1966, Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic in 1970, After Virtue in 1981, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? in 1988, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry in 1990, and Edith Stein in 2005. After Virtue remains MacIntyre’s most widely discussed book, and a third edition has just been published in celebration of its twenty-fifth anniversary. We are also fortunate to have two recent volumes of his selected articles published by Cambridge University Press: The Tasks of Philosophy and Ethics and Politics. These essays are crucial for any assessment of MacIntyre’s position: Arguments and observations he makes in his books were often first developed in articles, and defended later in other articles, not widely available. The constructive character of MacIntyre’s work is apparent in his understanding of the philosophical task. A philosopher, he insists, should try to express the concepts embedded in the practices of our lives in order to help us live morally worthy lives. The professionalization of philosophy into a technical field—what might be called the academic captivity of philosophy—reflects (and serves to legitimate) the compartmentalization of the advanced capitalistic social orders that produce our culture of experts, those strange creatures of authority in modernity. General dismissals of MacIntyre too often rest on a fundamental failure to understand the interconnected character of his work. His criticisms of modernity are often thought to reflect a nostalgic and unjustified preference for the Middle Ages. MacIntyre sometimes cannot resist wickedly confirming his critics’ prejudices about his work, but those who refuse to take MacIntyre seriously because they think him antimodern fail to understand the fundamental philosophical arguments that shape his position. A focus on his accounts of action and practical reason reveals that his fundamental perspective has been remarkably consistent. . . . Read the whole article here: http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6041.

Vargas Llosa, Mario. "The Paradoxes of Latin America." AMERICAN INTEREST 3.3 (2008).

What does it mean to feel you are Latin American? It means being aware that the territorial boundaries dividing our nations are artificial, imposed arbitrarily during the colonial years. And neither our leaders during the emancipation period nor the republican governments that followed bothered to correct that situation. In fact, they often worsened things by further separating and isolating societies whose commonalities were deeper than their petty differences. This balkanization of Latin America, unlike what took place in North America, where the Thirteen Colonies became the United States, has been one of the conspicuous factors in our underdevelopment. It has engendered nationalism, war and conflict, bleeding our nations and wasting natural resources that could have been used for modernization and progress. Only in the cultural arena was Latin American integration a reality, the result of experience and necessity—everyone who writes, composes, paints or practices any creative endeavor discovers that what unites us is more important than what separates us. In other areas—politics and economics, especially—attempts to unify governmental actions and markets have always been thwarted by the nationalist reflexes ingrained in the continent. That is why all of the plans conceived to unite the region have failed. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.the-american-interest.com/ai2/article.cfm?Id=366&MId=17.

Kirsch, Adam. "Between Liberalism and Leftism: a Review of Michael Walzer's THINKING POLITICALLY." NEW YORK SUN December 12, 2007.

"I don't think that I ever managed real philosophy," Michael Walzer says in the interview that forms the last chapter of Thinking Politically (Yale University Press, 333 pages, $30), the stimulating new collection of his essays. This may sound like false modesty coming from Mr. Walzer, who is one of America's leading political philosophers. But in fact, by forswearing the name of philosopher, he is merely trying to give a more precise definition of the kind of thinking he does. "I couldn't breathe easily at the high level of abstraction that philosophy seemed to require," he explains. "I quickly got impatient with the playful extension of hypothetical cases, moving farther and farther away from the world we all lived in." Mr. Walzer's essays take exactly the opposite approach: They set up camp in the midst of the world we all live in bringing the rigor of political theory to the messiness of political debate. It makes sense that Mr. Walzer is both a professor at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and an editor of Dissent, the left-liberal journal: His theories are always also interventions. This is true of his major works — books such as Just and Unjust Wars (1977), which sought to redefine just-war theory for the post-Vietnam age, and Spheres of Justice (1983), which argues from liberal principles for a social-democratic politics. It is all the more obviously true of the essays in Thinking Politically, most of which began life as lectures and journal articles. The book offers an informal survey of the major themes of Mr. Walzer's thought, as applied to some of the major issues of the last 25 years. It is thus a good opportunity to come to grips with the strengths and the limitations of both Mr. Walzer's political principles and his way of practicing political philosophy. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nysun.com/article/67946.

Weiss, Michael. "The Bertrand Russell of Islam: a Review of Warraq's DEFENDING THE WEST [on ORIENTALISM]." NEW YORK SUN December 12, 2007.

. . . "Orientalism," Mr. Warraq writes, "taught an entire generation of Arabs the art of self-pity . . . encouraged the Islamic fundamentalist generation of the 1980s, and bludgeoned into silence any criticism of Islam." Though it's Mr. Warraq's plaint that the book "stopped dead the research of eminent Islamologists who felt their findings might offend Muslims' sensibilities," it is not merely an abstract charge, but personally felt. "Ibn Warraq" is an Arabic pseudonym, meaning "son of a stationer, book-seller, paper-seller," which this Indian-born writer assumed after witnessing the critical reception Islamists gave Salman Rushdie, all the while claiming themselves as victims. Said, Mr. Warraq argues, contributed to the Islamic ideology of victimization, practically inviting offense by writing, "every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric." This sentence is repeated multiple times throughout Defending the West, which otherwise might have been titled "Not In My Name." Applying the cool, thin steel of Occam to these and other follies of logic and critical analysis, Mr. Warraq asks, "If Orientalists have produced a false picture of the Orient, Orientals, Islam, Arabs, and Arabic society . . . then how could this false or pseudo-knowledge have helped European imperialists to dominate three-quarters of the globe?" . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nysun.com/article/67922.

Howard, Jennifer. "The Literary Anthology, Revised and Excised." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION December 21, 2007.

The first edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature appeared in 1962. Since then, the mighty tome has gone through eight editions and introduced generations of undergraduates to the joys (or sorrows) of Chaucer, Milton, and Keats. For many, the memory of staples like "Ode on a Grecian Urn" cannot be separated from the physical fact of the Norton, its hundreds of tissue-thin pages adding up to serious canonical heft. Forty-five years later, the Norton remains the 800-pound gorilla in the classroom. But it faces vigorous and growing competition from other anthologies, notably the Longman Anthology of British Literature and the Broadview Anthology of British Literature. And, like its younger rivals, it has to figure out how to stay relevant — and marketable — in what's been called the postcanonical age, when the old literary lions fight for space with hordes of once-neglected writers. Today's anthologies must appeal to instructors faced with increasingly tough decisions — about what students in survey courses should read, how much they're willing or able to read, and what background they need to understand it in the first place. Behind all of that looms a bigger, theoretical concern. The study of world literatures in English is on the rise. How close is the day when anthologies centered on the literary output of the British Isles will have outlived their usefulness? . . .

Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=fcRjyp3kjvPnpsPNRfSQCMwD8MT3pZxt.

Summer School in Social Cognition and Social Narrative, University of San Marino, July 7-13, 2008.

A one-week interdisciplinary collegium/summer school sponsored by the European Science Foundation, on contemporary research in the area of social cognition, theory of mind, and narrative theory. This collegium is designed to bring CNCC researchers and major figures in the area of social cognition together with younger scholars, graduate students, and postdocs to discuss the role of narrative and embodied intersubjectivity. Within the framework of a week-long summer school, research presentations, discussions, and tutorial sessions will allow researchers and students to share knowledge and interact. Researchers from outside the CNCC projects, together with researchers from CNCC projects will be participating. For further information, go here: http://www.philosophy.ucf.edu/pcs/smCollegium.html.

Gallagher, Shaun, and Dan Zahavi. THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL MIND: AN INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY OF MIND AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE. London: Routledge, 2007.

