Angier, Natalie. "Mirrors Don't Lie. Mislead? Oh Yes." NEW YORK TIMES July 22, 2008.

For the bubbleheaded young Narcissus of myth, the mirror spun a fatal fantasy, and the beautiful boy chose to die by the side of a reflecting pond rather than leave his “beloved” behind. For the aging narcissist of Shakespeare’s 62nd sonnet, the mirror delivered a much-needed whack to his vanity, the sight of a face “beated and chopp’d with tann’d antiquity” underscoring the limits of self-love. Whether made of highly polished metal or of glass with a coating of metal on the back, mirrors have fascinated people for millennia: ancient Egyptians were often depicted holding hand mirrors. With their capacity to reflect back nearly all incident light upon them and so recapitulate the scene they face, mirrors are like pieces of dreams, their images hyper-real and profoundly fake. Mirrors reveal truths you may not want to see. Give them a little smoke and a house to call their own, and mirrors will tell you nothing but lies. To scientists, the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of mirrors make them powerful tools for exploring questions about perception and cognition in humans and other neuronally gifted species, and how the brain interprets and acts upon the great tides of sensory information from the external world. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/science/22angi.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin.

O'Kane, Josh. "Want to Get Ahead? Take Philosophy." TELEGRAPH-JOURNAL July 23, 2008.

Philosophy has become more, not less, relevant in today's world, and the enrolment numbers are there to prove it. Since 2002, UNB Saint John has seen an rise in enrolment of nearly 20 per cent in philosophy classes at the school - increasing from 2,572 students to 3,075 in just five years. UNBSJ professor Murray Littlejohn, one of the two philosophy professors at the school, says the increasing interest in philosophy is part of a national trend. David Flagel is the other professor and co-ordinator of the discipline for UNBSJ. "Physics, biology, astronomy, medicine, psychology, politics, literary studies, cultural studies - these are all philosophy's children," said Littlejohn. "It is very natural for philosophy to continue to reflect critically on the subject matter that is at issue in each of these disciplines since they were all born of philosophical reflection and inquiry." . . . Read the rest here: http://telegraphjournal.canadaeast.com/city/article/362709.

Hu, Winnie. "In a New Generation of College Students, Many Opt for the Life Examined." NEW YORK TIMES April 6, 2008.

Once scoffed at as a luxury major, philosophy is being embraced at Rutgers and other universities by a new generation of college students who are drawing modern-day lessons from the age-old discipline as they try to make sense of their world, from the morality of the war in Iraq to the latest political scandal. The economic downturn has done little, if anything, to dampen this enthusiasm among students, who say that what they learn in class can translate into practical skills and careers. On many campuses, debate over modern issues like war and technology is emphasized over the study of classic ancient texts. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/education/06philosophy.html?_r=1&oref=slogin.

McCarthy, Tom. "Top 10 European Modernists." GUARDIAN May 8, 2008.

From time to time, Western literature undergoes an upheaval so momentous that its entire landscape is transfigured. The old order falls away, or rather is devoured and transformed by its own offspring, and the tremors carry on for decades, even centuries, with fault lines spreading out in all directions. Modernism is not a movement, nor even a way of thinking, but an event: an event with which any serious writer has, in some way or another, to engage, and to which they should respond. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/may/08/top10s.modernists.

Nemser, Alexander. "Low Truths." THE NEW REPUBLIC July 30, 2008.

Gorky's Tolstoy and Other Reminiscences: Key Writings By and About Maxim Gorky. Trans. Donald Fanger. New Haven: Yale UP, 2008. Literarily speaking, Gorky was never a true 'realist': inventing heroes who were better than life, he placed them in realistic settings and convinced his readers and himself that he was a "chronicler of everyday events." According to the poet Vladislav Khodasevich, "he himself half-believed in that half-truth all his life." Gorky had a tendency toward a broad, bright clarity that blurred life into myth. "In Gorky's books," Victor Shklovsky noted, "things take on an inflated quality without being enlarged out of proportion.... It's like a card game played by some officers sitting in the basket of an observation balloon a mile up in the air." . . . Gorky appeared bearing tales of hoodlums and tramps, but also scraps and pamphlets of anarchist ideas charged with revolutionary hopes. His financial support, much of which came from his own royalties, bolstered Lenin and the Bolsheviks from 1903 until their seizure of power in 1917. Wishing to believe all his life that human reality could be improved and even perfected, Gorky achieved a greatness that was ultimately social, not artistic; at his best he was a grand-scale inspiration for a worldwide cult of human progress and social struggle. He was a famously mesmerizing raconteur, but many who heard his stories in person were disappointed when they read them. He was himself attracted to power and the raw energy of self-assertion, and idolized men who tried to remake the world. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=74022519-053e-4ed5-bcdd-ab3de3c2e87d.

Brockes, Emma. "America's Last Taboo." GUARDIAN July 21, 2008.

Twenty years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote an article for the New York Times in which she pointed out the growing inequality of American society and was promptly denounced, by a rival paper, as a Marxist. "The Washington Times is an extreme-rightwing publication," she says, so there was no surprise there. But the paper's reaction underlined a general principle: that while one can say "fairly wild" things about race and gender in the US, there persists a certain coyness about class. "There's this powerful myth that America doesn't have classes; that they're an ancient English or European thing that we abolished. And that if you're not rich, it's your own damn fault." . . . Read the rest here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/interviews/story/0,,2291935,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=fromtheguardian.

Gert, Bernard. "Review of Quentin Skinner's HOBBES AND REPUBLICAN LIBERTY." NDPR (July 2008).

Skinner, Quentin. Hobbes and Republican Liberty. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. In this book Quentin Skinner contrasts two rival theories about the nature of human liberty. The first, which he traces back to antiquity, is now called republican liberty. It asserts, "freedom within civil associations is subverted by the mere presence of arbitrary power." (p. X) "One crucial implication is that liberty can be lost or forfeited even in the absence of any acts of interference." (p. XII) Skinner contrasts this account of liberty with the definition of liberty with which Hobbes begins Chapter XXI of Leviathan,

Liberty, or freedome, signifieth (properly) the absence of Opposition; (by Opposition, I mean externall Impediments of motion;) and may be applyed no lesse to Irrationall and Inanimate creatures, than to Rationall. For whatsoever is so tyed, or environed, as it cannot move, but within a certain space, which space is determined by the opposition of some externall body, we say it hath not Liberty to go further.

According to Skinner, Hobbes holds that citizens have liberty insofar as they are not physically prevented from acting as they would like. Reading this book made clear to me how different the fields of history, even intellectual history, and philosophy, especially analytic philosophy, are. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13687.

Bay Area Continental Philosophy Association.

Details of a new association and a call for papers are here: http://www.usfca.edu/org/bacpa/.

Jacoby, Russell. "Gone, and Being Forgotten." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION July 25, 2008.

How is it that Freud is not taught in psychology departments, Marx is not taught in economics, and Hegel is hardly taught in philosophy? Instead these masters of Western thought are taught in fields far from their own. Nowadays Freud is found in literature departments, Marx in film studies, and Hegel in German. But have they migrated, or have they been expelled? Perhaps the home fields of Freud, Marx, and Hegel have turned arid. Perhaps those disciplines have come to prize a scientistic ethos that drives away unruly thinkers. Or maybe they simply progress by sloughing off the past. . . . Compared with economics, philosophy prizes the study of its past and generally offers courses on Greek, medieval, and modern thinkers. Frequently, however, those classes close with Kant, in the 18th century, and do not pick up again until the 20th century. The troubling 19th century, featuring Hegel (and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche), is omitted or glossed over. General catalogs sometimes list a Hegel course in philosophy, but it is rarely offered. Very few philosophy departments at major universities teach Hegel or Hegelian thought. Philosophy stands at the opposite pole from psychology in at least one respect. In most colleges and universities, it is one of the smaller majors, while psychology is one of the largest. Yet, much like psychology, philosophy has proved unwelcoming for thinkers paddling against the mainstream. Not only did sharp critics like Richard Rorty, frustrated by its narrowness, quit philosophy for comparative literature, but a whole series of professors have departed for other fields, leaving philosophy itself intellectually parched. That is the argument of John McCumber, a scholar of Hegel and Heidegger who himself decamped from philosophy to German. His book Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era (Northwestern University Press, 2001) savages the contemporary American philosophical profession and its flight from history. He notes, for instance, that 10 years after the 1987 "breakthrough anthology" Feminism as Critique, not one of its contributors, from Seyla Benhabib to Iris Marion Young, still taught in a philosophy department. The pressures that force — or tempt — big names such as Rorty and Martha Nussbaum to quit philosophy, McCumber observes, exert equal force on those outside the public eye. He charges, for instance, that senior editors dispense with peer review and run the major philosophy journals like private fiefdoms, and that a few established professors select papers for the discipline's annual conferences. The authoritarianism and cronyism drive out mavericks. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=cjtGhcnt3vYPDhDdjtvfySgdzkqpzShC.

Polt, Richard. "Review of Andrew Haas' THE IRONY OF HEIDEGGER." NDPR (July (2008).

Haas, Andrew. The Irony of Heidegger. London: Continuum, 2007. After reading a good deal of Heidegger, we start to hear his tones of voice and anticipate his rhetorical strategies. We recognize, for instance, that his lecture courses deliberately pile tension upon tension. We realize that he often pursues a line of thought simply in order to build a house of cards that he will then blow down. Certain words he uses drip with sarcasm, such as freischwebend (free-floating) and harmlos (innocuous). When Heidegger characterizes any viewpoint in these terms, it's a giveaway that he is offering the position a final cigarette before submitting it to his philosophical firing squad. In Andrew Haas' The Irony of Heidegger, then, one might expect to find an interpretation that explored Heidegger's tonalities and tropes in the light of the content of his thought -- but one's expectations might be confounded. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13686.

