John, Eileen. "Review of David Davies' AESTHETICS AND LITERATURE." NDPR (September 2008).

Davies, David. Aesthetics and Literature. London: Continuum, 2007. David Davies here offers a succinct, intelligent account of the state of play in a range of philosophical debates concerning literature, focusing on the Anglo-American tradition. The book considers conceptual and ontological questions (what is literature, what is fiction, what is a literary work, what is a fictional character), questions about interpretation (how to construe discourse concerning fiction, how intentions and context constrain interpretation of literary works), issues arising from emotional engagement with fiction (whether it is genuine emotion, how we can enjoy works of tragedy and of horror), and questions concerning the cognitive and ethical roles and values of literature. If you do not know these debates, this book would be an excellent, efficient route to wide-ranging understanding of the field. If you are familiar with these debates, I think it is well worth following Davies in his forthright examination of the issues. The book is not aimed at promoting Davies' views on the issues, and chapters typically leave the reader with a summary of the possibilities considered -- where one might go from here -- but the possibilities have been well canvassed for plausibility, and a number of interesting approaches are advanced along the way. With a few exceptions, I felt persuaded by Davies' way of framing, and assessing the promise of, the various views and strategies under consideration. . . . Read the rest of the review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14185.

Welch, Mark. "Review of Noel Carroll's THE PHILOSOPHY OF MOTION PICTURES." MOR April 29, 2008.

Carroll, Noel. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Any art form needs a philosophy; something that can begin to articulate its nature and value in representing and understanding our world. Hopefully, through the publication of this scholarly, detailed and thoroughly-argued book Carroll will finally put to rest the debate about whether or not films (aka motion pictures or moving images) can be seen as works of art. He makes the case persuasively that they can, and in the process exposes the limitations and narrowness of view of the opposing argument. Although the eponymous term moving pictures is not Carroll's preferred label (he would rather talk about the moving image and therefore it is a bit of a puzzle why he titled the book as he did) he does not waste undue time in making arcane arguments about whether we should be talking about films or cinema or whatever. We all pretty much know what we mean and we know what we sitting down to watch. Film-makers create and present a point of view that while it may be recorded is nevertheless created and imbued with choice. So, Carroll begins a careful and scholarly examination of the history of the philosophy of film, beginning with Munsterberg's 1916 exposition of what he called photoplays, through the traditional theorists such as Arnheim, Eisenstein, Bazin and Kracauer among others, to the period cultural studies to his own preferred and simplified position in which a pluralistic approach is applied and a functional definition is more important than any specificity of medium (that is to say, videotape, podcasting, CGI and new media can all be considered under the rubric of the moving image). . . . Read the rest here: http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=4207.

Westmaas, Nigel. "Walter Rodney: ‘Groundings’ and the Jamaica Ban Forty Years On." STABROEK NEWS September 21, 2008.

It was forty years ago this October that Walter Rodney was banned from Jamaica and set off disturbances that came to be known as the “Walter Rodney riots.”When Rodney left to take up a scholarship in the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica in 1966 signs of his later scholarly activism or ‘groundings’ were already prevalent and were being recorded according to declassified intelligence. The Jamaican security reports gave priority to Rodney’s activities from as early as his student days at Mona campus, between 1961-63. A partial trigger of security interest was Rodney’s several visits to Cuba and the Soviet Union in the same period. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.stabroeknews.com/features/walter-rodney-%e2%80%98groundings%e2%80%99-and-the-jamaica-ban-forty-years-on/. (Thanks to Mark McWatt for the link.)

Summers, Christina Hoff. "Reconsiderations: Betty Friedan's THE FEMINIST MYSTIQUE." NEW YORK SUN September 17, 2008.

"Groundbreaking." "A landmark." "A classic." Those are the words now commonly used to describe Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, first published in 1963. Friedan "pulled the trigger on history," wrote futurist Alvin Toffler; feminist admirers refer to it as "The Book." The Feminine Mystique sold more than 2 million copies when it came out, and remains a staple in women's studies classes today. But after nearly half a century, does it live up to its reputation? Rereading it, I find it to be both better and much worse than I remembered. Striking, certainly, is the famed opening passage, where Friedan introduces the "problem that has no name": The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — Is this all? For the next 450 pages, Friedan, who died in 2006, answered that question: No, it is not all. "What happened to [women's] dreams?" she asked. What happened to their "share in the whole of human destiny?" What happened, according to Friedan, is that women's magazines, advertisers, and an army of Freudian social scientists conspired to persuade American women that the fulfillment of their femininity was their truest and highest calling. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nysun.com/arts/reconsiderations-betty-friedans-the-feminine/86003/.

3rd Annual Conference, Hannah Arendt Circle, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, March 27-29, 2009.

The conference is jointly hosted by the departments of Philosophy, Communications, & Foreign Languages. Individual submissions for papers are welcome on any aspect of Arendt's work, including critiques and applications of her thinking. Please send an abstract of the paper, by e-mail (750 word limit). Abstracts should be formatted for anonymous review and submitted to the program committee chair, Karin Fry at kfry@uwsp.edu on or before November 14th, 2008. Please indicate "Arendt Circle submission" in the subject heading, and include the abstract as a ".doc" attachment to your message. Program decisions will be announced by the end of December. Program Committee: Karin Fry, University of Wisconsin Stevens Point Tama Weisman, Quincy University Irene McMullin, University of Arkansas Further information is available here: http://www.arendtcircle.com/ournextmeeting2.

"Afterlives of Postcolonialism," Centre for Postcolonial Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London, October 25-26, 2008.

In recent times some scholars have proclaimed that postcolonial theory has exhausted its critical energies- at the very time that it has been taken up by scholars and activists not located in English or Literature departments, the area where postcolonial theory made its early impact and sometimes found an institutional home. The Centre for Postcolonial Studies at Goldsmiths is organising a conference on the “Afterlives of Postcolonialism”- the ‘after’ referring both to its life/lives after the proclamation of its death, and also to its life after/outside the study of literature. In what ways can/has postcolonial theory been taken up by artists, architects and scholars of art and architecture, by those who study politics, anthropology and sociology, and area studies, and to what effects? Does it merely provide another way of ‘reading’ texts, to does it have the potential to destabilize and reconfigure practices and disciplines? And what happens to postcolonial theory when it moves into politics, art, sociology, and area studies; what mutations does it undergo, or need to undergo? Drawing upon speakers from a range of geographical (India, the U.S., South Africa, Palestine, the U.K.) and disciplinary locations (everything from architecture to art, film, music, politics. . .), involving practitioners as well as theorists, this conference asks whether postcolonial theory still has any life in it- and what sorts of lives it is leading once it travels outside of literature. Confirmed speakers include: Harry Harootunian, History and East Asian Studies, New York University Lindsay Waters, Harvard University Press (Executive Editor of Humanities) Ivor Chipkin, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg Eyal Weizman, Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths Robert Fine, Sociology, Warwick University Sandi Hilal, UNRWA, West Bank Rangan Chakravarty, film producer, KolkotaAlessandro Petti, International Art Academy, Palestine Gurminder Bhambra, Sociology, Warwick University Paramita Brahmachari, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkota Sonia Boyce, Artist, AHRC Research Fellow, Wimbledon College of Art & Design, University of the Arts London Andrew Cross, Artist Marko Daniel, Curator of Public Programmes, Tate Modern Leon Wainwright, Manchester Metropolitan University Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/postcolonial-studies/afterlives.php.

5th Annual California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race, University of California, Berkeley, October 3-4, 2008.

Update (September 22, 2008): The programme and related information may now be found put here: http://www.caroundtable.org/. Original Post (April 5, 2008): The California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race announces a call for papers for its fifth annual roundtable, to be held October 3-4, 2008 at UC Berkeley. This roundtable brings together philosophers of race, and those working in related fields in a small and congenial setting to share their work and to help further this sub-discipline. Papers are invited on any philosophical issue regarding race, ethnicity, or racism, and including those that take up race in the context of another topic, such as feminism, political philosophy, ethics, justice, culture, identity, biology, phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, metaphysics, or epistemology. Submissions are especially encouraged from junior scholars and philosophers of color. We seek to foster a productive and intellectually stimulating environment for those working in philosophy and race. The Roundtable also aspires to bring together junior and senior scholars to develop and enhance constructive mentoring relationships. Registration is free but please register by email by April 30, 2008. Papers should be no more than 30 minutes in length. Please submit full paper or detailed abstract (2-3 pages), as MS word .doc or .pdf document to fsheth@berkeley.edu. Further information is here: http://www.californiaroundtablephilosophyrace.org/.

Wellmer, Albrecht. "Rereading Rorty." KRISIS 28.2 (2008).

When as a young philosopher, equally fascinated by Critical Theory and analytical philosophy, I first encountered Richard Rorty and began to read some of his writings, I was mostly struck by what I perceived as a certain frivolity of his manner of speaking and writing, that is, by what appeared to me then as a certain lack of seriousness concerning deep phi-losophical problems. When I think about Rorty today what comes first to my mind is that through his interventions in almost all important philosophical debates of the recent past – from the various spectres of ana-lytical philosophy to the most recent developments of continental philosophy – he has changed the parameters of contemporary philosophical discourse in a highly significant way. He has done this by reshuffling most of the important philosophical posi-tions of the past and the present in an ingenious way and thereby redrawing whatever has been one of the established current ‘maps’ of philosophical positions – in a way which most likely has irritated the occupants of each one of them. To put it differently: Rorty has exploited philosophical schools and traditions which before seemed incompatible and inimical to each other by playing them off against each other and using them to recontextualize them in a new way: Hegel, Dewey, Habermas, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Quine, Davidson, Derrida, Foucault, to name only some of the most important ones, not to speak of Plato or of early European rationalist and empiricist philosophers. The result is an entirely new way to conceive of the philosophical tradition as well as of the liberal culture of the North Atlantic tradition, concerning not least the possible role which philosophy could play within this culture. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.krisis.eu/content/2008-2/2008-2-01-wellmer.pdf.