The Phenomenological Mind is the first book to properly introduce fundamental questions about the mind from the perspective of phenomenology. Key questions and topics covered include:

• What is phenomenology?
• Naturalizing phenomenology and the empirical cognitive sciences
• Phenomenology and consciousness
• Consciousness and self-consciousness, including perception and action
• Time and consciousness, including William James
• Intentionality
• The embodied mind
• Action
• Knowledge of other minds
• Situated and extended minds
• Phenomenology and personal identity

Interesting and important examples are used throughout, including phantom limb syndrome, blindsight and self-disorders in schizophrenia, making The Phenomenological Mind an ideal introduction to key concepts in phenomenology, cognitive science and philosophy of mind.

Shaun Gallagher is Professor and Chair of Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Central Florida and Research Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the University of Hertfordshire. He is the author of How the Body Shapes the Mind and co-editor of Does Consciousness Cause Behavior? An Investigation of the Nature of Volition.

Dan Zahavi is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Subjectivity and Selfhood and Husserl's Phenomenology.

They jointly edit the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

For further information, go to http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t745720617.

Sawicki, Jana. "Review of Michel Foucault's ABNORMAL: LECTURES AT THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE, 1974-1975." NDPR January 3, 2005.

Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975. Trans. Graham Burchell. London: Verso, 2003. Abnormal is the second of Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France to appear in this new series of English translations. (The French volume was published by Editions de Seuil/Gallimard in 1999 under the general editorship of Francois Ewald and Allesandro Fontana. Arnold Davidson is the general editor of the series of English translations. The first in the series is Foucault's course in 1975-1976, Society Must Be Defended.) Reading these lectures one is ever mindful of the immense archival labor and the intensity of the discipline that Foucault mustered in his counter-disciplinary work. Here again Foucault exhibits his talent for unearthing startling documents and bringing to life the figures represented in them. While many of the analyses of these documents are more suggestive and exploratory than definitive, they are suggestive enough that they are likely to stimulate further genealogical research. Indeed, this was one of their principle purposes. Furthermore, situated as they are between the publication of Discipline and Punish (February 1975) and History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (October 1976), the lectures deepen our appreciation of the books insofar as they contain more developed analyses of some of their central themes. Foucault expands on themes such as confession, the repressive hypothesis, the medicalization of the family, the emergence of psychiatry, and the sexual pervert. Moreover, the lectures also explore themes and figures that are either less central to or absent from the books--the human monster, incest, cannibalism, witchcraft, possession, and the discovery of "instinct" as pivotal to the emergence of the "abnormal individual." And although the "Foreword" by Ewald and Fontana warns against reading the lectures as "sketches for the books," it is tempting, at the very least, to read them as a preliminary formulations of ideas that would have formed the basis of the unwritten volumes that Foucault, while he was writing the first volume of the history of sexuality, imagined he would write. (A, xiii) Readers who are disappointed that Foucault never wrote the promised volumes on confessions of the flesh, hysteria, the Malthusian couple, and onanism will find that these lectures offer some compensation. . . . Read the rest of the review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=1581.

Hearn, Mark. "Review of Foucault's SOCIETY MUST BE DEFENDED." LABOUR HISTORY 86 (2004).

Foucault, Michel. 'Society Must Be Defended': Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976. Trans. David Macey. London: Verso, 2003. Given his tendency to opaque deliberation, and alleged scorn, at least in the eyes of his critics, for the serious study of the past, Michel Foucault would surely have felt ambiguous about the preservation of his January–March 1976 Collège de France lecture series, Society Must Be Defended, as an historical artefact. Or perhaps not? Society Must Be Defended indicates that Foucault approached his lectures thoughtfully, and with attention to detail; he fretted over their reception. Addressed, like all lectures from the professors of the prestigious Collège, to an audience of anyone who wandered off the Paris streets and cared to hear them, Foucault's lectures presented findings from research conducted in the previous year. As reprinted in this Penguin edition (the first in a series of his annual lecture programs to be published in coming years), Foucault sought to clarify his aims in a carefully argued course summary written some months after the conclusion of the program; this displays a comforting concern to be understood from an intellectual so identified with a disturbingly radical break with traditional knowledge and methodology. . . . Foucault had in common with Isaiah Berlin an ability to draw from history obscure actors and thinkers whose experience or thought illuminates past and present in new or neglected ways (hands up all those familiar with Boulainvilliers, Sieyes, Montlosier, Buat-Nancay). With Berlin he shared a horror of totalising power and an instinctive scepticism for 'totalizing explanations'. Berlin would surely have applauded Foucault's observation that 'whether one wants it to be or not, [ideology] is always in virtual opposition to something like the truth'. Foucault, however, lacked Berlin's clarity and consistency. Foucault often seems torn between his ambitions: to provide a discrete, probing analysis of the breakdown of the totalising explanations — Marxism, psychoanalysis, the whole notion of western enlightenment — which, as he tells his audience, have been 'crumbling beneath our feet' since the 1960s; to give voice, through 'discursive critique' to the 'abnormals', the 'buried and disqualified', whose stories have been denied by those who have controlled the prevailing discourse of power and the instruments of government. Yet in the lectures and books that poured from him from the 1960s until his death in 1984 Foucault seemed determined to try to explain everything: sexuality, governmentality, the very 'order of things', the nature of knowledge and how it may be reconfigured. Society Must Be Defended records this intensely creative and frustrated process. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lab/86/br_5.html.

Butler, Nick. "The Management of Populations: Review of Foucault's SECURITY, TERRITORY, POPULATION." EPHEMERA 7.3 (2007): 475-480.

Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78. Trans. G. Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. The ongoing publication of the entire set of lecture courses which Foucault gave between 1971 and 1984 at the Collège de France have so far proved to be essential companions to his better known works. Security, Territory, Population – the fifth installment in a total series of thirteen, covering the period from January to April 1978 – is no exception. It provides a compelling glimpse into Foucault’s research at a time when his intellectual interests were shifting in dramatic ways. One of the most significant changes to his work concerns the long-planned History of Sexuality project, which was put on indefinite hold after the publication of the first volume (The Will to Knowledge) in 1976. The project underwent successive revisions before volume two (The Use of Pleasure) and volume three (The Care of the Self) eventually emerged together in 1984. These adjustments to the direction of Foucault’s research are very much apparent in the present lecture series, and for this reason Security, Territory, Population – as a work-in-progress – sheds a great deal of light on the development of his thought during this period. . . . For the rest of the review, please go to: http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/7-3/7-3butler.pdf.

Godelek, Kamuran. "Review of Michel Foucault's PSYCHIATRIC POWER." METAPSYCHOLOGY ONLINE REVIEWS November 27, 2007.

Foucault, Michel. Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France, 1973-1974. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Michel Foucault taught seminars at the College de France from January 1971 until his death in June 1984 under the title "The History of Systems of Thought". This edition based on the words delivered in public by Foucault covers the period between November 1973 and February 1974. Even though both his books and courses share certain themes, the lectures arise from a specific discursive regime within the set of Foucault's philosophical activities. In these lectures he sets out the program for a genealogy of psychiatry, of its characteristic knowledge/power relations. Thus, Psychiatric Power pursues the history started with Madness and Civilization which undertook the archaeology of the division between the insane and the sane in Western society. In order to give an account of this form of psychiatric and medical knowledge about madness, one must start with an analysis of the apparatuses and the techniques of power that organized the treatment of the mad in the period that spans from Philippe Pinel to Jean-Martin Charcot. Psychiatry is not born as a consequence of progress in the knowledge of madness but from the disciplinary apparatuses within which the regime imposed on madness is organized. From this point of view, Psychiatric Power continues the project of a history of human sciences. . . . Read the entire review here: http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=3943.

Gladwell, Malcolm. "None of the Above: What IQ doesn't Tell You about Race." NEW YORKER December 17, 2007.