Mamet, David. "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal.'" VILLAGE VOICE March 11, 2008.

I found not only that I didn't trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered. Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh. And I began to question my hatred for "the Corporations"—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live. And I began to question my distrust of the "Bad, Bad Military" of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world. Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not "Is everything perfect?" but "How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?" Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well. Read the rest here: http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-03-11/news/why-i-am-no-longer-a-brain-dead-liberal/1.

CFP: "Transmission: Cinema/Psychoanalysis," CRASSH, University of Cambridge, September 16-18, 2008.

The conference will focus around the theme of transmission in its exploration of relationships between cinema and psychoanalysis. This will contribute to discussions of cultural transmission relating to the CRASSH 2007-9 theme. Various possible modes of Transmission will be explored:

• The transmission of psychoanalytic discourse into film theory (re-visiting and re-assessing 1970s theory, Screen group, Metz, Mulvey etc., evaluating current relations between psychoanalysis and film theory)
• The transmission of psychoanalytic scenarios into filmmaking (e.g. Hitchcock, Lang; can we uncover what was lost in translation? what is the cultural/historical significance of such transmission?)
• Cinema as psychoanalysis: image, scene, time, speech, body, sound (how might cinema transmit psychoanalytically? Can cinema be conceived as a psychoanalytic mode of thought?)

In exploring these forms of transmission, the conference will seek to revisit the history of film theory and look forward to its future, asking whether psychoanalysis still has something to offer film theorists. In addition, the parallel histories (to use the term from the title of Janet Bergstrom's edited volume Endless Night) of cinema and psychoanalysis will be re-examined to shed new light on their past entanglement and possible future collaboration. Finally, through the investigation of scenarios and film form and their (mis)translations and mirrorings of psychoanalytic discourse and thought, approaches to film analysis will be explored.

Keynote Speakers:

• Professor Mieke Bal (University van Amsterdam)
• Professor Kaja Silverman (University of California Berkeley)

Further information is here: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/162/.

Sattler, Barbara. "Review of Christopher Shield's ARISTOTLE." NDPR (July 2008).

Shields, Christopher. Aristotle. London: Routledge, 2007. Shields' presentation focuses on philosophical problems that are interesting also for a contemporary philosopher. Shields' conception of his book becomes most obvious in contrast to Ross's well-known Aristotle (1923): While Ross gives us a synopsis of every chapter of a work of Aristotle, Shields picks out some central problems and frequently connects them with contemporary philosophical debates, as when he points out both differences and common features between Aristotle's essentialism and modern modal views (p. 105). What one might miss in Shields is an attempt to give us a sketch of the overall project of a whole work of Aristotle's and an explicit indication of the works that Shields does not discuss at all in this introduction, among others, Aristotle's numerous biological works. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13685.

Tartakovsky, Joseph. "Man of a Thousand Faces." CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS (Summer 2008).

Manguel, Alberto. Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey: a Biography. Douglas & Mcintyre, 2007. Alberto Manguel's slim "biography" is a literary history of Homer's epics, half criticism, half Britannica entry. In each of 22 short chapters, averaging ten pages apiece, he examines an angle of the Homeric phenomenon: the question of his existence; his reception by Greek philosophers; his heirs Virgil and Dante; the agonies of St. Jerome and Augustine of Hippo in reconciling him with Scripture; the excavation of Troy; his role in French debates between anciens and modernes; and his lessons on war and peace. Manguel flits about in time, but the progression is roughly chronological, from Homer's heroic age to our insistently anti-heroic one. The epics, thought to have been composed in the 8th century, have had few rivals in the inspiration of pedantry: an ancient scholar named Demetrius of Scepsis amplified 62 lines from the Iliad's Catalogue of Ships into 30 volumes. But Manguel, a critic, novelist, and translator born in Argentina and now living in France, writes with intelligence and curiosity. For a man of letters who has edited 23 anthologies and is reputed to possess a library of 30,000 volumes, he mostly avoids ostentation. Manguel's intent is to show that, for over 2,500 years, countless members of the species have found "in these stories of war in time and travel in space...the experience of every human struggle and every human displacement." The Iliad and Odyssey, which can be thought to represent the two great metaphors of life, a battle and a journey, are the "books which, more than any others, have fed the imagination of the Western world." . . . Read the rest here: http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1559/article_detail.asp.

Judson, Olivia. "Darwinmania!" THE WILD SIDE BLOG. NEW YORK TIMES June 17, 2008.

July 1, 2008, is the 150th anniversary of the first announcement of Darwin's discovery of natural selection, the main driving force of evolution. Since 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth (Feb. 12), as well as being the 150th anniversary of the publication of his masterpiece, On the Origin of Species (Nov. 24), the extravaganza is set to continue until the end of next year. Get ready for Darwin hats, t-shirts, action figures, naturally selected fireworks and evolving chocolates. Oh, and lots of books and speeches. But hold on. Does he deserve all this? . . . Read the rest here: http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/darwinmania/. See also by Judson:

• As the first major statement on evolution and how it works, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species not only transformed the way we humans see ourselves. It marks the beginning of modern biology. But reading it is evidently not a prerequisite for a successful career in biology — not even for those studying evolution. ) . . . An Original Confession July 8, 2008
• Darwin did more in one lifetime than most of us could hope to accomplish in two. But his giantism has had an odd and problematic consequence. It’s a tendency for everyone to refer back to him. “Why Darwin was wrong about X”; “Was Darwin wrong about Y?”; “What Darwin didn’t know about Z” — these are common headlines in newspapers and magazines, in both the biological and the general literature. Then there are the words: Darwinism (sometimes used with the prefix “neo”), Darwinist (ditto), Darwinian. Why is this a problem? Because it’s all grossly misleading. It suggests that Darwin was the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of evolutionary biology, and that the subject hasn’t changed much in the 149 years since the publication of the Origin. . . . Let's Get Rid of Darwinism July 15, 2008

GUARDIAN Feature to Commemorate the Centennial of Darwin's ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES.

This includes articles by Richard Dawkins on "Why Darwin Matters," John van Whye on "Common Misconceptions about Darwin" and Adam Rutherford's "Teflon Charlie" (unlike Newton and Freud, he writes, Darwin has survived years of scrutiny unscathed . . .). There are numerous other features as well. Visit: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/darwinbicentenary.

UC, Riverside Literature Professor Found Murdered.

An autopsy is scheduled Wednesday on the body of well-known English Professor Lindon Barrett, who was apparently murdered last week in his apartment in Long Beach. The body was found in an advanced state of decomposition, according to the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office, where the autopsy will take place. . . . [Barrett was a well-known UC, Irvine professor associated with the prestigious Critical Theory Institute and author of Blackness and Value: Seeing Double, among other items, who had recently moved to UC, Riverside. See his new Faculty page here: http://english.ucr.edu/people/faculty/barrett/index.html.] Read the article here: http://collegelife.freedomblogging.com/2008/07/15/breaking-news-former-uci-professor-found-murdered/.

Bauerlein, Mark. "The Attack on Theory." CHRONICLE REVIEW July 16, 2008.

Back in the 1980s, when conservatives such as William Bennett began attacking what they termed “the politicization of the humanities,” they made a basic error. They blamed theorists for reducing texts to vested interests, for planting identity politics on campus, for subsuming aesthetic criteria beneath ideological criteria, and for disrespecting the noble inheritance of Western literature and philosophy. The accusations struck humanities professors as hare-brained and panicky and altogether political, but I observed a number of professional occasions to which they applied all-too-well, even though I despised all things Republican at the time. But in one respect the critics were mistaken from the start: they included deconstruction among the prime targets. Deconstruction made everything meaningless, they said, removing classroom discussion from a grounding in tradition and truth, and allowing wayward professors to steer the learning any which way. Deconstruction was a canon-buster, too, irreverent and roguish. It set the critic alongside the novelist—remember Hillis Miller gushing about the creative side of criticism? No wonder it appealed to graduate students and junior faculty, who were only too eager to espouse something that licensed them to drop their humility in the face of the past. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/bauerlein/the-attack-on-theory.

Costelloe, Timothy. "Giambattista Vico." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY (Updated July 15, 2008.)

Vico consciously develops his notion of scienza (science or knowledge) in opposition to the then dominant philosophy of Descartes with its emphasis on clear and distinct ideas, the most simple elements of thought from which all knowledge, the Cartesians held, could be derived a priori by way of deductive rules. As Vico had already argued, one consequence and drawback of this hypothetico-deductive method is that it renders phenomena which cannot be expressed logically or mathematically as illusions of one sort or another. This applies not only most obviously to the data of sense and psychological experience, but also to the non-quantifiable evidence that makes up the human sciences. Drawing on the verum factum principle first described in De Antiquissima, Vico argues against Cartesian philosophy that full knowledge of any thing involves discovering how it came to be what it is as a product of human action and the "principal property" of human beings, viz., "of being social" ("Idea of the Work," §2, p.3). The reduction of all facts to the ostensibly paradigmatic form of mathematical knowledge is a form of "conceit," Vico maintains, which arises from the fact that "man makes himself the measure of all things" (Element I, §120, p.60) and that "whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand" (Element II, §122, p.60). Recognizing this limitation, Vico argues, is at once to grasp that phenomena can only be known via their origins, or per caussas (through causes). For "Doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters of which they treat" (Element CVI, §314, p.92), he says, and it is one "great labor of...Science to recover...[the] grounds of truth-truth which, with the passage of years and the changes in language and customs, has come down to us enveloped in falsehood" (Element XVI, §150, pp.64-5). Unveiling this falsehood leads to "wisdom," which is "nothing but the science of making such use of things as their nature dictates" (Element CXIV, §326, p.94). Given that verum ipsum factum-"the true is the made," or something is true because it is made-scienzia both sets knowledge per caussas as its task and as the method for attaining it; or, expressed in other terms, the content of scienza is identical with the development of that scienza itself. . . .

