Cfp: "Totalitarian Laughter: Cultures of the Comic under Socialism," Princeton University, May 8-9, 2009.

This conference is hosted by the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures. Throughout its history, socialist mass culture actively relied on satire, humor, and comedy to foster emotional bonds with its audience. Orchestrated by the state cultural industry, public laughter released social and political tension, while leaving intact or buttressing mechanisms of repression and institutions of power. In turn, late Soviet irony or the aesthetic of grotesque, developed from below, became instrumental in solidifying a cultural distance from the values promoted by the socialist state. Varied in their impact and scope, these cultures of the comic nonetheless constantly pointed to the irrationality and ludicrousness of the socialist way of life. Whether officially approved or censored, totalitarian laughter relativized existing practices and norms, suggesting different models of understanding and embodying really existing socialism. Regardless of their content, these jokes of repression shared the same quality: they were made, not found. It is precisely this active production of totalitarian laughter from above and from below that this conference aims to explore. How did state socialism transform traditional genres and categories of the comic? How crucial was state censorship in producing (or suppressing) totalitarian laughter? Through what forms of displacement and condensation did official and non-official cultures achieve their comic effect? How did these practices of the comic correspond and interact with each other? What kinds of communities were formed in the process of producing jokes of repression? What were the mechanisms and paths of circulation through which laughable versions of socialism became available to larger audiences? Finally, what kinds of pleasure did totalitarian laughter promise, if not deliver? We seek to address these questions by bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars interested in reconstructing the peculiar relationship between repression and laughter under state socialism. We invite papers that explore forms of socialist grotesque in the Soviet Union and central and eastern Europe in such diverse fields as politics, history, literature, arts, music, theater, television, and film, among others. Please send an abstract (300 words) of the paper you would like to present at this conference, along with your CV, by February 10, 2009 to oushakin@princeton.edu. We may be able to offer a limited number of travel subsidies for foreign presenters. Those selected to give presentations at the conference will be contacted at the end of February 2009. Final papers will be due no later than April 20, and they will be posted on the conference’s website. Program committee: Serguei Oushakine (Princeton), Petre Petrov (Princeton), Seth Graham (UCL), Kevin M.F. Platt (Penn) Nancy Ries (Colgate). Further information may be found here: http://slavic.princeton.edu/events/news/detail.php?ID=1882.

Cfp: "The Politics of Space and Place," Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, University of Brighton, September 16-18, 2009.

In a world where inequality and poverty are growing remorselessly, where you are, and where you happen to have been born, continue to determine, how, and in indeed whether, you live. From the urbanization of the human species and the burgeoning of slums to the rise of the modern gated community; from 'Fortress Europe' and the Israeli 'security wall' to land reform in South Africa; questions of space and place are central to some of today¹s most bitterly contested political issues.

• What might an analysis of politics which focuses on the operation of power through space and place, and on the spatial structuring of inequality, tell us about the world we make for ourselves and others?
• How is power structured and brought to bear on people through spaceand place?
• How does power operate locally, nationally and globally and in both its soft and hard forms
• How does it operate through urban planning, architecture, housing policy, immigration policy and national borders?
• How does it work to discipline and exclude some, while insulating others from the excesses of inequality and degradation?
• How are space and place utilised as a means of dividing people into 'us' and 'them'?·
• How and in whose interests do these divisions function as they pit against each other not only people who live in different parts of the world but also those who live just a few metres apart?
• What might an analysis of politics through questions of space and place indicate about how power, injustice and inequality could be better understood and more effectively contested?

We anticipate that these and related issues will be of interest to people working in, among others, philosophy, ethics, political theory, politics, sociology, social policy, globalisation, international relations, cultural studies, history, architecture, photography, geography, planning, refugee studies, migration studies, urban studies and area studies. Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be emailed to Nicola Clewer: nicolaclewer.hughes@ukonline.co.uk.

Pub: HISTORY AND THEORY (October 2008).

The Executive Editor, Brian Fay (bfay@wesleyan.edu), writes: The October 2008 issue of History and Theory contains four really interesting articles and eight review essays. Consider Susan Crane's "Choosing Not to Look: Representation, Repatriation, and Holocaust Atrocity Photography": Crane asks, "have Holocaust atrocity photographs reached the limits of their usefulness as testimony?" and she answers-against conventional wisdom and practice-that not only have they done so, but that as a result they should be removed from public view or be what she calls "repatriated." The essay is so cogently argued and gracefully written that it will at least stimulate ideas that you may well not have thought of before, or it may actually convince you and lead you to act quite differently. In either case, it is very much worth reading. To download a free copy of it, click here: http://www.historyandtheory.org/freearticle.html. But Crane's is not the only revelatory article in this issue. Anita Kasabova, in "Memory, Memorials, and Commemoration," presents what she calls a semantic account of the relation between the past and the present, and in the process shows the ways memory, memorials, and commemorations function in light of this relation. In this she offers an account at odds with the presentism of Eelco Runia and others who have presented their views on these subjects in our pages. The article is remarkably rich in the way it brings so many topics into focus and shows how they relate to one another. Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen's "Making Sense of Conceptual Change" addresses a fundamental question in intellectual history: what is it about? Some historians, such as Arthur Lovejoy of the great chain of being fame, have claimed that intellectual history is about unit-ideas, but critics have countered that there are no such units that cut across historical epochs; they propose, instead, that it is linguistic entities that are the object of study, or they wonder whether the whole notion of intellectual history isn't a non-starter because there is nothing stable enough to count as the object of such a history. To these critics Kuukkanen responds that we should accept ideas and concepts as the basis for an intelligible history of thought-so his is a return in a way to Lovejoy-but that we have to be more sophisticated than Lovejoy about what this means. He proposes that concepts and ideas are comprised of a core and a margin, and that conceiving of them in this way solves a number of problems that Lovejoy's original formulation could not. I bet most of you don't know what "Froude's disease" is. I didn't before I read Ian Hesketh's "Diagnosing Froude's Disease: Boundary Work and the Discipline of History in Late-Victorian Britain." Froude was one of the most popular historians in late nineteenth-century Britain, but he denied that history was a science, and claimed that it has more to do with art and drama. Needless to say, professional historians at the time didn't like this approach; indeed, E. A. Freeman warned the historical community that they "cannot welcome [Froude] as a partner in their labors, as a fellow-worker in the cause of historic truth," and diagnosed him as suffering from "an inborn and incurable twist" that resulted in "Froude's disease"-the inability to "make an accurate statement about any matter." Hesketh unpacks the construction of "Froude's disease," and exposes the disciplinary techniques at work in the professionalization of history, techniques that sought to exclude non-scientific modes of thought such as that offered by Froude. The result is not just an elegant revisiting of an earlier time, but a clarifying reminder of the ways disciplinary boundaries are established and enforced. The issue also includes these review essays:

• Christopher Lloyd on William H. Sewell Jr., The Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation
• Michael S. Roth on Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4
• Jürgen Kocka on Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: from Cultural History to the History of Society
• Richard H. King on Jerrold Siegel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century
• William H. Krieger on Peter Kosso, Knowing the Past: Philosophical Issues of History and Archaeology
• José Carlos Bermejo-Barrera on Karl Ameriks, Kant and the Historical Turn: Philosophy as Critical Interpretation
• Lionel Gossman on Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe
• Abdelmajid Hannoum on François Hartog, Régimes d'historicité: présentisme et expériences du temps

Click here to access the October issue: http://www.historyandtheory.org/archives/oct08.html (subscription necessary to download articles).

"American Tropics: Towards a Literary Geography," Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex, July 4-7, 2009.

By 'American Tropics' we understand an extended Caribbean, or what Edouard Glissant calls “the estuary of the Americas,” or what earlier scholars sometimes called 'Plantation America': an area including the southern USA, the Caribbean littoral of Central America, the Caribbean islands, and northern South America. The American Tropics project at Essex seeks to understand the writing associated with this area through a study of particular places within it: cities, borders, regions, natural features. Each place is a zone of encounter, bringing together sets of writing in different languages and styles, from different literary and cultural backgrounds, all of which have in common that attention to the same place. The project therefore approaches literary history via literary geography.

We call for papers which engage with this project in a number of different ways:-

• through attention to particular places and the writing associated within them;
• through consideration of the cultural features of particular places or regions within the American Tropics;
• through engagement with ideas of tropicality more generally, in America or beyond;
• through theoretical engagement with the ideas of literary geography or area studies as they pertain to the American continent;
• through consideration of significant circuits (personal, commercial, cultural) within and beyond the area.

Confirmed speakers include: Barbara Ladd, Richard Price, Sally Price, Susan Castillo, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Sharon Monteith, Gordon Brotherston, Neil Whitehead, Selwyn Cudjoe, Bill Schwarz, Luciana Martins, William Rowe, Margarita Zamora, María Cristina Rodríguez, Lowell Fiet, Ineke Phaf-Reinberger, Shalini Puri, Leah Rosenberg, Wendy Gaudin, Sue Thomas, Susan Gillman.

The final call for papers runs until 31 December 2008.

Colleagues are encouraged to look at the developing project at http://www.essex.ac.uk/literature/American_Tropics/index.htm; Informal enquiries to Peter Hulme at phulme@essex.ac.uk; Formal offers of papers (title plus 300 word synopsis) to Lesley Wylie at lwylie@essex.ac.uk.

