Cfp: "Rhétorique et traduction," Société d’Etudes des Pratiques et Théories en Traduction (SEPTET) and Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique (LLL), Université d’Orléans, January 26-27, 2012.

Pour les Latins, le terme de Traductio désignait une figure de rhétorique. On mesure ainsi la pertinence d’une rencontre portant sur les liens entre traduction et rhétorique. Aujourd’hui, la rhétorique, tout comme la traduction, rapproche des champs disciplinaires variés : linguistique, littérature, anthropologie culturelle, philosophie du langage, etc.

Les différents axes de travail suivants pourront être explorés:

1. La traduction et la nature de la rhétorique

La rhétorique peut-elle être encore aujourd’hui conçue comme un ajout, un supplément d’âme et de présentation, voire même un masque (plutôt qu’un visage) ? Autrement dit, la rhétorique cessant progressivement de se confondre comme dans l’Antiquité gréco-romaine avec l’art de dire, mais aussi de penser, peut-elle être confondue avec un ensemble de procédés, qui sans être strictement ornementaux, l’engage néanmoins dans le sens d’une esthétique seconde, comme c’est le cas chez un Fontanier par exemple ? Le traducteur doit-il alors considérer qu’un « contenu » invariant est ainsi masqué ? Par voie de conséquence, la rhétorique peut-elle se confondre avec un aspect de l’art du traducteur qui serait de faciliter (mais aussi éventuellement d’agrémenter) la lecture ? Les dimensions clairement « rhétoriques » du texte-source (par exemple les questions précisément dites « rhétoriques », liées à la seule gestation du texte) doivent-elles être gommées dans le travail du traducteur?

La rhétorique du traducteur a-t-elle une dimension « critique » ? Est-elle censée véhiculer (aussi) le point de vue singulier du traducteur ? Quelle est la part de la rhétorique dans le fait qu’historiquement les traductions ont si souvent fait l’objet d’adaptations marquées par la censure, l’idéologie, la volonté pédagogique, etc ? Quels sont les liens avec l’argumentation ? Le texte, la « lettre », doivent-ils dans l’acte de traduire s’effacer derrière des intentions, représentationnelles, polémiques et autres ? La rhétorique est-elle une « technique » ou un art « tactique ? Le traducteur doit-il être rusé?

Doit-on à rebours s’attacher à relever, comme le fait un Dumarsais, des liens étroits entre grammaire et rhétorique (nonobstant le trivium médiéval) ? La rhétorique, au contraire de l’idée commune, plonge-t-elle ses racines au cœur même de la langue ? Quelles seraient les conséquences d’une réponse positive pour la traduction?

2. La traduction entre champs rhétorique, poétique et émotionnel

Quels sont les liens entre rhétorique en tant que visée d’action, proche de la pragmatique moderne et poétique en tant qu’imitation d’action (mimesis) ? La traduction doit-elle être conçue comme une action, rendre le texte-source toujours plus efficace, ou doit-elle déployer et explorer les sources de sa propre poéticité

La rhétorique est-elle délibérément « cibliste » ? Est-elle idiosyncrasique, un art différent dans chaque langue particulière… ou relève-t-elle au contraire de techniques tendanciellement universelles?

La distinction entre rhétorique et poétique ne serait-elle pas une conséquence d’une vision réductrice de ce qu’était la rhétorique des origines, celle d’Aristote, comme semblent en attester certaines des plus récentes traductions de son texte fondateur et qui montrent l’indissociabilité non seulement des propriétés sémantiques et esthétiques du langage, mais aussi de ses propriétés esthétiques et poétiques? 

On pourra s’interroger sur l’instabilité du statut de l’émotion et de ses inscriptions passionnelles dans le champ rhétorique. Qu’à l’occasion d’un événement émotionnel, on convoque le concept de thymie en sémiotique, ou tout autre concept affine, comment cette « subconscience » où se déploient les instances affectivo-émotives est-elle saisie dans l’acte traductif ?

