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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goldstein, Rebecca: Two Pieces on Spinoza.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jardine, Lisa. "What the Romans Did for Us." BBC NEWS UK MAGAZINE. August 1, 2008.

Heroic buildings are, as Boris Johnson observed, one of the Roman Empire's great legacies. But more lasting and far-reaching even than these is the influence of the Roman rhetorical tradition - an array of instructions and strategies for using language to persuade. Our legal system, public debating conventions, and even the way contentious issues are argued over daily in newspapers and on television, have all been shaped and defined by a method credited to the great Roman orator Cicero, and reduced to a set of practical rules in the Oratorical Institutes of the later pedagogic writer Quintilian. . . . Roman discussions of exemplary forms of public debate are particularly relevant today. Our press and broadcast media currently thrive on the lurid presentation of controversy, particularly in the areas of science and medicine. Some of us are beginning to think that the tradition of adversarial argument is being tested to the limit. Last month the media regulator Ofcom published its response to complaints brought against a Channel 4 programme shown in March 2007, entitled The Great Global Warming Swindle. . . . Read the rest here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7537766.stm.

Friedman, Rachel D. "Review of Lorna Hardwick, et al., eds. CLASSICS IN POST-COLONIAL WORLDS." BMCR (August 2008).

Hardwick, Lorna, and Carol Gillespie, eds. Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds: Classical Presences. Oxford: OUP, 2007.

I take it as a sign of the health of our discipline that it seems no longer possible to dismiss reception studies, or, what used to be called the 'Classical Tradition,' as a minor or even marginal subfield of the discipline of classics. Classicists, slowly catching up with members of other academic fields, have begun realizing that it is no longer sufficient to devote ourselves to the recovery of some positivist philological truth while ignoring the historical, social, and political circumstances that have conditioned the reading of these ancient texts from which these so-called truths have been recovered. Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds, a collection of nineteen papers originally presented at a conference in 2004 at the Open University and published in the Oxford Classical Presences series, is an important indication of the newly prominent place of reception studies in the field of classics and also an interesting barometer of the current state of such studies. It is co-edited by Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie. Hardwick has been an important pioneer in the field and has, in numerous essays and books, laid the groundwork for what these new reception studies might look like. Carol Gillespie is the Project Officer of the Classical Receptions Project at the Open University, of which Hardwick is Director, though unfortunately there is no biographical notice for Gillespie in the list of contributors. This volume takes its place among other recently published collections such as the Blackwell Companion to Classical Receptions (edited by Hardwick and Christopher Stray), and Classics and the Use of Reception (edited by Charles Martindale), all of which perform the important function of exposing scholars to some of the new directions in which the field of classics is expanding. What distinguishes this volume from the others is its exclusive focus on the role of classics in 'post-colonial worlds.' Hardwick explains in her introduction (3) that the terms 'colonial' and 'postcolonial' were, for the purposes of the conference on which this collection is based, "used in their widest sense to include domination and emancipation through educational, ideological, cultural economic means, as well as through physical force." In its exploration both of the role that classics played in colonialism and in the 'writing back' against the empire, this volume serves as an important next step following the volume edited by Barbara Goff in 2005 and published by Duckworth, Classics and Colonialism, which is a collection of essays based on a conference in 2001 at the Institute of Classical Studies in London. Goff says, in her introduction to that volume (1), that the essays "investigate a selection of the ways in which the projects of the British Empire have been furthered or undermined by a cultural politics focused on the classics." Scholars new to this subfield of reception studies will find a rich sampling of the kind of work being done in this area, and scholars already engaged in questions surrounding the intersection of classics and colonialism will surely find many of these new essays stimulating. . . .

Contents: Introduction , Lorna Hardwick Case Studies: (1) Trojan Women in Yorubaland: Femi Osofisan's Women of Owu, Felix Budelmann (2) Antigone's Boat: The Colonial and the Post-colonial in Tegonni: An African Antigone, by Femi Osofisan, Barbara Goff (3) Antigone and her African Sisters: West African Versions of a Greek Original, James Gibbs (4) Cross-Cultural Bonds Between Ancient Greece and Africa: Implications for Contemporary Staging Practices, John Djisenu (5) The Curse of the Canon: Ola Rotimi's The Gods Are Not to Blame, Michael Simpson (6) Post-Apartheid Electra: In the City of Paradise, Elke Steinmeyer (7) Sculpture at Heroes' Acre, Harare, Zimbabwe: Classical Influences?, Jessie Maritz Encounter and New Traditions: (8) Perspectives on Post-Colonialism in South Africa: The Voortrekker Monument's Classical Heritage, Richard Evans (9) Imperial Reflections: The Post-Colonial Verse-Novel as Post-Epic, Katharine Burkitt (10) A Divided Child, or Derek Walcott's Post-Colonial Philology, Cashman Kerr Prince (11) Arriving Backwards: The Return of The Odyssey in the English-Speaking Caribbean, Emily Greenwood (12) `If you are a woman': Theatrical Womanizing in Sophocles' Antigone and Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona's The Island, Rush Rehm (13) Finding a Post-colonial Voice for Antigone: Seamus Heaney's Burial at Thebes, Stephen E. Wilmer Challenging Theory: Framing Further Questions: (14) `The same kind of smile': About the `Use and Abuse' of Theory in Constructing the Classical Tradition, Freddy Decreus (15) From the Peloponnesian War to the Iraq War: A Post-Liberal Reading of Greek Tragedy, Michiel Leezenberg (16) Western Classics, Indian Classics: Postcolonial Contestations, Harish Trivedi (17) Shades of Multilingualism and Multivocalism in Modern Performances of Greek Tragedy in Post-Colonial Contexts, Lorna Hardwick (18) The Empire Never Ended, Ika Willis (19) Another Architecture, David Richards

Read the rest of the review here: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2008/2008-08-05.html.

CFP: "Polyphony and Intertextuality in Dialogue," International Conference on Dialogue Analysis, Pompeu Fabra University, September 15-18, 2009.

As Mikhail Bakhtin has extensively argued in his works, language is essentially dialogic and polyphonic. The exchange between at least two speakers is the normal manifestation of speech, but each discourse is crisscrossed by several other historical, social and individual discourses. About forty years later, Oswald Ducrot demonstrated that polyphony is inscribed in the very meaning of words. Other voices and other texts can be heard in each discourse implicitly or explicitly. These voices and these texts can play a significant role in the argumentative orientation of the interaction. Other voices and other texts can be heard in each discourse implicitly or explicitly. These voices and these texts can play a significant role in the argumentative orientation of the interaction. Scholars from several disciplines are invited to explore the various ways in which polyphonic and intertextual phenomena are acting in dialogue: code switching, register variations, indirect speech, quotation, allusion, irony, to name but a few. Such explorations will enable a better understanding of the meaning constructed in dialogues at multifarious levels and diverse situations. It will help develop a more precise description of numerous discourse genres, but it will also benefit the comprehension of complex forms of dialogue in the framework of the ongoing world globalization and in increasingly multicultural societies. Plenary Speakers: Jacqueline Authier-Revuz, Université Paris 3 François Cooren, University of Montreal Ute Heidmann, Université de Lausanne Robert Sanders, University of Albany Enric Vallduví, Universitat Pompeu Fabra de Barcelona Further information may be found here: http://www.upf.edu/dtf/activita/IADA2009/index.html.