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

Thinking about the notion of the “transcendental” in the history of philosophy touches on a number of distinct topics that have proved of central significance. These include the understanding of the a priori, the nature of necessity claims in experience, the questions of the nature of experience itself and its possibility, and the understanding of what is essential in claims of knowledge. Whilst transcendental philosophy as a venture has tended in recent years to be identified with the Kantian project, it is not exclusively connected to it, since successors to Kant have contested the understanding and significance of the “transcendental”. Included amongst alternatives to the Kantian conception are those of the German Idealists (Fichte, Schelling and Hegel), all of whom have either described themselves or been described by others as transcendental philosophers. Similarly,the revival of interest in Kant in the late nineteenth-century, produced significant revisions in the understanding of transcendental methods and arguments. The traditions of European philosophy include significant reinventions of the concept of the transcendental in the works of Husserl, Derrida and Deleuze and the analytic tradition includes such transcendental projects as those of Wilfred Sellars and Peter Strawson and Charles Pierce provides an additional example of an arguably transcendental philosophy. By contrast, in considering the place of the concept of the transcendental in philosophy, it is also important to consider its usage prior to the work of Kant in, for example, the medieval tradition of describing the transcendentals or Plotinus’conception of the transcendental. In responding to this topic contributors might focus, inter alia, on any of the following: Transcendental philosophy: its nature and scope; Transcendental arguments; the nature of transcendental idealism; the viability of transcendental realism; transcendental phenomenology; the role of the transcendentals in medieval philosophy; transcendental empiricism; transcendental philosophy and metaphysics; the synthetic a priori; transcendental deductions; transcendental psychology; analytic philosophy and the transcendental; the intuition of essences; categorial intuition; transcendental subjectivity; science and experience; transcendental apperception; transcendental imagination; transcendental logic; the logic of experience; transcendental ontology; transcendental pragmatism; semiotics and the transcendental; transcendental dynamics; mathematics and experience; nature and the world; mind and world; transcendental aesthetics; transcendental dialectics; transcendental methods. Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words, by December 31st, to the following: Gary Banham [g.banham@mmu.ac.uk] and James Clarke [jac505@york.ac.uk].

"Thought and Action in Aristotle and the Aristotelian Tradition," Department of Philosophy, Marquette University, June 16-18, 2009.

This Conference is intended to provide a formal occasion and central location for philosophers and scholars of the Midwest region (and elsewhere) to present and discuss their current work on Aristotle and his interpreters in ancient and medieval philosophy. PRESENTERS: Established Scholars: send a title and tentative abstract; Graduate Students: send a title, abstract and a supporting letter from your faculty advisor or dissertation director. Send applications to: Richard.Taylor@Marquette.edu The Organizing Committee will select presenters on the basis of qualityof proposals (title and abstract) and scholarly record as the primary criteria. Presenters selected will be asked to confirm their participation by registering and paying the conference fee ($40). CLOSING DATE FOR SUBMISSIONS: February 20. 2009 PROGRAM ANNOUNCED: March 1, 2009. Presented by the Midwest Seminar in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy and the Aquinas and the Arabs Project with the support of the Helen Way Klingler College of Arts and Sciences at Marquette University. Further details may be found here: http://web.mac.com/mistertea/Midwest_Seminar/2009_Summer_Aristotle_Conference.html.

Cfp: "Philosophical Futures: a Day of Φιλο-ΣοΦια (Philo-Sophia): Friendship and Philosophical Discussion," Murdoch University, December, 1 2008.

Update: The programme is now available here: http://philosophy.murdoch.edu.au/program_08.html. Original Post (July 25, 2008): The Murdoch Philosophy Association, in conjunction with the Murdoch School of Social Sciences and Humanities and the Faculty of Arts and Education, invites abstracts of 250 words for twenty-minute papers in any field of philosophy, or related disciplines. In choosing Philosophical Futures as the theme of this year’s Colloquium, we hope to encourage contributions that consider questions relating to the connections between philosophy and the future, for example, future directions for philosophy, links between philosophical pasts and futures, the role of philosophy in shaping the future, and the relevance of philosophy for future generations of theory and practice, life and reflection.

"Empires of Norms and Laws," Joint Sessions of the European Consortium for Political Research, Lisbon, April 14-19, 2009.

Directors: Professor Michael Baurmann (University of Dusseldorf) Email: baurmann@phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de Dr Nicholas Southwood (Australian National University /Jesus College, Oxford University) Email: nfs@coombs.anu.edu.au Call for abstracts: Politics, we are told, consists of systematic power and authority in human affairs. One important context in which such power and authority are manifest is in the formal institutions of coercive law. But there is a second highly significant context in which power and authority are also manifest, namely, in the structures we call social norms. The first has received considerable attention from political theorists. Indeed, there is even a branch of political theory – jurisprudence – that is charged specifically with the task of investigating the kind of power and authority that law possesses (analytical jurisprudence), and considering how and to what extent it helps realise, or might be made to help realise, things we have reason to want (normative jurisprudence). Norms, by contrast, have not received anything like the same kind of sustained attention, an omission that would seem to have the consequence of excluding a crucial part of the proper subject of political inquiry. The aim of this workshop will be to bring together individuals from diverse perspectives in order to try to develop a better understanding of the kinds of power and authority manifest in social norms, and in what ways, and to what extent, they might they be made to help realise things that we have reason to want. We are particularly interested in papers that can help us develop a better understanding of the relation between norms and law: the different kinds of power and authority at issue; their respective strengths and weaknesses as regulatory tools; and how they do and ought to work alongside one another. Submission deadline: 1 December, 2008 Please send a brief abstract by email to both baurmann@phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de and nfs@coombs.anu.edu.au no later than December 1, 2008. Further information is here: http://www.essex.ac.uk/ecpr/events/jointsessions/index.aspx.

Pub: RADICAL PSYCHOLOGY 7 (2008).

• Post Vietnam Syndrome: National Identity, War, and the Politics of Humiliation by Myra Mendible
• Community Participation in Developing Primary Prevention Programs to Enhance Community Well-Being by Jean-Marc Bélanger
• Madness or Illness? by Jason Bernard Claxton
• Psychiatric Slave No More: Parallels to a Black Liberation Psychology by Lauren J. Tenney
• The Psychotic Element in Everyday Group Thinking: Reflections on the Salem Witch Trials by Diana Semmelhack and Larry Ende
• Mere and Divine Madness: Bush, Schreber and the Contexts of Insanity by Mark S. Roberts
• Struggling Against Psychiatry’s Human Rights Violations: An Antipsychiatry perspective by Don Weitz
• “ ‘Are You Sure, Sweetheart, That You Want to Be Well?’ ”: An Exploration Of The Neurodiversity Movement by Kathyrn Boundy

Visit the Radical Psychology homepage here: http://radicalpsychology.org/index.html.

"Genre and Interpretation," Finnish Literary Society and Finnish Graduate School of Literary Studies, Helsinki, June 10–12, 2009.

Confirmed keynote speakers for the conference include Brian McHale (Ohio State University) and Ansgar Nünning (Justus-Liebig-Universität). Two of the eight workshops focus on Bakhtinian ideas on genre. Please send your abstract (300 – 500 words) for a 20-minute paper to Tintti Klapuri, tintti.klapuri@utu.fi, and to Saija Isomaa, saija.isomaa@helsinki.fi, no later than January 16th, 2009.

Monokl-Cogito International Hegel Congress, Bahçeşehir University, Beşiktaş Campus, November 14-16, 2008.

The Programme: Wolfgang Welsch "Reconsidering Hegel's Idealism" Klaus Vieweg "Hegel über die Einheit von theoretischer und praktischer Philosophie" Ralf Beuthan "Erfahrung und spekulatives Denken" Claus Arthur Scheier "Die Logik von Rousseaus zweitem Discours und Hegels ,,Wissenschaft derErfahrung des Bewusstseyns" Çetin Türkyılmaz "Hegel on the Concept of Realization" Tom Rockmore "Is Hegel's Phenomenology phenomenological?" Robert Stern "Is Hegel's Dialectic of Self-Consciousness in the Phenomenology a Refutation of Solipsism?" Kenneth R. Westphal "Hegel's Phenomenological Critique of the Content of our Categories: a Conspectus" Wolfgang Bonsiepen "Die Phänomenologie des Geistes im Kontext der Denkentwicklung Hegels in derJenaer Zeit" Dietmar Heidemann "The Method of Skepticism in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit" David Gray Carlson "The Role of Fear in Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic" Sebastian Roedl "Hegel's concept of the Idea" Italo Testa "Spirit and Habit" Matthias Haussler "Some Implications of The Phenomenology of Spirit for Hegel's Subsequent System(s)" Klaus Brinkmann "Does Hegel's System need The Phenomenology of Spirit?" Further information may be found here: http://kongre.monokl.net/?pages=KongreOturumBasliklari.

33rd Annual Conference, Society for Caribbean Studies, University of Hull, July 1-3, 2009.

The Society invites submissions of one-page abstracts and a short CV by 15th January, 2009 for research papers on the Hispanic, Francophone, Dutch and Anglophone Caribbean, and on Caribbean Diasporas for this annual international conference. Papers are welcomed from all disciplines and can address the themes outlined below. We also welcome abstracts for papers or for full panel proposals that fall outside this list of topics. Those selected for the conference will be invited to give a 20-minutepresentation and will be offered the opportunity to publish their work as part of the Society's online series of papers. Provisional Panels: Slavery and Emancipation Caribbean geographies: place and space Crime and criminality Sexualities Sickness, health and healing Visual and material culture Cultures of resistance Caribbean Religions Civil society and political economy Environment and development Sport and recreation The Cold-War Caribbean Short stories and oral traditions Theatre and performance Remittances and the transnational economy Further information is available here: http://www.caribbeanstudies.org.uk/.

Burrell, David. "Review of Michael Gillespie's THE THEOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF MODERNITY." NDPR (November 2008).