3. Rhétorique et traduction dans leurs dimensions philosophiques et sémiologiques

D’une part: 

la rhétorique ne serait-elle pas au fond de nature philosophique ? Peut-on y voir l’art même de former des concepts en les délivrant?

la rhétorique se confond-elle avec la pragmatique moderne (wittgensteinienne, austinienne …)?

D’autre part :

Quels liens avec la sémiologie et/ou la sémantique discursive et textuelle ? Comment la traduction doit-elle prendre en compte des effets comme l’idiomaticité, le cliché, le stéréotype, l’emblèmatisation, les « métaphores conceptuelles », etc. Les questions évidemment décisives de l’analogie, de la polysémie, de l’implicite, de l’inférence, comme mécanismes de production des textes sont-elles rhétoriques et relèvent-elles à ce titre d’un chapitre autonome de l’art du bien traduire ?

Et finalement:

Quels liens entre rhétorique, traduction et phénoménologie : le « contenu » peut-il être distingué de son apparaître, de ses modalités de donation ? L’essence figurale du langage renvoie à l’expérience immédiate, au « corps vécu » ? La traduction est sans arrêt confrontée à cette alternance de présentation (figurale, motivée, phénoménologique) et la gestation de contenus de représentation. Tout accès au réel est partiel, de l’ordre de l’esquisse, mais il s’impose avec la force du tout : ce que la tradition figure en termes - trop analytiques - de métaphore, métonymie, synecdoque, etc. renvoie à cette réalité en quelque sorte anthropologique. Mais très différemment d’une langue à l’autre. Comment la traduction doit-elle affronter ce problème?

Visit: http://philosophyoftranslation.blogspot.com/2011/05/rhetorique-et-traduction.html.

Das, Saitya Brata. "Friedrich Schelling." INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY March 14, 2011.

F. W. J. von Schelling is one of the great German philosophers of the late 18th and early 19th Century. Some historians and scholars of philosophy have classified him as a German Idealist, along with J. G. Fichte and G. W. F. Hegel. Such classifications obscure rather than illuminate the importance and singularity of Schelling’s place in the history of philosophy. This is because the dominant and most often limited understanding of Idealism as systematic metaphysics of the Subject is applicable more to Hegel’s philosophy than Schelling’s. While initiating the Post-Kantian Idealism of the Subject, Schelling went on to exhibit in his later works the limit and dissolution of such a systemic metaphysics of the Subject. Therefore, the convenient label of Schelling as one German Idealist amongst others ignores the singularity of Schelling’s philosophy and the complex relationship he had with the movement of German Idealism.

The real importance of Schelling’s later works lies in the exposure of the dominant systemic metaphysics of the Subject to its limit rather than in its confirmation. In this way, the later works of Schelling demand from the students and philosophers of German Idealism a re-assessment of the notion of German Idealism itself. In that sense, the importance and influence of Schelling’s philosophy has remained “untimely.” In the wake of Hegelian rational philosophy that was the official philosophy of that time, Schelling’s later works was not influential and fell onto deaf ears. Only in the twentieth century when the question of the legitimacy of the philosophical project of modernity had come to be the concern for philosophers and thinkers, did Schelling’s radical opening of philosophy to “post-metaphysical” thinking receive renewed attention.