One Saturday in November of 1984, James Flynn, a social scientist at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, received a large package in the mail. It was from a colleague in Utrecht, and it contained the results of I.Q. tests given to two generations of Dutch eighteen-year-olds. When Flynn looked through the data, he found something puzzling. The Dutch eighteen-year-olds from the nineteen-eighties scored better than those who took the same tests in the nineteen-fifties—and not just slightly better, much better. Curious, Flynn sent out some letters. He collected intelligence-test results from Europe, from North America, from Asia, and from the developing world, until he had data for almost thirty countries. In every case, the story was pretty much the same. I.Q.s around the world appeared to be rising by 0.3 points per year, or three points per decade, for as far back as the tests had been administered. For some reason, human beings seemed to be getting smarter. Flynn has been writing about the implications of his findings—now known as the Flynn effect—for almost twenty-five years. His books consist of a series of plainly stated statistical observations, in support of deceptively modest conclusions, and the evidence in support of his original observation is now so overwhelming that the Flynn effect has moved from theory to fact. What remains uncertain is how to make sense of the Flynn effect. If an American born in the nineteen-thirties has an I.Q. of 100, the Flynn effect says that his children will have I.Q.s of 108, and his grandchildren I.Q.s of close to 120—more than a standard deviation higher. If we work in the opposite direction, the typical teen-ager of today, with an I.Q. of 100, would have had grandparents with average I.Q.s of 82—seemingly below the threshold necessary to graduate from high school. And, if we go back even farther, the Flynn effect puts the average I.Q.s of the schoolchildren of 1900 at around 70, which is to suggest, bizarrely, that a century ago the United States was populated largely by people who today would be considered mentally retarded. . . . Read the whole article here: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/12/17/071217crbo_books_gladwell?printable=true. (Thanks to Egberto Almenas for this and related links.)

McWhorter, Ladelle. "Review of Cressida J. Heyes' SELF-STRANSFORMATIONS: FOUCAULT, ETHICS, AND NORMALISED BODIES." NDPR December 8, 2007.

Heyes, Cressida J. Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies. Oxford: OUP, 2007. Deeply informed by both contemporary feminist theory and Michel Foucault's genealogical method and analytics of power, Cressida Heyes' Self-Transformations presents an extended consideration of a set of bodily practices that are increasingly common in North America, namely, sex reassignment surgeries and related sex-transformational regimes, dieting for the purpose of weight-loss, and cosmetic surgeries such as face-lift, liposuction, gastric bypass, and rhinoplasty. The book's discussion of these practices is interesting, nuanced, and politically sensitive. Heyes does an excellent job of reviewing the academic debates surrounding them and explicating the objections that many feminist social critics have made to them. But she doesn't stop there. She also critically, yet sympathetically, examines the claims and reports of those who take up these techniques and technologies and use them in their own projects of self-transformation. And she even goes so far as to take up one such practice herself, enrolling for a ten-month stint in Weight Watchers. Her descriptions in every case are vivid and compelling, and her prose is clear and honest, as well as often quietly amusing. Despite the book's straightforward tone, concrete examples, and relatively simple style, however, its thesis and themes are importantly complex. Its central issue is not whether these various techniques for altering the human body are repressive or, on the contrary, self-expressive; the central issue is not whether feminists should endorse these practices or condemn them and have them outlawed. In this book, detached moral judgment is displaced, and a different kind of ethical discourse comes to the fore. Heyes is concerned about normalization and the foreclosure of freedom it portends, and she is clear and adamant that these practices are normalizing, sometimes in the extreme. But as a student of Foucault she rejects both a sovereign account of selfhood and the notion that power is external to selves and primarily prohibitive, and thus she resists the feminist temptation to see trans men and women, recidivist dieters, and candidates for cosmetic surgery as mere dupes or victims of the normalizing sexist ideologies and institutions that they at times recite and inhabit. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu:80/review.cfm?id=11923.

CFP: "Literature and Law: a Celebration," John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, April 11, 2008.

This conference aims to bring scholars of literature and law into an interdisciplinary setting to share the fruits of their research and scholarship. The conference celebrates the restoration of John Jay's English major with its unique literature and law emphasis. The conference's keynote speaker is Brook Thomas, a noted literature and law scholar and Chancellor's Professor at the University of California Irvine. His most recent book, just published by UNC Press, is Civic Myths: A Law-and-Literature Approach to Citizenship. We are in negotiations with the journal Law and Literature to publish full versions of the best of the papers presented atthe conference in a special symposium issue.We invite papers dealing with any aspect of literature and law, including papers which might address some of the following:

• Convict narratives
• Treason
• Mercy and equity
• The reasonable man/person standard
• Natural, divine, and positive law
• Legal standards and presumptions
• Fictional evidence
• Proportionality and punishment
• Fairness versus equality
• Reasonable Doubt
• Lady Justice
• Blasphemy and censorship
• The legal fiction of an era

Please submit abstracts (250 words or less) to Andrew Majeske, ajmajeske@gmail.com, by Friday, January 18, 2008.

Further information may be found here: http://literatureandlaw.blogspot.com/.

Gillespie, Nick. "Who's Afraid of the MLA?" TCS DAILY December 27, 2007.

No academic conference draws more smirks and bitch-slaps than the annual Modern Language Association convention. Held every December 27-30, the MLA convention pulls together upwards of 10,000 literary scholars ranging in status from rock-star professors feeling the love of their intellectual acolytes to starving, hysterical grad students desperate for any position in a perennially tight job market. This year's meeting, which is taking place in Washington, D.C., features almost 800 panels and presentations, ranging from Tuesday's "Women and Devotional Writing in Early Middle English" (the first literature panel listed in a program as thick as a phone book) to Friday's finale, "Gypsies in European Literature, Culture, and the Arts." In between are meetings of groups devoted to Andre Gide, Margaret Fuller, William Carlos Williams, and seemingly every other author with more than a haiku to his name; endless job interviews in which those nervous grad students throw off more flop sweat than Thomas Jefferson contemplating a just god; and, not uncoincidentally, more cash bars than there are in heaven (or at least Brooklyn). Despite its preeminence within academic literary and cultural studies, the MLA convention is the Rodney Dangerfield of such confabs, getting little or no respect not just from right-wingers who reliably scoff at the unmistakable left-wing bent to the proceedings but from liberal mainstream media who eye the jargon-choked pronouncements of the professoriate with equal helpings of disdain, derision, and dismissiveness. . . . To read the rest of this article, go to http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=122705A; For part 2, go to http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=122805B; For part 3, go to http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=122905B.

Dowling, William C. "Literary Studies versus Cultural Studies." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION September 17, 1999.

The essential distinction is very simple. Literary studies takes the literary work as its object of inquiry. Whatever is not literary studies does not. Thus, a literary-studies teacher takes Hamlet to be a self-contained world of motive and action whose immense complexity is the subject of discussion with students. Many other things may be discussed in elucidating this world -- Renaissance cosmology, social history, theology, alchemy, etc. -- but they exist for the purpose of understanding Hamlet, not the other way around. Cultural studies, on the other hand . . . does not take Hamlet, or any other literary work, as its object of inquiry. [Cultural studies scholars like] Ms. Felski clearly thinks she's making a decisive point when she talks admiringly about "the multileveled meanings of black hairstyles" as a shining example of the sort of thing about which American critics of cultural studies need to be more aware. But she's missing the point. The point is that American universities are so structured that they already have departments -- anthropology, sociology, history, communications -- that study the sort of thing she's interested in. The problem with cultural studies is that, like a parasite flourishing at the expense of its host, it has left the study of literary works and literary tradition in a desperately enfeebled condition, with most younger English-department faculty members incompetent to do so much as help students learn how to read a lyric by Donne or Wyatt, let alone Hamlet or Paradise Lost. . . . Read the rest here: http://members.aol.com/rualliance/chronlet.htm.

Delblanco, Andrew. "The Decline and Fall of Literature." NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS November 4, 1999.