Read the whole entry here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vico/.

Senchuk, Dennis. "Review of Larry Hickman's PRAGMATISM AS POST-POSTMODERNISM." NDPR (July 2008).

Hickman, Larry A. Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism: Lessons from John Dewey. New York: Fordham UP, 2007. This book, a collection of essays, suggests that Dewey has anticipated solutions to some major problems that plague postmodernism -- a loosely confederated movement which the author characterizes (with help from other scholars) as a rejection of epistemological foundationalism, objectivity, and metaphysical realism, as an affirmation of self-reflexiveness and relativism, and as an attempt to have meaning without transcendent value and action without absolute truth. The essays range over po-mo views on global citizenship, Rorty's neo-pragmatism, divers conceptions of technology, environmental concerns, and some straightforwardly expository discussions of Dewey's philosophy. At book's end, Hickman concludes that Dewey's (and Peirce's) views on habit afford post-po-mo solutions to po-mo problems about objectivity and the interminability of "self-referentiality, redescription, and reinterpretation" (p. 254). . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13646.

Dusek, Val. "Review of Steve Fuller's THE KNOWLEDGE BOOK." NDPR (July 2008).

Fuller, Steve. The Knowledge Book: Key Concepts in Philosophy, Science and Culture. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 2007 Steve Fuller's work is in the format of Raymond Williams' Keywords, Elizabeth Fox Keller and Elizabeth Lloyd's Keywords in Evolutionary Biology, and, more recently -- and aptly -- Cary Nelson's Keywords in Academia: a Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education. The work contains forty-two succinct entries, averaging four to six pages long, on a number of notions of relevance to science studies. It contains, for instance, under P: Philosophy versus sociology, Postmodernism, and Progress; under R: Rationality, Relativism versus constructivism, Religion, and Rhetoric. The entries are extensively cross-referenced. The work was originally published in Japan, where there are a number of skilled interpreters of Fuller's social epistemology. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13666.

CFP: "Double Edges: Rhetorics / Rhizomes / Regions," International Association of Philosophy and Literature, Brunel University, June 1-7, 2009.

The deadline for submissions of individual and panel abstracts is October 15. Further information will be posted at the IAPL website in due course: http://www.iapl.info/.

Schmidt, James. "Review of Jane Kneller's KANT AND THE POWER OF IMAGINATION." NDPR (July 2008).

Kneller, Jane. Kant and the Power of Imagination. Cambridge: CUP, 2007. Kant tends to be viewed as one of the most stalwart defenders of the Enlightenment, Romantic writers like Novalis have long been cast in the role of the Enlightenment's most vigorous critics, and the relationship of German idealism to Kant's philosophy has always been troubled -- though Fichte saw himself as completing Kant's system, Kant rejected his efforts in no uncertain terms. Not the least of the virtues of Jane Kneller's fine study is that it unsettles the conventional picture of late eighteenth-century German thought by introducing readers to a Kant who had far more in common with Novalis and his colleagues than with Fichte and his. Along the way she explores the ambiguous function of the imagination in Kant's critical enterprise, untangles the philosophical commitments of the first generation of Romantics, and sheds a good deal of light on the extent to which the Jena Romantics might be seen as advancing at least some of the ideals associated with the Enlightenment. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13665.

Fyffe, Richard. "Conversational Constraints: Richard Rorty and Contemporary Critical Theory." ACRL (January 1996).

Rorty's own work be read as an attempt to introduce the vocabulary of what he calls a post-philosophical culture to replace the "objective" ideals of science and Philosophy. Such a culture, he says, would be thoroughly literary -- erasing C.P. Snow's famous split between science and literature. Rorty characterizes this culture as one in which "neither the priests nor the physicists nor the poets nor the Party were thought of as more 'rational' or more 'scientific' or 'deeper' than ... another. No particular portion of culture would be singled out as exemplifying (or signally failing to exemplify) the condition to which the rest aspired." (COP xxxviii). "A post-Philosophical culture, then, would be one in which men and women felt themselves alone, merely finite, with no links to something Beyond. . . . [It would not] erect Science as an idol to fill the place once held by God. It views science as one genre of literature -- or, put the other way around, literature and the arts as inquiries, on the same footing as scientific inquiries" (COP xlii-xliii). Post- Philosophical culture, Rorty concludes, thus amounts to "a study of the comparative advantages and disadvantages of the various ways of talking which our race has invented. It looks, in short, much like what is sometimes called 'culture criticism'" (COP xl). . . . Read the rest here: http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/bitstream/1808/972/1/Conversational%20Constraints%20ALA.pdf.

Rée, Jonathan. "Remembering Rorty." PROSPECT MAGAZINE 136 (July 2007).

In The Linguistic Turn, Rorty observed that if philosophy could give up its claims to be a modern, scientific discipline, then it would be able to move on to a “post-philosophical phase,” throwing away the cumbersome baggage of “pseudo-scientific argumentation” and reinventing itself as a “new art form.” In his most famous book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), he stepped up to the plate, proposing that philosophy should be seen not as a hotline to Truth about the World but as a loose literary tradition which might from time to time provide the public with new metaphors to live by, or new stories for articulating the past or imagining the future. He was thus able to extend a hand of friendship to the kind of “continental philosophers” who had always been anathema to his colleagues; but then he made new enemies because the admirers of Heidegger, Gadamer and Derrida were not pleased to have their heroes bundled up with loose-talking American pragmatists who had given up on the idea of a shining path to truth. Rorty’s disenchantment with hard-edged scientism led him not only to the sorts of thinkers that most professional philosophers dislike, but also to a kind of politics that they found equally unpalatable. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9692.

"Derrida Today," Department of Critical and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, July 10-12, 2008.

Update: The programme may be downloaded here: http://www.derridatoday.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/final-dt-conference-program3.pdf. Original Post (October 12, 2007): Deadline for paper abstracts and panel proposals: 15 November, 2007 (For details about submitting abstracts go to the conference website: http://www.derridatoday.org/ ) Keynotes: Prof. Catherine Malabou (Paris X Nanterre), Prof. Andrew Benjamin (Monash), Prof. Martin McQuillan (Leeds University). Special Round Table:Julian Wolfreys (Loughborough Uni, UK), Niall Lucy, Ros Diprose (UNSW), Margrit Schildrick (Queens, Belfast), Stephen Barker (Uni California, Irvine), and others to be announced Hosted by: Nicole Anderson & Nick Mansfield, Department of Critical and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University. Contact Nick and Nicole at:Email: dtconference@scmp.mq.edu.au. The theme of the conference is based on the new journal Derrida Today (general editors: Nick Mansfield and Nicole Anderson, and to be published by Edinburgh University Press, ISSN: 1754-8500). The first issue of the journal will be launched at the conference. Journal Website: http://www.eup.ed.ac.uk/journals/content.aspx?pageId=1&journalId=12856 Participants will be invited to submit article length versions of their papers for consideration for publication in the journal. Snail Mail: Nick Mansfield and Nicole Anderson, Derrida Today Conference organisers, Department of Critical and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia 2109; Email: dtconference@scmp.mq.edu.au ; Phone: +61 2 9850 8044.

Fearn, Nicholas. "Review of Simon Critchley's THE BOOK OF DEAD PHILOSOPHERS." INDEPENDENT July 13, 2008.

Critchley, Simon. The Book of Dead Philosophers. London: Granta, 2008. Once we get into the sober, modern era of analytic philosophy, the deaths become as straight-laced as the thinkers, except on the Continent where things are always different. When Jean-Paul Sartre expired from dropsy, Simone de Beauvoir threw herself on top of his corpse, where she drank herself to sleep. An exception on the Anglo-American side was A J Ayer, who died twice – the first time temporarily after choking on a piece of salmon. He came back with a tale of celestial cabinet ministers and a red light that rules the universe. His wife reported that he "has got so much nicer since he died". . . . Read the rest here: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-book-of-dead-philosophers-by-simon-critchley-864646.html.

Thompson, Simon. "Richard Rorty: the Making of an American Philosopher." TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION July 10, 2008.

Gross, Neil. Richard Rorty: the Making of an American Philosopher, 1931-1982. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. This book is a curious hybrid. One part is a relatively orthodox intellectual biography of Richard Rorty. It begins with accounts of his parents' intellectual interests and political commitments, then moves chapter by chapter from Rorty's undergraduate and masters degrees at Chicago, through his doctoral studies at Yale, to his first academic position at Wellesley College, and then to his time at Princeton, before taking up an interdisciplinary professorship at Virginia. The narrative ends with the publication of Rorty's collection of essays, Consequences of Pragmatism, in 1982. This part of the book is interesting for several reasons. Perhaps, most importantly, it counters the widely held view that Rorty began as an analytic philosopher and then defected to the pragmatist camp. In fact, as Neil Gross shows, Rorty was always sympathetic to pragmatist ideas, and in most of his work on analytic philosophy sought to demonstrate the desirability of dialogue between the analytic and pragmatist traditions. The other part of the book is an attempt to make a contribution to a "new sociology of ideas", one that in particular seeks to understand "some of the social processes that intellectuals encounter and navigate as they develop their ideas". In this part of the book, Gross provides an account of the work of Pierre Bourdieu on academic sociology (Homo Academicus) and Randall Collins on the sociology of philosophies. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=402680&c=1.