Gillespie, Michael Allen. The Theological Origins of Modernity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. This massively erudite study offers an alterative genealogy of "modernity," showing it to be a sustained attempt to re-cast the created world in a new key, once the metaphysical idiom had shifted from "scholasticism" to "nominalism." Gillespie challenges the standard account, which focuses on the religious wars of the seventeenth century to trigger a set of strategies we call "modern," inaugurated as ploys to circumvent and neutralize "religion" or "faith," so as to clear a way to understand the universe more straightforwardly. His elaborately constructed case proposes to show how intractable controversies in philosophical theology helped to shape the goals of that more straightforward understanding of nature, though not the disparate paths proposed to attain that understanding. The details of the case instruct us well in the "history of ideas," allowing us to become philosophically engaged as dialectical oppositions emerge and meet. His story opens in Avignon with a brief chance encounter of William of Ockham, Francesco Petrarch, and Meister Eckhart after Sunday mass (1, 43). In different ways, these three presage the emergence of alternatives to "scholastic realism," each shaped by the novel metaphysical mode of "nominalism." But let us outline the story before scrutinizing what these abstract names portend for the author, and the ways he wishes to put them into play. The initial chapter elaborates the metaphysical thesis noted, rooting the dynamic proper to modernity in the near-total supersession of "nominalism" over "scholasticism," with the narrative then moving to "Petrarch and the invention of individuality," leading into a fulsome description of Italian humanism by way of its principal protagonists, only to shift to the Low Countries with the impressive figure of Erasmus. While frequently mentioned as a source of patronage for intellectuals, the papal court provides the cultural backdrop for the urbane Christian humanism of the Mediterranean, yet that very urbanity proved a stumbling block to the church's claim to presage the coming of the Kingdom, triggering a northern reaction of righteous reform: "Luther and the storm of faith." The ensuing chapter proves axial to the author's thesis: Erasmus and Luther locked in combat yet each somehow beholden to the "nominalist" revolution. The next two chapters focus on Descartes and Hobbes, respectively, each searching for new strategies with which to think the universe, while these are tested in a mutual encounter highlighted in the final chapter: "contradictions of the enlightenment." An epilogue liberates us from the dreary landscape of northern Europe to introduce a player ancient and new: Islam; suggesting that "the west" will prove unable to engage Islam fruitfully until we understand the real roots of our touted modernity. So what appears as an afterthought in response to recent events, traumatic for the west, becomes the point of this extensive and intensive study. The detail of the extensive study is breathtaking, with intellectual biographies of the major protagonists elaborated against the backdrop of social and political upheavals of their times. We are constantly and consistently instructed. The intensive study, however, is bedeviled with some crucial ambiguities, though these need not undermine the author's overall thesis, and may in fact elicit refinements which could prove enlightening. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14665.

Bottum, Joseph. "Sir Vidia's Dance: Can Life and Art be Separated?" WEEKLY STANDARD November 17, 2008.

French, Patrick. The World is What It is: the Authorized Biography Of V. S. Naipaul. London: Picador, 2008. During a brief remission in his wife's cancer, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist V.S. Naipaul casually explained to a journalist that he had always been "a great prostitute man," mongering among the whores from the early days of his marriage. The publicity that followed from the remark "consumed" his wife, he later admitted to his biographer, Patrick French. "She had all the relapses and everything after that. She suffered. It could be said that I killed her. .  .  . I feel a little bit that way." Unfortunately, he didn't feel "that way" enough to think it inappropriate to move into his house, the day after he cremated his wife, his new mistress, a Pakistani journalist he'd just met (and would, in short order, marry). Even before the whoring revelations, Naipaul's first wife, a middle-class woman named Patricia Hale whom he'd met while he was a student on scholarship to England, had known about a prior mistress--but only because Naipaul himself decided one day to tell her, explaining the violent acts he enjoyed with the woman, some of them memorialized in photographs he brought along to aid the explanation. The woman's name was Margaret Gooding, and Naipaul met her in 1972 in Buenos Aires. French's new biography of Naipaul, The World Is What It Is, quotes extensively from her letters: unbearable scrawls that read like clinical case studies drawn from the pages of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. She begs, moans, despairs, and pleads for Naipaul's "cruel sexual desires." She calls him her "god," her "black master." Her multiple abortions of his children sicken her, but she offers them up to him as proof of her love and abasement. And all this sex stuff is only the beginning. Throughout The World Is What It Is Naipaul shows himself arrogant beyond belief, and vile-tempered, and as self-obsessed as a man simpering while he looks at himself in the mirror. His letters and conversation are full of references to "niggers" and dismissals of Africans and dark-skinned Indians. The man was capable of bouts of extraordinary cruelty: Unhappy with Margaret at one point, Naipaul explains, "I was very violent with her for two days. .  .  . Her face was bad. She couldn't appear really in public. My hand was swollen." But then, he was capable of ordinary, everyday cruelty, as well: "You are the only woman I know who has no skill," his wife's diaries reveal Naipaul once told her, just in passing. "You behave like the wife of a clerk who has risen above her station." He moved on to the mistress who would become his second wife because his inamorata Margaret had simply grown unworthy of his use: "middle-aged, almost an old lady." Vile stuff. I didn't need to know all this about Naipaul. I didn't want to know all this about the man. But the weird thing is that Naipaul himself wants us to know all this. The subtitle makes that clear enough: "The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul." The novelist turned over his papers to French and sat for interview after interview, apparently hiding nothing--all in the course of authorizing this account of his life. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=15793&R=13CD537152.

Pardo, Michael S. "Review of Doug Walton's WITNESS TESTIMONY EVIDENCE." NDPR (November 2008).

Walton, Doug. Witness Testimony Evidence: Argumentation, Artificial Intelligence, and Law. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. Understanding the epistemology of witness testimony is tremendously important for the law. In any legal order, a significant degree of factual accuracy is a necessary condition for just legal judgments, and witness testimony (whether in oral or written form) provides a major -- indeed, often the most important -- class of evidence on which such judgments depend. For these reasons, evidence scholars in law devote attention to the epistemology of the legal proof in general and the role of testimony in particular. A major theme of this scholarly focus has been the extent to which aspects of the proof process can and ought to be formalized. The attempts at formalization typically have appealed to probability theory, often presenting Bayesian models of (1) the proof structure as a whole, (2) aspects of it such as burdens of proof and decision standards, or (3) the probative value of masses or individual items of evidence. Although these models have contributed greatly to understanding some aspects of juridical proof, they have been shown to suffer from deep problems from descriptive, explanatory, analytical, and normative perspectives. Given these limitations, interests have shifted toward other theoretical ways to understand the process and other ways to model it. Douglas Walton's book, Witness Testimony Evidence, is an example of this trend. Focusing primarily on the Anglo-American trial system, the book looks to logic, argumentation theory, formal dialectical models, and artificial intelligence to "understand the structure of witness testimony as a form of evidence in law" (1). It analyzes and evaluates this structure with the aid of formal systems that diagram the inferential relationships between testimonial assertions and the conclusions they are intended to support (in this sense, they are computerized methods similar to one developed in the early Twentieth Century by the great evidence scholar John Henry Wigmore). Although the book discusses the common epistemic problems that can arise with witness testimony, it ultimately defends the trial's reliance on this form of evidence as rational and justified. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14625.

"Charles Taylor wins Kyoto Prize for Arts, Philosophy." THE GAZETTE November 11, 2008.

In Japan yesterday, renowned Montreal philosophy professor Charles Taylor was presented with the Kyoto Prize, one of the world's biggest cash awards. Often referred to as the "Japanese Nobel," the prize consists of a diploma, a 20-karat gold medal and 50 million yen ($604,000). Taylor, 76, is a professor emeritus at McGill University. He became a familiar face in Quebec over the past year through the Bouchard-Taylor Commission into religious diversity, which he co-chaired with historian and sociologist Gérard Bouchard. Taylor won the Kyoto Prize in the arts and philosophy category, one of two Canadians to pick up the award. . . . Further information is here: http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=743d35f2-53af-46c5-bac7-462781cda595.

Cfp: "Feminist Philosophy Made Simple," SWIP UK and International Association of Women in Philosophy, London, February 13, 2009.

Feminism claims women are oppressed, and aims to free them. Like any liberation movement, feminism is dogged by propaganda. But anti-feminist propaganda has been astonishingly effective. Despite endemic and persistent serious harms to women including abuse of girl-children, rape, domestic violence, economic, legal and political disadvantage, and despite centuries of work by feminists, most men and women today will say 'I'm not a feminist' or 'feminism goes too far'. The aim of this conference is to affirm the unity and simplicity of feminism in the face of the propaganda. The unity is captured well in Simone de Beauvoir's phrase 'absolute feminism', which points to necessity as well as unity. The liberation of women is necessary, not something a just society can do without. At the conference we will explore how the apparent complexity and diversity of feminism may be no more than a superficial effect of oppression. Feminists face sceptical, even hostile, standards of evidence and argument. They are expected not only prove there are problems, and suggest solutions. They are also expected to prove feminist solutions are possible, will work - and are not just covert attacks on men. In epistemic conditions like this, it is no wonder feminists modify their claims, distance themselves from each other, and make distinctions so fine they tend to paranoia. Pace the propaganda, feminism is simple. It needs just a couple of concepts to hold it together. At its core, it needs the idea that there are women, who are being harmed and need help. But it seems the propaganda has found a way to undermine even this most fundamental feminist idea. The concept 'gender' used to be a feminist tool for exposing the wrongs of sex roles. But it can also become a patriarchal Trojan horse, smuggling into the heart of feminism tools for the dismantling of the core concept, 'woman'. Proposals are invited for philosophical ways to re-affirm women, without affirming oppressive sex roles. Please send abstracts of up to 400 words by 9th January 2008 by email to soranreader@fastmail.fm with the title 'SWIP UK Spring 2009' in the header line. Please note this is a women-only event. Venue to be announced. For further information and updates see the SWIP UK website: http://www.dur.ac.uk/swipuk/ or the IAPh website http://www.iaph-philo.org/.

"Persons by Convention," University of Sydney, December 16-18, 2008.

Some things in world are perfectly real, but not perhaps instances of natural kinds. Corporations, nations, swimming pools are all rightly so called because of sets of conventional practices in which they are involved. Could persons fall into this category? In the last decade or so a number of theorists have argued so. This conference focuses on the state of this debate—both exploring new ways to make sense of the idea, and new stumbling blocks to its progress. Speakers include: David Braddon-Mitchell (Sydney) Brian Garrett (ANU) Mark Johnston (Princeton) Sarah-Jane Leslie (Princeton) Catriona Mackenzie (Macquarie) Kristie Miller (Sydney) Denis Robinson (Auckland) Carol Rovane (Columbia) David Shoemaker (BGSU) Caroline West (Sydney) For more information see http://web.mac.com/slezak/Persons_by_Convention/Home.html or email Michael Slezak at m.slezak@usyd.edu.au .