Although the following, somewhat dated article targets 'English' per se, Delblanco really seems to have in mind what many call today 'Cultural Studies' which, admittedly, has in many cases come to dominate literature departments:

A couple of years ago, in an article explaining how funds for faculty positions are allocated in American universities, the provost of the University of California at Berkeley offered some frank advice to department chairs, whose job partly consists of lobbying for a share of the budget. "On every campus," she wrote, "there is one department whose name need only be mentioned to make people laugh; you don't want that department to be yours." The provost, Carol Christ (who retains her faculty position as a literature professor), does not name the offender—but everyone knows that if you want to locate the laughingstock on your local campus these days, your best bet is to stop by the English department. The laughter, moreover, is not confined to campuses. It has become a holiday ritual for The New York Times to run a derisory article in deadpan Times style about the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, where thousands of English professors assemble just before the new year. Lately it has become impossible to say with confidence whether such topics as "Eat Me; Captain Cook and the Ingestion of the Other" or "The Semiotics of Sinatra" are parodies of what goes on there or serious presentations by credentialed scholars. At one recent English lecture, the speaker discussed a pornographic "performance artist" who, for a small surcharge to the price of admission to her stage show, distributes flashlights to anyone in the audience wishing to give her a speculum exam. By looking down at the mirror at just the right angle, she is able, she says, to see her own cervix reflected in the pupil of the beholder, and thereby (according to the lecturer) to fulfill the old Romantic dream of eradicating the distinction between perceiver and perceived. The lecturer had a winning phrase—"the invaginated eyeball"—for this accomplishment. During the discussion that followed, a consensus emerged that, in light of the optical trick, standard accounts (Erwin Panofsky's was mentioned) of perspective as a constitutive element in Western visual consciousness need to be revised. . . .

Thanks to Ed Brandon for sending the link (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/318).

Metcalf, Stephen. "Dissecting the IQ Debate: a Response to Liberal Creationism." SLATE December 3, 2007.

In response to James Watson's remarks concerning the intelligence of blacks, Slate's William Saletan wrote a series of pieces on race, IQ, and genetics. In his first post, Saletan wrote: "It's time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true." One's to-do list reflects a balance of perceived likelihoods. Is preparing for the congenital mental inferiority of blacks more like budgeting for retirement, or buying asteroid insurance? Caveats and wiggle words aside, the impression left by Saletan's piece is that it's more like, say, a prudent response to rising sea levels. To drive the point home, Saletan suggested a historical parallel: Liberals made angry or defensive by the possibility that blacks (as a group) score lower on IQ tests than whites (as a group) for genetic reasons are like Christians made angry or defensive by the theory of evolution. Thus the headline "Liberal Creationism." Saletan's analogy implies that the conflict over race, intelligence, and genetics is a conflict between science and superstition. It's not; it's a conflict between science and science. Worse, even when Saletan shades his rhetoric carefully, the reader is left with the impression that science—hard, empirical disinterested science—is trending to a hereditarian explanation for the IQ gap, and that bad or weak science—really a kind of wishful, mushy, quasi-superstitious scientism—is on the side of an environmental or cultural explanation. If you explore the subject in any depth, or even just click through to some of Saletan's own links, you find the opposite is closer to the truth. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=1700945566886988248.

Hannay, Alastair. "Review of Mooney, Edward F. ON SOREN KIERKEGAARD: DIALOGUE, POLEMICS, LOST INTIMACY, AND TIME." NDPR December 7, 2007.

In his Preface Edward Mooney defines the space of On Søren Kierkegaard as one where 'theology and philosophy, literature and ethics, poetry and sculpture, artistry and sacrament can mingle, affording mutual attractions and inter-animations'. When so much Kierkegaard commentary and discussion is generated by partial and divided interests, this catch-all signals a refreshing return to square one. We are ushered back to a Kierkegaard in all his authorial multiplicity, but also to where Mooney thinks philosophy should begin. His book is a skillfully and richly presented case in defense of what Kierkegaard came to believe himself: that Socrates was the thinker with whom he should be most closely associated. The book is divided into three parts, the second two including revisions of previously published essays. . . . Read the full review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=11884.

Kant Attack Ad on You Tube -- Nietzsche for President!

From The Mole, the blog of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society: http://friedrichnietzschesociety.wordpress.com/2007/12/10/kant-attack-ad/. (Or here: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=7M-cmNdiFuI.)

"The Guattari Effect: the Life and Work of Felix Guattari, 1930-1992," CRMEP, Middlesex University, April 17-18, 2008.

This 2-day international conference, organized by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, will be the first devoted to the work of the French psychoanalyst, philosopher, and political activist Felix Guattari. Its primary aim will be to gauge the contemporary significance of a theorist whose status as an ‘extraordinary philosopher’ was proclaimed by his collaborator Gilles Deleuze. To that end, it will bring together 3 internationally renowned experts on Guattari (Gary Genosko, Brian Massumi, Peter Pal Pelbart) along with 7 other philosophers, psychoanalysts, historians, sociologists, anthropologists and artists, all of whom have been profoundly influenced by Guattari. The goal will be to explore the full spectrum of Guattari’s work, from his early political engagement as an activist in the French mental health system, through to his critique of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis and his conception of a ‘micro-politics of desire’ (which challenged the then dominant theoretical paradigm of ‘structure’ with the concept of ‘machine’), finally considering his later elaboration of a ‘new ethico-aesthetic paradigm’, where ‘subjectivity’ was to be considered ‘from the point of view of its production’. While acknowledging the importance of Guattari’s influential collaborations with Gilles Deleuze (Anti-Oedipus, Kafka, A Thousand Plateaus, What is Philosophy?), one of the primary purposes of the conference will be to give due weight to Guattari’s own independent and highly innovative contributions to a variety of fields, including linguistics, pragmatics, aesthetics, ecology, architecture and media theory. Among the questions the conference seeks to explore are:

• Why did Guattari turn his attention to these fields, and what did he produce in them?
• What forms did his activism take in the 1970s and 80s, and of what relevance are they today?

Rare archival film and audio footage from these periods will be screened to accompany discussions of Guattari’s adventures in media activism.

The conference will be chaired by Professor Eric Alliez and Dr. Christian Kerslake, both of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University. Speakers include:

• Franco Berardi, Academy of Fine Arts, Milan 'Chaosmotic Sensibility and Ethics’
• Dr. Gary Genosko, Lakehead University ‘Banking on Félix: Refashioning Low Threshold Semiosis Through A-Signifying Particle-Signs’
• Professor Barbara Glowczewski, Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales ‘Passion According to Guattari: Attractors and Detractors in Anthropology’
• Professor Monique David Ménard, Université de Paris VII Denis-Diderot ‘Guattari and “Collective Assemblages of Enunciation”’
• Dr. Anne Querrien, Université de Paris XV-Evry Val d'Essonne ‘Mapping in an N-Dimensional Plane’
• Professor Brian Massumi, University of Montreal ‘Always Having Been, For the First Time: Emergence and Eternality in the Work of Guattari’
• Professor Peter Pal Pelbart, Catholic University of Sao Paolo ‘Re-founding the Unconscious upon Deterritorialization’
• Dr. Anne Sauvagnargues, École Normale Supérieure ‘Politics of the Face’
• Dr. Stephen Zepke, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna ‘To Remake the Readymade: Guattari and Duchamp’
• Professor François Dosse, History, Institut Universitaire de Formations des Maitres de l’Académie de Créteil 'Guattari with Deleuze’

Further information is available here: http://www.mdx.ac.uk/www/CRMEP/EVENTS/TheGuattariEffect.htm.

Saletan, William. "Created Equal." SLATE November 18, 2007.

Last month, James Watson, the legendary biologist, was condemned and forced into retirement after claiming that African intelligence wasn't "the same as ours." "Racist, vicious and unsupported by science," said the Federation of American Scientists. "Utterly unsupported by scientific evidence," declared the U.S. government's supervisor of genetic research. The New York Times told readers that when Watson implied "that black Africans are less intelligent than whites, he hadn't a scientific leg to stand on." . . . Read the rest here: http://www.slate.com/id/2178122/entry/2178123/. (Thanks to Egberto Almenas for the link.)

Leiter, Brian, and Michael Rosen, eds. OXFORD HANDBOOK OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY. Oxford: OUP, 2007.