PUB: ENVIRONMENT AND PLANNING D: SOCIETY AND SPACE 26.4 (2008).

The latest issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space is now available online at http://www.envplan.com/contents.cgi?journal=D&issue=current. Contents:

• Guest editorial: Pakistan—an ungovernable space? 571 – 581 by Robina Mohammad
• The Shock Doctrine: a discussion 582 – 595 by Naomi Klein, Neil Smith
• The Technological metaphysics of planetary space: being in the age of globalization 596 – 610 by Mikko Joronen
• Foucault’s spatial combat 611 – 626 by Peter Johnson
• The Work of policy: actor networks, governmentality, and local action on climate change in Portland, Oregon 627 – 646 by Ted Rutland, Alex Aylett
• Out of rubble: natural disaster and the materiality of the house 647 – 662 by Justin Wilford
• On Inscriptions and ex-inscriptions: the production of immediacy in a home telecare service 663 – 675 by Daniel López, Miquel Domènech
• Inventing seed: the nature(s) of intellectual property in plants 676 – 697 by Thom van Dooren
• The Power of water: developing dialogues between Foucault and Gramsci 698 – 718 by Michael Ekers, Alex Loftus
• Space and protest policing at international summits 719 – 735 by Mike Zajko, Daniel Béland

Acts of genocide:

• Introduction 736 – 739 by Christian Abrahamsson
• Beseiged history? An evaluation of Shooting Dogs 740 – 746 by Nigel Eltringham
• Sacrifice as gothic romance 747 – 751 by Bülent Diken
• UNTITLED 752 – 757 by Gunnar Olsson

Reviews 758 – 760

• Minca on Agamben: Il potere e la gloria
• Garrett on Edensor: Industrial ruins: space, aesthetics and materiality

Books received

7th Conference on Argumentation, International Society for the Study of Argumentation, University of Amsterdam, June 29-July 2, 2010.

Keynote Speakers: Maurice Finocchiaro (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) James Klumpp (University of Maryland) James Freeman (Hunter College, City University of New York). The planning committee of the 7th ISSA Conference invites presentations of original, non-published work on argumentation. Argumentation theorists, (informal) logicians, discourse analysts, communication scholars, rhetoricians, legal scholars, and other scholars involved in the study of argumentation are all encouraged to take part. Anyone who wishes to present a paper can submit an abstract in English to the planning committee by sending an e-mail attachment to issa-fgw@uva.nl. Abstracts (ca. 250 words), prepared for blind refereeing, must be submitted in Word no later than November 1, 2009. All abstracts should be accompanied by a separate file in which the author indicates his/her research interests and provides a list of key publications on argumentation. Please include your surname and "issa abstract" in the subject entry of your e-mail message. Themes: Argument schemes Argumentation structures Fallacies Theoretical issues Argumentative strategies Argumentation and stylistics Ethos and pathos in argumentation Analysis of controversies Argumentation in debate Persuasion research Interpersonal argumentation Visual argumentation Religious argumentation Argumentation and epistemology Argumentation in the media Argumentation in a medical context Argumentation in a legal context Argumentation in a political context Further information on the 7th ISSA Conference is available at: http://www.hum.uva.nl/issa. The address of the planning committee is: Frans H. van Eemeren, University of Amsterdam, Department of Speech Communication, Argumentation Theory and Rhetoric, Spuistraat 134, 1012 VB Amsterdam; email: issa-fgw@uva.nl.

Sax, Boria. "Review of Derrida's THE ANIMAL THAT THEREFORE I AM." H-NET REVIEW (July 2008).

Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. Theorists constantly remind us that words like 'nature,' 'God,' 'civilization,' or 'consciousness,' except in the most restrictive contexts, have nothing close to the sort of precision that we usually expect from academic work, and it is very easy to dismiss them as incoherent or even meaningless. But, to the immense frustration of many positivists, analytic philosophers, and deconstructionists, no amount of critique or complaint ever seems to make such words disappear. They grow and evolve in ways that seem well beyond the control of those who use them (as even their critics almost always do), as if the words themselves were alive. In The Animal that Therefore I Am, Derrida expresses his intense opposition to the concept of the 'Animal.' . . . Read the rest here: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=207901217255183.

Hirsch, E. D., Jr. "The Religious Roots of 'Child-Centered' Education." CLASSICAL TEACHER (Summer 2007).

There are many disputes within the education field, but none so vituperative as the reading and math wars—the battles over how best to teach children to read and to solve arithmetic problems. These aren’t just disputes over instructional techniques--they are expressions of two distinct and opposing understandings of children’s nature and how children learn. The two sides are best viewed as expressions of romantic versus classical orientations to education. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.memoriapress.com/articles/hirsch.html.

Bauerlein, Mark. " The Remarkable Turn of E. D. Hirsch." CHRONICLE BRAINSTORM August 2, 2008.

Back in the 1960s, after publishing a book on Wordsworth, Hirsch published several essays in literary theory that became tokens of a certain outlook on interpretation. (It is noteworthy how many mid-century theorists wrote important essays and books on Romantic poets as they were crafting their ideas — Hirsch, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Northrop Frye, Earl Wasserman, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom.) His works “Objective Interpretation” and Validity in Interpretation were key statements in the initial phase of Theory (around the years 1965 to 1975), and they were taken as the significant position contrary to that of “undecidability,” “aporia,” and other poststructuralist and postmodern uncertainties. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/bauerlein/the-remarkable-turn-of-e-d-hirsch.

Baggini, Julian. "Truth Stranger than Falsehood." GUARDIAN July 31, 2008.

It is ironic that philosophy – the subject that aspires to describe the most universal and fundamental truths – is probably, as a matter of fact, the least universal discipline of all. At any global scientific gathering, for example, you could at least be sure that everyone there was doing the same subject. They'd also largely use the same methods and, except at the cutting edge, would agree on a huge body of fact too. In philosophy, however, what counts as universal is very local. Here in Seoul, the diverse approaches on display at the conference range from Jainism, Buddhism and Confucianism, through to Hegelian dialectics, hermeneutics and Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Although all are welcome into the philosophy family for the congress, it is not clear that what they mean by philosophy is the same thing at all. However, dialogue is de rigeur and everyone does their best to at least pretend to treat all the different forms of philosophy equally. But this is politics, not philosophy. For instance, I've just been to a session by an organisation called Jain Vishva Bharati, in which 10 people lined up to describe "The Role of Jainism in Evolving a New Paradigm of Philosophy." . . . Only the day before [the former president of FISP Ioanna Kuçuradi] had spoken about the need to resist relativism and insist knowledge has an object. The Jainists, however, had explicitly denied the "binary system of logic" which "maintains that if something is true it cannot be false." "This is not acceptable to the Jain point of view," said Prof S. R. Bhatt, although presumably he would allow that it was acceptable too. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/31/korea.