"Philosophical Ibsen," Department of Philosophy, Temple University, September 26, 2008.

Speakers include:

• Toril Moi (Duke University)
• Frode Helland (The University of Oslo)
• Richard Eldridge (Swarthmore College)
• Simon Critchley (The New School)

For more information, visit the conference homepage at http://www.temple.edu/humanities/Conferences/Ibsen08/index.htm.

Garver, Eugene. "Review of Marina McCoy's PLATO ON THE RHETORIC OF PHILOSOPHERS AND SOPHISTS." NDPR (September 2008).

McCoy, Marina. Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists. Cambridge: CUP, 2007. Marina McCoy's book has a simple thesis: "Plato distinguishes Socrates from the sophists by differences in character and moral intention" (p. 1). She immediately notes two complications. First, there is no simple way of separating Socrates from the sophists, and the drama of several of the dialogues consists in exploring that complexity, as characters, not excluding Socrates, find the difference between Socrates and the sophists difficult to make out. So saying that Plato distinguishes Socrates from the sophists by their respective characters doesn't solve the problem; it instead tells us how to look at it. Second, McCoy's thesis has a polemical edge; it denies the claims of many commentators who think there is a difference between Socratic and sophistic method. Instead of distinguishing philosophy from sophistic, Plato, she thinks, is at pains to distinguish the philosopher from the sophist. The payoff from her thesis is in insightful readings of several of the dialogues. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14126.

"Re-Imagining Identity: New Directions in Postcolonial Studies," Postcolonial Studies Association, Waterford Institute of Technology, May 6-8, 2009.

This inaugural conference of the Postcolonial Studies Association will focus on a broad re-consideration of the cultural, political, theoretical and practical re-imaginings of the concept of 'identity' as it relates to the field of Postcolonialism and the wider Humanities and the Social Sciences. The conference aims both to explore current understandings of 'identity' in a multicultural, globalised and conflicted world, and to encourage disciplinary self-reflexivity. We welcome papers that interrogate the conceptual category of identity itself, as well as those that relate to the ways specific identities are constructed, assigned or imagined. Questions to be asked will include: 'What is the future of Postcolonialism as a discipline?' and: 'What is the relationship between received understandings of "identity", specific formulations of key contemporary identities, and our understanding of "the postcolonial"?' The PSA invites papers from academics working in the disciplines of Literature, History, Cultural Studies, Film, Human Geography, Linguistics, Politics, Psychology, Religious Studies, Art, Music, Media & Communication and related fields. Our aim is to bring together a wide variety of scholarly interests and methodological approaches. Paper or panel topics may focus on the following conceptual intersections: § Identity, Religion and Spirituality (the secular & sacred, New Age & alternative spiritualities, the Enlightenment, sectarianism, religious symbolism, fundamentalism) § Identity and Time (history, memory, policy, repetition, development, modernity, eternity, death) § Identity and Language (language policy, seizing the pen, language as mission and calling; propaganda) § Identity and Politics (resistance, war, terror) § Identity and Space (regions, blocs, global flows, the EU and the wider world, the environment) § Identity, Theory and Disciplinary Boundaries (postcolonialism as a discipline, theoretical approaches, the policing of knowledge, multidisciplinarity, comparative postcolonialisms) Panels will normally comprise three 20-minute papers. Proposal acceptance is subject to organising committee approval. To submit a paper or panel proposal please contact: Dr Christine ODowd-Smyth - codowdsmyth@wit.ie or psa@postcolonialstudiesassociation.co.uk. Closing date for abstract submissions: 1 December 2008 For more information please contact: Dr Gerri Kimber - gerri@thekimbers.co.uk or Dr Marta Vizcaya Echano - martavizcaya@hotmail.com Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.postcolonialstudiesassociation.co.uk/id63.html.

"Imagined Communities, Real Conflicts, and National Identities," Association for the Study of Nationalities, Columbia University, April 23-25, 2009.

The ASN Convention, the most attended international and inter-disciplinary scholarly gathering of its kind, welcomes proposals on a wide range of topics related to national identity, nationalism, ethnic conflict, state-building and the study of empires in Central/Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, the Balkans, Eurasia, and adjacent areas. Disciplines represented include political science, history, anthropology, sociology, international studies, security studies, economics, geography and geopolitics, sociolinguistics, psychology, and related fields. The Convention also features a section devoted to theoretical approaches to nationalism, from any of the disciplines listed above. The papers in this section need not be grounded in an area of the former Communist bloc usually covered by ASN, provided that the issues examined are relevant to a truly comparative understanding of nation-alism-related issues. In this vein, we are welcoming theory-focused and comparative proposals, rather than specific case studies from outside Central/Eastern Europe and Eurasia. A dozen panels are normally featured in the Nationalism section. Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.nationalities.org/convention/convention.asp.

Geuss, Raymond. Introduction to PHILOSOPHY AND REAL POLITICS.

Geuss, Raymond. Philosophy and Real Politics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008. When I object to the claim that politics is applied ethics, I . . . intend a . . . specific view about the nature and structure of ethical judgment and its relation to politics, and in particular a theory about where one should start in studying politics, what the final framework for studying politics is, what it is reasonable to focus on, and what it is possible to abstract from. “Politics is applied ethics” in the sense I find objectionable means that we start thinking about the human social world by trying to get what is sometimes called an “ideal theory” of ethics. This approach assumes that there is, or could be, such a thing as a separate discipline called Ethics which has its own distinctive subject-matter and forms of argument, and which prescribes how humans should act toward one another. It further assumes that one can study this subject-matter without constantly locating it within the rest of human life, and without unceasingly refl ecting on the relations one’s claims have with history, sociology, ethnology, psychology, and economics. Finally, this approach proposes that the way to proceed in “ethics” is to focus on a very few general principles such as that humans are rational, or that they generally seek pleasure and try to avoid pain, or that they always pursue their own “interests”; these principles are taken to be historically invariant, and studying ethics consists essentially in formulating them clearly, investigating the relations that exist between them, perhaps trying to give some kind of “justification” of at least some of them, and drawing conclusions from them about how people ought to act or live. Usually, some kind of individualism is also presupposed, in that the precepts of ethics are thought to apply directly and in the first instance to human individuals. Often, although not invariably, views of this type also give special weight to “ethical intuitions” that people in our society purportedly share, and they hold that an important part of ethics is the attempt to render these intuitions consistent. . . . In this essay I would like to expound and advocate a kind of political philosophy based on assumptions that are the opposite of the “ethics-first” view, and so it might be useful to the reader to make the acquaintance, in a preliminary and sketchy way, of the four interrelated theses that, I will claim, ought to structure a more fruitful approach to politics than “ethics-fi rst.” . . . Read the rest here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8809.html.

Orasimcha. "Žižek For Jews." JEWCY.COM August 26, 2008.

Zizek, Slavoj. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso, 2007. Slavoj Žižek declares in his latest opus, In Defense of Lost Causes (Verso), that while postmodernism has caused (or allowed) every other kind of racial, social, and cultural identity to be in flux, Jewish identity appears to have become fixed in a simple equation in which Jews=Zionists=racists (thank you, UN) Jews are expected, he says (in his usual difficult prose) to “yield with regard to their name”—that is, “in the liberal multiculturalist perspective, all groups can assert their identity – except Jews, whose very self-assertion equals Zionist racism.” Žižek, an internationally reknowned intellectual, has been at the cutting edge of social and political theory for almost two decades, and apparently strives to be an outsider. It is therefore no surprise that he has developed an interest in Jews, as such. Žižek cares so much about Jewish identity because he identifies as Jewish. Not literally. He is no more a Jew than Joe Lieberman is a liberal. Rather, Žižek, a product of Slovenia, a country torn by the last century’s wars, sees in the Jewish experience a representation of contemporary experience that is far more subtle than a chaotic and relativistic mash-up of identity politics. Was it not, as Žižek says, that “in the history of modern Europe, those who stood for the striving for universality were precisely atheist Jews from Spinoza to Marx and Freud?" The irony is that throughout the history of anti-Semitism, Jews stand for both of these poles. They're either too insistent on being 'Jewish,' so much so that they never integrate fully in the societies in which they live; or, conversely, reveling in a stereotypically homeless cosmopolitanism indifferent, if not hostile, to religion and ethnicity. The first thing to recall is thus that this struggle is (also) inherent to Jewish identity. And, perhaps, this Jewish struggle is our central struggle today: the struggle between fidelity to the Messianic impulse and the reactive (…) “politics of fear” which focuses on preserving one’s particular identity. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.jewcy.com/post/zizek_jews.

Two Recent Conferences on Narrative Theory, at the Center for the Study of the Novel, Stanford University.

Visit the pages below for further information on the following conferences which, although completed, may be of interest to readers. (PDFs of presentations are available in some cases.)

• For a Theory of the Novel of the 21st Century, Center for the Study of the Novel, Stanford University, April 20-21, 2008;
• Race and Narrative Theory, Center for the Study of the Novel, Stanford University, April 11, 2008.

PUB: Issue on Jacques Ranciere. ART AND RESEARCH 2.1 (2008).