Pettigrew, David. "Review of Iain Macdonald, et al., eds. ADORNO AND HEIDEGGER." NDPR (July 2008).

Macdonald, Iain, and Krzysztof Ziarek, eds. Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. This volume proposes a significant undertaking: an investigation of the relation between the philosophical thought of Adorno and Heidegger. The editors write, "there is much to be gained from working through and reassessing the differences that have kept these two thinkers' works quarantined from each other for more than seven decades" (4). The book is, without a doubt, an important contribution to the field. However, the range of articles would have benefited from a more detailed introduction indicating the contents and interrelation of the various contributions. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13626.

Malik, Kenan. "Identity is That Which is Given."

Malik, Kenan. Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate. Oxford: Oneworld, 2008. Excerpt: We’re All Multiculturalists Now observed the American academic, and former critic of pluralism, Nathan Glazer in the title of a book. And indeed we are. The celebration of difference, respect for pluralism, avowal of identity politics - these have come to be regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive, antiracist outlook and as the foundation of modern liberal democracies. Ironically, culture has captured the popular imagination just as anthropologists themselves have started worrying about the very concept. After all, what exactly is a culture? What marks its boundaries? In what way is a 16-year old British born boy of Pakistani origin living in Bradford of the same culture as a 50-year old man living in Lahore? Does a 16-year white boy from Bradford have more in common culturally with his 50-year-old father than with that 16-year old ‘Asian’? Such questions have led most anthropologists today to reject the idea of cultures as fixed, bounded entities. Some reject the very idea of culture as meaningless. ‘Religious beliefs, rituals, knowledge, moral values, the arts, rhetorical genres, and so on’, the British anthropologist Adam Kuper suggests, ‘should be separated out from each other rather than bound together into a single bundle labelled culture’. ‘To understand culture’, he concludes, ‘we must first deconstruct it. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=338. Other long excerpts may be found here: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5425/ and http://newhumanist.org.uk/1809. A review may be found here (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/strange-fruit-by-kenan-malik-859393.html).

"Herder and his Impact," International Herder Society, Friedrich Schiller Universitat Jena, August 18-21, 2008.

The programme is available here: http://www.johann-gottfried-herder.net/english/ihs_activities.htm.

Kim, Alan. "Review of Andrea W. Nightingale's SPECTACLES OF TRUTH IN CLASSICAL GREEK PHILOSOPHY." NDPR (May 2005).

Nightingale, Andrea W. Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context. Cambridge: CUP, 2004. Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy (SOT) is the latest and hopefully not the last installment of Andrea Wilson Nightingale's (AN) project of situating ancient Greek philosophy in its cultural context. In her book, Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1995), AN presented Plato's dialogues as part of his struggle to define philosophy as a cultural practice distinct from rhetoric and sophistic. In SOT, she turns her attention to the various ways in which the religious pilgrimage called "theôria" was appropriated by fourth-century (BCE) philosophers in crafting both the private and public image. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=2461.

Brueckner, Anthony. "Review of Michael Forster's KANT AND SKEPTICISM." NDPR (July 2008).

Forster, Michael N. Kant and Skepticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008. Forster begins by asking: which forms of skepticism is Kant most worried about in the first Critique? Bucking the trend of much Anglo-American Kant commentary, Forster maintains that Kant's concern with what Forster calls "veil of perception" (hereafter vop) skepticism is something of a side show, nothing more than a "secondary concern" for Kant. VOP skepticism is what Kant calls "problematic idealism" in the Refutation of Idealism: it is Cartesian skepticism about knowledge of outer objects (e.g., cats) located in space. The problematic idealist "pleads the incapacity to prove, through immediate experience, any existence except our own". Forster makes a fairly reasonable textual case for downplaying the role of vop skepticism in Kant's thought. Further, there has always been the prima facie worry about how to square a concern with refuting Cartesian skepticism with a full embrace of transcendental idealism. But even so, in a book entitled Kant and Skepticism, one would have expected, for the sake of completeness, more than Forster's perfunctory treatment of the Refutation of Idealism and at least some discussion of the bearing of the Transcendental Deduction on vop skepticism. I will return to the latter issue later, and regarding the former, I note briefly the following criticism from Forster. Kant's premise in the Refutation of Idealism is "I am conscious of my own existence as determined in time". One plausible construal is that I know that I have had "mental states in a certain order over a stretch of time" (fn. 22, 97). However, according to Forster, "no 'veil of perception' skeptic worth his salt will concede this claim" (97). Against this, Cartesian skepticism is not about memory and does not challenge the sorts of knowledge about our own minds to which common sense lays claim (such as knowledge of the temporal ordering of at least some of our mental states). As Kant saw it, the Cartesian problem is about how to move from knowledge of our own minds to knowledge of the world apart from our minds. Kant claims to have solved that problem in the Refutation of Idealism. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13545.

Dentsoras, Dimitrios. "Review of Terence Irwin's THE DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS, Vol. 1." NDPR (July 2008).

Irwin, Terence. From Socrates to the Reformation. Vol. 1 of The Development of Ethics: a Historical and Critical Study. Oxford: OUP, 2007. In the first volume of his The Development of Ethics, Terence Irwin undertakes the ambitious task of offering a historical and critical study of moral philosophy from Socrates to the Reformation. Unlike other works on the history of ethics, Irwin does not simply give a sequential exposition of various historical moral theories, accompanied by an account of the possible philosophical foundations and merits of each theory. Rather, Irwin views the development of ethics as part of a tradition -- what he calls the "Socratic tradition," which he approaches in a critical manner. Not afraid of expressing his own philosophical preferences, Irwin places Aristotelian naturalism at the center of his exposition, and defends its importance in the history of ethics, as well as its basic philosophical soundness. He does so while remaining historically sensitive and accurate. Irwin achieves this by restricting his critical comments to their historical context, and showing that the original texts are rich enough to express (and perhaps reply to) our contemporary critical philosophical demands. Irwin is aware that his approach is not the only one, but argues convincingly that it is an important one that can promote our understanding both of ethics and of its history. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13525.

"Neuroeconomics: Hype or Hope?," Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam, November 20–22, 2008.

After having operated as a separate science for decades, economics is now opening up its boundaries to other disciplines. One such discipline is cognitive neuroscience. The nascent field of neuroeconomics is a booming business. Worldwide, more than a dozen of new Centers for Neuroeconomics Studies equipped with high tech brain scanners have been founded within the past few years. Several papers on neuroeconomics already found their way into prestigious academic journals such as Science and Nature. At the same time neuroeconomics meets resistance among economists (as perhaps best expressed in Gul and Pesendorfer's (2008) "The Case for Mindless Economics"). Many economists and methodologists are skeptical about the contribution neuroeconomics can make to economics. They question the relevance of data about decision-making processes at the neural level for addressing the sorts of questions economics is traditionally interested in.Is neuroeconomics a flimsy and fleeting hype in economics that is overselling itself? Or is neuroeconomics here to stay, offering the hope that economics will finally be transformed into a modern science? Topics: The Conference aims to offer a platform for discussing methodological and philosophical issues raised by the advent of neuroeconomics. More specifically, we invite paper submissions on the following topics: - What standards of scientific respectability and progress are implied (or invoked) in the claim that neuroeconomics will finally move economics into its proper standing of a modern science? - What consequences does neuroeconomics have for the subject matter, scope and method of economics? - How do the different disciplines of economics and of cognitive neuroscience relate to each other in neuroeconomics? Does the relationship between economics on the one hand and cognitive (neuro)science on the other need to be redefined? - Do we first need to know how different levels of analysis (e.g. of observable choice behavior, of its underlying computational algorithms and of the neural "hardware" in which they are implemented) relate to each other before we can tell how neuroeconomic evidence and findings bear on economics? If so, what levels are at stake and how are they related? - What light can insights from contemporary philosophy of mind shed on the topics raised here? - How is neural activity in people related to the various institutions in which they function? How can an improved understanding of neural processes inform institutional analysis? - What is the role and place of evolutionary theory in neuroeconomics Keynote Speakers: • Ariel Rubinstein (Tel Aviv University, New York University) • Paul J. Zak (Claremont Graduate University) • Don Ross (University of Alabama Birmingham, University of Cape Town) • John Davis (University of Amsterdam, Marquette University) • Uskali Mäki (University of Helsinki) • Jack Vromen (Erasmus University Rotterdam) • Francesco Guala (University of Exeter, San Raffaele University) Further information is here: http://www.eur.nl/fw/english/eipe/eipe_conferences/.

PUB: SENSE AND NONSENSE. PLI: WARWICK JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 19 (2008).