"Human Rights Rhetoric: Controversies, Conundrums, & Community Actions," Department of Communication, University of Pittsburgh, Sept. 30-Oct. 2, 2010.

A Call for Papers for the 22nd biennial Public Address Conference. Human rights have been asserted, recognized, reaffirmed, and undermined around the globe. Yet what the expression, “human rights,” designates and ought to encompass has been, and will continue to be, the subject of international controversy. At a concrete level, “rights” have a paradoxical quality that renders them contingent on individual, communal, and national commitments and actions. Rights do not exist outside of their mutual recognition by selves and others, that is, outside of a reconciliation of individual wills in which people freely agree to act according to obligations that they simultaneously expect of others. Once constituted in recognition, human rights may come to compete with other rights that make similar claims to universal status. To take a simple example, as numerous twentieth-century public advocates have argued, the right to freedom of speech may come into conflict with the likewise compelling rights to security of person and equality. There are other reasons why human rights may be the subject of controversy. The security of any particular right requires sufficient resources for securing its enforcement and actualization. The finitude of resources and the (potential) lack of consensus on how to distribute them means that disputes about which rights are “more important” are sure to erupt. Moreover, material conditions and power arrangements can provide substantial restraints on the rhetorical situations in which rights are asserted. Another reason why human rights engender controversy has to do with the term’s wide scope: in some situations, a narrower focus may be more appropriate. On the scale of a sovereign nation governed by law, for example, we may speak of civil or constitutional rights. A focus on health and safety may warrant advocacy under the rubric of environmental rights, whereas an interest in economic and social welfare may require such rubrics as social, economic, or cultural rights. We may also note the way in which systematic violations of the rights of members of a particular identifiable group may occasion the establishment of rights formally tied to group identity—e.g, ethnic, cultural, or national identity. Finally, we could note the increasing imbrications of the human, non-human, and artificial parts, which raise the question of whether human rights, itself, as a concept, may reach its limit in the face of certain medical technological developments and practices. The fact that “human rights” is a locus of ongoing controversy is especially evident within the history of public address and rhetoric. We bring specific rights into focus when we talk about them; or more specifically, when we address them before audiences or publics willing to consider, recognize, support, enact, enforce, or undermine and deny them. The theme of the conference invites discussion of how human rights are addressed in political, legal, social, economic, and other contexts. The scope of the discussion will include past, present, and future public address concerning human rights within the United States and internationally, considering both descriptive and critical dimensions. Relevant questions would include how to identify a corpus of human rights rhetoric that should be cultivated, expanded, or revised; what implications the recent online technologies carry for the articulation, defense, or constriction of rights; what changes globalization brings to the discourse of rights; what pressures global economic changes put on workers’ and immigrants’ rights; recent governmental incursions into Constitutionally protected rights in the US; the limits and possibilities of applying one nation’s successful human rights rhetoric to another’s; the place for articulating and defending human rights under the encroaching pressures of corporatization; the questions raised about universality, given differences of race, gender, ethnicity, and more; and what emerging trends should be watched and studied by members of our scholarly community. Further information may be found here: http://www.pitt.edu/~olson/.

Cfp: "Music and Morality," Institute of Musical Research & Institute of Philosophy, University of London, June 16-17, 2009.

Confirmed keynote speakers include: George Benjamin, John Deathridge, Deirdre Gribbin, Jerrold Levinson, Susan McClary, Roger Scruton Convenor: Guy Dammann, Institute of Musical Research Music has commonly been considered the most elusive of artforms and yet throughout history there have been frequent assertions of its strong links with our moral sensibilities. While this situation may suggest shifting views and expectations of art and music, it may also point to some deeper questions about the nature of music and morality. In the context of increased academic and practical interest in the question of music’s moral value and potential, we are seeking contributions from academic and practical musicians, philosophers, psychologists and historians of ideas, offering critical reflections on questions or cases that touch on the theme of music and morality. Interested contributors should send, in a first instance, a 300 word abstract for a proposed paper of not more than 20 minutes reading time to Valerie James, Institute of Musical Research, music@sas.ac.uk by the deadline of 31 January 2009. Notice of acceptances of submissions will be announced within one month of this deadline. General questions of interest include but are not limited to the following: Can music yield moral knowledge or understanding? Must good music have a moral value? Is there such a thing as immoral music? Is the idea of morality in music compatible with aesthetic formalism? Further information may be found here: http://www.philosophy.sas.ac.uk/Music_Morality_CFP2.doc.

Carter, Jacoby Adeshei. "Review of Lewis R. Gordon's AN INTRODUCTION TO AFRICANA PHILOSOPHY." NDPR (November 2008).

Gordon, Lewis R. An Introduction to Africana Philosophy. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. An Introduction to Africana Philosophy begins, as any text with that or any similar title should, with a discussion of the difficulties of firmly fixing an accurate conception of Africana philosophy. It is Gordon's aim to introduce Africana philosophy as a modern philosophy, where the modern period is inaugurated by the discovery of the "new world" and the institution of the Atlantic Slave Trade and continues on to the present. Gordon presents the reader with a veritable Who's Who of intellectuals who have made some contribution to Africana philosophy from antiquity to the present day. The result is a comprehensive, yet nuanced, account of how and by whom central themes in Africana philosophy have originated and been developed over time throughout the diaspora. For the most part, Gordon's book gives a comprehensive account of the wide ranging field of Africana philosophy while also providing a close look at its instantiations in particular thinkers and select geographic regions. Gordon makes an effort to pay attention to the emergence and development of central themes in various parts of the diaspora though, on the whole, the book is heavily weighted in favor of discussions of African American and Afro-Caribbean philosophy over African philosophy. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14705.

Foucault Seminar Series, Nottingham Contemporary, November-December, 2008.

Free Talks and Seminars organised by Nottingham Contemporary. Monday 10th November 2008, 6 – 8 pm "Meaning, Truth and Prisons: The Legacy of Michel Foucault" David Macey, Foucault’s biographer, will discuss the astounding contribution of this very “uncomfortable thinker.” Although he died over two decades ago, his work continues to inform contemporary life and culture, whether that is our understanding of madness, prison as a model for many modern institutions, or the self-constructed individual who still relishes the audacity of this activist-philosopher today. Monday 17th November, 6 – 8 pm "Michel Foucault and art after Minimalism" Lisa Le Feuvre “A glance, stare or gaze is a function of power,” states Lisa Le Feuvre. “Looking involves taking, giving and refusing permissions – a process predicated to control.” In this lecture she relates Foucault’s theories of surveillance to the concerns of art after Minimalism, revealed particularly in the work of Dan Graham, Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman. Acconci’s attempted invisibility, Graham’s investigations of the politics of vision and architecture, and the conflict with regulation in Nauman’s work are all explored. Their work attempts to revoke the dominating authority that determines bodies in time, space and ultimately, what we see. Monday 24th November 2008, 6 – 8 pm "Stranger in a Strange Land: Michel Foucault in the Business School" Ken Starkey Foucault is regularly cited in business management literature. At first sight, says Professor Ken Starkey, this might seem “strange”. However, his investigations included prisons, schools and hospitals, now seen by managers as potential business opportunities. However, the complicated workings of modern corporations shouldn’t be simply seen as replicating the all-controlling ‘panopticon’. In the current economic crisis we need to escape from our own intellectual prisons, drawing on Foucault’s thoughts to prise open possibilities. Monday 3rd December, 6pm - 8pm "The Architecture of Occupation in Israel/Palestine" Eyal Weizman and Alessandro Petti Weizman and Alessi are currently researching a masterplan that exposes the hidden intention of Israeli planners after the ending of occupation and the settlers’ evacuation. Here architecture appears to collude with oppression, while ghettoising both Israelis and Palestinians. “The landscape has become the battlefield on which power and state control confront both subversive and direct resistance,” Weizman writes in the introduction to his acclaimed book A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture. Planning and the built environment have become blatant political tools, the speakers argue, dominating and determining different life courses as effectively as Foucault’s “biopower.” Monday 8th December, 6 pm – 8 pm "Prison Today" Erwin James Prisoners today are as marginalised and silent as they were when Foucault organised his Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons to give them a voice. Possibly the one exception has been Erwin James, who wrote a regular column for The Guardian while still serving his sentence. He is uniquely placed to understand the prison debate from both inside and out. Tonight he will question the causes of crime, the role of punishment within our society, and whether prison works. To book a place please email info@nottinghamcontemporary.org. Further information may be found here: http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/programme/current/events/.

Suhamy, Ariel. "Samuel Beckett in History." LA VIE DES IDEES November 13, 2008.

Temkine, Pierre, ed. Warten auf Godot: Das Absurde und die Geschichte. Trans. Tim Trzaskalik. Berlin: Matthes and Seitz, 2008. A book on Samuel Beckett’s famous play, Waiting for Godot, is causing quite a stir beyond the Rhine, and further: even the Danish press mentions it. Nothing is known in France of this commotion, despite the fact that the book is translated from the French – it hasn’t found a publisher here. Why? Is it because its authors are not university-spawned? Or because the position they defend is unbearable? Indeed, according to Pierre and Valentin Temkine, Waiting for Godot is not the play we thought it was. The famous collection Les Ecrivains de toujours once summed up the play in these terms: “Vladimir and Estragon, two puppets stranded in the limbo of a no man’s land where everything repeats itself – lingering words, gestures of tenderness or aversion, clowning around meant to elude suffering, visits from humanity […] – persist in expecting the unlikely rescue from an outside or a great beyond which leaves them to their own devices, trapped within their questions in the here and now” (Ludovic Janvier, Beckett par lui-même, Seuil, 1969). It’s the same song and dance in a recent theatre programme: “In a bit of countryside, on a slow evening, two tramps await a certain Godot [...] What are Vladimir and Estragon, this pair of bewildered jokers, harping on about?” (Compagnie Kick Theatre, Theatrical Centre of Guyancourt, 2007, quoted in the book by François Rastier). From the time of the premiere, a critic had set the tone: “Godot, in an indefinite past, in rather uncertain circumstances, set them a rather imprecise appointment in an ill-defined place at an indeterminate time”. Valentin Temkine’s comment is: “One couldn’t be more systematically mistaken!” Repetition, no man’s land, clowning, all these categories that constitute what by common accord is called “absurdist theatre” are energetically dispatched by Temkine. Quite conversely, the play has a place, a time and its characters have a well-defined identity. The plot is set in the Roussillon region of southern France (where Beckett resided during the war), at the time of the invasion of the free zone, and the two characters Vladimir and Estragon are Jews who are waiting for the smuggler who is to save them: some Godot. In 1942, there would have been no reason for them to leave Roussillon. By 1944, they would already have been deported. The play is therefore set in the Spring of 1943 precisely. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Samuel-Beckett-in-history.html.