Contents: 1. Introduction , Brian Leiter and Michael Rosen Part I: Problems of Method 2. Phenomenology as Rigorous Science , Taylor Carman 3. Hermeneutics , Michael N. Forster 4. Philosophical Aestheticism , Sebastian Gardner 5. The History of Philosophy as Philosophy , Michael Rosen 6. Historicism , Frederick Beiser 7. What Have We Been Missing? Science and Philosophy in Twentieth-Century French Thought , Gary Gutting 8. Marxism and the Status of Critique , Alex Callinicos Part II: Reason and Consciousness 9. Serpentine Naturalism and Protean Nihilism: Transcendental Philosophy in Anthropological Post-Kantianism, German Idealism, and Neo-Kantiasm , Paul Franks 10. Dialectic, Objectivity, and the Unity of Reason , Fred Rush 11. Overcoming Epistemology , Herman Philipse 12. Individual Existence and the Philosophy of Difference , Robert Stern 13. Consciousness in the World: Husserlian Phenomenology and Externalism , Peter Poellner Part III: Human Being 14. Nihilism and the Meaning of Life , Julian Young 15. nullThe Presentation of the Infinite in the Finitenull: The Place of God in Post-Kantian Philosophy , Stephen Mulhall 16. Being at Home: Human Beings and Human Bodies , Maximilian de Gaynesford 17. Freedom as Autonomy , Kenneth Baynes 18. The Legacy of Hellenic Harmony , Jessica N. Berry 19. Critical Theory and Practical Philosophy: On the Normative Credentials of Frankfurt School Social Criticism , Gordon Finlayson 20. Morality Critics , Brian Leiter 21. The Humanism Debate , Thomas Baldwin Bibliography Index Authors, editors, and contributors: Edited by Brian Leiter, The University of Texas at Austin and Michael Rosen, Harvard University Contributors: Kenneth Baynes is Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University. Frederick Beiser is Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University. Jessica N. Berry is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University. Alex Callinicos is Professor of European Studies at King's College, London. Taylor Carman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Barnard College and Columbia University. Gordon Finlayson is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. Michael N. Forster is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Paul Franks is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. Sebastian Gardner is Professor of Philosophy at University College London. Maximilian de Gaynesford is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Reading. Gary Gutting is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Brian Leiter holds the Hines H. Baker & Thelma Kelley Baker Chair in Law and Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin. Stephen Mulhall is Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at New College, Oxford University. Herman Philipse is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utrecht. Peter Poellner is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Michael Rosen is Professor of Government at Harvard University. Fred Rush is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Robert Stern is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Julian Young is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland. Thomas Baldwin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York.

Smith, Barry. "What's Wrong with Contemporary Philosophy?" TOPOI 25.1-2 (2006): 63-67.

Philosophy in the West now divides into three parts – Analytic Philosophy, Continental Philosophy and History of Philosophy. Analytic Philosophy (AP), although it comes in many varieties, has four striking properties. First, it is cultivated with every appearance of theoretical rigour. Second, its practitioners do not, by and large, believe that philosophy is or can be a science, i.e., they do not believe that it can add to the stock of positive human knowledge. Third, the philosophers who until very recently were the most influential models in the pursuit of philosophy as a theoretical enterprise – Chisholm, Davidson, Armstrong, Putnam, Kripke, Searle… – have no obvious successors. Finally, AP has succeeded in the institutional task of turning out increasing numbers of highly trained, articulate and intelligent young philosophers. Each of these properties reflects a relatively uncontroversial empirical claim. Continental Philosophy (CP) comes in almost as many varieties as does AP but is always decidedly anti-theoretical. This is particularly true of those varieties which sport the name “Theory”, but it holds in general of all those CP philosophical traditions in which political goals are more or less preeminent. The heroes of CP – Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida – also belong to the past and they, too, have no obvious successors. The History of Philosophy (HP) is pursued by both analytic philosophers and their Continental consoeurs. In Continental Europe – with the exception of Scandinavia and Poland – philosophy is, in large measure, just the history of philosophy. In the Anglosaxophone world most philosophers are not historians of philosophy. The almost total identification of philosophy with its history in Continental Europe reflects massive scepticism about any theoretical ambitions on the part of philosophy. These claims are also uncontroversial, as an examination of the publications of philosophers in Continental Europe easily shows. . . . Read the rest here: http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/WhatsWrong.pdf. (Thanks to Ed Brandon for the link.)

Vatter, Miguel. "Review of Claude Lefort's LE TEMPS PRESENT: ÉCRITS, 1945-2005." NDPR December 2, 2007.

Claude Lefort has never quite made it to the rank of the French "maîtres à penser" like Sartre and Lacan, Althusser and Foucault. Nevertheless, during the second half of the 20th century he became France's most important practitioner of political theory, in the North American understanding of the term, as defined by the likes of Arendt, Strauss, and Sheldon Wolin. This volume collects over eighty texts by Lefort, written from 1945 to 2005, composed for the most part of journal and newspaper articles, interviews, and conference papers. They provide a fascinating exercise in what Foucault once called the project of an "ontology of the present." Until his break in 1958 with the journal Socialism or Barbarism, which he founded together with Cornelius Castoriadis, Lefort was active in the "revolutionary" Left, first as a Trotskyite, later as an advocate of people's self-government in the form of workers' councils. The texts in this collection written in the thirty years from 1945 to 1975 reflect the changes that brought Lefort to completely reject what he calls the "myth" of the Revolution found in the Marxist-Leninist tradition, and to espouse the non-Marxist, yet radical democratic theory for which he is best known. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=11823.

Babich, Babette E. "On the Analytic-Continental Divide in Philosophy: Nietzsche's Lying Truth, Heidegger's Speaking Language, and Philosophy."

(From A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy. Ed. C. G. Prado. New York: Humanity Books, 2003. 63-103.) . . . What are we doing and what do we mean when we name a being defined utterly beyond human comprehension? Can we think of God? What do we think of when we think we do? How can we know something we cannot know? Can we conceive a divinity, a being greater than which is not to be imagined, an infinite, omnipotent, self-caused creator of the world and everything in it? Or is our monotheistic thought of God, as Nietzsche wondered if it might be, nothing more than a de-deification of a god-filled world, a "monotono-theism" [74] - as Nietzsche named it - little better than, and more than half way to the disenchanted universe of a science bent on replacing divinity with a singularity at the beginning: the big bang as the boy scientist's idea of God. The rationalistic justification of atheism however is itself only another kind of "better knowing." As Nietzsche would say the claim to know and the claim not to know are both overweening claims, presuming in each case to know too much. And the question of freedom, tied to the question of self or the subject, who is it that speaks whenever one speaks? One is not transparent to oneself, one has no more certain knowledge of oneself than one has of the universe, of the past or the future. If one wills one's subjugation is one less or no less subject? If we have discovered mirror neurons, have we solved the problem of consciousness or do we merely presume it, once again? If there are unconscious motivations, if we are beings whose thoughts are manifestations of brain and body functions, what can be said of freedom? What is an illusion, what is truth? what is lie? Nietzsche, who began to raise questions of this kind, as we have seen, reaped a harvest of contradictions in his philosophy - but more insights into the nature of truth and indeed of human beings who use language to think about truth than many other, more sanguine and clear philosophers. To questions like these, and certainly to ones far better framed, analytic philosophers have answers, rather a lot of them, carefully repeated in the literature. For their part (and this should be kept in mind when reading authors like Heidegger and Nietzsche), continental philosophers tend less to answer or conclude inquiry than to compound their own (and our responding) questions - adverting to ambiguity, unclarity, complexity and all the detail that ultimately is required to begin to think philosophy as the meaning of life. It is significant that of the analytic answers given, none would seem to have purchase or staying power, not even for the analysts themselves. Hence and seemingly having exhausted their own mandate and with it their own project, analytic philosophy has begun to turn toward continental philosophy. Not, alas as rapprochement, not by inviting practitioners of continental philosophy to join the discussion, but only and all by themselves, and as if bored to tears by their own analytic themes, taking up the themes (and the names, like Nietzsche, like Heidegger and Deleuze) of continental philosophy. For the analytic tradition is intentionally bankrupt (this is the internal logic of the analytic method) but although rendered moribund at its own hand, within the profession (aka academic and editorial control) it enjoys the power of the majority or dominant tradition. To keep itself going it means to seize (but not to "think") the spiritual capital of a tradition whose own authority is denounced as that of non- or "bad" philosophy. The claim then, as it may be heard from Brian Leiter to Simon Critchley and Manfred Frank but also in almost every analytic book and review on the topic, is that anything continental philosophy can do, analytic philosophy can do better, much better.What makes it so much better is, it goes without saying in this assertion, its much vaunted clarity. But it is a claim that remains ultimately unclear, not only because unclarity belongs to the essence of what it is that continental philosophers do (and because unclarity, the very idea, is anathema to analytic philosophy) but also because the analytic method is ineliminably self-dissolving: whatever it takes into its mind, it ends up clarifying, that is, in Skorupksi's and not only Skorupski's account of it: analyzing away. Analytic philosophy as the clarification of questions or as the enterprise of problem solving works elegantly for idle problems of logic - one thinks of Russell's "tea-table" [75] - or for crossword and other puzzles (or within a closed system or defined universe of variables) but it may be that there is still yet more in heaven (and out of it) than dreamt of in such a philosophy. And continental philosophy in its best practitioners still does know this. Although there has yet to be an authentic conversation between analytic and continental philosophy, so that one justifiably speaks of a dubious estrangement - it still seems to the present author that the best way to resolve this estrangement is not to deny to acknowledge differences between one's own and another's language and theoretical concerns, all for the sake of a "conversation," if we may use Gadamer's all-too ordinary language for this indispensable and fundamentally hermeneutic engagement of one scholar with another. Not in spite of the differences but because of these differences, we might begin by speaking to one another, recognizing the divide between analytic and continental, and so including both in philosophic discourse. Read the rest here: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/babich02.htm.