Table of Contents: "The Expression of Meaning in Deleuze's Ontological Proposition" by Ray Brassier "Expression and Immanence" by Miguel de Beistegui "Nonsense and Mysticism in Wittgenstein's Tractatus" by Angela Breitenbach "Epistemology and the Civil Union of Sense and Self-Contradiction: a Co-ordinated Solution to the Shared Problems of Political and Mainstream Epistemology" by Jeremy Barris "Presuppositionless Scepticism" by Ioannis Trisokkas Varia: "Essay on Transcendental Philosophy: A Short Overview of the Whole Work; On the Categories; Antinomies. Ideas" by Salomon Maimon "Conflicted Matter: Jacques Lacan and the Challenge of Secularising Materialism" by Adrian O. Johnson "Alain Badiou: Truth, Mathematics, and the Claim of Reason" by Christopher Norris "On the Horrors of Realism: an Interview with Graham Harman" by Tom Sparrow Reviews: "Earth Aesthesis: Sallis' Topographies and the Aesthetics of the Earth by Bobby George "The Natural History of the Unthinged: Iain Grant's Philosophies of Nature After Schelling" by James Trafford "Jay Lampert's Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy of History" by Giovanna Gioli and Matthew Dennis Further information is here: http://www.warwick.ac.uk/philosophy/pli_journal/vol_19.html.

Brook, Eric C. "Review of James Davidson's THE GREEKS AND GREEK LOVE." BMCR (July 2008).

Davidson, James. The Greeks and Greek Love: a Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007. As the subtitle of this text indicates, Davidson questions how ancient Greek homosexuality has been approached in recent scholarship, and seeks to reinterpret the evidence from the primary sources in order to clarify issues under current debate. As such, this text represents a shift that is underway regarding the study of Greek homosexuality that originally took its cue from scholars like Dover and Foucault. Davidson's main objections to their work has to do with their preoccupation with homosexual acts (particularly regarding anal sex), the correlation of these sexual acts with a discourse on domination, and the assertion that the word "homosexuality" does not reflect a historical reality that was true of the Greeks. . . . Read the rest here: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2008/2008-07-20.html.

Johnson, David M. "Review of David Wolfsdorf's TRIALS OF REASON." BMCR (July 2008).

Wolfsdorf, David. Trials of Reason: Plato and the Crafting of Philosophy. Oxford: OUP, 2008. Wolfsdorf's book is part of the recent welcome trend to combine the literary and analytical approaches to Plato's early dialogues. While Wolfsdorf positions himself early on as a critic of the analytical approach (associated above all with the late Gregory Vlastos and his students), his main debts clearly lie in that direction. Wolfsdorf's central contribution is a new method to resolve inconsistencies between statements made by Socrates within a single dialogue or within several early dialogues. The resolution of such inconsistencies is one of the greatest problems we face in unraveling the philosophy of the early dialogues, and Wolfsdorf's solution to this problem is clearly and forcefully presented. He argues that the attempt to find a consistent Socrates, whether he be the historical Socrates or a psychologically realistic character largely of Plato's creation, is fundamentally misguided. Socrates is a tool, a puppet used by Plato in different ways at different times, usually to advance Plato's own ideas but sometimes to mouth more conventional ones. By abandoning the search for a consistent Socrates, Wolfsdorf is able to find a consistent Platonic doctrine in the early dialogues. But the dialogues are not only treatises in disguise. Rather, Plato uses the dialogue form to illustrate the conflict between philosophy and what Wolfsdorf calls "anti-philosophy", whence the trials of reason of his title. Wolfsdorf addresses literary issues head-on in a way most unusual in the analytical tradition. But he does not very clearly develop what he means by "anti-philosophy". And by robbing Socrates of his integrity as a psychologically realistic character and therefore of much of his value as an exemplar of the philosophical life, Wolfsdorf effectively disarms philosophy in its battle with its rivals. Plato's Socrates, whether he is historical or not, has certainly led more readers to philosophy than has any other individual in the western tradition, and he has done so as much by the force of his personality and by his deeds as by the philosophical doctrines he advances. If Wolfsdorf is right, such readers have been misled. . . . Read the rest here: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2008/2008-07-23.html.

Feeney, Dennis. "Review of I. J. F. de Jong, et al., eds. TIME IN ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE." BMCR (July 2008).

de Jong, I. J. F., and R. Nuenlist, eds. Time in Ancient Greek Literature: Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative. 2 Vols. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Readers should be advised that the focus is rigorously narratological, so that the title is somewhat misleading: instead of Time in Ancient Greek Literature we might have had Some Results of Applying Narratological Analysis to Ancient Greek Literature. In their Epilogue the editors justify this particular narratological emphasis and make it perfectly plain that there are other approaches to the vast topic of time in narrative texts, such as the "philosophical-historical approach", or "through linguistics" (522). Their own aim has been to enlist contributors who can analyse a wide range of Greek texts through this particular lens, hoping especially to have a diachronic dimension which will throw variations over time and genre into relief (ix): in fact, the main overall conclusion is that "most narratological categories are not bound by genre: the same devices occur in different genres, and genres are not homogeneous where the use of narrative devices is concerned" (522). The risk remains, however, of seeing narratology as an end in itself. Too many of the papers in this volume end up appearing to have a virtually parochial interest in the categories of narratology per se, in a way that makes it hard to keep an eye on the larger picture that such analysis is meant to be elucidating. I kept thinking of the wonderful scene in the movie Shakespeare in Love when the actors have adjourned to the local pub after rehearsing Romeo and Juliet, and the actor playing the nurse is downing a pint as a friend asks him what this new play is all about: with the perspective of the true actor, he replies, "Well, there's this nurse..." I do not mean at all to decry the use of the analytical techniques or terminology of narratology, which can produce extraordinary interpretative results. In the case of Jean Genette, the pater narratologiae, his evolution of terminology in Discours du récit was continually in dialogue with the text of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, and the new forms of analysis he produced kept generating deep insights into the novel's core themes and concerns. Again, the point is simply that narratology is not an end in itself. There is a certain interest and utility in having it demonstrated in the case of all kinds of texts that they can be analysed in terms of analepsis and so on, but this demonstration would ideally be the beginning of criticism, not the end. The chapters in this book that really sing are the ones in which narratology is regarded as a tool instead of a goal; in these cases one suddenly sees how much light can be shed in unexpected places by the careful consideration of technique. Space forbids discussion of all the chapters, although they may all be recommended for anyone working on the authors in question, since they all succeed in demonstrating that narratological time-analysis has traction in each instance; I shall concentrate on some cases where the narratology seems to be more of a goal, and on some cases where it seems to be more of a tool. . . . Read the rest here: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2008/2008-07-24.html.

Gover, K. "Review of Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei's THE ECSTATIC QUOTIDIAN." NDPR (July 2008).

Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2007. The quotidian is an elusive and paradoxical phenomenon. Like the anthropologist whose very presence changes the society she intends to study, everydayness is transformed as soon as we try to reflect on it, since it is by definition that which recedes into the background. It seems that the only way to gain traction on the quotidian is through a kind of dialectic, whereby the familiar and the strange are held in contradistinction, each implying the other. Hence the paradoxical title of Gosetti-Ferencei's book The Ecstatic Quotidian, which means "stepping outside of an everyday familiarity": the ordinary can only be got hold of via the phenomenon of the extraordinary, and vice-versa. The conceptual starting point of this book is the observation that modernist movements in philosophy and art all share a distinctive turn toward everydayness as a theme. Gosetti-Ferencei notes that the modernist interest in the quotidian is fundamentally ambivalent: it is an object of both fascination and denigration. In contrast to those theorists who are critical of the everyday, seeing it as fallen, alienated, and empty, Gosetti-Ferencei announces in the introduction that her book takes an affirmative approach. As its subtitle indicates, the book offers "sightings" of the ecstatic-everyday as it manifests itself in modernist art and thought. Each chapter approaches the subject either through a thematic lens, such as childhood, or through a particular medium, such as poetry or painting. As the term implies, these "sightings" are a series of scholarly, detailed discussions of the topic rather than an argument or series of arguments that build to a conclusion. The Ecstatic Quotidian is an excellent resource for those interested in the intersection between phenomenology and the visual art and poetry that both influenced and was inspired by it. Gosetti-Ferencei's insightful reflections and thorough research shows the richness of the dialogue between modernist art and thought. While the book leaves some of the larger implications of this dialogue unexplored, it is a valuable starting point for an investigation of the ways in which art and philosophy were engaged with each other in modernism to a degree perhaps unprecedented in the Western tradition. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13606.

CFP: "Feminist Rhetorics for Social Justice," Syracuse University, October 23-25, 2008.

In the academy, Feminist Rhetorics has, over the past two decades, become a very promising interdisciplinary field, spanning communication studies, women’s studies, rhetoric and writing studies, various branches of ethnic studies, and even branches of the social sciences. In a general sense, the term feminist rhetorics has referred to “to discourse advocating enlarged legal, economic, and political rights for women” (Karlyn Kohrs Campbell “Feminist Rhetoric” 301). Feminist rhetorics also have served as a way to document and analyze the multi-layered histories of feminist social movements. Scholars of feminist rhetorics have undertaken a large-scale historical recovery project that involves recovering, analyzing, and anthologizing speeches and written texts by feminist activists, organizers, and writers. There are now graduate seminars taught nationally on feminist rhetorics and many graduate students in communication studies and rhetorical studies are choosing to focus their work in this area, often blending scholarship and activism. In addition to focusing on the historical past, feminist rhetoricians also have studied and participated in strategies and movements for contemporary feminist social change in the arenas of public policy, politics, education, the workplace, and community organizing. Our major themes and questions for the symposium will be as follows: 

Feminist Activism and Rhetoric:

• How can we evaluate and understand the influence of women’s historical, geographic, economic, social, and political locations on rhetorical tactics and strategies for feminist activism?
• How can we understand the roles that individuals or groups take in maintaining or dismantling gender-based inequalities at local, national, and transnational levels?
• How can we address the presumed division between scholarly theorizing and activist work, and how can rhetoric be a tool for bridging that presumed divide?