Ribard, Dinah. "Foucault: Truth in Action." LA VIE DES IDEES October 23, 2008.

Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres: Cours au Collège de France, 1982-1983. Ed. François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana. Intro. Frédéric Gros. Paris: Gallimard / Le Seuil, 2008. [not yet published in English] The Government of Self and Others opens with a famous analysis of Kant’s “Was ist Aufklärung” (What is the Enlightenment?), that Foucault described on January 5 (p.8) as a: “text that is a a bit of a herald, a bit iconic to me.” This is the first edition, strictly speaking, of what was only known until now from the text of May 27, 1978 at the Société française de philosophie (French Society of Philosophy) entitled “Qu’est-ce que la critique?” (What is criticism?), which was published in the Bulletin of this organisation and not republished in the posthumous collection of Foucault’s spoken and written words entitled in French “Dits et Ecrits,” and which was also published in Magazine littéraire in May 1984, a month before the death of Foucault. This article, an early homage and a publishing event, came precisely from the lessons of January 1983 of the Collège de France. We therefore have the complete and authorized analysis of “the ontology of current events” at our disposition now. But this release also gives context to the analysis and brings up new questions: what link is there between this “ontology of current events”, also called by Foucault “ontology of ourselves” and, once beyond the initial “herald”, “the drama of the truth” to which the essential of the lectures of 1982-1983 is dedicated? . . . Read the rest here: http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Foucault-Truth-in-Action.html.

Howard, Jennifer. "Google, Publishers, and Authors Settle Huge Lawsuit Over Book-Scanning Project." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION October 28, 2008.

Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers announced today that they had settled their longstanding legal battle over Google’s mass scanning of books. Under the terms of the deal, Google will pay $125-million to establish a Book Rights Registry, to compensate authors and publishers whose copyrighted books have already been scanned, and to cover legal costs. . . . If approved by a judge, the accord would allow users of Google Book Search in the United States to see the full texts of books they can read only in snippets now. The deal would also have the potential to put millions more out-of-print or hard-to-find titles within the reach of readers and researchers. Institutions would be able to buy subscriptions so that their students and faculty members could have full access to complete texts. All public libraries in the United States would be given free portals for their patrons. (The settlement does not apply to the use of Google Book Search outside the United States.) Users without library or institutional access would pay a fee to preview the full text of a book. Google and the copyright holders—the publishers and authors—would share the proceeds from subscriptions and individual use. Authors and publishers could opt out of the program. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/?id=3423.

Malkin, Irad. "Review of Henry Hurst, et al., eds. ANCIENT COLONISATIONS." BMCR (November 2008).

Hurst, Henry, and Sara Owen, eds. Ancient Colonizations: Analogy, Similarity and Difference. London: Duckworth, 2005. Tthe book's subtitle reads "analogy, similarity and difference" but, except for Purcell's article, most of it reads as if the latter two words are merely implied in the first. Basically the question that interests the editors is: are analogies helpful or should the attractive ones be considered an enemy? I wonder, however, whether we are anachronistically inclined to treat ancient colonization in terms of modern imperialism and colonialism, or have we been so well trained to be suspicious of anachronism that not only do we avoid analogies but expect their existence in others’ work where it is perhaps unjustified to do so? One would expect the first task of such a book, before its contributors warn against the various dangers of analogy, is to establish whether or not the plague is rampant. Anthony Snodgrass makes a remark, typical of the book, that the examples are simply too numerous to cite, yet directs us to a rather specific article by Gillian Shepherd on marriages among Greeks and non-Greeks. In truth, when reading through its pages, one would be hard-pressed to find more than just a handful of meaningful examples of the 'anachronistic model,' at least for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.bmcreview.org/2008/11/20081108.html.

Griswold, Charles. "Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY Revised November 12, 2008.

Plato's discussions of rhetoric and poetry are both extensive and influential. As in so many other cases, he sets the agenda for the subsequent tradition. And yet understanding his remarks about each of these topics—rhetoric and poetry—presents us with significant philosophical and interpretive challenges. Further, it is not initially clear why he links the two topics together so closely (he suggests that poetry is a kind of rhetoric). Plato certainly thought that matters of the greatest importance hang in the balance, as is clear from the famous statement that “there is an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (Republic, 607b5-6). In his dialogues, both this quarrel and the related quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric amount to clashes between comprehensive world-views—those of philosophy on the one hand, and of poetry or rhetoric on the other. What are these quarrels about? What does Plato mean by “poetry” and “rhetoric”? The purpose of this article is to analyze his discussions of rhetoric and poetry as they are presented in four dialogues: the Ion, the Republic, the Gorgias, and the Phaedrus. Plato is (perhaps paradoxically) known for the poetic and rhetoric qualities of his own writings, a fact which will also be discussed in what follows. . . . Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/.

"Centering the Caribbean in Caribbean Studies," 34th Annual Conference, Caribbean Studies Association, Kingston, Jamaica, June 1-5, 2009.

The question that this Conference asks the Association in its 34th year of existence is: how may we continue as a Caribbean Studies Association with a greater self consciousness of the umbrella term that unites our scholarship and practice? Possible themes include:

• Who defines the Caribbean and who interprets the various definitions?
• What are the changing interests of scholars and practitioners who work in the field of Caribbean studies and who formulates “Caribbean” policies and programmes?
• Who are the beneficiaries from the knowledge that are produced in the name of Caribbean studies?
• Has the Caribbean’s unique history and geography produced ideas that serve a present global discourse on cultural exchange, ethnic dis/harmony, race, gender and class relations, economic development, political sovereignty and scientific research?

Further information may be found here: http://www.caribbean-studies.org/en/index.html.

Major, William. "Teaching Composition: a Reconsideration." INSIDE HIGHER ED July 22, 2008.

When I tell new acquaintances that I am an English professor, they generally react two ways. First, they express dismay that they now have to watch what they say (as if I were grading their performance). Second, and more to the point, many of them ask an inevitable question: “How well do your students write?” That people outside of academia recognize a crisis of communication within speaks to one central fact: The average college student is remarkably challenged by the age-old practice of putting ideas down on paper. Very few people would argue with the truism that success within the university and beyond is predicated upon students’ achieving a certain level of proficiency as writers. Thus, if the inability to communicate is begrudgingly taken as a given at the beginning of the freshman year, it becomes — in the general lament — a tragedy by graduation. Who, then, is to blame? English departments are a common target. I was stunned when, as a work/study graduate student in the department office, I answered the phone during lunch only to be berated by a physics professor who wanted to know what the hell we were doing over there. Things had apparently become so critical that even the good people in the sciences were beginning to notice. Leaving aside for a moment the unexamined presumption that only English departments should be responsible for writing — as if we alone knew how to impart the wisdom of subject-verb-object — I do in fact want to take his complaint seriously. What are we doing over here? I have no interest in the now clichéd grumblings over English departments and their esoteric if not onanistic engagement in high-octane literary theory. I will only say that there is merit to the criticism. On the whole, however, such censure really isn’t going anywhere; these exercises in cryptic marginalia are simply what we do, much in the same way that hyenas eat carrion. Both have their place, and whether one is more useful than the other is a matter for disputation. My questions are more practical, if not more overtly political: Why is the teaching of writing so readily given over to the novitiate? If writing is that important as a university and life skill, why do we assign its teaching to graduate students and part-time instructors? Where are the associate and full professors of English, for it is exceedingly difficult to find them in writing classrooms? . . . Get the answers here: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/07/22/major.

"Connect Deleuze: Transdisciplinary Perspectives," Department for American Studies, University of Cologne, August 10-12, 2009.

2nd International Deleuze Studies Conference. The Conference aims at building transdisciplinary assemblages that involve Deleuze in a wider range of thought, i.e. at constructing, from different‘modules of thought,’ innovative conceptual arrangements that integrate Deleuzian philosophy into the larger field of contemporary knowledge production and practices of living. Speakers include: Brian Massumi [Université de Montréal] Hanjo Berressem [Universität zu Köln] Ian Buchanan [Cardiff University] Paul Harris [Loyola Marymount University] Eugene Holland [Ohio State University] Gregg Lambert [Syracuse University] Patricia Pisters [Universiteit van Amsterdam] Mirjam Schaub [Freie Universität Berlin] Janell Watson [Virginia Tech] James Williams [University of Dundee] Submit panel proposals andor individual abstracts [250 words] to CONNECTdeleuze@web.de. DEADLINE: Apr 30, 2009 (please include your affiliation and short bio) Further information may be found here: http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/englisch/abteilungen/berressem/deleuze2009/.

Berkowitz, Peter. "Towering Ivories: Stanley Fish and his Ideal of the American University." WEEKLY STANDARD 14.8 (2008).

Fish, Stanley. Save the World on Your Own Time. Oxford: OUP, 2008. Stanley Fish, the title of whose book is an admonition to professors to keep their politics out of the classroom, understands a great deal about what is wrong with higher education in America. Unfortunately, his prescriptions for reform--which amount to little more than exhortations to faculty and administrators to mend their ways and, whatever else they do, not to explain or justify liberal education to legislators, private donors, alumni, parents, or students--are foolish and self-defeating. Part of the trouble is Fish's fondness for deflationary tactics and contrarian positions. The deeper problem is his failure to take seriously the liberal in liberal education and the liberal in liberal democracy. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/740pcklf.asp?pg=1.