Tallis, Raymond. "Saving Truth." PHILOSOPHY NOW 67 (2008).

Truth has been having a rather hard time in recent decades. Insults have been hurled at it from left and right. Truth, we are endlessly told, is relative to perspective, to viewpoint, to ‘where you’re coming from’. The most popular versions of such relativism connect truth with power: what counts as true is the world according to those who have the greatest political or institutional clout. Even the truths of science are less about nature than about discourses that have become dominant for reasons other than their ability to uncover reality. Nietzsche’s famous riposte to the positivist claim that there are only facts – that “there are no such things as facts, only interpretations” – is a favourite among humanist intellectuals. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.philosophynow.org/issue67/67tallis.htm.

Gera, Deborah Levine. "Review of John Heath's THE TALKING GREEKS." BMCR (July 2008).

Heath, John. The Talking Greeks: Speech, Animals, and the Other in Homer, Aeschylus, and Plato. Cambridge: CUP, 2005. "The thesis of this book is embarrassingly unsophisticated: humans speak; other animals don't," reads the opening sentence of this rich and illuminating study by John Heath. The book is an exploration of the use the Greeks made of the criterion of speech -- or, at times, the criterion of intelligible, cogent, and authoritative speech -- to distinguish between gods and mortals, humans and animals, Greeks and non-Greeks, as well as between men and women, slaves, and children. Heath looks closely at passages in Homer, Aeschylus, and Plato, in order to examine how the singular human capacity of language is used by the Greeks to establish and explore the differences between themselves and various types of the Other, most notably non-speaking animals. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2008/2008-07-62.html.

Chittick, William. "Ibn Arabi." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY August 5, 2008.

Ibn ‘Arabî (1165–1240) can be considered the greatest of all Muslim philosophers, provided we understand philosophy in the broad, modern sense and not simply as the discipline of falsafa, whose outstanding representatives are Avicenna and, many would say, Mullâ Sadrâ. Western scholarship and much of the later Islamic tradition have classified Ibn ‘Arabî as a “Sufi”, though he himself did not; his works cover the whole gamut of Islamic sciences, not least Koran commentary, Hadith (sayings of Muhammad), jurisprudence, principles of jurisprudence, theology, philosophy, and mysticism. Unlike al-Ghazâlî, whose range of work is similar to Ibn ‘Arabî, he did not usually write in specific genres, but tended rather to integrate and synthesize the sciences in the context of thematic works, ranging in length from one or two folios to several thousand pages. Nor did he depart from the highest level of discourse, or repeat himself in different works. The later Sufi tradition called him al-Shaykh al-Akbar, the Greatest Master, a title that was understood to mean that no one else has been or will be able to unpack the multi-layered significance of the sources of the Islamic tradition with such detail and profundity. . . . Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ibn-arabi/.

Jackson, John L. "Anthropology: the Softest Social Science." CHRONICLE BRAINSTORM July 29, 2008.

Why are people sometimes so dismissive of anthropology? In the era of Franz Boas and Margaret Mead, anthropologists were public intellectuals of the highest order. They wrote for popular magazines and challenged Americans’ too-quick assumptions about the hard-wired ‘nature’ of social life. But that was then. Now, anthropologists seem mostly relegated to the very back of the line when it comes to assessments about the value of social-scientific attempts to make sense of contemporary issues. . . . Anthropology often gets characterized as a 'postmodern' cesspool, a discipline that wallows in pseudo-theoretical (even literary) waters, embraces the most solipsistic form of navel-gawking introspection, and has recanted most of its earlier commitments to ‘objective’ outsiderism. At the same time, economists are thought to occupy a firmer space much closer to the normative benchmark that is the natural sciences, crunching numbers in ways that purport to eschew the ideologically-driven meanderings of those softer social sciences. There is a general pecking order in the social sciences. We all know that. It moves from economics down through the likes of political science and psychology, finally landing in the realm of sociology and anthropology. The closer one gets to serious mathematics as constituitive of the center of the discipline’s exploits, the higher one’s salary, the less diverse one’s colleagues (in terms of categories such as race or gender), and the more powerful one’s academic department. There are exceptions to this formulation, but it holds true quite a bit of the time, no? . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/jackson/anthropology-the-softest-social-science.

PUB: Callaghan, Jane, and Rose Capdevila, eds. ASYLUM AND MIGRATION. ANNUAL REVIEW OF CRITICAL PSYCHOLOGY 6 (2008).

This issue of the Annual Review of Critical Psychology is devoted to critical work around globalisation and two of its emergent progeny: migration and asylum. The papers in this issue engage with the questions that arise around how we might theorise, understand and engage with the varying instantiations and positionings of these phenomena critically. The point of departure for us as editors is that traditionally dominant psychological approaches offer little to an understanding of the transgressive movements that are associated with transnational communication, migratory lifestyles and hybrid identities. Rather, we would argue, the modernist project of psychology, characterised as it is by categorisation (the processes of differentiation and distinction along with the symbolic construction of boundaries) serves to reinforce hegemonic ideologies of nation state, the tenaciousness of ethnic identity, and reified constructions of culture. These mainstream approaches can be seen to obscure the very ways in which national identities are challenged by the shifts that emerge as a consequence of a range of boundary transgressions. By drawing on a range of theoretical and methodological resources, these articles address these transgressions and problematise the incommensurabilities that are (re)produced when Psychology brings its knowledges to bear on issues of globalisation, migration and asylum. . . . Access the whole issue here: http://www.discourseunit.com/arcp/6.htm.

PUB: Nicolacopoulos, Toula. THE RADICAL CRITIQUE OF LIBERALISM: IN MEMORY OF A VISION.

Nicolacopoulos, Toula. The Radical Critique of Liberalism: in Memory of a Vision. Melbourne: Re-Press, 2008. Enjoy the benefits of Open Access! Download your copy available for free from Re-Press here: http://www.re-press.org/content/view/25/38/. For further information on Re-Press, visit their homepae (http://www.re-press.org/) or contact Paul Ashton at paul.ashton@vu.edu.au.

Seaton, James. "When Lit-Crit Mattered." WALL STREET JOURNAL August 2, 2008.