Feminist Rhetorical Histories:

• Which rhetorical histories have been recovered, and which have been omitted? What generational and social movement tensions are present in these feminist rhetorical histories?
• What role has public memory played in feminist rhetorical histories? How have feminist rhetorical histories accounted for the histories and experiences of aging women, women with disabilities, working class women, women of color, lesbian and transgendered people, women living beyond the borders of the U.S. and Europe?
• How have rhetorical histories challenged the primary focus on the Anglo-American context as scholars have begun to engage transnational feminist rhetorical histories and contemporary practices?

Further information is available on the conference homepage: http://wrt.syr.edu/frSJ/.

Fuller, Steve. "Who Needs the Humanities?" PROJECT SYNDICATE (2008).

Nowadays, in country after country, policymakers have become obsessed with the need to strengthen science education. But what about the humanities – all those disciplines (literature, history, languages, and so forth) whose relevance to economic competitiveness is not so obvious? We need the humanities only if we are committed to the idea of humanity. If the humanities have become obsolete, then it may be that humanity is losing its salience. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/fuller6/English.

Smith, Caitlin. "Edmund Husserl and the Crisis of Europe." MODERN AGE 48.1 (2006).

EDMUND HUSSERL (1859-1938) was the last great European rationalist, albeit a unique and even paradoxical one: the father of phenomenology but also of existentialism; the Cartesian whose researches in the end eviscerate the cogito; the mathematician-logician whose ultimate concern was spirit. The final phase of his thought, like the final phase of his life, unfolded in Nazi Germany in the years just prior to the Second World War. . . . Husserl was to suffer persecution at the hands of the Nazis (and even at the hands of his erstwhile disciple Martin Heidegger) but his death in 1938 spared him the fate of his fellow Jews. And like so many German Jews, Husserl was thoroughly assimilated, more German than Jew, the product of high German intellectual culture, the “Good European” profoundly concerned with the destiny of a contemporary Europe dominated by Heidegger on the one hand and the Vienna Circle on the other; the rationalist offended, astonished, and challenged by the philosophical irrationalism, skepticism, and mysticism of his day and among his own disciples. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.mmisi.org/ma/48_01/smith.pdf.

Neiman, Susan. "Can and Kant." GLOBE AND MAIL May 10, 2008.

Kant was a terrible writer. He was honest enough to admit it, and gracious enough to publish his longing for the elegance and clarity of style with which two of his contemporaries – David Hume and Moses Mendelssohn – were born. Kant knew The Critique of Pure Reason was a problem, and his later attempts to revise or summarize it only made things worse. Still, the book is the single greatest work of modern philosophy, and has but one rival – Plato’s Republic – in the history of thought. It’s not only general readers who are put off by its clumsy, sluggish writing; most university courses spend so much time on the first half that they stop before reaching what Kant said was the point. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.susan-neiman.de/docs/kant_globe08.pdf.

Moulakis, Athanasios. "Twelve Ways to Know the Past." WILSON QUARTERLY (2008).

The universities’ culture wars have abated. Most people have grown tired of the debates between the worth of “dead white males” on the one hand, and the sins of politically correct ideologues on the other. Neither side can be said to have won. An uneasy truce reigns, broken by an occasional ­rear-­guard action. But the underlying issues have not gone away. How we interpret the past affects the norms by which we ­live. . . . But a cultural legacy is never simply given. As Goethe observed, one must acquire it in order to possess it. To come alive, a cultural heritage needs to be read, deciphered, interpreted, and felt. It is like a landscape: What aesthetic, cultural, and social messages it conveys depend on how you look at it. The same valley looks different in the eyes of a painter, a rancher, or a military planner. Depending on who I am, I can see that valley as picturesque, as good for grazing cattle, or as suitable for deploying light cavalry. And landscapes are sometimes deliberately arranged to suit the expectations or taste of the viewer. The gondolier sings Neapolitan songs, to the delight of foreign honeymooners and the horror of true Venetians. The Houses of Parliament rebuilt after the Blitz are “Gothic,” faithfully reproducing the Victorian fake. Revivals and renaissances are other ways of rearranging the past. As Ernest Renan wrote in his 1882 essay “What Is a Nation?” a nation coheres as much around what it forgets as what it remembers. There are many ways of apprehending (and eliding) the past, but 12 stand out as most ­common. . . . Find the answer here: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=358748.

Fish, Stanley. "What Did the Framers Have in Mind?" THINK AGAIN BLOG. NEW YORK TIMES July 6, 2008.

Whatever side of the Second Amendment controversy you may be on, the clear winner in District of Columbia v. Heller (striking down a Washington, D.C., ban on hand guns) was intentionalism, the thesis that a text means what its author or authors intend. The text in dispute is 27 words long, and it is cited in the opening pages of each of the three opinions: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” None of the words in this sentence is esoteric and the syntax is straightforward; but if textual simplicity were sufficient to determine meaning, there would be no reason for 157 pages of close legal and linguistic argument. What are the justices arguing about? A lot – the meaning of words, the significance of documents contemporary to the framing of the amendment, debates at constitutional conventions, regulations adopted or not adopted by various states, the Court’s own precedents – but basically the argument is about what the framers had in mind. As Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, observes, “The two sides in the case have set out very different interpretations of the amendment.” But the two sides do not proceed from different theories of interpretation. Both agree that the task is to read the amendment in the light of the purpose the framers would have had in writing it. They disagree about what that purpose was, and the materials they cite are meant to establish a purpose so firmly that in the light of it the words of the amendment will have one and only one obvious meaning. . . . Read the rest here: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/what-did-the-framers-have-in-mind/.

McClay, Wilfred. "The Burden of the Humanities." WILSON QUARTERLY (2008).

What does it mean to speak of the “burden” of the humanities? The phrase can be taken several ways. First, it can refer to the weight the humanities themselves have to bear, the things that they are supposed to accomplish on behalf of us, our nation, or our civilization. But it can also refer to the ­near ­opposite: the ways in which the humanities are a source of responsibility for us, and their recovery and cultivation and preservation our job, even our ­duty. Both of these senses of ­burden—­the humanities as preceptor, and the humanities as ­task—­need to be included in our sense of the problem. The humanities, rightly pursued and rightly ordered, can do things, and teach things, and preserve things, and illuminate things, which can be accomplished in no other way. It is the humanities that instruct us in the range and depth of human possibility, including our immense capacity for both goodness and depravity. It is the humanities that nourish and sustain our shared memories, and connect us with our civilization’s past and with those who have come before us. It is the humanities that teach us how to ask what the good life is for us humans, and guide us in the search for civic ideals and institutions that will make the good life ­possible. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=452772&forumaction=forums.threads.

Reisz, Matthew. "Off the Couch, Back on its Feet." TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION June 12, 2008.

The American Psychoanalytic Association recently set up a task force with an ambitious goal - to "reach and captivate the 10,000 best minds of the next generation with the power of psychoanalytic ideas". Clearly worried that its influence was in decline, it employed Jonathan Redmond and Michael Shulman to research "access to psychoanalytic ideas in American undergraduate institutions". Their report was recently published in the association's journal. After looking at the course catalogues of 150 highly ranked colleges and universities, the authors note that "psychology departments typically offer little coursework on psychoanalysis ... most often it is mentioned dismissively in textbooks describing psychoanalytic ideas as scientifically invalid, or in misleading, incomplete or simplistic ways". Readers could well conclude that it was just "a desiccated and dead tributary of the psychological mainstream". Yet this is only half the story because "six times more courses featuring psychoanalytic ideas are available outside psychology departments than in them". Many are in the humanities and social sciences, where "basic psychoanalytic concepts have been undergoing significant transformation". As a result, the report points out, "clinically orientated analysts might find themselves on unfamiliar ground", particularly when courses are "steeped in Lacanian concepts or postmodern theorising". . . . Read the rest here: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=402337&c=1.

Darnton, Robert. "The Library in the New Age." NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS June 12, 2008.

Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google? How to make sense of it all? I have no answer to that problem, but I can suggest an approach to it: look at the history of the ways information has been communicated. Simplifying things radically, you could say that there have been four fundamental changes in information technology since humans learned to speak. . . . Read more here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21514.

Fifth Conference on the Dialogical Self, University of Cambridge, August 26-29, 2008.

The concept of dialogical self is a new development in psychology which combines the work of theorists such as Bakhtin and James with the latest developments in cultural, cognitive and social psychology and in psychotherapy. This new approach is closely related to narrative psychology, constructivism, and cultural psychology, but the focus is upon the multivoiced self. According to the concept of the dialogical self, the individual self is social in origin and dialogical in function. The self reflects and appropriates the voices of society and significant others, and within the functioning of the self we find these voices in dialogue. Exploration of the dialogical self has broad scope, ranging from literary sciences to brain research and from empirical psychology to psychotherapy practice. It brings together different fields of psychology, such as personality, developmental, social, and clinical psychology. Across these diverse fields, the concept of the dialogical self provides an interdisciplinary platform for innovative research, theory and practice. Central topics of interest include: self and identity, culture and self, globalization, music and dialogue, power and rhetoric, dialogue and political psychology, reconstruction of self-narratives in psychotherapy, dialogue and development. The Fifth International Conference on the Dialogical Self will focus upon the self and dialogue and the ways in which meaning is constructed and reconstructed. The purpose of the conference is to organize interchange and discussion of problems related to the dialogical self across the boundaries of specific (sub)disciplines. As such, the Fifth International Conference on the Dialogical Self is open to psychologists and representatives of other social sciences and arts. More information is available on the conference homepage: http://www.dialogicalscience.com/. The programme is available here: http://www.dialogicalscience.com/DS%20timetable%20chge%20&%20TITLES__5.pdf.