"Levinas: Four Readings," Beit Avichai, Jerusalem, December, 2, 9, 16, 23, 2008.

Emmanuel Levinas—one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century—paved a unique, highly impressive road that drew on the major texts of western philosophy as well as the treasures of Jewish tradition. The series will trace Levinas’s thinking as reflected in four different aspects of his philosophy. Series organizer and moderator: Dr Joëlle Hansel, chair of the Raissa and Emmanuel Levinas Center, Jerusalem IN HEBREW Admission: NIS 30 per session; students: NIS 20; NIS 100 for the series Tuesday, December 2, at 8PM : For the Sake of a Just Society: Responsability for the Other Yair Tsaban, former Knesset member and government minister Prof. Shalom Rosenberg, Department of Jewish Thought, Hebrew University The session will include the screening of an interview that Levinas gave in 1985. Tuesday, December 9, at 8PM: To the Jewish Bookshelf Muki Tzur, scholar of rural settlement and a member of Kibbutz Ein Gev Dr. Shmuel Wygoda, head of the Department of Jewish Philosophy, Yaacov Herzog College, and a research fellow at the Van Leer Institute The session will include the screening of a 1986 film in which Levinas explains his statement "We thank You for our thanking You." Tuesday, December 16: The State of Israel and the Religion of Israel Dr. Zvia Walden, head of the Institute for Initiatives, Language, and Computers at Beit Berl Academic College Rabbi David Bigman, head of Yeshivat Maale Gilboa The session will include the screening of a 1976 film in which Levinas discusses his book /Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism/. Tuesday, December 23 (second night of Hannukah) 8PM: Between Light and Darkness: Particularistic Universalism in Levinas' Thought Salomon Malka, author, journalist, and Emmanuel Levinas’s biographer Ada Paldor reading excerpts from "The Light and the Dark," Levinas’s essay on Hanukkah. Joelle Hansel, Raissa and Emmanuel Levinas Center All events will take place at King George Street, 44, Jerusalem, Israel.

Buruma, Ian. "The Lessons of the Master." NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS November 20, 2008.

French, Patrick. The World is What It is: the Authorized Biography Of V. S. Naipaul. London: Picador, 2008. Many writers—myself included—owe a great debt to V.S. ("Vidia") Naipaul. He opened up new literary possibilities, ways of seeing and describing the world, especially the non-Western world. The hardest thing for admirers is to avoid imitating him. To sound like a writer one respects may be a sincere form of flattery, but it is also a profound misunderstanding of what makes Naipaul, or indeed any good writer, extraordinary. Finding his own voice is something of an obsession to which Naipaul returns often in his reflections on writing: the constant search for his place in the world, a unique perspective, a writerly compass. Naipaul's voice, which some younger writers are tempted to mimic, cannot be defined by citing his opinions on race, the colonial experience, India, literature, or anything else. His views are frequently designed to shock and outrage, thrown out, especially in interviews, as a kind of smokescreen to protect the autonomy of "the writer." No, what makes Naipaul's writing so inspiring is the way he makes an art out of experience, travel, careful scrutiny of the physical world, and sharp analysis of ideas, history, culture, politics. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22062.

Jones, Dan. "The Emerging Moral Psychology." PROSPECT MAGAZINE 145 (2008).

Long thought to be a topic of enquiry within the humanities, the nature of human morality is increasingly being scrutinised by the natural sciences. This shift is now beginning to provide impressive intellectual returns on investment. Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, economists, primatologists and anthropologists, all borrowing liberally from each others’ insights, are putting together a novel picture of morality—a trend that University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt has described as the “new synthesis in moral psychology.” The picture emerging shows the moral sense to be the product of biologically evolved and culturally sensitive brain systems that together make up the human “moral faculty.” . . . Read the rest here: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10126.

Howard, Jennifer. "The Birth of FRANKENSTEIN." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION November 7, 2008.

Almost from the moment that it was published anonymously on New Year's Day 1818, Frankenstein had readers and critics arguing over its origins. Early rumor held that it wasn't Mary Shelley but her husband, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who deserved the credit. (Or the blame; some early readers were outraged by the novel's idea that a man could play God and create life.) Even after the couple confirmed Mary's authorship and her name appeared on new editions in 1823 and 1831, some critics held on to the idea that Percy was the guiding spirit behind Frankenstein. A few still do. As late as last year, an independent scholar named John Lauritsen dismissed Mary Shelley's claim to authorship. In The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein (Pagan Press), Lauritsen argued that "an uneducated, teenaged girl" could not have written the book but that her husband — "one of the greatest poets and prose stylists in the English language" — could have. Lauritsen is an outlier among Shelley scholars, almost all of whom consider Frankenstein to be Mary's work. They also agree that Percy was present at the creation, helping Mary nurture her nightmare inspiration as it grew into a full-blown novel. All the evidence — manuscripts, letters, journals, the Shelleys' own testimony — places Percy at the creative scene. (It's known, for instance, that he embellished the ending and made it, at least in some readers' minds, more melodramatic.) That's where the debate heats up. How much of a participant was Mary Shelley's better half? Should Percy be considered a co-creator of her masterpiece? Was he a co-opter of her genius? Was he Mary's Svengali, her Max Perkins, or merely a good copy editor? Thanks to the dogged textual work of a scholar named Charles E. Robinson, a professor of English at the University of Delaware, readers will now be able to see for themselves what Mary wrote before she turned it over to Percy's editorial ministrations. Last month, the Bodleian Library published Robinson's edition of The Original Frankenstein, a version of the novel that probably comes as close as it's possible to get to the draft that Mary first handed Percy to read. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i11/11b01201.htm. See also Lynda Pratt's "Who Wrote the Original Frankenstein?" TLS October 29, 2008 (http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article5035717.ece).

Weinberg, Steven. "Without God." NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS September 25, 2008.

Let's grant that science and religion are not incompatible—there are after all some (though not many) excellent scientists, like Charles Townes and Francis Collins, who have strong religious beliefs. Still, I think that between science and religion there is, if not an incompatibility, at least what the philosopher Susan Haack has called a tension, that has been gradually weakening serious religious belief, especially in the West, where science has been most advanced. Here I would like to trace out some of the sources of this tension, and then offer a few remarks about the very difficult question raised by the consequent decline of belief, the question of how it will be possible to live without God. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21800.

Davenport, Arlice. "Surveying the Rich, Conflicted legacy of Martin Heidegger." WICHITA EAGLE November 1, 2008.

McGrath, S. J. Heidegger: a (Very) Critical Introduction. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008. He was a failed seminarian and a Nazi sympathizer. He called his readers to authenticity by writing about anxiety and guilt. He inspired some of continental Europe's greatest thinkers, and frustrated their counterparts in England and America. Love him or hate him, Martin Heidegger ranks as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.kansas.com/entertainment/books/story/581042.html.

Church, Jeffrey. "Review of Dean Moyar, et al. ,eds. HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT." NDPR (November 2008).

Moyar, Dean, and Michael Quante, eds. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: a Critical Guide. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. Few texts in the history of thought are as difficult and yet as exciting as Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. In the 201 years since its publication, the Phenomenology has had a broad influence on diverse fields of thought, including philosophy, sociology, theology, political science, and literary theory. It has been a source of philosophical inspiration for some and the frustratingly wrong-headed celebration of everything disastrous in modern thought for others. Yet what remains constant is that the Phenomenology demands and indeed has elicited thoughtful interlocutors who must combine Hegel's own qualities -- at once philosophically rigorous and focused, and also imaginative and comprehensive. The twelve contributors to Moyar and Quante's excellent volume are readers of just this variety. They wrestle with small portions of Hegel's challenging text and show how Hegel's insights can help advance and even transform our thinking about traditional philosophical problems. This makes the Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide a belated but fitting bicentennial birthday present. This volume is the first to appear in Cambridge's "Critical Guide" series, which is devoted to examining the great works of philosophy, one work at a time (future installments will include Mill's On Liberty (December 2008) and Kant's "Idea for a Universal History" (May 2009)). One outstanding feature of this series is that it collects an "international team of contributors," and Moyar and Quante's volume is certainly no exception. German scholars like Fulda, Horstmann, and Siep have been producing excellent work on Hegel for more than a generation, but have not enjoyed a wide English-language readership. In the past ten years, however, more and more translations of German scholarly works on Hegel have appeared (see, for instance, Quante's Hegel's Concept of Action (2004) and Pippin and Höffe (eds.), Hegel on Ethics and Politics (2004)). This volume continues this salutary trend by including essays by six leading German philosophers. The aim of the volume is twofold: first, the essays try to clarify Hegel's arguments and purposes in some of the central or especially difficult passages of the Phenomenology. The volume is organized in accordance with Hegel's own text, though some portions of the Phenomenology are given much more attention than others: four essays are devoted to the chapter on Spirit, for instance, whereas only one examines the chapter on Reason. The second aim of the volume explains in part this disproportional treatment. Each essay elicits those arguments in Hegel, which, when suitably clarified, can be brought to bear on contemporary philosophical problems. As Moyar and Quante argue in the Preface, these claims include Hegel's epistemological "holism", his account of the relationship between the "natural and the normative," and his view of the relationship between theory and practice (xiii-xiv). These different claims are rooted in Hegel's difficult concept of "Spirit," which commentators have increasingly come to understand in a non-metaphysical sense. That is, commentators, and especially those in this volume (with Horstmann an important exception), have come to explain this concept in terms of something like Sellars' "space of reasons," or of what Pinkard calls in his recent book on the Phenomenology "social space," that is, as a self-developing system of norms embedded in concrete social and political institutions from which individuals derive their self-understanding. In recent years, this concept of Spirit has gained some traction in Anglo-American analytic philosophy in the work of Robert Brandom and John McDowell. Most of the contributors in this volume recognize Brandom's inferentialism in one way or another as a promising programmatic statement of some central Hegelian claims (see Heidemann, Moyar, and Pippin), yet see greater possibilities in Hegel's concept of Spirit than Brandom's pragmatism admits. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14525.