This is because it is perceived that the task of philosophical thinking is no longer the foundational act of the systematic metaphysics of the Subject. In the wake of “end of philosophy,” the philosophical task is understood to be the inauguration of new thinking beyond metaphysics. In this context, Schelling has again come into prominence as someone who in the heyday of German Idealism has opened up the possibility of a philosophical thinking beyond the closure of the metaphysics of the Subject. The importance of Schelling for such post-metaphysical thinking is rightly emphasized by Martin Heidegger in his lecture on Schelling of 1936. In this manner Heidegger prepares the possibility of understanding Schelling’s works in an entirely different manner. Heidegger’s reading of Schelling in turn has immensely influenced the Post-Heideggerian French philosophical turn to the question of “the exit from metaphysics.” But this Post-Structuralist and deconstructive reading of Schelling is not the only reception of Schelling. Philosophers like Jürgen Habermas, whose doctorate work was on Schelling, would like to insist on the continuation of the philosophical project of modernity, and yet attempt to view reason beyond the instrumental functionality of reason at the service of domination and coercion. Schelling is seen from this perspective as a “post-metaphysical” thinker who has widened the concept of reason beyond its self-grounding projection. During the last half of the last century, Schelling’s works have tremendously influenced the post-Subject oriented philosophical discourses. During recent times, Schelling scholarship has remarkably increased both in the Anglo-American context and the Continental philosophical context. . . .

Visit: http://www.iep.utm.edu/schellin/.

Bowell, T. "Feminist Standpoint Theory." INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY March 10, 2011.

Feminist standpoint theorists make three principal claims: (1) Knowledge is socially situated. (2) Marginalized groups are socially situated in ways that make it more possible for them to be aware of things and ask questions than it is for the non-marginalized. (3) Research, particularly that focused on power relations, should begin with the lives of the marginalized. Feminist standpoint theory, then, makes a contribution to epistemology, to methodological debates in the social and natural sciences, to philosophy of science, and to political activism. It has been one of the most influential and debated theories to emerge from second-wave feminist thinking. Feminist standpoint theories place relations between political and social power and knowledge center-stage. These theories are both descriptive and normative, describing and analyzing the causal effects of power structures on knowledge while also advocating a specific route for enquiry, a route that begins from standpoints emerging from shared political struggle within marginalized lives. Feminist standpoint theories emerged in the 1970s, in the first instance from Marxist feminist and feminist critical theoretical approaches within a range of social scientific disciplines. They thereby offer epistemological and methodological approaches that are specific to a variety of disciplinary frameworks, but share a commitment to acknowledging, analyzing and drawing on power/knowledge relationships, and on bringing about change which results in more just societies. Feminist scholars working within a number of disciplines—such as Dorothy Smith, Nancy Hartsock, Hilary Rose, Sandra Harding, Patricia Hill Collins, Alison Jaggar and Donna Haraway—have advocated taking women’s lived experiences, particularly experiences of (caring) work, as the beginning of scientific enquiry. Central to all these standpoint theories are feminist analyses and critiques of relations between material experience, power, and epistemology, and of the effects of power relations on the production of knowledge. . . .

Visit: http://www.iep.utm.edu/fem-stan/.

Pomerleau, Wayne P. "William James." INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY February 10, 2011.

William James is considered by many to be the most insightful and stimulating of American philosophers, as well as the second of the three great pragmatists (the middle link between Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey). As a professor of psychology and of philosophy at Harvard University, he became the most famous living American psychologist and later the most famous living American philosopher of his time. Avoiding the logically tight systems typical of European rationalists, such as the German idealists, he cobbled together a psychology rich in philosophical implications and a philosophy enriched by his psychological expertise. More specifically, his theory of the self and his view of human belief as oriented towards conscious action raised issues that required him to turn to philosophy. There he developed his pragmatic epistemology, which considers the meaning of ideas and the truth of beliefs not abstractly, but in terms of the practical difference they can make in people’s lives. He explored the implications of this theory in areas of religious belief, metaphysics, human freedom and moral values, and social philosophy. His contributions in these areas included critiques of long-standing philosophical positions on such issues as freedom vs. determinism, correspondence vs. coherence, and dualism vs. materialism, as well as a thorough analysis of a phenomenological understanding of the self and consciousness, a “forward-looking” conception of truth (based on validation and revisable experience), a thorough-going metaphysical pluralism, and a commitment to a full view of agency in connection with communal and social concerns. Thus he created one of the last great philosophical systems in Western thought, even if he did not live quite long enough to complete every aspect of it. The combination of his provocative ideas and his engaging writing style has contributed to the enduring impact of his work. . . .