The Contents include:

• Editorial: Five Lessons in Artistic Research
• Sophie Berrebi: Everything you wanted to know...
• Jacques Rancière: Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community
• Stephen Wright: Behind Police Lines
• Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield: Nowhere is aesthetics contra ethics
• An Exchange with Jacques Rancière
• Jacques Rancière and Indisciplinarity: an Interview
• Sophie Berrebi: Jacques Rancière: Aesthetics is Politics

Visit the issue homepage at http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/v2n1editorial.html.

Johnson, Violet. "'What Then is the African American?' African and Afro-Caribbean Identities in Black America." JOURNAL OF ETHNIC HISTORY 28.1 (2008)

In his examination of status ascriptions in American society, sociologist Everett Hughes illustrated the rigidity and power of blackness as a designation for all peoples of African descent in the United States: "membership in the Negro race, as defined in American mores and/or law, may be called a master status–determining trait. It tends to overpower, in most crucial situations, any other characteristics which might run counter to it." This 1945 study provides the pivot—the master status—around which the present discussion revolves. From the beginning of voluntary black immigration in the late nineteenth century to the present, this master status has been at the center of the history of black foreigners in the United States. Much of this history is shaped by a complex set of ambivalent processes marked by the immigrants' understanding of, acquiescence to, and outright challenge of the master status. The determination not to let this phenomenon overpower their nonracial distinctiveness has led immigrants of African descent to embark on, in Erving Goffman's term, "presentation of self," through which, individually and collectively, they have presented themselves as "the other" in black America. The diverse and complex outcomes of this presentation of the self have, in turn, contributed to the ethnicization of black America—in short, the creation of ethnic groups within a racialized American ethnicity, thus shattering the erroneous, even if enduring, notion of a monolithic black America. The "othering" of black immigrants and their children, self-consciously and by others, questions the master status in important ways that get to the core of who is African American. This interrogation has been crucial since the early twentieth century, when, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois and other American-born black leaders challenged the legitimacy of Jamaican Marcus Garvey as a black American activist. It gained significant momentum with the phenomenal increase of the foreign black population at the close of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. The emergence of Barack Obama, a biracial American with a white mother and a Kenyan immigrant father, has provided the single most glaring illustration of the sharper attention to the black immigrant factor. During the 2004 U.S. Senate race in Illinois, black Republican Alan Keyes remarked about his Democratic opponent: "Barack Obama and I have the same race—that is, physical characteristics. We are not from the same heritage. My ancestors toiled in slavery in this country. My consciousness, who I am as a person, has been shaped by my struggle, deeply emotional and deeply painful, with the reality of that heritage." The "Obama heritage" debate gained new life with the senator's announcement of his candidacy for the 2008 presidential race. Immediately, some people began to ponder the implications of the first black American president tracing his blackness not to ancestors who experienced American slavery but directly to ancestors in Kenya, instructively, an African country that was not even a source of supply for the Atlantic slave trade, which laid the foundations for the native-born black community. From soul food restaurants to hairdressing and barber salons, Obama's authenticity as a "real African American" was put under scrutiny. The outcomes of developments around Obama's candidacy, which are bound to provide useful insights for future analysis, are unfolding: the endorsement by Oprah Winfrey, arguably the most influential black icon of contemporary America; Obama's surprisingly sound victory in predominantly white Iowa; and his postracial politics. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jaeh/28.1/johnson.html.

Baker, Houston A., Jr. BETRAYAL: HOW BLACK INTELLECTUALS HAVE ABANDONED THE IDEALS OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA. New York: Columbia UP, 2008.

In black American life and culture a race man or race woman is one who dedicates his or her life and work to countering the lies, ideological evasions, and pretensions to “innocence” and “equal justice for all” that prop up America’s deeply embedded, systemic, and institutionalized racism. Race men and race women (which I consolidate, and at the same time, I think, usefully expand to the term “race people”) seek remedy for harms to the black body caused by the gospel and practice of white supremacy. Race people contest an ideologically inspired and profit-hungry white power structure that still maintains and reaps scandalous billions of dollars from a traffic in and enslavement of black bodies in the Americas. (Today’s slavery is disguised as criminal justice in the form of a vast American private prison-industrial complex.) Race people model themselves as sharers of a culture, cause, and community held to be of African descent and labeled variously “African,” “colored,” “Negro,” “black,” “Afro-American,” “African American.” These are the selfsame people the precociously brilliant poet-essayist Amiri Baraka hailed as “blues people.” Often patterning their labors after biblical prophets, race people commit themselves to a mobile, resounding, fierce redefinition of the state of race and the race in a troubled American nation. They do this in the very face of race’s most brutal exclusions. When they are granted or when they secure public voice, they use their forum to advocate the interests of what they define as “their race” at its majority level. Select black individuals may achieve fame—and a growing black middle class may work profitably at race-oriented and affirmative action–induced jobs. Elite blacks may even find themselves subjects for glossy, high-end magazines such as Ebony, Sports Illustrated, and Essence. But to state the unequivocal once again, the race reaps virtually no benefit from the bling of a black celebrity “elite” that is often more damning in its condemnation of the black American majority than white America at large. Where the majority is concerned, any real (consumable) public gains or advancement in America must provide nourishment for all; there must be a collective harvest. The life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are rich in acknowledged commitment to the advance of the race as a whole, as well as to race as a valued and valuable category for the analysis of American life and history. . . . Read the whole extract here: http://www.cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-13964-9/betrayal/excerpt.

Miller, Laura. "The Heretic." SALON August 25, 2008.

Rowland, Ingrid. Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008. But who was Giordano Bruno, and why was he executed in the Campo de' Fiori in 1600? A common misperception mixes him up with Galileo, who ran into trouble with the church 16 years later for embracing the Copernican model of the solar system instead of endorsing the Aristotelian belief that the sun revolves around the Earth. (In fact, the two men shared an Inquisitor, the implacable Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, canonized by the Catholic Church in 1930.) Bruno, too, thought that the Earth circled the sun, and subscribed to many other than heterodox ideas as well: that the universe is infinite and that everything in it is made up of tiny particles (i.e., atoms), and that it is immeasurably old. But as Ingrid Rowland demonstrates in her new biography of the renegade thinker, Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic, Bruno was no martyr for science. What got him killed was a murky mixture of spiritual transgression and personal foibles, combined with a large dose of bad luck. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.salon.com/books/review/2008/08/25/bruno/index.html.

Scull, Andrew. "The Fictions of Foucault's Scholarship." TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT March 21, 2007.

Foucault, Michel. History of Madness. Foreword by Ian Hacking. Ed. Jean Khalfa. Trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. London: Routledge, 2006. [The recent and full translation of Focault's Folie et deraison.] The back cover of History of Madness contains a series of hyperbolic hymns of praise to its virtues. Paul Rabinow calls the book “one of the major works of the twentieth century”; Ronnie Laing hails it as “intellectually rigorous”; and Nikolas Rose rejoices that “Now, at last, English-speaking readers can have access to the depth of scholarship that underpins Foucault’s analysis”. Indeed they can, and one hopes that they will read the text attentively and intelligently, and will learn some salutary lessons. One of those lessons might be amusing, if it had no effect on people’s lives: the ease with which history can be distorted, facts ignored, the claims of human reason disparaged and dismissed, by someone sufficiently cynical and shameless, and willing to trust in the ignorance and the credulity of his customers. . . (http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25347-2626687,00.html) Colin Gordon's response "Extreme Prejudice": Scull was . . . engaged in the 1980s . . . in blackening Foucault’s reputation by manipulative misquotation, and this review unfortunately shows that his methods have not changed. Scull tries to present Foucault as saying, implausibly, that English psychiatric asylums were established in former monasteries. A reader who tracks down this citation (page 56 in the translation) will find that Foucault is in fact referring to foundations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century houses of correction in England and Germany. Foucault nowhere asserts, as Scull implies, that all or most insane people in early modern Europe were incarcerated in such institutions. The primary targets of the seventeenth-century “Great Internment” which Foucault’s book famously describes were, as it makes clear, the idle poor. . . . (http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25390-2633037,00.html and, in greater detail, http://foucaultblog.wordpress.com/2007/05/20/extreme-prejudice/)

Grayling, A. C. "Origin of the Specious." NEW HUMANIST 123.5 (2008).

Fuller, Steve. Dissent Over Descent: Intelligent Design's Challenge to Darwinism. Cambridge: Icon, 2008. It is sometimes hard to know whether books that strike one as silly and irresponsible, like Dissent over Descent, the latest book from Steve Fuller, are the product of a desire to strike a pose and appear outrageous (the John Gray syndrome), or really do represent that cancer of the contemporary intellect, post-modernism. I suppose putatively sincere extrusions of the post-modern sensibility might henceforth deserve to be known as “the Steve Fuller syndrome”. For this offering by the American-born sociologist is a classic case of the absurdity to which that sensibility leads. . . . (http://newhumanist.org.uk/1856) Fuller's reply "Against the Faith": I wish I could repay AC Grayling’s compliment by naming an exotic mental pathology after him, but regrettably his review of Dissent over Descent displays disorders of a much more mundane kind: he has merely failed to read the book properly and does not know what he is talking about. Other than a sense of the chapter titles, the reader of his review will learn nothing about the contents of the book. My only difficulty in responding to Grayling is that he connects so little with what I actually say – for example, his longest quote from me is eight words. However, based on what Grayling himself says in the review, my guess is that he cooked it up using this five-part recipe: 1. Flip book’s pages to find names of philosophers. (Hint: index may prove helpful.) 2. Note that author positions these philosophers in unfamiliar ways that seem to make Intelligent Design (ID) look good. 3. Condemn immediately by applying A-level intellectual history boilerplate. 4. Appease readers whose own knowledge is also at this level and whose prejudices are like those of the reviewer. 5. Repeat as necessary. In light of this modus operandi, I conclude that either Grayling simply did not “read” the book as ordinarily understood, or he was afraid to admit he was not up to the job of reviewing it, and so he figured he could bluff his way by saying philosophy-looking things that effectively preached to the converted (i.e. “new humanists”). . . . (http://newhumanist.org.uk/1880) Academics can be so vicious. I wonder why we can't simply agree to disagree?