Olkowski, Dorothea. "Review of Nathan Widder's REFLECTIONS ON TIME AND POLITICS." NDPR (November 2008).

Widder, Nathan. Reflections on Time and Politics. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2008. Recently I browsed through Amazon.com looking over the books by and about Gilles Deleuze. I found over 240 books, quite a lot it seems. Books on Deleuze and art, Deleuze and other philosophers, Deleuze and cinema, Deleuze and literature, Deleuze and politics, Deleuze and time. This raises the question, which if any are helpful to the student or scholar who wishes to understand Deleuze or to use his ideas to understand something else, or even, to create a new philosophy? This question is difficult to answer because it raises another question: Do Deleuzians understand Deleuze? Nathan Widder's Reflections on Time and Politics, for example, states that "current philosophies of time often treat Bergson as Deleuze's chief inspiration. Yet is Bergson's insistence on time's continuity not fundamentally incompatible with Deleuze's idea of time as a 'disjunctive synthesis'?" (3) Clearly, Widder thinks that the current scholarship is mistaken and he sets out to correct these errors. Does he succeed? Get the answer here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14546.

Cfp: "Foucault and St. Paul." JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND RELIGIOUS THEORY.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault has been cited in relation to Saint Paul from a number of different critical perspectives. In the early 90's, Stephen D. Moore and Elizabeth Castelli have used Foucault's early work to analyse the notion of power within the Pauline epistles, allowing them to adopt a critical perspective on Paul. More recent scholarship, such as the work of Halvor Moxnes, has tended to focus on how Foucault's later work on the care and ethics of the self found in first and second century Greek philosophy might provide insight into Paul's understanding of the self. In this case, interaction between Foucault and Paul is seen more as a dialogue than as a critique of Paul by Foucault. In this special edition of JCRT, we hope to focus on a truly dialogical approach to Foucault and Paul. In order to accomplish this, we aim to provide a panoramic view of the various critical ways in which the two thinkers have been engaged. To this end we invite articles and reviews on any aspect of this 'dialogue' between Foucault and Paul. Topics might include but are by no means limited to: Foucauldian readings of the Pauline Epistles - argumentative strategies - discourses of power - feminist critiques of Paul Foucault, Paul and the Greeks - Ethics - The Self Foucault and Paul as anti-philosophers Foucault's discussion of pastoral power in Security, Territory, Population Please send abstracts to Sophie Fuggle (sophie.fuggle@kcl.ac.uk) and Valérie Nicolet Anderson (vnicole@emory.edu) by 1 February 2009. Visit the journal homepage here: http://www.jcrt.org/.

Rosen, Gary. "Body of Knowledge." NEW YORK TIMES October 31, 2008.

Shorto, Russell. Descartes' Bones: a Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason. New York: Doubleday, 2008. For Shorto, the pivot upon which the old world yielded to the new was the genius of Descartes, the philosopher who gave us the doubting, analytical, newly independent modern self. The Frenchman’s most famous phrase, “I think, therefore I am,” may strike our own ears as a coffee-mug cliché, but in the 17th century it was a revolutionary declaration. Shorto’s achievement is to complicate this picture, and with it our understanding of modernity, by also describing the religious context of the philosopher’s ideas. Though Descartes’s name has come to be associated with unrelenting rationalism, he was “as devout a Catholic as anyone of his time,” Shorto writes, and looked to theology to support his system. As Shorto recognizes, our own fundamentalists, religious and secular alike, might draw some useful lessons in modesty from Descartes’s example. Descartes made a cameo appearance in Shorto’s previous book, The Island at the Center of the World (2004), a richly detailed revisionist history of 17th-­century Dutch Manhattan and its liberalizing influence on America’s British colonies. In those pages, we encountered the philosopher as a celebrity in Holland, where he lived for almost two decades and, in 1637, published his seminal Discourse on the Method. Descartes takes center stage in Shorto’s new book, but not in the way one might expect. The action opens in the winter of 1650, with the hapless Frenchman on his deathbed in faraway Stockholm, cursing the fate that had lured him to the Swedish court of Queen Christina. By Page 40, after an instructive synopsis of his controversial career, exit Descartes, a corpse — and enter a large, motley cast of Cartesians, determined to do right by their teacher’s ideas and by his moldering, displaced bones. Shorto makes deft use of the centuries-­long to-and-fro over Descartes’s remains, a tale that involves three different burials, events in six countries and lingering questions, partly resolved by the author himself, about the authenticity of the skeleton, or rather of its scattered parts. As it turns out, the skull of the philosopher was separated mysteriously, at an early date, from the rest of his bones. This macabre fact provides Shorto with the makings of a detective story but also with an irresistible metaphor. Descartes’s chief contribution to modern science and philosophy was his radical focus on epistemology, on defining the boundaries of what we are capable of knowing with certainty. At the center of this project was his assertion of mind-body dualism, the notion, as Shorto explains, that “the mind and its thoughts exist in a different category or somehow on a different plane from the physical world.” For his admirers and for a latter-day scientific establishment aware of its debt to him, what could be more urgent than identifying and uniting the deceased philosopher’s own head and body? Read the rest of the review here (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/books/review/Rosen-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin) and a short extract from the book here (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/books/chapters/chap-decartes-bones.html?ref=review).

Cfp: "Philosophy as Literature," THE EUROPEAN LEGACY (2009).

Like novelists, historians or columnists, philosophers, too, are writers. They make sophisticated use of language, and employ - whether deliberately or not - specific rhetorical and stylistic devices, as well as certain repertoires of metaphors, images and symbols. As writers, philosophers also have to adjust their writing to specific audiences, tailor it to serve specific purposes, and strategically choose one genre over another, with all its rules, protocols, and constraints. In short, it is crucial for philosophers - if they are to persuade readers - to advance their ideas following certain aesthetic rules, rhetorical procedures and strategies of persuasion. This has led some authors to speak of "the literariness of philosophical texts" (Berel Lang) as something indistinguishable from the philosophical substance and relevance of those texts. A writer's relationship to language, writing and weaving of narratives in general is always complex. For, if we are to believe Heidegger, although "man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, . . . in fact language remains the master of man." Therefore, it might well be the case that - as often happen with writers - philosophers, too, go through some peculiar experiences: sometimes, for example, they become so completely seduced by language that they almost lose themselves in the act of writing and come to utter whatever language compels them to; some other times, they become so deeply caught up in their own discourse that it becomes difficult for them to separate from it: on such occasions they are not very different from those novelists who end up becoming characters in the narratives they are weaving. The implication is that a work of philosophy might well be seen as a work of (literary) art, as an autonomous world, for whose creation the author's personal vision, imagination, playfulness and inventiveness play a major role. In other words, according to this view, The Critique of Pure Reason is, in a fundamental way, much closer to Hamlet or The Brothers Karamazov than to, say, On the Origin of Species. With this in mind, some scholars of philosophy have been in a position to say that philosophy is nothing other than literature. Others, more cautious, have allowed philosophy to be literature only to some degree or under circumstances. Then, there are, of course, those for whom philosophy does not have anything to do with literature. We invite submissions dealing with the multifaceted relationship between philosophy and literature, some aspects of which have been pointed to above.Interdisciplinary approaches (combining, for example, philosophy, literary theory and intellectual history) are particularly encouraged. Here are only some of the possible topics: - The employment of literary categories (genre, tropes, narrative, plot, point of view, etc.) in the production of philosophical texts - The genres of philosophical writing (dialogue, treatise, meditation, journal article, etc) and their significance for the content of those writings; how exactly the adoption of a certain genre shapes the philosophizing in question - Philosophical styles: styles of writing / styles of philosophizing; "the anatomy of the philosophical style" (Berel Lang) - The variety of literary practices in the history of philosophy - The philosophers' rhetoric; philosophy of rhetoric / rhetoric of philosophy - Canons and canonization in the history of philosophy - Author/authorship/authority in the production of philosophical texts; author's "voice"; the use of personae, masks, masquerades - Philosophy as expression of the self (philosophy and autobiography) - The art of the "literary philosophers" (Plato, Augustine, Giordano Bruno, Vico, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Unamuno, Benjamin, Sartre, Camus, Cioran, etc) - Recent philosophizing on the relationship philosophy-literature (contributions dedicated to the work of Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, Paul Ricoeur, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Theodor Adorno, Stanley Cavell, Alexander Nehamas, Slavoj Zizek, Jean-Luc Nancy, Berel Lang, Iris Murdoch, Simon Critchley, etc) - Literary theorists/historians on the relationship philosophy-literature (contributions dedicated to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Rene Wellek, Wolfgang Iser, Hayden White, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Umberto Eco, etc) Submissions Guidelines: Deadline for submissions: January 1, 2009 Length: 6000 words All articles and reviews submitted to The European Legacy undergo peer-review. Manuscripts and Notes, typed double-spaced, should be submitted to the Guest Editor as e-mail attachments, using WordPerfect or Microsoft Word. The author's full address should be supplied as a footnote to the title page. Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition. You can submit your contributions to: bradatan@hotmail.com. Please allow at least 4-6 months for the review process and editorial decisions. Receipt of materials will be confirmed by email. Unless otherwise noted in this Call for Papers, the Instructions for Authors on the journal's webpage are adopted for this issue:http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=1084-8770&linktype=44.

"Towards a New Philosophy of the Body," Merleau-Ponty Circle of Japan, Rikkyo University, November 22-23, 2008.

The theme of the congress is "international research for the construction of a new philosophy of body -- the 100th anniversary of Merleau-Ponty". This congress is sponsored by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Merleau-Ponty's theory of body has been researched in a wide field, not only in phenomenology and the philosophy but also in sociology, social anthropology, psychiatry, psychology, aesthetics, linguistics, pedagogies, nursing studies, cognitive science and robotics, etc. So, this international congress is held aiming to focus on his theory of body, and to succeed to his thought based on the latest researches, and to search for the possibility of new development in the future, inviting the researchers in such various areas from around the world, and exchanging the researches that concern Merleau-Ponty's theory of body. Visit the conference homepage here: http://homepage3.nifty.com/mpc/icmpcj_en.html.