Davis, Garrick, ed. Praising It New: the Best of the New Criticism. Athens: Ohio UP, 2008. Some of the critics of the period -- figures such as Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson -- emphasized the connections between a writer's life and his work or between the work and the political and cultural world of which it was a part. Other critics focused on close studies of "the work itself," a phrase that became a motto of what came to be called the New Criticism. In Praising It New, Mr. Davis collects the essays of several New Critics, reminding us of the intensity of their readings and the insights that close attention to a poem or novel -- to "the work itself" -- can bring. It is a good time for us to be reminded, since so many writers with literary pretensions are now hyped beyond their merits or neglected in spite of them. In the universities, meanwhile, "cultural theory" -- concerned mostly with race, gender, class, linguistics and colonialism -- plays a major role in the way that literature is taught. . . . Read the rest here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121763770961106433.html?mod=2_1167_1.

Collini, Stefan. "Upwards and Onwards." LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS July 31, 2008.

Smith, Dai. Raymond Williams: a Warrior's Tale. Carmarthen: Parthian, 2008. If Williams could at one point have been seen as ‘the English Lukács’, not least for his sustained engagement with the historical place of literary realism, he now came to be seen as ‘the English Goldmann’ or even ‘the English Bourdieu’ (such labels always exhibited a disregard for the fact that he was not English, as he pointed out with increasing insistence). And indeed, since cultural materialism’s attentiveness to non-literary contexts and its repudiation of ‘evaluative criticism’ was seen by many to have affinities with the academically still more powerful school of New Historicism, Williams could even be classified, at least when seen down the wrong end of a transatlantic telescope, as ‘the English Greenblatt’. Fortunately, his standing was never confined to the world of academic literary studies. His work, early and late, on ‘communications’, especially television, meant that he was a constant point of reference in the fast expanding field of Media Studies (‘the English McLuhan’), just as several of his books from Culture and Society onwards were regarded as founding texts, although frequently repudiated, in the diverse field, or movement, now established as Cultural Studies (‘the English Gramsci’). And, of course, his more directly political writing always engaged with a much wider, non-academic, left-leaning public, to whom he spoke inspiringly of the continuing value of ‘community’, of the imperative to pursue a thoroughgoing democratisation of economic and cultural as well as political institutions, and of the need to cultivate ‘resources for a journey of hope’ towards a possible form of socialism (‘the English Habermas’?). In his concern with the natural environment, especially in the form of the relations between country and city, he provided the elements from which a ‘Green Williams’ could be constructed, just as his reflections on the consequences of colonial settlement and cultural dominance, here drawing explicitly on his Welshness, could even be made to yield a sketch of a ‘post-colonial Williams’. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n15/coll01_.html.

Baez, John. "The Bogdanov Affair."

Update: Foucault Blog has an interesting recent entry on Foucault and the Bogdanov brothers:

These guys (tv celebs in France) were the eponymous characters in the “Bogdanov Affair” which is a kind of reverse “Sokal Affair.” They published papers in scientific journals with a new theory explaining the Big Bang that some physicists say were a hoax and comprised of pseudoscientific jargon (see wikipedia entry for more on the affair, including details of how the French wikipedia entry on them had possibly been edited by they themselves). . . .

Read the rest here: http://foucaultblog.wordpress.com/2008/08/03/foucault-science-fiction-and-the-bogdanov-affair/. Original Post (July 17, 2008): We all laughed when the physicist Alan Sokal wrote a deliberately silly paper entitled Transgressing the boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity, and managed to get it accepted by a journal of social and cultural studies, Social Text. But in 2002, on the 22nd of October many of us began hearing rumors that two brothers managed to publish at least five meaningless papers in physics journals as a hoax - and even got Ph.D. degrees in physics from Bourgogne University on the basis of this work! . . . To read the rest, visit: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanov.html.

Bauerlein, Mark. "How Theory Damaged the Humanities." CHRONICLE BRAINSTORM July 31, 2008.

Hard as it is to believe, given the passions it continues to arouse, 42 years have passed since critical theory started to infiltrate the humanities in the United States. That’s if we count the famous Hopkins conference of 1966 as its inaugural event. And almost as old as theory is its antagonist, anti-theory, which since the early-70s has charged it with a set of intellectual sins. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/bauerlein/how-theory-damaged-the-humanities.

Menkiti, Ifeanyi. "On Rationality and the Burden of the Ijele Masquerade: a Note on Emmanuel Eze's Work." Special Issue on Eze. SYMPOSIA (2009).

There is a saying that the eye cannot see what the mind does not already know. Here, Eze is surely right in reminding us that the mind’s knowing, and consequently its seeing, is anchored in an irreducible way in the specificities of circumstance, the exigencies of experience in history. There can be no one fell swoop global perceptual act that anchors all our knowledge, or anchors all our rationality conceived with a capital R. . . . Read the rest here: http://web.mit.edu/sgrp/2008/eze/MenkitiEZE08.pdf.

CFP: "Rhetoric and the Study of Public Memory," NCA Pre-Conference Seminar, San Diego, November 20, 2008.

Conveners: Kendall R. Phillips (Syracuse University) and G. Mitchell Reyes (Lewis & Clark College). Rationale: The study of public memory has achieved remarkable prominence in the humanities over the past few decades. Not surprisingly, rhetoricians have been heavily involved in this trend and our journals are filled with articles engaging the rhetoric involved in public acts of remembrance. The preconference is designed to provide a space for rhetoricians engaged in questions of public memory to consider the broader relationships between rhetoric and public memory and to consider the role of rhetorical studies in the larger growth of public memory studies. With this goal in mind, the preconference format will integrate three sets of concerns: 1) the theoretical relationship between rhetoric and public memory; 2) the contribution rhetorical criticisms can make to the study of public memory; and 3) the ways that rhetorical studies can be positioned within the broader community of public memory studies. In order to facilitate this conversation, scholars interested in public memory should submit a short position paper (no more than 2 pages single spaced) addressing one of these broad issues: 1) Theoretical Relationships: The rhetorical tradition is replete with references to memory and collective remembrance and contemporary theories of rhetoric continue to develop that connection. Scholars interested in the intersections between theories of rhetoric from classical to contemporary and public memory should submit papers that expand, explore, question, or challenge contemporary thought. 2) Critical Interventions: Case studies constitute much of the work on the rhetoric of public memory. Scholars interested in analyzing the rhetorical dimensions of public memory within a specific context should submit papers offering short but instructive readings that explore the rhetoric of remembrance or the ways that critical case studies expand our understanding of public memory. 3) Disciplinary Issues: In spite of the important work on public memory within rhetorical studies, many of the most prominent public memory scholars are operating within other disciplinary frameworks. Papers under this section should address the relationship between rhetorical approaches and other disciplinary approaches and consider the avenues that rhetoricians might pursue in making rhetoric a more prominent part of the interdisciplinary conversation on public memory. Please send your two page position papers to G. Mitchell Reyes at mreyes@lclark.edu by September 1, 2008. Please include the issue you are addressing, your current position, and your contact information in your submission.