Ralston, Laurel. "A Derridean Approach to Musical Identity." POSTGRADUATE JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS 5.2 (2008).

The issue of musical identity—of what defines works of music, gives each its unique character and distinguishes them from one another—is one of the central issues in the philosophy of music. Too often in the philosophical literature it is approached as a purely theoretical question, one that can be answered adequately through careful intellectual consideration of scores and performances. The typical philosophical approach to the performance of Western art music, particularly that composed between the Baroque and Romantic eras, is to offer descriptions of how musical works come into being, what their origins may be, which of their structural and aesthetic elements must be observed and conserved in their representations, and so on. It takes the written notation of a musical work, the score, to be a kind of blueprint created by a composer, defining and describing an autonomous musical entity, the musical work, such that another person might perform it. The work is recognized paradoxically as something existing independently of, yet deriving its identity from, its origins with the composer. In this essay I propose that an alternative to this approach can be constructed by analogy with the ‘textual strategies’ characteristic of Jacques Derrida’s approach to literary theory, criticism and the philosophy of language. Philosophical accounts of literary identity have upheld the supposed immutability of the ‘original version’ of the text and allowed it to remain the ‘ultimate reference’ for its identity. Derrida, however, has pointed out the problematic nature of traditional thought regarding literary texts: that there is a certain tension between the recognition of the enigmatic nature of the identity conditions of a literary work and the continued belief that it is possible to articulate such conditions. The structure of writing, of all writing, precludes any notion of the written text as fixed and eternal, because signification, representation, and the substitution of one meaning or context for another all occur indefinitely within it and without closure. Writing works in such a way that it engages signified meaning “in its own economy so that it always signifies again and differs. . . . [That] which is written is never identical to itself.” The centre that would enclose this economy, that could cause the chain of signification to close itself by linking the origin and the end and boiling all substitutions down to a single, cohesive interpretation, would transgress this structure of writing. Substitution as it occurs in writing does not simply happen once and for all; it is structurally bound to occur ad infinitum. In music this encompasses the substitution of notation for sound—a dual structure set in motion by différance, the playing movement that emerges within musical practice not only as the theoretical interaction of possible interpretations, but also as the concrete exercise of creating sound, time and again: of playing music. This is the case with all written texts—they do not possess a simple origin, because they are originally iterable. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.british-aesthetics.org/uploads/A%20Derridean%20Approach%20to%20Musical%20Identity%20-%20Laurel%20Ralston.pdf.

"Walter Rodney Conference," Institute of Caribbean Studies & Centre for Caribbean Thought, University of the West Indies, Mona, October 16-18, 2008.

The Institute of Caribbean Studies and the Centre for Caribbean Thought, in association with the Guild of Students, UWI, Mona and the Africana Studies Department, Brown University, invite abstracts for a conference, to be convened from October 16-18, 2008 at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, to mark the 40th anniversary of the October 16, 1968 student protests resulting from the expulsion of Walter Rodney. The Mona campus was cordoned off by the police and military for two weeks and staff and students engaged in self-searching discussions about the political situation and the character of the University itself and its mission. Revisiting this historic moment is particularly appropriate as we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the University of the West Indies. The impact of the Rodney protests was felt throughout the Caribbean region and especially at the UWI campuses in Trinidad and Barbados and at the University of Guyana. There were protests in London, the United States and elsewhere. These protests internationalised the local events and contributed to the emergence of newspapers such as Abeng in Jamaica, Moko in Trinidad and Ratoon in Guyana. The October 1968 events helped to stimulate the radicalisation of Caribbean politics and culture in the 1970s and challenged the Caribbean to consider alternative ways of thinking about and building egalitarian societies in the early years after political independence. Walter Rodney's intellectual and political work reinvigorated and refined the radical Pan-African tradition in the 1960's and 70's. His reflections on 1968 and some of his articles and speeches were published in 1969 in The Groundings With My Brothers. His return to the University of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania in 1969 saw him continue his scholarly work on African history as well as his collaboration with liberation movements based in the Tanzanian capital. In 1972 his classic book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa appeared. Walter Rodney returned to Guyana in 1974 and was denied employment at the University of Guyana by the administration of Forbes Burnham. Rodney, one of the leaders of the Working People's Alliance, was killed on June 13, 1980 when an explosive he thought was a walkie-talkie, given to him by a soldier in the Guyana Defence Force, detonated. His book, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905, was published posthumously in 1981. CONFERENCE THEMES: § Walter Rodney's Academic and Political Legacy § Pan-Africanism Revisited § Marxism in the Caribbean § Student Activism in the Contemporary Caribbean § Anti-colonial movements in the Caribbean § Black Power in the Caribbean § Gendering Black Power § Rastafari and Political Activism in Jamaica § Grassroots Journalism in the Caribbean § Oral Histories of the Rodney Protests § Literary Representations of Revolutionary Politics in the Caribbean § Rodney, Revolution and Popular Music The themes outlined above are not exhaustive or mutually exclusive and are intended as a guide/focus for panels and papers. We invite submission of research paper abstracts by September 8, 2008. Submissions should include: 1)an abstract of not more than 300 words 2)a cover page with name, affiliation, contact information and short bio (75 words or less) Email your submission to: Leon Burrell Conference Co-ordinator Email: conferencewalterrodney@yahoo.com <mailto:conferencewalterrodney@yahoo.com> Tel: (876) 977-1951 Fax: (876) 977-3430

"Cognitive Disability: a Challenge to Moral Philosophy," Department of Philosophy, SUNY, Stony Brook, Manhattan Campus, September 18-20, 2008.

"Cognitive Disability: A Challenge to Moral Philosophy" will explore philosophical questions about three specific populations — people with autism, Alzheimer's disease, and those labeled "mentally retarded." We will raise ethical and foundational questions regarding both theoretical and practical matters.

The areas to be explored include:

• Personhood: Should individuals with cognitive disabilities be excluded from the protections and responsibilities we assign to "persons"? Do the implications of such exclusion force a reconsideration of the concept of personhood?
• Justice: Should individuals with cognitive disabilities be excluded from the claims and protections granted to members of a political community? If not, how might their interests be represented and given a political voice?
• Care: How should we define, and how can we recognize, relationships and obligations to people lacking the ability to fully care for themselves? How should we understand the obligations of and to their caregivers? What significant aspects of the nature of all human interaction are revealed in these relationships?
• History and Conceptual Bases of Classifications: How have various categories of cognitive disability emerged? What historical, social and political contingencies have played a part in our classifications?
• Metaphilosophical Concerns: How has the "benign neglect" philosophers have exercised with respect to this subject shaped the substance of wider philosophical theory and practice?

Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.stonybrook.edu/sb/cdconference/about.shtml.

Showalter, Elaine. "'Changing Places' in Changed Times." CHRONICLE REVIEW September 12, 2008.

Thirty years ago, every American academic going on a research trip or a sabbatical to England carried a copy of David Lodge's comic classic, Changing Places (1975), which told a tale of two 40-year-old professors of English literature and two embattled campuses in the eventful spring of 1969. An ineffectual British academic, Philip Swallow, from the University of Rummidge (think Birmingham), and a hotshot American star, Morris Zapp, from the State University of Euphoria (a fictional state between Northern and Southern California), in Plotinus (Berkeley), switch places for a six-month exchange of offices, courses, and even wives. Both are transformed by the experience, and since the women's-liberation movement is just beginning (the Plotinus Gazette announces its first demonstration, for free child-care centers), the wives are changing, too, in ways none of the characters can foresee or control. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i03/03b00401.htm. See also Showalter's Faculty Towers: the Academic Novel and its Discontents (Pennsylvania: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005).

McLemee, Scott. "Prospero's Island." INSIDE HIGHER ED September 10, 2008.

We reached the island on the morning of Labor Day, as the last of the vacationers were closing up their summer rentals; they caught the afternoon ferry back to New Bedford. At peak times, there may be 300 people on Cuttyhunk. It is a tiny island with a peculiar shape, located about two hours from Boston — one hour each by land and by sea. A retired academic couple, Marvin and Betty Mandell, had lent my wife and me use of their place for a few days. (Marvin is professor emeritus of English at Curry College, while Betty holds the same position in social work at Bridgewater State College.) By the evening of our first day, the island’s population had shrunk to a few dozen people – none of whom, it turned out, was a restaurateur. We sank into the quiet. Cell phones didn’t always work, and we were wireless-less. It was a good place to let your imagination to take over. We began speculating about the puzzling sets of rocks arranged in odd patters, the occasional symbol painted here and there, the graffiti laboriously scratched into the stones of a bridge. We worked out our own myth about the sacrificial traditions of the island – two parts Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and one part H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” (It seemed obvious that worship of sinister fish gods would be involved, given all the yachts). What made the private joke work, of course, was the absolute lack of menace or stress on the island otherwise – unless you counted the occasional need to get out of the way of golf carts putting down the road. Exploring the local history books on Marvin and Betty’s shelves and in the Cuttyhunk Public Library, I became intrigued by the area’s most ambitious claim to fame. This was the theory that it served as the inspiration for Prospero’s island in The Tempest. Since getting back home, to a city with good research collections, it has been possible to explore the matter a little further. By now, it is not so much a case of scholarly fascination as reluctance to surrender all of the vacation mood. . . . Read the rest here: http://insidehighered.com/views/2008/09/10/mclemee.