"Erôs in Ancient Greece," Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, March 28-31, 2009.

One of the most exciting developments in recent classics research has been in the field of ancient emotions and representations of the mind and self. Within this rich field of inquiry UCL and the Institute of Classical Studies will host an International conference on the topic of "Erôs in ancient Greece", organised by Ed Sanders, Chiara Thumiger, Chris Carey and Nick Lowe. The conference will offer papers on a wide range of topics related to Erôs as pathos or epithymia, including iconography associated with erotic passions, Erôs as literary motif, and philosophical approaches. The chronological span will be from the Archaic period to the Second Sophistic, including reception. The conference homepage is here: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/silva/GrandLat/newsandevents/newsandevents/conferences.

Kavka, Martin. "Review of Dana Hollander's EXEMPLARITY AND CHOSENNESS." NDPR (October 2008).

Hollander, Dana. Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. There are approximately seven books wrapped up in Exemplarity and Chosenness, a book which treats the intellectual debt of Franz Rosenzweig to Hermann Cohen, of Jacques Derrida to Edmund Husserl, of Derrida to Emmanuel Levinas, of Derrida to Rosenzweig, of Continental philosophy to Jewish thought, of Jewish thought to Continental philosophy, and finally the equiprimordiality of life and thought. There will be readers who will feel as if reading this book will itself require teaching a graduate seminar that follows along, chapter by chapter. It is by no means a quick read, and so I err in this review on the side of giving an overly summary account. Still, the central two claims of Hollander's excellent book can be telegraphed quite briefly. First, there is no possibility of thinking the universality of philosophy without thinking the historically and culturally determined particularity of the philosopher who takes that particularity as an example from which universality is derived. In other words, universality is never given as such to thought; it is for this reason that philosophy is bound up with national affirmation (e.g. Greece, Germany, Jewishness). The second move points out that particularity, if it is to be given to thought, can no longer be given as the particularity that it is. For this reason, universalism can, and should be, expressed in terms of an exile from or desertification of the rootedness typically associated with nationalism. We see this move exemplified in Derrida's notion of the "messianic without messianism" in Specters of Marx as well as Rosenzweig's notion of the Jewish people as beyond time in The Star of Redemption. What we are left with is particular communities pointing beyond themselves, invoking the universal as a phantasmatic idea, both regulative and grounding, but all the while invoking it in their own idioms. The universal and particular, the infinite and finite, the nations and the elect nation, require each other to be thought at all. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14506.

"The Surplus of Culture: Sense, Common-Sense, Non-Sense," Institute of English Cultures and Literatures, University of Silesia, September 16-20, 2009.

This conference is designed as a forum for interdisciplinary dialogue on the cultural and literary aspects of Sense (and meaning, as in philosophy), Common-Sense (and everyday life or the quotidian or just ordinary) and Non-Sense (as in the discourse on the absurd, meaningless, the comical, the funny, etc). Culture and literature have always been most inspiring sites to address the idea of the sens-ical or the sens-uous, the common sens-ical (ambiguous as the word“sense” can be) and the non-sensical which, from medieval times or the Renaissance to the present, have been ubiquitous in discourse. The conference debates will circle round but will not be limited to the following questions: What knowledge is necessary for the reader to bring to thet ext to understand its sense/meaning? In what ways may the meaning of the text be regarded as stable (unstable)? What are full evaluative arguments that assess the works of art, in a broad sense: formal, literary, moral, aesthetic, etc? What is the sense of the work of art as opposed to or concurrent with its meaning? What is the unique sense of the work of art if at all? What is the source of sense? The (non)sensical will address topsy-turvyness, absurdity, theories of humor, humor and cultural differences, humor and art of translation, riddles, children’s humor, multivalence, word games in literature, the grotesque, parody, satire, the carnivalesque, the effect of nonsense caused by an excess of meaning, etc. What are the forms of nonsense writing in various genres or types of literature such as romantic verse, travel writing, short story, lyric poetry, natural history, journalism, to name a few? Is nonsense funnybecause it does not make sense, or because of various techniques and devices that are employed in this type ofwriting? What is the absurd, the nonsensical and the exaggerated? Why are philosophers and linguists fascinated with nonsense? Common sense is often juxtaposed with reasoning and rationality; the commonsensical and the rational are defined as “two distinctive features of the common cognitive architecture” (Renee Elio). As Barry Smith puts it, “Commonsense is on the one hand a certain set of processes of natural cognition - of speaking, reasoning, seeing, and so on. On the other hand, common sense is a system of beliefs or the world of objects to which the processes of natural cognition and the corresponding belief-contents standardly relate”. For the Catholic apologist, John Henry Newman, in his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, common sense is vital to the Illative Sense, “the power of judging and concluding, when in its perfection.” The conference debates will address all of the aforementioned issues and many others to inquire into the sense/common-sense (or non-sense) of contemporary literary and cultural studies, whether European, American, Afro-American, Asian, Asian-American, Australian, Caribbean, New Zealander and others, the presentation of which will be most welcome. We invite a wide range of voices, historical, critical and theoretical papers that will address the above aspects (in a narrow or broad sense of the terms). The conference portions will be inaugurated by plenary lectures followed by papers no more than twenty minutes in length to be presented in concurrent sessions (each session featuring three papers). Please forward 300-word abstracts, including title, professional affiliation, addresses (especially e-mail), phone number, and audio-video requirements by April 15, 2009. Electronic submissions are highly encouraged. Papers should be delivered in English. Contact: Prof. Dr. hab. Ewa Borkowska Institute of English Cultures and Literatures (IECL) Department of Philology University of Silesiaul Gen. Grota-Roweckiego 541-205 Sosnowiec Poland. Tel.: +48 32 3640 892 (804) Email: surplus.conference2009@gmail.com Web: https://mail.cavehill.uwi.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.fil.us.edu.pl/ibacl/pl_konferencje.php

Harris-McCoy, Daniel. "Review of Jason Konig, et al., eds. ORDERING KNOWLEDGE IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE." BMCR October 31, 2008.

König, Jason, and Tim Whitmarsh, eds. Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire. Cambridge: CUP, 2007. König and Whitmarsh's collection of eleven essays, whose origins can be traced to a 2001 conference held at St. John's College, Cambridge, is a welcome edition for what might be called the emerging field of the history of information science; that is, scholarship that investigates how data is collected, organized, and packaged for its consumers and the cultural forces -- philosophical, literary, political, etc. -- that underlie these activities. This field is relatively new to classical studies and owes its existence largely to Foucault's work on the relationship between knowledge and power, which in turn inspired landmarks in Greco-Roman scholarship such as Claude Nicolet's Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill's now classic article "Mutatio Morum: The Idea of a Cultural Revolution." A flood of monographs on the relationship between mainly Roman technical and encyclopedic literature and their imperial contexts followed. Pliny's Natural History has received the most attention (Isager, Murphy, Carey) though other authors have also been examined using a political lens including Vitruvius (McEwen), Frontinus (Peachin), and others. König and Whitmarsh's volume is similarly interested in the intertwined relationship between the ordering of data and its Imperial context but excels its predecessors insofar as it takes pains to highlight the complexity of this relationship. This is partly the result of the range of authors and analytical tools that appear in the volume, bringing the markedly varied landscape of Imperial-era compilatory texts, their construction, and their motivations into sharp focus. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.bmcreview.org/2008/10/20081039.html.

"Migration, Border, and the Nation-State," ACLALS, Comparative Literature Program, Texas Tech University, April 9-11, 2009.

As our age of globalization continues to be defined by endless war and persistent economic crises, migration and border crossing have increasingly become tropes of cultural imagination and sites of critical intervention. Not only has the traditional singular pattern of human migration from the "periphery" to the "core" nation-states been diversified and supplemented by two-way and circular movements of human populations around the planet, but new border economies, hybrid identity formations, growing planetary consciousness, and transnational cultural productions have also flourished in challenge to the nation-state and the capitalist world-system. How have these defining moments been captured, negotiated, and represented in literary and cultural productions? How have creative writers, visual and performance artists, as well as cultural theorists intervened in the process of globalization and articulated their new cultural visions, artistic sensibilities, and political agencies? The joint conference looks for presentations that investigate new meanings, assumptions, and implications of migration, border crossing, and nation building as well as papers that explore the representations of emigration, borderlands, and nation-states in different cultural forms, literary genres, and technological media. We welcome both proposals that examine the interrelations among migration, border, and the nation-state in political and historical terms and projects that offer innovative interpretations of cultural productions that foreground the new dynamics in relation to our everyday life, social practice, and planetary awareness. Possible topics may include but are not restricted to the following: - Migration, border crossing, and changing family structure - Migration, gender, and social justice - Homeland security and the militarization of the Mexico-U.S. border - Borderland and mestizo consciousness - Borderland, natural environment, and planetary consciousness - Border crossing and critical cosmopolitanism - Border literature, Chicano/a theory, and hemispheric studies - The fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Soviet Communism, and the representation of the Cold War - Post-socialism in China, Russia, and Eastern European countries - The Trans-Pacific movement of Chinese in diaspora - Wall Street and the future of "market democracy" - Westward movement and American Southwestern literature - Globalization and transnational American studies - Human rights and human abuse in an age of endless war - Postcolonial literatures from South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean - Colonialism and neocolonialism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America - Casualties of war: displacement, migration, and expulsion - Vietnamese in diaspora and the global memory of the American War in Vietnam - Transnational feminist and queer studies - Postcolonial studies and beyond Please send your one-page proposal and one-page C.V. by January 19, 2009, to Dr. Yuan Shu. Dr. Yuan Shu Department of English Texas Tech University P.O. Box 43091 Lubbock, TX 79409-3091 USA Email: yuan.shu@ttu.edu Visit the conference homepage here: http://english.ttu.edu/complit/annual_symposium.html.