Visit: http://www.iep.utm.edu/james-o/.

Pub: Edelman, Christopher. "Michel de Montaigne." INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY April 28, 2011.

Michel de Montaigne is widely appreciated as one of the most important figures in the late French Renaissance, both for his literary innovations as well as for his contributions to philosophy. As a writer, he is credited with having developed a new form of literary expression, the essay, a brief and admittedly incomplete treatment of a topic germane to human life that blends philosophical insights with historical anecdotes and autobiographical details, all unapologetically presented from the author’s own personal perspective. As a philosopher, he is best known for his skepticism, which profoundly influenced major figures in the history of philosophy such as Descartes and Pascal.

All of his literary and philosophical work is contained in his Essays, which he began to write in 1572 and first published in 1580 in the form of two books. Over the next twelve years leading up to his death, he made additions to the first two books and completed a third, bringing the work to a length of about one thousand pages. While Montaigne made numerous additions to the book over the years, he never deleted or removed any material previously published, in an effort to represent accurately the changes that he underwent both as a thinker and as a person over the twenty years during which he wrote. These additions add to the unsystematic character of the book, which Montaigne himself claimed included many contradictions. It is no doubt due to the unsystematic nature of the Essays that Montaigne received relatively little attention from Anglo-American philosophers in the twentieth century. Nonetheless, in recent years he has been held out by many as an important figure in the history of philosophy not only for his skepticism, but also for his treatment of topics such as the self, moral relativism, politics, and the nature of philosophy. . . .

Visit: http://www.iep.utm.edu/montaign/.

Fish, Stanley. "Dorothy and the Tree: a Lesson in Epistemology." Opinionator Blog. NEW YORK TIMES April 25, 2011.

At one point in The Wizard Of Oz, Dorothy (Judy Garland) picks an apple and the tree she picks it off protests: “Well, how would you like to have someone come along and pick something off of you?” Dorothy is abashed and she says, “Oh, dear — I keep forgetting I’m not in Kansas,” by which she means she’s now entered an alternate universe where the usual distinctions between persons and objects, animate and inanimate, human beings and the natural world that is theirs to exploit do not hold. In Kansas and, she once assumed, everywhere else, trees are things you pick things off (even limbs) and persons are not. Persons have an autonomy and integrity of body that are to be respected; trees do not. A person who is maimed has a legal cause of action. A tree that has been cut down has no legal recourse, although there may be a cause of action (not, however, on behalf of the tree) if it was cut down by someone other than the owner of the property it stood on.

All this seems obvious, but what the tree’s question to Dorothy shows is that the category of the obvious can be challenged and unsettled. . . .  Hers is not a failure of memory. Hers is not a failure at all, but the inevitable and blameless consequence of having a consciousness informed by certain assumptions about the classification of items in the world, assumptions that deliver those items already catalogued and labeled, exactly in the manner Darwin labels those to whom sympathy is being extended “lower animals” and drops the adjective “useless” ever so casually, that is, without thinking. Rorty is no less limited (not a criticism, but a description) in his vision of things when he restricts the category of the unjustly marginalized to “people.” What about cats, trees, stones, streams and cockroaches?

The obvious answer to this not entirely frivolous question is, “you can’t think of everything,” and that’s the right answer. Despite imperatives like “broaden your thinking” or “extend your horizons or “widen your sense of ‘us,’” thought is not an expandable muscle that can contain or comprehend an infinite number of things. Thought is a structure that at once enables perception — it is within and by virtue of thought’s finite categories that items emerge and can be pointed to — and limits perception; no structure of thought can enable the seeing of all items, a capacity reserved for God. It follows that when you have a change of mind (of the kind the tree is trying to provoke when it addresses Dorothy) you won’t see more; you will see differently. A system of distinctions (and that is what thought is) will always privilege some categories of being and devalue others, sometimes even to the extent of not recognizing them. And when one system is succeeded by another and new things come into view, some old things will have been consigned to the category of chimera and, except for histories of error, will have vanished from sight. (Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolution is a primer on the process.) . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=1700945566886988248.