Butterworth, Trevor. "Prevarication Nation." BOOKFORUM (September-November 2008).

Rabaté, Jean-Michel. The Ethics of the Lie. New York: Other, 2008. Jean-Michel Rabaté, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, bookends The Ethics of the Lie with Jacques Lacan, the French psychiatrist who connected the anxieties of poststructuralism to those of psychoanalysis. At the beginning, we have the proposition, apropos Monica Lewinsky, that Bill Clinton may have been “the world’s first Lacanian president” because, as Lacan saw it, “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship” (and as Clinton tried to explain to a mortified nation, oral sex should be thought of as an aperitif rather than an entrée). At the end, and apropos Pinocchio’s nose, we are told that from a Lacanian point of view, “the lie always keeps something of the structure of the phallus, because the phallus is always like a joke, partakes [sic] of its mythical origins with the ludicrously inflated prosthesis carried on the stage in Aristophanes’ theater.” . . . Read the rest here: http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_03/2755. See also for the author's perspective on his book: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/home/SASFrontiers/rabate.html.

Kleinberg, Ethan. "Review of Francois Cusset's FRENCH THEORY." NDPR (September 2008).

Cusset, François. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. There is a central question that provides a guiding thread through François Cusset's far ranging and intellectually challenging investigation into the reception of "French Theory" in the United States: how is it that "around the beginning of the 1980s, right when the works of Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Derrida were being put to work on American campuses and in some alternative communities as the theoretical foundation for a new type of politics, those very names were being demonized in France as the epitome of an outdated 'libidinal' and leftist type of politics"? (XVIII) His study unfolds, examining the chronological periods before and after this crucial decade, casting back to roughly 1966 and then moving forward up until 2004, in an attempt to answer this question and explain the American phenomenon he terms French Theory. Cusset is fascinated by the simultaneous American invention and French erasure of French Theory and his investigation into the social, political, and theoretical causes of this transatlantic divergence takes the reader on a journey from the "public birth" of post-structuralism at the 1966 Johns Hopkins University conference that brought Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and others to the United States (and together) for the first time, through the mutations and revisions of French Theory in the American academic, cultural, and political landscape up to our current moment. To be sure the wide range and loose chronology of the book makes it difficult to discern a clear American trajectory. But what makes the book an exciting and informative read is the details gleaned as we move from the world of advanced academics to the world of cyberpunk comics, temporary autonomous zones (an early incarnation of the internet), and post-modern architecture. In Cusset's account, French Theory was never the sole property of advanced academics but a site of shared interest for those academics and countercultural figures. It is actually the symbolic capital, the star power, of the countercultural figures that led to the rising popularity of the French theorists; this light then reflected back onto the American academics who, in turn, basked in the glow. Thus Cusset's narrative unfolds in two ways. It tells the story of the academics who were instrumental in cultivating French Theory in American higher education and it also attempts to discern and explicate the points of contact with American counter-cultural forces. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14085.

Sorman, Guy. "Economics Does Not Lie." CITY JOURNAL 18.3 (2008).

The dismal science is at last a science—and the world is the beneficiary. Though economics as a discipline arose in Great Britain and France at the end of the eighteenth century, it has taken two centuries to reach the threshold of scientific rationality. Previously, intuition, opinion, and conviction enjoyed equal status in economic thought; theories were vague, often unverifiable. Not so long ago, one could teach economics at prestigious universities without using equations and certainly without the complex algorithms, precise (though not infallible) mathematical models, and computers integral to the field today. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_3_economics.html.

Lunn, Peter. "Behavioural Economics: is it Such a Big Deal?" PROSPECT MAGAZINE 150 (September 2008).

Orthodox economic models are not wrong as such, but rather sloppy, biased approximations of how our economy works. They present a cartoon characterisation of economic life, greatly exaggerating one side of our nature at the expense of others. Behavioural economics has started to paint a more realistic picture. Its progress is following the pattern of a scientific revolution. At first the findings seem to be anomalies and oddities, but on closer inspection they yield new principles and regularities. Economists trained in the conventional approach were initially resistant—many still are—but over time the more open-minded and, interestingly, younger economists are being enticed towards the new field; testing explanations, deriving implications. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10359.

Derakhshani, Tirdad. "The Peril of Racial Paranoia." PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER August 21, 2008.

Jackson, John L. Racial Paranoia: the Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness. New York: Basic Civitas, 2008. Update: See Jackson, John L. How Not to Read Racial Paranoia. CHRONICLE BRAINSTORM September 8, 2009. Extract: I just read a short review of my book in the magazine Color Lines. The reviewer, Julianne Ong Hing, tries to argue that I mistakenly privilege a psychological reading of racism over a structural one. However, she then goes on to claim that “by keeping it light” (a euphemism, I think, for not writing the book more polemically), I ignore “the deeper psychological impacts of a lifetime of racial micro-aggressions.” She claims that I emphasize “personal interactions as the crux of the racial impasse plaguing U.S. society in the 21st century.” This is the heart of her critique: “The realm of personal relationships may be the most accessible for folks to begin to discuss race, but too often the conversation stops at the personal, as it does in this book. Jackson misses the point by equating the frustrations of people of color with those of whites. There are sharp differences between a group that’s imprisoned at disproportionately high rates and one that is not, between a group whose members own the vast majority of the country’s wealth and the groups with the highest poverty rates. Jackson does a disservice to his readers by limiting his analysis to the “he said-she said” between people of color and whites without delving into the structural roots of racism that permeate our daily interactions and our social, political and economic institutions. Even though Jackson acknowledges larger, structural racisms and recognizes the danger of his argument, he nevertheless persists.” This is a reading of the book’s argument that Hing brought with her to its pages. Of course, that’s part of why race and racism are such thorny issues. We are all already tangled up in some ideologically sticky webs of our own (and others’) spinning when it comes to this topic. We are on the defensive, overly sensitive to the potential of Trojan-horsed attacks — or of the other side’s cold-blooded disinterest. . . . Original Post (September 5, 2008): Jackson, an associate professor of anthropology and communications at the University of Pennsylvania, says African Americans live with the suspicion that they encounter racism constantly in their daily lives - though they can't always prove it. They see subtle signs of contempt in a simple look, a gesture, a remark, a nod of the head by white men and women who otherwise seem very friendly. . . . Jackson insists that racial paranoia is more than a feeling or psychological state: It shapes the way people relate to each other across the racial divide. "People aren't just being hypersensitive," he says. "Paranoia defines the organizing principle . . . of how racism functions in American culture today." Nor is racial paranoia limited to one race, Jackson adds. "White folks also are constantly paranoid," Jackson says. In their case, the paranoia is "about the accusation of being called racist." . . . Read the rest here: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/magazine/20080821_The_peril_of_racial_paranoia.html.

CFP: "Consciousness, Theatre, Literature, and the Arts 3," Lincoln School of Performing Arts, University of Lincoln, May 16-18, 2009.

Abstracts (up to 1 page) are invited for papers relating any aspect of consciousness (as defined in a range of disciplines involved with consciousness studies, but not therefore restricted or limited to the academic university context) to any aspect of theatre, performance, literature, music, fine arts, media arts and any sub-genre of those. Creative work is also expressly invited.

Please send the abstract to Professor Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe, dmeyerdinkgrafe@lincoln.ac.uk. Deadline for receipt of abstracts is 1 March 2009.

(Thanks to http://www.continental-philosophy.org/.)

Lapidos, Juliet. "The Hottest Rhetorical Device of Campaign '08." SLATE September 5, 2008.

Politicians eager to keep up with the latest fad need more than a flag pin this election season; the hottest accessory of the 2008 campaign is the reversible raincoat. That's the nickname speechwriters have given to the rhetorical device in which words are repeated in transposed order, as with Churchill's famous line: "Let us preach what we practice—let us practice what we preach." The fancy Greek name for the trick is antimetabole, and it's been cropping up in speeches by Democrats and Republicans alike. John McCain, in his Thursday convention address, deployed the technique in this admirably honest line: "We were elected to change Washington, and we let Washington change us." The audience roared. McCain's antimetabole echoed one used by his running mate, Sarah Palin, the night before: "In politics, there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers. And then there are those, like John McCain, who use their careers to promote change." The inversion of change and career, forming a crisscross structure, gives the line a powerful one-two-punch feel. During his speech last week, Bill Clinton recycled an antimetabole he'd first used in the 1990s: "People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power." The turn of phrase pleased the delegates—they clapped and hooted . . . Read the rest here: http://www.slate.com/id/2199536/.

Kneller, Jane. "Review of Novalis' NOTES FOR A ROMANTIC ENCYCLOPEDIA." NDPR (September 2008).