CFP: Fifth International Symposium on Text Genre Studies, Universidade de Caxias do Sul, Brazil, August 11-14, 2009.

The International Symposium on Text Genre Studies – SIGET – gathers together researchers, university, secondary, and primary school teachers and other professionals involved in the study of text genres. Due to the inherent interdisciplinarity of the study object (text genres), this symposium aims at researchers from different areas within both Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (discourse analysts, researchers on text, conversation, and enunciation, teacher trainers), as well as professionals and researchers of other fields, such as pedagogy, psychology, sociology, communication, terminology, translation, an others. Symposium themes; Text genres: epistemology and methodology Text genres and language teaching Text genre and teacher training Text genres and professional areas Text genre and literacy Text genre and media For more information, visit http://www.ucs.br/ucs/extensao/agenda/eventos/vsiget/ingles/apresentacao.

CFP: "Sexual Knowledge: Uses of the Past," Department of Classics, University of Exeter, July 27-29, 2009.

Why and how have people throughout history turned to the past in order to make sense of sexual experience? What kinds of authority has the past exercised in popular and scholarly debates about sexual practices, identities, civilization and morality? How do changing interpretations of past sexualities reflect historical shifts in the way sex is understood? The aim of this interdisciplinary conference is to explore the way that discussions about sex and human nature over the centuries have both been informed by and helped to shape ideas about past cultures and the interpretation of their material and textual legacies. The conference organisers invite 300 word abstracts for papers examining any aspect of the way that representations of sexual practices in the past have been invoked in debates, from any era including the present, about the nature of sexuality, religion, civilization or nature and also, in turn, how beliefs, prejudices, anxieties and fantasies frame the analysis of past sexual cultures and societies. We are interested in research exploring the reception in any subsequent era of material (whether textual or visual) such as the Khajuraho carvings, artefacts from Pompeii and Herculaneum, Greek pots, Anglo Saxon carvings, Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, Aretino’s sonnets, the so-called “Kama Sutra,” as well more abstract ideas about the sexual practices of the past such as Roman orgies or Persian harems. Our aim is to create a new focus for international and interdisciplinary scholarship, by bringing together scholars from across the world and from across the full range of academic disciplines whose research interests intersect at this precise nexus, including disciplines such as Anglo-Saxon studies, anthropology, archaeology, art history, classics and classical reception, Egyptology, history, medical history, museum studies and museology, Oriental studies, colonial history, ancient, medieval and modern languages, literary theory, cultural and media studies, film studies, philosophy, psychology, sociology and theology. This conference is part of the Sexual Knowledge, Sexual History project, run by Dr Kate Fisher and Dr Rebecca Langlands. Further details are here: http://www.centres.ex.ac.uk/medhist/projects/sexual_knowledge/conference.html.

Barbone, Steven. "Review of Charlie Huenemann, ed. INTERPRETING SPINOZA." NDPR (July 2008).

Huenemann, Charlie, ed. Interpreting Spinoza: Critical Essays. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. 'Caute' ('Attention!') was how Spinoza sealed his letters, and editor and contributor Charlie Huenemann opens this anthology by reminding readers that despite Spinoza's use of the geometric method in the Ethics, Spinoza (whose name derives from the Spanish word for "thorn") must be read with care and attention to avoid the prickles many encounter in his philosophy. While not pretending to deliver the last word on some of the more thorny sticking points in Spinoza's thought, this work proposes and succeeds to offer new (not reprinted) studies to help clarify important intertwining issues in Spinoza's metaphysics, psychology, and politics. Though each contribution was written independently and may stand on its own merit, there is a certain cohesion among the essays, and the reader will discover several themes -- the meaning of 'in' in Spinoza's philosophy, the possibility of free thought, and the role of the imagination especially in his political philosophy -- that reflect and respond to other essays in the collection. Because the volume includes contributions from both well established Spinoza scholars and some researchers newer to Spinoza studies, readers will also discover some refinements and clarifications of current interpretations as well as some new, original analyses. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13786.

CFP: "Transcendental Philosophy: its History and Nature," BSHP, Manchester Metropolitan University, April 14-17, 2009.

Thinking about the notion of the 'transcendental' in the history of philosophy touches on a number of distinct topics that have proved of central significance. These include the understanding of the a priori, the nature of necessity claims in experience, the question of the nature of experience itself and its possibility, and the understanding of what is essential in claims of knowledge. Whilst transcendental philosophy as a venture has tended in recent years to be identified with the Kantian project it is not exclusively connected to it since successors to Kant have contested the understanding and significance of the transcendental. Included amongst alternatives to the Kantian conception are those of the German Idealists (Fichte, Schelling and Hegel) all of whom have either described themselves or been described by others as transcendental philosophers. Similarly the revival of interest in Kant in the late nineteenth century produced significant revisions in the understanding of transcendental methods and arguments. The traditions of European philosophy include significant re-inventions of the concept of the transcendental in the works of Husserl, Derrida and Deleuze and the analytic tradition includes such transcendental projects as those of Wilfrid Sellars and Peter Strawson. By contrast, in considering the place of the concept of the transcendental in philosophy it is also important to consider its usage prior to the work of Kant in, for example the medieval tradition of describing the transcendentals as providing us notions that exceed those of categorial determination. In responding to this topic contributors might focus, inter alia, on any of the following: Transcendental philosophy: its nature and scope; Transcendental arguments; the nature of transcendental idealism; the viability of transcendental realism; transcendental phenomenology; the role of the transcendentals in medieval philosophy; transcendental empiricism; transcendental philosophy and metaphysics; the synthetic a priori; transcendental deductions; transcendental psychology; analytic philosophy and the transcendental; the intuition of essences; categorial intuition; transcendental subjectivity; science and experience; transcendental apperception; transcendental imagination; transcendental logic; the logic of experience; transcendental ontology; transcendental pragmatism; semiotics and the transcendental; transcendental dynamics; mathematics and experience; nature and world; mind and world; transcendental aesthetics; transcendental dialectic; transcendental methods. Please send abstracts to the following: Gary Banham, Reader in Transcendental Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University (g.banham@mmu.ac.uk); James Clarke, Lecturer in Philosophy, University of York (jac505@york.ac.uk).

Radford, Gary P., and Marie L. Radford. "Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and the Library: Saussure and Foucault." JDOC 61.1 (2004).

This paper seeks to provide a gateway to new avenues of inquiry and to provide fresh insights for investigating and conceptualizing the field of library and information science (LIS). It describes the principles of structuralism and post-structuralism, illustrating these descriptions with literary examples to clarify these models, and discusses their relevance to LIS. . . . Download the whole document here: http://www.theprofessors.net/Structuralism.pdf.

Bapty, Ian. "Nietzsche, Derida and and Foucault: Re-excavating the Meaning of Archaeology."