Leiter, Brian. "'Analytic' and 'Continental' Philosophy." PHILOSOPHICAL GOURMET REPORT 2006 - 2008.

"Analytic" philosophy today names a style of doing philosophy, not a philosophical program or a set of substantive views. Analytic philosophers, crudely speaking, aim for argumentative clarity and precision; draw freely on the tools of logic; and often identify, professionally and intellectually, more closely with the sciences and mathematics, than with the humanities. (It is fair to say that "clarity" is, regrettably, becoming less and less a distinguishing feature of "analytic" philosophy.) The foundational figures of this tradition are philosophers like Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, the young Ludwig Wittgenstein and G.E. Moore; other canonical figures include Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Kripke, Rawls, Dummett, and Strawson. "Continental" philosophy, by contrast, demarcates a group of French and German philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries. The geographical label is misleading: Carnap, Frege, and Wittgenstein were all products of the European Continent, but are not "Continental" philosophers. The foundational figure of this tradition is Hegel; other canonical figures include the other post-Kantian German Idealists (e.g., Fichte, Schelling), Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Gadamer, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, and Foucault. Continental philosophy is sometimes distinguished by its style (more literary, less analytical, less reliance on formal logic), its concerns (more interested in actual political and cultural issues and, loosely speaking, the human situation and its "meaning"), and some of its substantive commitments (more self-conscious about the relation of philosophy to its historical situation). . . . Read the rest here: http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/analytic.asp.

Mulligan, Kevin. "The Great Divide." TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT June 26, 1998, 6-8.

At the turn of the century, Russell, Husserl and Couturat singled out Leibniz the logician as an important precursor of the way they thought philosophy should be done. Like their most gifted contemporaries they conceived of philosophy as essentially argumentative and - as Russell put it in a 1911 talk in French - analytic. Unsurprisingly, the search for the best arguments and analyses meant that good philosophy was cosmopolitan. William James and Ernst Mach were read everywhere. James studied Mach and the pupils of Brentano, whom Stout introduced to Cambridge. Moore recognised the deep kinship between his work on ethics and that of Brentano. Russell was influenced by Peano, used and criticised Meinong and was attacked by Poincaré. Pragmatism was subjected to a series of criticisms by realists in German and in English but gradually began to win adherents, for example in Italy, where Vailati and Calderoni introduced both pragmatism and Austrian philosophy of mind. Philosophy at the end of the century presents a very different aspect. Two very different complex (families of) philosophical traditions occupy the scene - Analytic and Continental philosophy. The terminology is neither happy nor stable. John Searle likens distinguishing between philosophies in this way to the claim that America has two parts, Kansas and business; Bernard Williams compares it to the distinction between cars which are Japanese and those with front-wheel drive. Members of the first tradition hesitate between "analytic" and "analytical" and many of their heroes were in fact from the continent. A short list of such heroes would include the names of Russell and Moore, Wittgenstein, Carnap and Tarski, Quine, Davidson, Kripke, Lewis, Putnam, Nozick and Rawls, Strawson, Armstrong, Dummett, Wiggins, Williams and Evans. Behind them stands the tradition's grandfather, the great German logician and philosopher Gottlob Frege. Among Frege's earliest readers were Couturat and Russell - who immediately proclaimed his importance - and Husserl - who maintained a strange silence on the subject. . . . To read the rest of the essay, please visit the following URL: http://www.unige.ch/lettres/philo/enseignants/km/doc/GreatDivide.pdf.

Rockmore, Tom. "Remarks on the Structure of Twentieth Century Philosophy." METAPHILOSOPHY 35.4 (2004): 466-478.

The first step in considering the structure of twentieth century philosophy is to limit the discussion in identifying the important philosophical movements, those that must be included on any list of what went on in that period. In one sense the answer is simple enough. If we limit the question for the moment to roughly the last hundred years, we know that towards the beginning of the twentieth century, at a time when other philosophical tendencies were in the ascendant, three important movements emerged independently, movements which for different reasons rapidly came to dominate the debate: American pragmatism, so-called continental philosophy, and Anglo-American analytic philosophy. These three tendencies are very different, independent, and cannot be reduced to each other. Much of the discussion over the ensuing century takes the form of a contest for hegemony between them fought out in the philosophical space. Each of these tendencies has its own undeniable charms. It would be a mistake not to be knowledgeable about one or the other. It would be just as mistaken to think that one has a decisive advantage over its philosophical competition. I further think that at a minimum all three of them must be taken into account to have any hope of arriving at a viable understanding of the evolution of the recent debate. Anything less, an account which fails to consider one or another of these tendencies, presents a false view of the debate in the twentieth century. In different ways and to different degrees, these three tendencies have dominated the philosophical debate since they emerged. Their fortunes have been very varied. As a result of a variety of pressures, after they emerged each of them later changed in ways that perhaps could not have been foreseen. Analytic philosophy, which for about a half century has clearly been the dominant tendency in English-speaking countries, although that may be changing, emerged in part through a struggle against British idealism in England. This struggle was pioneered by Russell and Moore, classmates at the University of Cambridge and the thinkers most responsible for the emergence of analytic philosophy in England. Ever since Frege, analytic philosophy has been concerned with the semantic problem under the heading of reference (or what Russell called denotation). About a century later, analytic philosophy seems to be in the process of abandoning a theoretical approach to reference, hence the very problem as originally understood, while turning to pragmatism and curiously to Hegel. In different ways, for Quine, Putnam, Rorty, and Brandom, though not for McDowell a neo-analytic form of pragmatism is increasingly seen as the most viable alternative to a formal theory of reference. Continental philosophy emerged in Husserl’s breakthrough to phenomenology and continued through Heidegger, then later through such others as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, and Derrida. Yet understood as phenomenology it was severely tested by Heidegger, and seems, with some exceptions, to have sharply declined after his death. Heidegger’s theories, which he officially constructs on his reading of Husserl – Being and Time, his major work, is dedicated to Husserl – seem less to continue than rather sharply to oppose a number of central tenets of Husserl’s position, such as reduction, essential intuition, and the claimed link to Cartesianism. There is a lot of confusion about what ‘phenomenology’ means. Yet if the truth be told, Heidegger contributes less to prolonging than to putting an abrupt end to what has been called the phenomenological movement. Although there are still many philosophers committed to phenomenology, it is unclear that, beyond the term, they share anything approaching a central doctrinal commitment. Pragmatism, which is the only indigenous American philosophical movement, nearly came to a halt when Dewey died. Although it was still studied after Dewey, there was little original work from the time of his death in 1952 until, say, the end of the 1970s, when it was taken up and transformed by a number of important analytic thinkers. It has lately been revived in very different form, mainly through Rorty’s efforts, through the migration, or conversion, of such analytic stalwarts as Quine, Putnam and Rorty to neo-analytic pragmatism. Peirce, the inventor of pragmatism, was a strong critic of Cartesian epistemological foundationalism, which he criticized in a series of articles in the 1880s. Pragmatism, which emerged in the wake of Peirce’s canonical critique of Descartes, has always been a very pluralist movement centered on the concern to continue the discussion of knowledge on a non-foundationalist basis (see Rescher 2000). Yet neo-analytic pragmatism arguably consists in a collection of theories which bears little direct relation to the views of Peirce, who founded the movement. In simplest terms, pragmatism has now split into scholarly discussion of first-generation American pragmatists such as Peirce, James and Dewey, and so-called neo-analytic pragmatism, including such thinkers as Rorty, Putnam, and now Brandom, concerned to appropriate selected pragmatic themes for their analytic concerns, on the other. . . . For the rest of this essay, please visit the following URL: http://www.arsdisputandi.org/index.html?http://www.arsdisputandi.org/publish/articles/000128/index.html.