CFP: "The Subject in Question." PLI: THE WARWICK JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 20 (2008).

The deadline for submissions to volume 20: 'The Subject in Question', has been extended to the 30th of September. The call for papers is reposted in full below. Pli invites submissions for the next volume (Volume 20), which will be concerned with the philosophy of the subject, whether classical, critical, or transformative. "There never 'remains' anything of the subject, since he is to be created on each occasion, like a focal point of resistance, on the basis of the folds which subjectivize knowledge and bend power." Gilles Deleuze, Foucault "A subject is not a result - any more than it is an origin." Alain Badiou, Being and Event "Any theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the 'masculine'." Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman The notion of the subject is a staple of the history of philosophy. Whether deployed in discussions of knowledge, agency, or identity, it has possessed a distinguished place in determining philosophy's destiny. However, from Nietzsche, through structuralism, post-structuralism and beyond, this primacy of the subject, and even its very consistency, has been brought into question. The subject's access to truth has been questioned, its unitary agency has been fractured, and the very possibility of its origin has been cast into doubt. This is not to detail the differences (sexual, ethnic, and otherwise) that the subject, as universal and self-identical form, has been said to suppress. Even within the question of sexual difference there is controversy: some strive to de-problematise the divide between gender as nurture and sex as nature, others essentialise the biological body to unravel discrepancies in the ontological. In light of these questions, it is legitimate to ask: can the subject be renewed? Can it be reinvented, as witness to non-propositional truth, decentred locus of conflicting desires, or as embodied, visceral and inclusive of differences? Or, must we abandon the notion of the subject under the weight of these critiques? Or even, are both approaches missing the real power and insight of the classical accounts of the subject? In this issue we ask for answers to these questions. We particularly welcome papers on Butler, Irigaray, Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger, Zizek, Badiou, Deleuze, the history of the subject from Descartes to Hegel, and the subject in the phenomenological tradition. Examples of topics that could be covered by papers are:- - Foucault, Butler and the Constitution of Subjectivity - The Embodied Subject - The Problems of the Subject-Object Distinction - Sexual Difference and Ontico-Ontological Distinction - The Subject, Agency and Desire - Badiou's Subject of Truth - Meillassoux's Critique of Correlationism - Psychoanalysis and the Cartesian Subject We also invite submissions covering other topics of interest for our Varia section, along with submissions for our Reviews section. Submissions, no longer than 8,000 words, should be sent in the form of a single hard copy, plus a copy on disk as a Word or RTF file. Alternatively, we accept submissions by email to: plijournal@googlemail.com. We only accept articles and will not review abstracts, nor should abstracts be included with full drafts. The deadline for submissions is 30th September 2008. Please refer to the "Notes for Contributors" on this website. Include an e-mail address if possible for future correspondence. Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy University of Warwick Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK. Visit the journal homepage at http://www.warwick.ac.uk/philosophy/pli_journal/.

PUB: PHILOSOPHICAL FRONTIERS 3.1 (2008).

The Table of Contents includes: Articles: Some Versions of Platonism: Mathematics and Ontology According to Badiou by Christopher Norris (Cardiff University) Berlin, Dewey and Rawls: Relativism and Liberalism by Martin A. Bertman (Helsinki University) Could God Know What I Would Freely Do? Molinism and the Grounding Objection by Richard H. Corrigan (University College Dublin) Consciousness and the Alleged Failure of Analytic Philolosophy by Majid Amini (Virginia State University) Japanese and Russian Philosophies: a Comparative Study by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein (Tuskegee University) Hegel’s Pyjamas: Refashioning World-History in Light Of Postcolonial Criticism by Gina Altamura and J. M. Fritzman (Lewis & Clark College) Consequentialism and Permitting Too Much by Tanya Ward (York University) Embodied and Situated Cognition: Significance and Promise of a Paradigm Shift? by Nader N. Chokr (Shangdong University) Critical Discussions: A Critical Appraisal of Amini's 'Consciousness and the Alleged Failure of Analytical Philosophy' by Steven Bond (Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick) Visit the journal homepage here: http://www.philosophicalfrontiers.com/vol3issue1.html.

PUB: KRITIKE 2.1 (2008).

A new issue is now online at http://www.kritike.org/Current_Issue.html. Table of Contents: Editorial: Marking the First Year of Kritike: an Online Journal of Philosophy - The Editor Articles: Interruptions: Derrida and Hospitality by Mark W. Westmoreland Iris Murdoch’s The Bell: Tragedy, Love, and Religion by Kenneth Masong 'To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die?' by Saitya Brata Das A Comparative Study on the Theme of Human Existence in the Novels of Albert Camus and F. Sionil Jose by F. P. A. Demeterio The War on Concepts: The Thought of Jan Patočka and the War on Terror by Katy Scrogin Mass Mentality, Culture Industry, Fascism by Saladdin Said Ahmed The Causal Relevance and Heterogeneity of Program Explanations in the Face of Explanatory Exclusion by Wilson Cooper A Freewheeling Defense of Kant's Resolution of the Third Antinomy by Todd D. Janke The Structures of Perception: An Ecological Perspective by Michael James Braund Book Reviews : Powell, Jason, Jacques Derrida: A Biography by Marko Zlomislic Evans, C. Stephen, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays by Robert C. Cheeks Drake, David, Sartre and Bernasconi, Robert, How to Read Sartre by Marella Ada Mancenido

Griffiths, Paul. "Philosophy of Biology." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY July 4, 2008.

Three different kinds of philosophical enquiry fall under the general heading of philosophy of biology. First, general theses in the philosophy of science are addressed in the context of biology. Second, conceptual puzzles within biology itself are subjected to philosophical analysis. Third, appeals to biology are made in discussions of traditional philosophical questions. The first two kinds of philosophical work are typically conducted in the context of a detailed knowledge of actual biology, the third less so. Philosophy of biology can also be subdivided by the particular areas of biological theory with which it is concerned. Biology is a diverse set of disciplines, ranging from historical sciences such as paleontology to engineering sciences such as biotechnology. Different philosophical issues occur in each field. The latter part of the entry discusses how philosophers have approached some of the main disciplines within biology. . . . Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/biology-philosophy/.

47th Annual Conference, Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, Duquesne University, October 16-18, 2008.

The Programme for what is the largest annual conference devoted to Continental philosophy in North America may be downloaded here: http://spep.org/2008_Program.pdf.

Tatar, György. "The Heaviest Burden: Nietzsche and the Death of God." EUROZINE June 20, 2008.

In Nietzsche's mind, the total collapse of hitherto existing goals and values – their general loss of reality – is formulated as the absence of world. According to him, unlike the ancients, modern man no longer inhabits an eternal world created for him. He is "moving, away from all suns, plunging continually, through an infinite nothing". However, because the meaning of the news about the death of God are still distant and strange to him, he still lives as if he lived in a divinely created world, even if he does not believe in it. In Nietzsche's conception, the images man makes of the world and of himself are the externalizations of his goals, values, mistakes, truths and prejudices. More precisely, the ones emerging victorious from the battle over goals and values will be the ones giving shape to the world of posterity. It is they who become its "higher man". Regardless of greater or smaller differences across different customs, or of the historical evolution of beliefs, the essential nature of these goals and values – the fundamental structure of world they belong to – remains the same. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-06-20-tatar-en.html.

McKie, Robin. "How Darwin Won the Evolution Race." OBSERVER June 22, 2008.

'Wallace's letter gave Darwin a good kick up the backside,' says the geneticist Steve Jones. 'He had prevaricated for 20 years and would have done so for another 20 if he hadn't realised someone else was on the trail.' The summer of 1858 changed everything for Darwin. Although by no means an arrogant man, he knew his worth. He was already a Royal Society Gold Medal winner and was not going to be robbed by a whippersnapper specimen collector in Malaysia. So he sat down, with a board across his knee, on the only chair in his house that could accommodate his long legs, and wrote up the research he had been carrying out for the past 20 years. The end result was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, whose 150th anniversary will be celebrated next year along with the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. Remarkably, it is the only major scientific treatise to have been written, deliberately, as a piece of popular writing, a book whose interlacing story lines have been compared with those of George Eliot or Charles Dickens and which is peppered with richly inventive metaphor. 'Darwin was creating a lasting work of art,' as Darwin's biographer Janet Browne puts it. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jun/22/darwinbicentenary.evolution.

Parini, Jay. "Why Poetry Matters." CHRONICLE June 27, 2008.

Poetry doesn't matter to most people. They go about their business as usual, rarely consulting their Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Frost. One has to wonder if poetry has any place in the 21st century, when music videos and satellite television offer daunting competition for poems, which demand a good deal of attention and considerable analytic skills, as well as some knowledge of the traditions of poetry. In the 19th century, poets like Scott, Byron, and Longfellow had huge audiences around the world. Their works were best sellers, and they were cultural heroes as well. But readers had few choices in those days. One imagines, perhaps falsely, that people actually liked poetry. It provided them with narratives that entertained and inspired. It gave them words to attach to their feelings. They enjoyed folk ballads, too. In a sense, music and poetry joined hands. In the 20th century, something went amiss. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=knz7d3nc19g60h47flh19j1pn0dxc4sy.

Fear of Writing: Derrida Interview.

There is a revealing snippet from a longer interview in which Derrida expresses his fears concerning the consequences of his philosophising. See it here: http://themiddleeastinterest.wordpress.com/2008/06/30/derrida-interviews-fear-of-writing/.