Novalis. Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia. Trans. and ed. David W. Wood. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007. David Wood's translation of the unfinished collection of notes that Novalis (pseudonym of Friederich von Hardenberg) intended as "material for an encyclopedics" is a welcome contribution to the growing literature in English on the philosophy of the early German romantics. The fact that these are "unfinished" notes should by no means deter the reader. This is an important set of short essays, aphorisms, fragments and musings on the sciences and the nature of systematic knowledge. In true early romantic fashion it is wide-ranging in content and style, touching on topics from art to experimental method in the sciences, from philosophy and religion to butter softening, colic, gout, fever and the symbolism of human dress. Taken as a whole, the notes represent the beginnings of a philosophical experiment that, if successful, would support the hypothesis that a unified methodology is possible for the arts and sciences. Novalis' vision was that this could only be carried out successfully by philosophers who were both scientists and poets, and who could "treat the sciences both scientifically and poetically." The Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia, or the Allgemeine Brouillon as the editor of the 1929 German edition called it (literally, "general rough draft"), is a preliminary gathering of materials that Hardenberg hoped to pull together into a book that would embody the ideal practices of any science: "All good researchers -- physicians, observers and thinkers, proceed like Copernicus -- They turn the data and methods around, to see whether or not they fit better this way" (92, #517). It was to be a book that would model the artistry, or at least the aesthetic dimension, of scientific practice. What Novalis called the "magic wand of analogy" is at work throughout these notes. Musical terminology is used to illuminate physiological claims, chemical terms describe religion, etc. This book deserves to be read not simply for its many poetic moments ("Philosophy is really homesickness -- the desire to be everywhere at home" (155, #857)) but for the overall vision that gives the poetry its theoretical punch. That lovely characterization of philosophy, for instance, when read in the context of the surrounding material (it follows a comment on the nature of pain and pleasure, motion and interruption, and the feeling of powerlessness), is presented as a medical diagnosis: Philosophy is a symptom of human vulnerability. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14068.

Romano, Carlin. "A French Intellectual Star Considers What's Right About the Left." CHRONICLE September 5, 2008.

Levy, Bernard-Henri. Left in Dark Times: a Stand against the New Barbarism. New York: Random House, 2008. Isn't it time that snobs in French departments, who'll schedule 20 Bataille, Blanchot, or Deleuze seminars before permitting even an invited chat on Lévy, admit that his impact on French intellectual history will far outlast that of their heroes? Left in Dark Times: a Stand against the New Barbarism (Random House, September) — Lévy's blend of memoir, dissection of the 1970s New Philosophy movement that made him famous, and call for a leftism that's neither infantile nor robotic — demonstrates the acuity of his antennae, and his good fortune in reflecting current events. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i02/02b00601.htm.

Sokolowski, Robert. "Review of Santiago Zabala's THE HERMENEUTIC NATURE OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY." NDPR (August 2008).

Zabala, Santiago. The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy: a Study of Ernst Tugendhat. Trans. Michael Haskell and Santiago Zabala. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. This book is a translation of an Italian study that appeared in 2004. Its purpose is to introduce English readers to the work of Ernst Tugendhat, who has been an important figure in European philosophy for the past half-century. Tugendhat was born in 1930 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, into a Jewish family. His family moved to Switzerland in 1938 and then to Venezuela. He did his undergraduate studies in classics at Stanford. After the war, he returned to Germany and did doctoral work at Freiburg, where he was much influenced by Heidegger. His dissertation on Aristotle's theory of being and predication was published in 1958 under the title Ti kata tinos: Eine Untersuchung zu Struktur und Ursprung Aristotelischer Grundbegriffe. His Habilitationsschrift, also earned at Freiburg, was published in 1967 as Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger. Tugendhat was invited for a semester in 1965 to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he came into contact with analytical philosophy. He found the approach congenial and his next major work was Traditional and Analytical Philosophy: Lectures on the Philosophy of Language. It appeared in German in 1976 and in English in 1982. The book was the outcome of a course given at Heidelberg in 1970. In it Tugendhat asserts the importance of focusing on actual speech and sentences and thus gives his reading of Heidegger and phenomenology something of a "linguistic turn," but he also tries to give a hermeneutic reading of linguistic analysis. Another major work, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, appeared in German in 1979 and in English in 1986. Since that time, Tugendhat has concentrated on issues concerning human rights, ethics, and mysticism. He taught at Heidelberg from the conclusion of his graduate studies until the mid 1970s, when he left Germany for Chile. He has since lived in both Germany and South America, has held research positions in Starnberg and Berlin, and has commented on current social, political, and international topics. Some observers have contrasted Tugendhat with Gadamer, both of whom were indebted to Heidegger at the beginning of their intellectual careers: Gadamer developed Heidegger's thought in a "hermeneutic" direction, and Tugendhat is said to have developed it along "linguistic" or "semantic" lines. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14025.

Marshall, Donald G. "Review of Francis Ambrosio's DANTE AND DERRIDA." NDPR (August 2008).

Ambrosio, Francis J. Dante and Derrida: Face to Face. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007. Francis J. Ambrosio tackles . . . Jacques Derrida "as a sort of Virgil to contemporary readers of the Commedia" (6). More precisely, to this end, he deploys a "thematically and chronologically . . . narrow cross-section" of Derrida's work (8), in particular a selection of the later texts in which Derrida reflected on religion. These include his engagement with Augustine in Circumfession (Derrida's part of the book Jacques Derrida, authored with Geoffrey Bennington and published in French in 1991); The Gift of Death (1992), which centers especially on the work of the Czech philosopher Jan Potočka and on Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling; the catalogue for an exhibition Derrida organized at the Louvre, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (1990); and the lecture "To Forgive: The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptible" from Questioning God, edited by John Caputo et al. (2001). Derrida wrote much more about religion, but these texts are well chosen to resonate with Dante. It is important to stress that Ambrosio is not "applying" Derrida to Dante in the manner of some interpreters who treat deconstruction as a shiny new sausage grinder they can run texts through to produce all-too-predictable results. On the contrary, his aim is "to engage the questions [Dante and Derrida] engage, which are primarily questions about faith, hope, and love, about responsibility, and about writing" (160). Derrida guides Ambrosio's reading of Dante, but Ambrosio is equally alert to how reading Dante helps us "read Derrida better" (132). He mediates a dialogue through which to probe deeply both writers' "shared commitment to forgiveness as the fundamental and universal concern of the religious dimension of personal existence" (11). . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14006.

CFP: "Emergent Encounters in Film Theory: Intersections Between Psychoanalysis and Philosophy," King’s College, London, March 21, 2009.

Keynote Speakers: Parveen Adams (Fellow of the London Consortium) Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University) Interdisciplinary approaches to the theoretical discussion of the cinematic medium have often engaged with philosophical or psychoanalytic perspectives. While philosophy and psychoanalysis are by no means opposed schools of thought, the potential to develop new ways of understanding film remains an opportunity to be explored. In seeking out further lines of enquiry, the study of intersections between cinema/philosophy/psychoanalysis, seems most pertinent to our generation of ‘film thinking,’ to invoke Daniel Frampton’s concept of the ‘film mind.’ whose future still stands, to some extent, in the shadow of psychoanalysis. Recent philosophical models of thought offered by film theorists such as Frampton and D. N. Rodowick embrace a new ontological grasp of the cinema, but what then are the implications of this shift for psychoanalysis? The question, therefore, remains whether philosophy and psychoanalysis are indeed irreconcilable, or if the specific philosophical turn sets up boundaries that unjustly seal off the possibility of dialogue between the two methodologies. We invite proposals of 200 words for papers of 20 minutes on areas including: -Films as philosophical and/or psychoanalytical form of representation -Questions of realism and illusion, from documentary cinema to the fantasy genre -Ethical responses to, and within, cinema -The family, sociality, fraternity and sorority -Changes and developments within spectatorship -The impact of, and approaches to, new technologies -Responses and approaches to film aesthetics/film art -Corporeal subjectivity, embodiment and the senses -Temporality, memory and amnesia in the cinema -Depictions of criminality, revenge and guilt Please send abstracts by 14th November 2008 to encounters@kcl.ac.uk; Enquiries may also be sent to davina.quinlivan@kcl.ac.uk. Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.film-philosophy.com/announcements/files/4bc500ad11bded82abd928884ba760f1-74.php#unique-entry-id-74.

Mukherjee, Pablo. "A Manifesto to Discard Elitism." TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION August 28, 2008.

Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. If theory "simply is the process of reflecting on the underlying frameworks, principles, and assumptions that shape our act of interpretation," how do we explain the blood-splattered field of the theory wars? Unsurprisingly, Felski finds that it is the structural elitism of the literary critics that has given theory its bad name. We are caught between those who hold a theological view of the uniqueness of literature and those who maintain that literature always unknowingly transmits dominant ideological norms. But both schools agree that it is the critic alone who can interpret the full range of literary meanings by adopting poses of "analytical detachment, critical vigilance, guarded suspicion." Felski wants to find an "ordinary" theory of literature and culture that would replace these hermeneutics of suspicion. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=403291&c=1.

Fox, Robin. "Demonic Males and Missing Daughters." EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY 6.3 (2008): 432-435.

Gottschall, Jonathan. The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer. Cambridge: CUP, 2007. Jonathan Gottschall, himself a Greek scholar and Homer expert, . . . has taken the trouble to learn the best of evolutionary theory and information and asked himself the question: can our knowledge of behavioral evolution inform our interpretation of Homer and archaic Greece? Not to explain away Homer at all, but to elucidate what is happening in the great epics. He asks the simple question: Why did the men in the Iliad and the Odyssey fight? What were they fighting about? The Trojan war was not typical of Greek fighting in the Dark Ages (12th and 13th centuries BC.) More usually "war" was raiding expeditions of one tribe against another. Huge armies engaged in 10-year sieges was exceptional, and while the Iliad may have been a literary fiction nevertheless it is an incomparable record of life and fighting at the time. Erick Havelock (Preface to Plato) called it, and its companion volume, a "tribal encyclopedia" and so it is. Gottschall mines it for information on the motives and methods of the Greek warriors in a tribal society (not a nation) addicted to conflict, not unlike the Vikings. What was the conflict about? . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep06432435.pdf.

PUB: ANTHURIUM: A CARIBBEAN STUDIES JOURNAL 5.2 (2007).