Bapty, Ian. "Nietzsche, Derida and and Foucault: Re-excavating the Meaning of Archaeology." Archaeology after Structuralism: Post-Structuralism and the Practice of Archaeology. Ed. Ian Bapty and Tim Yates. London: Routledge, 1990. The plan of this paper is to use Nietzsche to frame a discussion of rather more recent trends in 'structuralism' and 'post-structuralism', and to do that specifically in relation to the thought of Foucault and his transition in the late 1960s/early 1970s to a position explicitly and implicitly claiming links with Nietzsche (and then, in a final skew of direction to interpose from this debate into the topic of this book -archaeology after structuralism). The point is not to conduct an analysis ultimately justifying Nietzsche against Foucault or Derrida, or vice versa, and then to impose this new 'truth' as yet another new epistemological underpinning for archaeology - which would be exactly to fall prey to the seductive wiles of what Nietzsche calls the 'will to truth' once more 'tempting us to many a venture' - instead the aim is to consider the value that binds together such opposing positions in their mutual activity and reactivity. . . . Read the rest here: http://archaeology.kiev.ua/meta/bapty.html.

Bapty, Ian, and Tim Yates. "Archaeology and Post-Structuralism."

Bapty, Ian, and Tim Yates, ed. Archaeology after Structuralism: Post-Structuralism and the Practice of Archaeology. London: Routledge, 1990. Nearly a decade has passed since the symbolic and structural archaeology conference announced a coherent challenge to to the existing paradig­matic and epistemological structure of archaeology. These ten years have been momentous ones for the discipline. Not only has its practice been transformed with the introduction of new conceptual frameworks (such as the notion of the archaeological record - material culture - as text) but also whole issues, questions and debates that were previously unthinkable have become relatively commonplace - debates about the social implications and embeddedness of scientific and academic study, about the politics of archaeological production, about the context of archae­ology and the social sciences in late capitalist society, about the construction of gender relations in the past, and so on. The framework provided by the New Archaeology had provided little, if any, space for consideration of these issues, and although the last three to four years have seen a general mellowing of the initial opposition to structuralism mobilised by the positivists (as elements of structuralist theory are diluted and wash over the international scene), for many processualists it is not only still possible to distance archaeology from these issues, from the present, from society, from contemporary systems of representation, but absolutely vital that we continue to do so. . . . Read the rest of the introductory chapter here: http://archaeology.kiev.ua/meta/bapty_yates.html.

UPDATE: Smith, David Woodruff. "Phenomenology." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY July 28, 2008.

Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions. Phenomenology as a discipline is distinct from but related to other key disciplines in philosophy, such as ontology, epistemology, logic, and ethics. Phenomenology has been practiced in various guises for centuries, but it came into its own in the early 20th century in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others. Phenomenological issues of intentionality, consciousness, qualia, and first-person perspective have been prominent in recent philosophy of mind. . . . Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/.

Bulson, Eric. "THE MODERNIST PAPERS by Fredric Jameson." TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT July 27, 2008.

Jameson, Frederic. The Modernist Papers. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Considering the impact of works like The Political Unconscious (1981) and Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Jameson hardly needs an apologist for his style or substance. The publications of his articles and books are intellectual events, and he has that unique power to change the terms of the discussion. His writing is unapologetically difficult and resists quick and easy consumption. And that is precisely the point: Jameson's densely packed sentences with their asides, corrections and elaborations have the effect of slowing readers down and making them think. Reading Jameson makes you aware of the fact that if sentences are, strictly speaking, linear, then thought, the motor behind them, is not. He has made a career out of writing what he calls "dialectical sentences." And as he explains elsewhere in a discussion of Adorno and Hegel, you can't think dialectically without writing dialectically. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.powells.com/review/2008_07_27.

Johnson, Charles R. "The End of the Black American Narrative." THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR (Summer 2008).

As a writer, philosopher, artist, and black American, I’ve devoted more than 40 years of my life to trying to understand and express intellectually and artistically different aspects of the black American narrative. At times during my life, especially when I was young, it was a story that engaged me emotionally and consumed my imagination. I’ve produced novels, short stories, essays, critical articles, drawings, and PBS dramas based on what we call the black American story. To a certain degree, teaching the literature of black America has been my bread and butter as a college professor. It is a very old narrative, one we all know quite well, and it is a tool we use, consciously or unconsciously, to interpret or to make sense of everything that has happened to black people in this country since the arrival of the first 20 Africans at the Jamestown colony in 1619. A good story always has a meaning (and sometimes layers of meaning); it also has an epistemological mission: namely, to show us something. It is an effort to make the best sense we can of the human experience, and I believe that we base our lives, actions, and judgments as often on the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves (even when they are less than empirically sound or verifiable) as we do on the severe rigor of reason. This unique black American narrative, which emphasizes the experience of victimization, is quietly in the background of every conversation we have about black people, even when it is not fully articulated or expressed. It is our starting point, our agreed-upon premise, our most important presupposition for dialogues about black America. We teach it in our classes, and it is the foundation for both our scholarship and our popular entertainment as they relate to black Americans. Frequently it is the way we approach each other as individuals. . . . Yet, despite being an antique, the old black American narrative of pervasive victimization persists, denying the overwhelming evidence of change since the time of my parents and grandparents, refusing to die as doggedly as the Ptolemaic vision before Copernicus or the notion of phlogiston in the 19th century, or the deductive reasoning of the medieval schoolmen. It has become ahistorical. For a time it served us well and powerfully, yes, reminding each generation of black Americans of the historic obligations and duties and dangers they inherited and faced, but the problem with any story or idea or interpretation is that it can soon fail to fit the facts and becomes an ideology, even kitsch. . . . As phenomenologist Edmund Husserl revealed a hundred years ago, we almost always perceive and understand the new in terms of the old—or, more precisely, we experience events through our ideas, and frequently those are ideas that bring us comfort, ideas received from our parents, teachers, the schools we attend, and the enveloping culture, rather than original ones of our own. While a story or model may disclose a particular meaning for an experience, it also forces into the background or conceals other possible meanings. Think of this in light of novelist Ralph Ellison’s brilliant notion of “invisibility,” where—in his classic Invisible Man—the characters encountered by his nameless protagonist all impose their ideologies (explanations and ideas) on the chaos of experience, on the mysterious, untamed life that forever churns beneath widely accepted interpretations and explanations of “history” and “culture,” which in our social world, for Ellison, are the seen. . . . What I am saying is that “official” stories and explanations and endlessly repeated interpretations of black American life over decades can short-circuit direct perception of the specific phenomenon before us. The idea of something—an intellectual construct—is often more appealing and perfect (in a Platonic sense) than the thing itself, which always remains mysterious and ambiguous and messy, by which I mean that its sense is open-ended, never fixed. It is always wise, I believe, to see all our propositions (and stories) as provisional, partial, incomplete, and subject to revision on the basis of new evidence, which we can be sure is just around the corner. . . . Read the rest of this provocative piece here: http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su08/narrative-johnson.html.