Rorty, Richard. "Deconstructionist Theory." FROM FORMALISM TO POSTSTRUCTURALISM. Vol. 8 CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM. Cambridge: CUP, 1995.

Most of Derrida’s work continues a line of thought which begins with Friedrich Nietzsche and runs through Martin Heidegger. This line of thought is characterized by an ever more radical repudiation of Platonism of the apparatus of philosophical distinctions which the West inherited from Plato and which has dominated European thought. In a memorable passage in The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche describes ‘how the “true world” became a fable.’ There he sketches an account of the gradual dissolution of the other-worldy way of thinking common to Plato, to Christianity, and to Kant, the way of thinking which contrasts the True World of Reality with the World of Appearance created by the senses, or matter, or Sin, or the structure of the human understanding. The characteristic expressions of this other-worldliness, this attempt to escape from time and history into eternity, are what deconstructionists often call ‘the traditional binary oppositions’: true–false, original–derivative, unified–diverse, objective–subjective, and so on. . . . Read the rest here: http://themiddleeastinterest.wordpress.com/2008/07/01/deconstructionist-theory/.

CFP: 4th Annual Joint Conference, Society for European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy, University College Dublin, August 29-31, 2008.

Update: The conference website is here: http://www.ucd.ie/philosophy/sepfepconference/index.html. The list of speakers and paper titles is here: http://www.ucd.ie/philosophy/sepfepconference/resources/List%20of%20Speakers-Papers.pdf. Original Post (February 5, 2008): The fourth SEP-FEP Joint Conference offers faculty and graduate students the opportunity to present papers in any area of European Philosophy. Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be submitted by 30th May 2008 to Juliana Cardinale, either in electronic form to: J.Cardinale@lse.ac.uk or by mail to: Forum for European Philosophy, Room J5, European Institute, Cowdray House, Portugal Street, London School of Economics, London, WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom In addition to proposals for individual papers (as above) proposals for themed panels of (up to) four speakers on any area of European Philosophy are also invited. If you would like to organise a themed panel, please contact Brian O’Connor before 18th April, 2008 at brian.oconnor@ucd.ie. Keynote speakers: Françoise Dastur (Nice) Alessandro Ferrara (Rome) Jean Luc Marion (Paris IV/Chicago) Michael Rosen (Harvard). Plenary Sessions: The Possibilities of Critical Theory, Maeve Cooke (UCD) The Future of Phenomenology, Dermot Moran (UCD). Further Information: Dr Brian O'Connor, Head, School of Philosophy, Newman Building, University College Dublin Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland T: +353 1 716 8141 F: +353 1 269 3469

Hughes, Kathryn. "The Death of Life Writing." GUARDIAN June 28, 2008.

Nigel Hamilton opens his new primer How to Do Biography (Harvard) with the bold boast that we are living in "a golden age" of life writing. Really, he should know better. To anyone who reads, reviews or writes on the subject, such confidence is baffling. (Hamilton, a Briton, lives mainly in the States, which may account for his rosy myopia.) Seen close up, and with an eye to proper detail, biography appears in rather a bad way. 'Crisis' would probably be putting it too strongly, not least because it suggests a certain convulsive energy. 'Sclerosis' might be nearer. Sales, it's true, are still good, though showing signs of softening. According to Nielsen BookScan, literary biography reached an all-time high in 2005, but has since started to fall. General arts biographies are also down. However, to give an idea of how the non-fiction market as a whole has recently been bent out of shape, it's worth noting the exponential leap in celebrity memoir. Thus Katie Price has managed to shift 335,649 hardback copies of her life story Being Jordan, despite her jaunty admission that someone else wrote it. Meanwhile, Hilary Spurling's Costa-winning Matisse the Master, surely one of the best biographies of the decade, has lifetime hardback sales of just 12,451. . . . Read the rest here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/biography/story/0,,2287893,00.html.

Menand, Louis. "The Pound Error." NEW YORKER June 9, 2008.

Pound’s aspirations for literature were grand. He believed that bad writing destroyed civilizations and that good writing could save them, and although he was an élitist about what counted as art and who mattered as an artist, he thought that literature could enhance the appreciation of life for everyone. He was vain and idiosyncratic, but he had no wish to be a prima donna. No doubt Eliot, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Ernest Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford, and Marianne Moore would have produced interesting and innovative work whether they had known Pound or not, but Pound’s attention and interventions helped their writing and sped their careers. He edited them, reviewed them, got them published in magazines he was associated with, and included them in anthologies he compiled; he introduced them to editors, to publishers, and to patrons; he gave them the benefit of his time, his learning, his money, and his old clothes. “A miracle of ebulliency, gusto, and help,” Joyce called him. It’s true that he was flamboyant, immodest, opinionated, tactless, a pinwheel of affectation; he made people crazy and he became crazy himself. Gertrude Stein’s description of him is frequently invoked: “A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.” . . . Read the rest here: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/06/09/080609crbo_books_menand.

Kirsch, Adam. "Cloudy Trophies." NEW YORKER July 7, 2008.

Of all the piteous elements in Keats’s story, none is more distressing than the idea that he went to his grave convinced of his failure. For Keats’s last book, in addition to the three masterpieces named in its title, included a series of odes—“Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to Psyche,” “Ode on Melancholy,” and “To Autumn”—that are now universally regarded as among the greatest poems in the English language. If any single book ever earned its author immortality, it was this one. And, as Stanley Plumly points out in Posthumous Keats (Norton; $27.95), his moving new study of the poet’s work and legend, “one could form a considerable collection from what was left out of this last book.” Some of Keats’s best poems, including “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” were never collected in his lifetime. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/07/07/080707crbo_books_kirsch?currentPage=all.

CFP: "Queer in Europe," Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Sexuality and Gender in Europe, University of Exeter, September 13-15, 2008.

Queer theory as an academic discourse emerged in the1980s in the Anglo-American world in the wake of post-structuralist currents coming from continental Europe, such as Foucaldian discourse analysis and Derridean deconstruction. It constituted both a reaction against identity-politics-based perspectives, such as feminism and gay and lesbian studies on the one hand, and a development, modification and expansion of them on the other. (Indeed, in some quarters, it is now routinely used as a synonym for them.) Queer historicizes and relativizes the disciplinary assertions (psychological, medical) about the meanings of gender and sexualities. However, as well as issuing from the academy, queer also emerged at grass-roots level as a strategy of contestation in response to homophobic political rhetoric surrounding the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. (The ironic recuperation of the term ‘queer' by Queer Nation, for example, is central to the subverting force that queer discourse carries.) The importance of this link between ‘high theory' and political activism, and the intermeshing of European and American influences in creating queer, are only occasionally acknowledged or interrogated in the numerous existing published studies of queer. All too often, queer is treated at a national level as a national phenomenon, shorn of its crucial global dimension. Theorists are accused of abstraction, and activists of a lack of understanding. And the importance of queer both as an artistic practice and as a hermeneutic tool is often underplayed or ignored. Moreover, just as Moldavia famously exists in the American imagination as a land of unreality and fantasy, so mental maps of Europe are often distorted and incomplete. The aim of this conference, organized in conjunction with a network bid and a consciousness raising book project, is to address these issues by bringing together scholars and activists from a wide variety of backgrounds to discuss the following broad questions:

• How are paradigms of same sex love and other dissident sexualities experienced in different national cultures, discourses and political arenas?
• How is the body of work known as Queer Theory disseminated and received in Europe, and how do the paradigms identified in (1) affect this?
• How do the factors identified in (1) and (2) affect the production and reception of cultural artefacts (literature, film & television, drama and cabaret, the visual arts, popular music etc.)?
• How do the factors identified in (1), (2) and (3) impinge on and help to set the agenda for future scholarship and activism in this field?

What we are hoping for at this stage are expressions of interest from as wide a spectrum of potential participants as possible, including artists and practitioners as well as theorists and activists. It is envisaged that, alongside traditional academic papers, there will be workshops and breakout groups, sessions run by activists and artists, poster sessions and performances, a round table discussion and a publication workshop. A discussion forum will also be in place for those who are unable to attend the conference in person. A volume of conference proceedings, designed to reflect the whole spectrum of activities, will be submitted to Ashgate's ‘Queer Interventions' series, with anticipated publication in 2009.

Expressions of interest, accompanied where appropriate by paper titles and short proposals (no more than 200 words) should be addressed to either Lisa Downing l.m.downing@exeter.ac.uk or Robert Gillett r.m.gillett@qmul.ac.uk by May 31st 2008.

The conference homepage is here: http://www.sall.ex.ac.uk/content/view/1562/3/.

CFP: "Sexual Selves," Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, May 1-3, 2009.

The theme of the conference (“Sexual Selves”) is sexuality and sexual identity. Papers will consider themes of sexuality and sexual identity understood from epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical perspectives. We encourage both Continental and Analytic approaches to these issues. Further information is here: http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~pmarino/SPSLwebpage_files/CFP.pdf.

Fish, Stanley. "Fish to Profs: Stick to Teaching." Interview with Andy Guess. INSIDE HIGHER ED July 1, 2008.

Fish, Stanley. Save the World on Your Own Time. Oxford: OUP, 2008. Stanley Fish is very clear about what college professors should do in the classroom. They “can (legitimately) do two things: (1) introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry that had not previously been part of their experience; and (2) equip those same students with the analytical skills — of argument, statistical modeling, laboratory procedure — that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and to engage in independent research after a course is over.” And what should they not do? Everything else. . . . Read the rest here: http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/01/fish.