Table of Contents: Acknowledgements by Jennifer Rahim Keeping an eye on Naipaul: Naipaul and the Play of the Visual by Jean Antoine-Dunne “The history that had made me:” The Making and Self-making of V.S. Naipaul by Edward Baugh Naipaul’s Sense of History by Bridget Brereton Consuming the Self: V.S. Naipaul, CLR James, and A Way in the World by Rhonda Cobham Signifying Nothing: Writing about not Writing in The Mystic Masseur by Barbara Lalla A Mala in Obeisance: Hinduism in Select Texts by V.S. Naipaul by Vijay Maharaj Consorting with Kali: Migration and Identity in Naipaul’s “One Out of Many” by Paula Morgan V.S. Naipaul and the Interior Expeditions: “It is Impossible to Make a Step Without the Indians” by Sandra Pouchet Paquet The Shadow of Hanuman: V.S. Naipaul and the “Unhomely” House of Fiction by Jennifer Rahim The Confessional Element in Naipaul’s Fiction by Gordon Rohlehr Visit the issue homepage at: http://scholar.library.miami.edu/anthurium/volume_5/issue_2/V5I2index.html.

CFP: "The Making of the Humanities," University of Amsterdam, October 23-25, 2008.

Goal of the Conference: We aim at bringing together scholars and historians of the various humanities disciplines to draw the outlines for a comparative history of the humanities. We are especially keen on understanding the mutual interplay between the humanities and how they developed from the artes liberales, via the studia humanitatis, to (early) modern disciplines. Although there exist separate histories of single humanities disciplines, a comparative history would satisfy a long-felt need, and fill a conspicuous gap in intellectual history. An edited book with a prominent publisher is planned, with the provisional title Another History of Science: The Making of the Humanities. Topics for Abstracts: We invite submissions that explore the connections between different disciplines in the history of the humanities. While the focus is on the early modern period when the humanities started to emerge (roughly 1400-1800), we also welcome proposals for papers exploring interesting links with earlier or later periods. Topics include all aspects of the history of philology, linguistics, logic, rhetoric, music theory, ‘ars historica’ and ‘ars poetica’, with an emphasis on their interrelations as well as their impact on the natural sciences, philosophy and theology, and on the broader cultural and political context. Sample questions of interest include the following: What was the role of the humanities in the development of the natural sciences and the scientific revolution? How were different humanities disciplines integrated in different periods, e.g. in Lorenzo Valla’s discovery that the Donatio Constantini was a forgery? Did developments in historiography lead to a Copernican turn in the humanities? Can the origins of empiricism be traced back to philology? What were the major discoveries and inventions in the humanities that “changed the world”? How did the combined presentation of naturalia and artificialia in cabinets of curiosities influence the development of the humanities? Who are the key figures of the humanities in different periods -- e.g. Alberti, Valla, Ramus, Erasmus, Scaliger, Reuchlin, Kircher, Holder etc. For more information, visit the conference homepage at http://www.illc.uva.nl/MakingHumanities/abstracts.html.

CFP: "Science and Human Perspectives: Western and Russian Perspectives," Department of Philosophy, Baylor University, November 16-18, 2008.

For further information, visit the conference homepage: http://www.baylor.edu/philosophy/index.php?id=57776.

PUB: JOURNAL OF POWER 1.1 (2008).

Contributors to Volume One: Amy Allen - Dartmouth College, USA Clarissa Hayward - Washington University, USA Steven Lukes - New York University, USA Since Aristotle's classification of political systems, power has been one of the most central and debated themes of the social sciences. Yet, despite its centrality, there has been little consensus on what constitutes the essence of power. It is part of the raison d'etre of the Journal of Power to capitalize on the consequent debates surrounding power. In political science, there have been continual debates from Dahl to Lukes and, recently, between followers of Foucauldian perspectives and more modernist view points. These have centred on the contrast between power in terms of agency and the way in which social consciousness create conditions of possibility for action or differential capacities. If we move into a cognate discipline, such as International Relations, we find that the area is divided between those who consider power purely in terms of material resources and those who argue that it is defined by ideas and perceptions - so-called realists'and idealists' A similar division is found in political-sociology, where some focus upon power in terms of legitimacy and authority while other, more 'hard-headed' theorists view it in Machiavellian terms of war and deceit. In political philosophy, the key division lies between those who consider power as defined by its exercise, its effects, intentions, and potentialities. In rational choice theory power is divided between those who view it positionally, almost as a kind of luck, and those who see it as episodic. In anthropology, in contrast to all the above, power is theorized in terms of rituals and ceremony. In sociology, there is a clear division between those influenced by Marxism, who define power in terms of class or economy, and the followers of the tradition of Weber, who consider power as linked to authority and domination. In feminist literature, the debate is dominated by the intricacies of the division between social constructivist accounts of gender and those who emphasize violence and material resources. Running through all these debates is the fundamental contrast between those who view power negatively, as domination, and those who think of it positively, as an essential ingredient of autonomy and empowerment. In short, some of the key debates within the social sciences are centred on the theme of power and it is intended that this journal should reflect this. Aside from theoretical debates, the Journal of Power is a primary outlet for those doing empirical work on relations of power and powerlessness. For instance, the Journal welcomes empirical analysis of the process whereby globalization, ethnicity, nationalism, war and gender are central to the constitution of power, whether conceptualised as domination or empowerment. The first issue is available for free online here: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/17540291.asp.

"Recreate, Replace, Restore: Exploring the Intersections between Meanings and Environments," Ohio Northern University, April 17-19, 2009.

The natural world has been “humanized”—even areas thought to be wilderness bear the marks of human impact. Given the long reach of human influence, environmental thought in the humanities and the sciences have sought to understand how we can limit, change, or reverse the more disastrous effects that humans have had on the environment. Preservation is not the sole or primary strategy; restoration, sustainable design, and other creative responses to place have become part of the debate. Further, both the sciences and the humanities have increasingly realized the interconnection between human accounts of meaning and the more-than-human world. Thus, reflections on the proper approaches to natural and built environments increasingly include investigations into contested religious, philosophical, and ethical meanings of the environments that surround us. The aim of this conference is to further the ongoing dialogue on religion, ethics, and the environment by exploring three interrelated concepts: to recreate, to replace, and to restore. The interdisciplinary dialogue hosted by the conference is meant to illuminate certain unique dimensions at the crossroads between finding value and reflecting on one’s place in the world. Each of these terms has diverse religious, ethical, and scientific connotations. Each converges on the ways in which humans both think about and act upon their surroundings. And each radically questions the damaging conceptual divisions between nature and culture, human and environment, and scientific explanation and religious/ethical understanding. Papers, discussions and keynotes will reflect on how one or more of these terms illuminates the intersection between questions of meaning and the environments in which we find ourselves. Recreate “Re-creation” is multivalent and complex. At the heart of this word is a term with important theological meanings—“creation.” In turn, creation leads to a host of other associations: the concept of a divine creator, the power of creativity, homo faber, and the cosmic creation myths. In an ecological context, to recreate can suggest innovative, novel approaches to scientific phenomena, both in theoretical and applied ecology. These, in turn, allow us to better understand the diversity of ecological processes and the role humans play within. But recreation in these cases also quickly leads to religious narratives of destruction and annihilation. A creator must “wipe the slate clean” in order to recreate. Scientists must challenge and question existing technologies, models and paradigms to innovate. Replace Regarding the term "replace", this might refer to adding new knowledge into our pedagogies and practices. In the sciences, the more we understand, the more important it is for biologists to incorporate this knowledge into practice. But the term also highlights the spatial dimensions of nature as seen by its etymological rootedness in “place.” The OED tells us that “to replace” returns us to an earlier place, or take the place of something else. For philosophical and religious thought on nature, this might mean to return to earlier settings and places, or to overcome the ways in which we dwell in place. Further, to replace evokes issues of sustainability and consumption in light of current economic debates and practices. Restore At the intersection of the humanities and the sciences, the concept of “restoration” holds a diversity of meanings. For example, for ecology and policy studies, “to restore” evokes our need to implement scientific knowledge in restoring areas to self-sustainable, diverse landscapes, communities, and ecosystems. To restore a place or landscape includes a desire to minimize our "footprint" upon the Earth. But restoration also means that we must understand the history and temporality of nature, for it conjures up thoughts of returning to a primeval or primitive state. Paralleling such philosophical and scientific questions, some of the connotations of restoration highlight cosmic meaning and anthropology. The ideal of many religions is to restore nature and the human to some ideal state, such as a union with God, an original perfection, or a pre-existent cosmic order. Conference website: http://www.onu.edu/org/wgren/conference-index.html.

"Literature, Art and Culture in an Age of Global Risk," Cardiff University, July 2-3, 2009.