Hardt, Hanno. "Cruising on the Left: Notes on a Genealogy of 'Left' Communication Research." FAST CAPITALISM 2.2 (2007).

This essay traces the idea of "left" communication research in the United States, with references to the writings and practices of American authors and critics of mass communication and in the context of historical developments from nineteenth century philosophical and theoretical influences to the rise of the New Left in the 1960s. Not unlike the Old Left, which never achieved holding political power and realizing its political goals—but whose ideas have made a difference in reforming American society—"left" communication research never dominated the research culture in the United States, but its contributions continue to enrich the landscape of communication studies. The idea of "left" communication research is typically contained in the notion of "critical" communication research. Although potentially different (in terms of ideology), both share an understanding of communication as relations of power, which they address in their critique of the relations of media and society, for instance. There is a tolerance of inclusion (of left perspectives) among those writing about "critical" communication research, like Leslie T. Good, who sees even a moral imperative at work in "critical" communication research on the demystification of power relations with the goal of creating a climate of interrogation among "critical" researchers (or theorists). While Sue Curry Jansen writes about the implementation of a "media-critical" theory to suggest a broad based critique of media practices, W. J. T. Mitchell's ideas about "dialectical pluralism," with its notion of "pushing divergent theories and practices toward confrontation and dialogue" become the inspiration for the mission of a new journal, Critical Studies in Mass Communication. The work in a Marxist tradition of communication research, one thinks of Herbert Schiller or Dalles Smythe, for instance, remains isolated in its critique of society and reappears later with the rise of a Marxist tradition in a new and perhaps more hospitable environment of Cultural Studies, inspired by the work of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, in particular, and legitimized by their intellectual standing. Mainstream—or traditional—communication research, on the other hand, represents a different understanding of communication, one that is compatible with the ruling ideology. The latter embraces relations of power for the purpose of creating and maintaining community or democracy by preserving a pluralism of shared responsibilities, or consensus in a Deweyan sense. Under these conditions of existence, communication studies describes representative relations of power among social, economic, and political or cultural institutions in pursuit of a common good. Its research practices are embedded in the positivism of the traditional social sciences and provide empirical evidence, whose decontextualized and ahistorical nature invites a growing critique during the 1980s, in particular. All the while "left" communication research is marginalized in the disciplinary discourse; it is either considered a foreign product—based on European philosophical or theoretical propositions regarding democracy and society—or a Marxist project, which occupies only a fleeting moment in the American experience, when leftist ideas influenced the cultural and intellectual life of some communities before repression and the McCarthyism of the 1950s destroyed the sense of a collective mission. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/2_2/hardt.html.

Byatt, A. S. "Novel Thoughts." TIMES November 28, 2007.

. . . During my lifetime we have used various metaphors for the activity of the mind – when I was a girl it was seen as a telephone exchange. Later it became fashionable to describe the brain as a computer – though a computer was constructed by a brain. In the past few years the work of Jean-Pierre Changeux has furnished us with descriptions, both purely physical and philosophically theoretical, of the way the brain puts the mind together. When he describes the relations between axons, dendrites, perception, memory, concepts and the world outside a brain, I feel I am reading a description of what I always sensed was happening, but could not describe. He is interested both in a biological and chemical 'grammar' or algebra, and in the way in which things we perceive are retained – by the neurones – and combined to make “images” and “concepts” which are made by strengthened and stabilized collections of neurones, related both by the “pruning” of the sensory input and the combinations resulting from the way the mental objects are linked. This may seem a little abstract in the context of a paper on the novel. A novel is made of language, and arouses both feelings and thoughts in its readers, as it should depict both feelings and thoughts in its people and its microcosm. Changeux’s descriptions of the cells of the brain and the way they combine and recombine give me a sense of understanding the excitement, the drive, the pleasure, I get out of making worlds with words. We have had a lot of the body as desire, and listened to many professors of desire. There is something else – the human capacity to think, and to make feelings into thoughts. It is a way out of narcissism. The full article is here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article2960112.ece.

Lianos, Michaelis, ed. "Pierre Bourdieu: a Critical Tribute in Times of Uncertainty." SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH ONLINE 12.6 (2007).

Essays include:

• Prefaceby Michaelis Lianos;
• Pierre Bourdieu: Episteme, Polity and Critique by Michaelis Lianos;
• Que Reste-T-Il Des Héritiers Et De La Reproduction (1964-1971) Aujourd'hui? Questions, Méthodes, Concepts Et Réception D'une Sociologie De L'éducation by Jean-Claude Passeron;
• Cultural Capital, Cultural Knowledge and Ability by Alice Sullivan;
• Towards a Theory of Constrained Relativism: Comparing and Combining the Work of Pierre Bourdieu, Mary Douglas and Michael Thompson, and Alan Fiske by Marco Verweij
• La Distinction Indifférente by Christian Papilloud;
• Habitus and Reflexivity: Restructuring Bourdieu's Theory of Practice by Nicos Mouzelis
• Critical Sociology and Social History by Eric Hobsbawm;
• Raisonnements Circulaires : Retour Nostalgique à Lévy-Bruhl by Mary Douglas; and
• Bourdieu and Postcommunist Class Formation by William Outhwaite.

To access the entire issue, click here: http://www.socresonline.org.uk/12/6/contents.html.

Cohen, Patricia. "Freud Is Widely Taught at Universities, Except in the Psychology Department." NEW YORK TIMES November 25, 2007.

PSYCHOANALYSIS and its ideas about the unconscious mind have spread to every nook and cranny of the culture from Salinger to South Park, from Fellini to foreign policy. Yet if you want to learn about psychoanalysis at the nation’s top universities, one of the last places to look may be the psychology department. A new report by the American Psychoanalytic Association has found that while psychoanalysis — or what purports to be psychoanalysis — is alive and well in literature, film, history and just about every other subject in the humanities, psychology departments and textbooks treat it as “desiccated and dead,” a historical artifact instead of “an ongoing movement and a living, evolving process.” . . . The primary reason it became marginalized . . . is that while most disciplines in psychology began putting greater emphasis on testing the validity of their approaches scientifically, “psychoanalysts haven’t developed the same evidence-based grounding.” As a result, most psychology departments don’t pay as much attention to psychoanalysis. At the same time, wondrous advances, in neuroscience, for instance, have attracted new students and resources, further squeezing out psychoanalysis. Outside the university setting, the refusal of most insurance firms to pay for extended psychoanalytic therapy has limited its reach. . . . But Mark Edmundson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author of “The Death of Sigmund Freud,” said, “Freud to me is a writer comparable to Montaigne and Samuel Johnson and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, writers who take on the really big questions of love, justice, good government and death.” Scholars in the humanities, he said, use Freud “skeptically and provisionally and don’t think of him as scientist at all, but as an interpreter.” . . . For the full article, go here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/weekinreview/25cohen.html?_r=1&oref=slogin.