Majavu, Mandisi. "The Wretched of the Earth: Critical Psychology in the Colonial Context." PAMBAZUKA NEWS May 22, 2007.

Derek Hook (2004) argues that Frantz Fanon’s greatest source of originality as a postcolonial theorist lay in the fact that he combined psychology and politics in his analysis of colonial problems, national liberation and social revolution. For Fanon, psychopathology in the colonial society, or any other oppressive society for that matter, can be characterised as a ‘pathology of liberty’. This means that for a psychological intervention to be sincere and relevant, the psychological services offered would have to play their part in restoring freedom in some meaningful capacity to the sufferer (Hooks 2004). . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/41566).

Hancock, Penny. "Novel Thinking." TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION July 10, 2008.

Until the 1990s, masters in creative writing existed only at the University of East Anglia and Lancaster University. Even ten years ago, courses at BA and MA level were virtually unheard of. English departments at universities focused on the study of literature, both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Being a writer of fiction or poetry did not require a degree, and writers evolved regardless - as many, of course, always have. Nobel prizewinners Harold Pinter and Doris Lessing, for example, didn't do a BA, let alone an MA, in anything. So how is it that there are now, in addition to more than 70 universities offering undergraduate degrees in creative writing, at least 50 masters programmes? There are various theories to explain this proliferation. One is that the courses replace the editorial input once provided by small publishing houses to promising new writers. Another is that students erroneously imagine that writing will offer a glamorous career - and one that can be achieved by taking creative writing at postgraduate level. Yet another suggests that there may be a crisis in traditional English studies, and that creative writing is taking over where the dusty academic study of literature leaves off. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=402673&c=1.

PUB: Devadas, Vijay, and Jane Mummery, eds. PROTEAN BORDERS AND UNSETTLED INTERSTICES. BORDERLANDS 7.1 (2008).

Table of Contents: Vijay Devadas & Jane Mummery Protean Borders & Unsettled Interstices Essays: Nick Mansfield 'There is a Spectre Haunting...': Ghosts, their Bodies, Some Philosophers, a Novel and the Cultural Politics of Climate Change Samuel Chambers & Alan Finlayson Ann Coulter and the Problem of Pluralism: from Values to Politics Debora Halbert A Political Geography of Geneva: Mapping Globalization and its Discontents Michele Acuto Edges of the Conflict: a Threefold Conceptualization of National Borders Rachel Weissbrod Israeli Literature and Cinema in a Web of Intercultural Relations: the Reconciliation of Conflicts on Screen John Hannaford & Janice Newton Sacrifice, Grief and the Sacred at the Contemporary 'Secular' Pilgramage to Gallipoli Narrative Essay: Anthony Burke Life, in the Hall of Smashed Mirrors: Biopolitics and Terror Today Review: Michael Maidan Foucault in the Geographer’s Den (Jeremy W. Crampton and Stuart Elden eds. Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007) Or read the entire issue at: http://www.borderlands.net.au/issues/vol7no1.html.

CFP: "Pragmatism and the Ethics of War," Society for Classical Pragmatism Studies, University of South Florida, March 5-7, 2009.

Keynote: John J. Stuhr, Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and American Studies, and Chair, Department of Philosophy, Emory University. Kynote address: "Our Love of War and What to Do About It. The United States has been involved in wars and military campaigns for approximately 3/4 of the years it has been in existence. There can be no doubt that war is a part of the American condition. What, then, does philosophical pragmatism -- a uniquely American school of thought, born during what was arguably the most peaceful period in U.S. history -- have to say on the subject of war? We will consider all papers dealing with pragmatic themes and military conflict, with preference for papers which connect the works of the classical pragmatists to contemporary problems. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to: Just War Theory The Global War on Terror The Ethics of Torture War and Uncertainty The Status of the Enemy Rights During Wartime War and Media Coverage Propaganda Asymmetric Warfare Terrorism as Tactic The Psychology of War Nonviolent Resistance The Ethics of Peemptive Strikes Individual Responsibility and the Military Inquiries and electronic submissions should be sent to: cps.usf@gmail.com. Acceptable document formats: .DOC, .PDF, and .RTF. Please have your paper prepared for blind review, with the e-mail serving as a cover sheet. Papers should be timed for a 20 minute reading (About 10-12 pages). Submission Deadline: November 4th, 2008.

Bauerlein, Mark. "A Lesson in Promotion." BRAINSTORM (Chronicle Blog) July 24, 2008

We might wonder whether de Man marks a success story precisely because he didn’t try to make a proper essay into a tenure-able book. How many other young professors couldn’t resist the book demand, however, and for quite understandable reasons? The result can be found in thousands of volumes in the library with call numbers PA to PT and dated 1975 and after. Instead of writing three rich, thoughtful scholarly essays over six years’ time, they produced . . . well, books that carried the imprimatur of a known press, bore all the signs of professionalism, and said a few interesting things. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/bauerlein/a-lesson-in-promotion.

PUB: INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BAUDRILLARD STUDIES 5.2 (2008).

Table of Contents: Power and Virtuality

• Dr. Melanie Chan. Virtually Real and Really Virtual: Baudrillard’s Procession of Simulacrum and The Matrix.
• Dr. Paula Murphy. The Simulacra of Global Conflict

Theory As Challenge

• Jesse Owen Hearns-Branaman. “Must we ourselves not become gods?” The Visual Theories of Foucault, Debord and Baudrillard in Explaining Contemporary Power Structures
• Maximilien Nayaradou. Terrorism As A Violent Way of Sharing Death in Baudrillard’s Theory

Too Much Is Too Much

• Jean Baudrillard. The Racing Driver and his Double
• Jean Baudrillard. Simulation and Transaesthetics: Towards the Vanishing Point of Art
• Marc J. LaFountain. Obscene Ethics: A Baudrillardian View of Spurlock’s Super Size Me
• Ryland Johnson. Baudrillard’s Butterfly Athleticism
• Jeff Roberts and Alex McVey. Affirmation – Being Resolved in Becoming Resolution

Visit the journal homepage here: http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/index.html.

Ruse, Michael. "Handmaiden to the Science." REDORBIT July 23, 2008.