Keynote speakers: Prof. Imre Szemán (McMaster University, Canada) Dr Charlie Gere (Lancaster University, UK) What are the cultural implications of living under conditions of global, manufactured risk? In the twentieth century, the possibility arose for the first time that a crisis of planetary proportions might result from human activities. By the early decades of the century, global economic and financial interdependence was such that a crisis unfolding in one location could radiate outwards to destabilize the entire socio-economic world-system. Through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the risk of pandemic upheaval has been heightened by an array of phenomena: the expansion and acceleration of media and telecommunications networks; the integration of financial markets and the instantaneous ramification of market fluctuations via programme trading; nuclear proliferation; international terrorism; rapid population growth; unsustainable consumption of natural resources; overload of electricity grids, leading to cascading power failures; pollution of the ecosphere and resulting climate change; computer viruses and ‘cyber-warfare’; genetic engineering; cloning; nanotechnology; artificial intelligence; bioweaponry; the emergence and rapid spread of new strains of infectious disease; and the development of antibiotic-resistant pathogens. Scholars speak of ‘systemic risk’ (Anthony Giddens), ‘simultaneous crisis formation’ (David Harvey), a ‘general disaster’ (Brian Massumi), ‘worst imaginable accidents’ (Ulrich Beck), ‘total risk of catastrophe’ (François Ewald), ‘global’ or ‘integral’ ‘accidents (Paul Virilio), ‘global catastrophic risks’ (Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic), and ‘modernist events’ – ‘events which not only could not possibly have occurred before the twentieth century but the nature, scope, and implications of which no prior age could even have imagined’ (Hayden White). Such occurrences hover indeterminably somewhere between the possible, the probable, and the inevitable. This conference will explore how writers, artists, filmmakers, dramatists, philosophers, and critical and cultural theorists have responded to the prospect and reality of global crisis. Moreover, it will ask how the methodologies of textual and cultural criticism might offer new insights into our age of global risk. Topics might include, but are by no means limited to: • Notions of futurity, messianism, and the à venir (‘to come’) • Modernism and the first era of globalization • Figurations of the contemporary, postmodern, or technological sublime • The alteration and/or realization of textual meanings in the wake of catastrophic events • Connections between conditions of global risk and the aesthetic or intellectual ‘risks’ taken by experimental artists and thinkers • Disaster films • Ecocriticism and climate change • Future ruins • The fate of the archive • ‘Nuclear Criticism’ and its possible revival post-9/11 • (Post-)apocalyptic visions • Cyberculture and utopian/dystopian futures • The cultural implications of Kondratiev waves and world-systems theory Please send 250-word abstracts for 20-minute papers to the organizer, Dr Paul Crosthwaite, at globalrisk@cardiff.ac.uk by Monday 22 December 2008. Proposals for three-person panels are also welcome; please send a brief description of the panel along with abstracts for the individual papers. Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/globalrisk/.

The Futures of Human Rights: Moral, Legal, and Political Cultures, Comparative Literature Program, University of South Carolina, February 28-29, 2009.

The idea of human rights is frequently invoked in national and international discussions and yet never has this idea been so contested as it is today. This interdisciplinaryconference is designed to open dialogue about the future of human rights. We welcome academic or creative submissions addressing the philosophical, legal, political, literary, sociological, or technological questions of human rights. We seek presentations that speak simultaneously to the issues of specific disciplines and to the general interests of the citizen, so that a common conversation can develop during the course of the conference. Papers should take no more than twenty minutes to read. Send 500-word abstracts and 50-word bios to Meili Steele. The deadline is November 1, 2008. Contact: Meili Steele Department of English University of South Carolina Humanities Office Building Columbia, SC 29208 USA Phone: +1 (803) 777-2045 Fax: +1 (803) 777-9064 Email: steelem@sc.edu.

Anon. "Capitalism Under Assault." ADBUSTERS July 23, 2008.

Not long ago, Roberto Mangabeira Unger was leading a life of academic stardom, working as a professor at Harvard Law School. The 60-year-old had first joined the faculty at age 24. By 29, he became one of the youngest tenured professors in the school’s history. His prominence expanded far beyond the field of law. Unger wrote prodigiously, churning out an endless stream of ideas about philosophy, politics, economics and social theory. He was, and he remains, a committed, radical leftist; he embraces the very idea of radicalism as a central pillar of his political philosophy. But now Unger has the chance to change history’s course. The Rio de Janeiro native was appointed last summer to be a minister in the government of Brazil. He has long been a critic of Brazil’s various governing regimes, including that of the man who appointed him, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. But now Unger is working from within government, instead of as an outsider. He will be the minister for strategic affairs – a job many call the “Minister of Ideas.” The question is whether his ideas will survive the cut and thrust of governmental politics, or be rendered as merely – in the most belittling sense of the word – academic. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/77/capitalism_under_assault.html.

Lippitt, John. "Hegel and the Chicken Suit." TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION March 31, 2008.

Zupancic, Alenka. The Odd One In: on Comedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. This book, by one of the three Slovenian philosophers central to the Lacan-inspired Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis, appears in a series called "Short Circuits". The other two - Slavoj Zizek and Mladen Dolar - are liberally cited, and the former contributes a foreword to the series in which he explains its name. A short circuit "occurs when there is a faulty connection in the network - faulty . . . from the standpoint of the network's smooth functioning". This makes short-circuiting "one of the best metaphors for a critical reading". By approaching various areas of inquiry from a Lacanian standpoint, we are told, we make them readable in a "totally new" and "disturbing" way. But the other, unmentioned, possibility is that a short circuit might plunge the reader into darkness, making it difficult to find one's way around. Such is the case, I fear, in several parts of this book. The reader relatively unfamiliar with concepts such as the Real and the Symbolic in their Lacanian-Zizekian modes isn't given much of a torch. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=402170&c=1.

Benhabib, Seyla. "On the Public Sphere, Deliberation, Journalism and Dignity." DIALOGUES ON CIVLISATIONS July 21, 2008.

An Interview with Karin Wahl-Jorgensen. We are facing a generation who is getting all its information online. The consequence is that one’s points of reference are so multiple that they may not intersect and a common world may not emerge. But fragmentation can also bring effervescence – says Seyla Benhabib, philosopher and Professor of political science and philosophy at Yale - . One medium that is in great crisis is television. I would like to see a citizens’ forum, rather than these continuously self-referential talking heads and so-called experts. We extend the boundaries of our sympathy by understanding the conditions of others who may be radically different than us – she concludes – At its best journalism does this; it extends your vision of the world by making you see the world through the eyes of the others.” . . . Read the whole interview here: http://www.resetdoc.org/EN/Benhabib-interview-media.php.

Furedi, Frank. "Spell It Like It is." SPIKED ONLINE August 12, 2008.

Those of us who work in universities are used to reading essays by students who have liberated themselves from the oppressive regime of good grammar and spelling. Some of us still bother to correct misspelled words; others have become tired and indifferent to the problem of poor spelling. Now, an academic has come up with an interesting compromise. Ken Smith, a criminologist at Bucks New University, England, argues that we should chill out and accept the most common spelling mistakes as ‘variant spellings’. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5574/.

Gerson, Lloyd P. "Review of Kevin Corrigan, et al., eds. PLATONISMS." BMCR (August 2008).

Corrigan, Kevin, and John D. Turner, eds. Platonisms: Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern. Leiden: Brill, 2007. The "Platonisms" of the title of this book is evidently used as equivalent to "varieties of Platonism" or "versions of Platonism," where the "variety" or "version" indicates an interpretation of Plato's dialogues or of the implications of the claims made therein. Usually, though, a variety of Platonism is attributable to a philosopher who is defending that position. Thus, we speak of the Platonism of Speusippus or of Numenius or of Proclus and designate their different doctrines as varieties of Platonism. We usually do not speak of the Platonism of philosophers who are not self-proclaimed followers of Plato in some sense; thus, we do not normally refer to Descartes' Platonism or Levinas' Platonism, even though their engagement with Plato is certain to be an engagement with some variety of Platonism. Nor do we typically designate as a variety of Platonism a philosophical position that either agrees with a variety of Platonism at some very general level or with some relatively remote consequence of a Platonic position. So, philosophers who argue for the existence of a first principle of all or even for the importance of critical reflection in human life are not said thereby to embrace a variety of Platonism. The same is true for philosophers who, for example, argue for a purely remedial theory of punishment. In the present volume, "Platonisms" is a term used with maximal scope, thus justifying the immense range of topics covered as well as methodologies employed. There is no harm in this; indeed, it is a positive step in demonstrating the extraordinary fecundity of Plato's thought. Still, I would be surprised if many individuals would have sufficient interest in enough of the areas covered to want to pay the very considerable price for this book. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.bmcreview.org/2008/08/20080843.html.

"Evolution and Morality," Annual Meeting, American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, Boston, August 28-29, 2008.

Conference co-chairs: Sanford Levinson, W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair of Law and Professor of Government, University of Texas; and James Fleming, the Honorable Frank R. Kenison Distinguished Scholar in Law, Boston University Thursday, August 28 4:15 PM: Panel 1. Hynes 105 Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor of Philosophy and James R. Barker Professor of Contemporary Civilization, Columbia University: "Naturalistic Ethics without Fallacies" Commentators: Jonathan Beckwith, American Cancer Society Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Harvard Medical School Robin B. Kar, Professor of Law, Loyola Law School Chair: James Fleming 7:30 PM: Evening Reception, Sheraton Exeter Friday, August 29 7:00 AM: Breakfast reception 7:50 AM: Annual business meeting, Sheraton Independence Ballroom West 8:00 AM: Panel 2. Sheraton Independence Ballroom West Nita Farahany, Assistant Professor of Law and Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University: "Law and Behavioral Morality" Commentators:Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Professor of Philosophy and Hardy Professor of Legal Studies, Dartmouth University Jennifer Culbert, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University Chair: Jacob T. Levy, Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory, McGill University 10:15 AM: Panel 3, Sheraton Independence Ballroom West Larry Arnhart, Professor of Political Science, Northern Illinois University: "Deep History in Biopolitical Science" Commentators: Daniel Lord Smail, Professor of History, Harvard University Richard Richards, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Alabama Chair: Donald Horowitz, James B. Duke Professor of Law and Political Science, Duke University Conference attendees may be interested in continuing discussion at the separate APSA Panel 3-34, Genes, Justice, and the Politics of Biotechnologies, Friday, 2 PM, with the following papers: Anja Karnein, Designing Our Children: Will This Create a New Inequality Between the Generations? Bruno Macaes, When Politics Transcends Biology Ashley Biser, Equal Yet Distinct: Plurality and the Politics of Genetics Further information may be found here: http://www.political-theory.org/asplp/.