Smith, Joanna. "Pursuing a PhD? Consider Wii Studies." TORONTO STAR November 24, 2007.

Future Play 2007, an international conference organized by Algoma University College last week, was an odd sort of conference. The kind of conference where it was perfectly normal for [one participant] . . . to brag about the pants her video-game character was sporting before launching into an elaborate thought experiment involving a feathered monster, collecting beeswax and charging $14.98 to her credit card to buy a bunch of gold. Everyone was there to talk and learn about video games and their psychological, sociological, political, technical, metaphorical – what have you – dimensions, which are all lumped together in the emerging field of game studies. That's right: video game studies, which is busy establishing itself as a bona fide academic field. Scholars might spend hours discussing avatars – the identities people adopt in online virtual reality games – but they are doing so in post-secondary institutions, peer-reviewed journals and in societies of the learned, such as the Digital Games Research Association, which held a large conference in Tokyo this year, or the fledgling Canadian Game Studies Association, which publishes a mostly online journal called Loading. Aside from specific areas of research like the oft-discussed studies linking video game violence to aggression in children, this worldwide phenomenon is still flying mostly under the public radar. Read the full article here: http://www.thestar.com/News/Ideas/article/279372.

Some Interesting Essays on Topics in Continental Theory, COSMOS AND HISTORY 3.1 (2007).

The newest issue of Cosmos and History is online. Take a look at the following essays in particular:

• Gare, Arran: The Primordial Role of Stories in Human Self-Creation;
• Arnett, Ronald C., Janie Harden Fritz, and Annette M. Holba: The Rhetorical Turn to Otherness Otherwise than Humanism;
• Hirst, Angela: Levinas Separates the (Hu)man from the Non(Hu)man, Using Hunger, Enjoyment and Anxiety to Illuminate the Relationship.

Some Essays on Various Topics in Continental Theory, MINERVA 11 (2007).

The newest issue of Minerva is now online. Take a look at the following essays in particular:

• Kane, Carolyn Lee: Aisthesis and the Myth of Representation;
• Tomasi, Alessandro: Nihilism and Creativity in the Philosophy of Nietzsche;
• Bolanos, Paolo: Nietzsche, Spinoza and the Ethological Conception of Ethics.

CFP: "Phronesis and Political Rhetoric: Campaigns, Compromise, and the Crusade for Civic Discourse," Texas Woman's University, February 8, 2008.

Phronesis (Greek: φρόνησις) from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is the emphasis on practical wisdom that combines elements of wisdom, knowledge, virtue, and decorum... Sloane, Thomas O., ed. Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (601)

The Rhetoric Symposium is now accepting proposals for papers and panels from faculty, graduate students, and independent scholars which address contemporary concerns with and applications of phronesis and political rhetoric. We define the theme broadly to include topics related to political rhetoric, civic discourse, public political speeches, private political discourses, technology, and critical theory. Additionally, we welcome submissions from all areas of study including, but not limited to: Rhetorical Theory, Rhetorical History, Discourse Analysis, Genre Analysis, Composition Theory, Political Science, Communication Studies, Orality, English, Journalism, Education, History, Government, Film Studies, Media Studies, Art, Psychology, Sociology, Disability Studies, Gender Studies, and Minority Studies. For further information, please visit: http://www.donnasouder.com/frs08/call_for_papers.htm.

Forthcoming Events Sponsored by Volcanic Lines, the Deleuzean Research Group, Greenwich University.

Here are some of the forthcoming events:

• John Protevi (Louisiana) "Water," Greenwich University, December 11, 2007 (http://deleuzeatgreenwich.blogspot.com/2007/01/if-you-plan-to-attend-this-event-and.html);
• Reading Group on Anti-Oedipus: meetings, all held at Greenwich University, commence October 31, 2007 (http://deleuzeatgreenwich.blogspot.com/2007/10/to-register-for-event-please-e-mail.html);
• "Philosophy after Deleuze," Graduate Conference, Department of Philosophy, University of Dundee, April 11-12, 2008 (http://deleuzeatgreenwich.blogspot.com/2007/01/what-is-philosophy-after-deleuze.html).

For further information on Volcanic Lines, please visit: http://www.deleuzeatgreenwich.blogspot.com/.

See also the blog Dialogues at Greenwich (http://www.dialoguesatgreenwich.blogspot.com/) for more detailled discussions of and reports on these and related Deleuzean events occuring at Greenwich University.

Worth, Sarah. "Review of William Irwin and Jorge J. E. Gracia, eds. PHILOSOPHY AND THE INTERPRETATION OF POP CULTURE." NDPR November 19, 2007.

Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture is an edited collection resulting from a conference on the topic held in Buffalo in April, 2004. From the list of contributors alone it is clear that this is an issue that is getting some serious attention by the world of academic philosophy. Heavy hitters such as Noël Carroll, Ted Cohen, Richard Shusterman, Jorge Gracia, and Gareth Matthews are all contributors to the volume. What I think is especially notable about the list of contributors more generally is that they are not all aestheticians, but are well-known philosophers in an array of fields. But this collection is not just another group of essays connecting various aspects of popular culture to philosophical topics. This is meta-philosophy of pop culture -- philosophy about philosophy of pop culture. For this reason, it stands apart from the other books, which examine philosophy through some particular aspect of pop culture. As Irwin says in the introduction, philosophy as a discipline has "had a public relations problem for a couple of centuries now, so engagement with popular culture is not an opportunity we can afford to miss" (3). This collection examines carefully how we might best cultivate this developing relationship between philosophical insight and popular culture in an interesting and effective way. The book is divided into two sections: the first on "Philosophy and Popular Culture," and the second on "Interpretation and Popular Art Forms." The first deals with the theoretical issues, concerns, and limitations of the interaction of the two fields, and the second includes essays in which philosophers deal with a specific artistic medium of popular culture. These media include television, horror films, children's literature, comic books, Rock' n' Roll, and photography. I found the first section considerably more interesting and useful than the second, as it dealt with the meta-issues of what the possibilities are with the courting of philosophy and popular culture in general. The books on the various popular topics "and philosophy" for the most part do not deal with the theoretical issues that concern the limitations of the philosophical use of popular culture, so these essays are particularly helpful in considering the value of doing this kind of philosophy. The second half of the collection focuses less on theoretical issues generally than on issues of interpretation that arise within particular genres of popular art. Although some might assume that popular art might be more transparent than high art and is in no need of interpretation, Irwin suggests in his introduction that this view is mistaken. The hermeneutic issues raised here are not necessarily novel ones, but as they are raised here they give the reader a good sense of how some of the classic problems in philosophy (and in particular in aesthetics) get fleshed out when applied in a new way. These essays are particularly helpful in understanding the unique issues connected with each medium. I will give a short summary of the issues dealt with in each of the essays in what follows. . . . Please read the full review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=11783.

More on the Amis-Eagleton Spat in the Editorial, STABROEK NEWS November 29, 2007.

. . . It would be disingenuous to claim, after such a destructive century, that we cannot judge religious and political ideologues on their stated aims and their actions. But what is moral superiority worth if it reconciles us to new horrors, like the catastrophic war which is currently breeding the very terrorism it was meant to curb? Easy judgements, however correct, are often the prologue to perilous simplifications: we tend to feel superior long after we have forgotten our morality. Read the rest here: http://www.stabroeknews.com/index.pl/article?id=56534130.