Half a century ago, philosophers of science paid little real attention to the nitty-gritty reality of what happens in the laboratory or field. Idealizations ran rife; the only subject considered was physics; and the only tenable philosophy was a logic- intoxicated form of positivism. But in the 1960s-thanks to people like Thomas Kuhn, who insisted in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) that philosophers must take seriously the real life of science-the field began to welcome those who took pains to study and understand the actual practice of empirical inquiry. No area saw a greater sea change than the philosophical study of biology. The 1950s and 1960s were good to the science itself, what with the discovery of the double helix at the molecular level and the growth in confidence of evolutionary studies at the organismic level. Looking for areas to conquer, philosophers of science turned to the life sciences, with aims beyond simply showing that organisms are more than just machines or that one must invoke vitalistic modes of understanding to capture the mystery of the organism. The first biennial conference of the (American) Philosophy of Science Association, held in Pittsburgh in 1968, marked the first real awakening of this new way of doing things. I was in attendance, one of a small group who were determined to look conceptually at the life sciences and make the philosophy of biology a genuine and worthwhile branch of the larger discipline. Looking back now, I see that beneath the excitement was a troubling issue that remains with us today. If you are an empirical scientist, the reasons for what you do are fairly obvious: You want to understand the nature and the workings of the world of experience. But what if you are a philosopher, specifically a philosopher of science? What are you doing and why? Is your job primarily to aid science, to be a kind of high-powered theoretician? In the words of the great British empiricist John Locke, is your task that of being a "handmaiden" to the sciences? Or do you have aims of your own, and if scientists do not care for what you are doing, tant pis? Should your primary focus be on the traditional problems of philosophy-epistemology (theory of knowledge) and ethics (theory of morality)? . . . Read the rest here: http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1490822/handmaiden_to_the_science/.

Shakespeare, Tom. "A World Based on Reason." NEW SCIENTIST July 23, 2008.

I don't hate reason, and I certainly don't want to dispense with rationality. Faced with the rhetoric of a bigot, I reach for rationality every time to counter his prejudices. But I also recognise that the twisted beliefs of racists or homophobes emerge from a complex mix of fears, half-truths and insecurities. Logic and evidence rarely suffice to dislodge them. For me, ethical judgement has three facets. Strong arguments plus good empirical data, certainly, but let's open a place for feelings, emotions and beliefs. They are part of the human approach to making sense of the world and we would be much worse off without them. I reserve the right to be inconsistent, ground my thinking in messy practicalities, and live up to the fundamental messiness of life. Rationality is a tool, not a universal acid. After all, didn't Niels Bohr once retort to a pig-headed colleague: "You aren't thinking. You are just being logical." . . . Read the rest here: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/dn14385-reason-special-a-world-based-on-reason.html.

Smolin, Lee. "Negotiating Diversity." NEW SCIENTIST July 23, 2008.

To me it is most puzzling that so many who live well because of the triumph of reason are unable to forcefully answer the challenges to its reliability which are being increasingly heard. One common challenge to the domain of reason springs from the worry that science and technology can have bad consequences if decisions about their use are divorced from human values. At issue is how much reason can play a role in decisions about the use of science and technology. When we attempt to resolve the difficult problems raised by science we encounter a second problem, which arises from the diversity of contemporary societies. The older notions of liberal democracy grew out of societies where everyone had the same background and history. Today, a citizen of the UK, Sweden, Canada, France or the US may have any ethnic origin, any appearance, and practice any religion – or none. Diversity is increasingly becoming the norm, as unprecedented mobility delivers a planetary society. But as we move around and mix, our differences move with us and, if anything, deepen as the number of philosophies, religions and life styles combine and multiply in unexpected ways. The challenge is how to have a diverse, multicultural society that is based on reason. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/dn14378-reason-special-negotiating-diversity.html.

Midgley, Mary. "Reason Eats Itself." NEW SCIENTIST July 23, 2008.

Like the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes and the ancient Greek philosophers, Hume thought that real knowledge had to be infallible. In order to achieve this they had proposed that it is guaranteed, as mathematics is, by logical necessity. But this deductive model is actually only one in great spectrum of patterns that we use in making sense of the world around us. To go back to Franklin's example of death, the mere formal structure of the familiar argument "All men are mortal – Socrates is a man – so Socrates is mortal", does nothing to protect its premises. The bold claim about "all men" has no logical backing; and the doomed attempt to invent one for it gave rise to endless inconclusive worrying about the "problem of induction". Seeing this difficulty, Hume concluded that real knowledge simply didn't exist. If, however, we ask how we actually form such generalizations the answer surely is that we do it not by logic but by pattern-recognition, using a great complex background of comparisons and analogies which we are naturally able to spot and, when necessary, to criticise. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14387-reason-special-reason-eats-itself.html.

Special Issue: "Seven Reasons Why People Hate Reason." NEW SCIENTIST July 14, 2008.

From religious fundamentalism to pseudoscience, it seems that forces are attacking the Enlightenment world view – characterised by rational, scientific thinking – from all sides. The debate seems black and white: you’re either with reason, or you’re against it. But is it so simple? In a series of special essays, our contributors look more carefully at some of the most provocative charges against reason. The results suggest that for all the Enlightenment has achieved, we still have a lot of work to do. . . . Access the issue here: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/dn14312-seven-reasons-why-people-hate-reason.html.

Rundkvist, Martin. "Against Theoretical Archaeology." AARDVARCHAEOLOGY July 23, 2008.

Rundkvist's credo:

• Archaeology is part of the hugely successful, rationalist, empirical, scientific Enlightenment project to find out what the world really is and has been like.
• Archaeology is one of the disciplines within this project responsible (in close interdisciplinary cooperation) for finding out what life was like for people in the past.
• Archaeology alone takes care of the study of material remains of past societies.
• All enquiry that does not concern the life-ways of people in the past and/or does not study material remains is non-archaeology.
• All non-rationalist enquiry is non-science and thus non-archaeology.
• All impressionist-aesthetic commentary is non-science and thus non-archaeology.
• Politics are about values and thus non-science. Archaeology should therefore resist all attempts from inside and outside the discipline to ascribe political relevance to it.. . .

Read the whole entry here: http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/2008/07/against_theoretical_archaeolog.php.

Kirsch, Adam. "Hugh Trevor-Roper's THE INVENTION OF SCOTLAND." NEW YORK SUN July 23, 2008.

Every April, New York's proud Scottish-Americans celebrate their heritage with the Tartan Day Parade, processing up Sixth Avenue in a sea of kilts, to the noble blare of the bagpipes. If you are thinking of attending the festivities next year, however, you might want to keep quiet about having read The Invention of Scotland (Yale University Press, 304 pages, $30), a punchy new book by the late historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. For as Trevor-Roper points out with ill-concealed glee, tartan and kilt, those universal badges of Scottishness, are about as authentic as Disneyland. Until the 18th century, no one north of the Tweed had ever seen a kilt; nor did the clans, as legend has it, distinguish themselves by the pattern of their tartans, until they were taught to do so by an enterprising clothing manufacturer. The Scottish costume is, Trevor-Roper shows, simply the latest example of an ancient national habit: the forging of tradition. . . .

Read the whole review here: http://www.nysun.com/arts/hugh-trevor-ropers-the-invention-of-scotland/82417/.