See the follow-up article, "Ideas and Theory: the Political Difference," here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/ideas-and-theory-the-political-difference/.

"The Foucault Effect 1991-2011," Birkbeck College, University of London, June 3-4, 2011.

Published seven years after Michel Foucault’s death, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality provided access to a little known and major new area of his later research, accompanied and illustrated by a rich collection of complementary studies by his co-researchers. The volume has served over the past 20 years as an influential and widely cited source, stimulating new work in many fields. In the past decade its effects has been accompanied by the acclaimed, ongoing publication of Foucault’s lectures, including the full original sources of The Foucault Effect. Foucault’s work on governmentality is now recognised as one of the important developments in later twentieth-century reflection on the political, whose implications may not yet have been fully registered.

This event brings together the editors and several contributors to The Foucault Effect, along with leading international scholars who have taken up and explored its themes in several interconnected areas, engaging with the history and issues of a changing present. Among them are editors of two important new publications: Lectures on The Will to Know (Foucault’s first College de France lecture series, edited by Daniel Defert) and Mal Faire, Dire Vrai (his 1981 Louvain lectures on confession, criminology and social defence, edited by Fabienne Brion and Bernard Harcourt, to be published in French by Louvain University Press and in English by Chicago University Press). Both of these new publications are likely to modify our understanding of Foucault’s enterprise and of its relevance to our time.

The programme and contributions will be structured around five topic areas:

- Global and postcolonial dimensions
- Law, rights, justice, punishment
- Problematising the political and the left
- The history of governmentality
- Social defence in the 21st century

Provisional Programme:

Daniel Defert: The emergence of power in Michel Foucault’s 1970-71 lectures.
Colin Gordon: Governmentality and the genealogy of politics*
Graham Burchell: Reflections on governmentalities and political culture (with Italy in mind)
Paul Patton: tbc
Peter Fitzpatrick and Carolina Olarte: Foucault and the Laws of Death
Ben Golder: The Limits and Possibilities of a Foucauldian Politics of Rights*
Fabienne Brion: Governmentality, citizenship and dangerousness*
Bernard Harcourt: tbc
Giovanna Procacci: From social insecurity to human security*
Peter Miller: The calculating self
Jonathan Simon: tbc

* exact title to be confirmed

Visit: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/law/news/the-foucault-effect-1991-2011-conference-3-4-june.

Cutrofello, Andrew. Review of Rebecca Comay, MOURNING SICKNESS. NDPR (May 2010).

Comay, Rebecca.  Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution.  Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010.

Rebecca Comay's insightful study of Hegel's philosophical reflections on the French Revolution clarifies Hegel's conception of the temporality of absolute knowing. On her account, absolute knowing is neither an atemporal intellectual intuition of the absolute nor the immediate self-presence of a persisting subject. It is, instead, a conceptual elaboration of the ubiquity of delay. This is not to say that thought is discursive in the Kantian sense of requiring the performance of temporal syntheses. The delay of the concept registered in absolute knowing is not due to the fact that concepts are second-order representations that succeed or postpone intuitions of objects. Absolute knowing represents thought as essentially belated (subsequent to events never apprehended and so unavailable for synthesis) and premature (prior to events whose essential, and therefore irreducible, futurity again makes them unavailable for synthesis). Acknowledging itself to be a Johnny-come-lately-and-early, spirit abandons previous conceptions of itself as a gathering subject of retentions and protentions (Self-certainty), or the gathered Da of a three-fold temporal ekstasis (Sittlichkeit). Terror, not anxiety, has taught it that time is out of joint. The moral impossibility of setting right a time disjoined by terror is brutally summarized by Lady Macbeth: "What's done cannot be undone." Despite the definitiveness of this hard, if banal, lesson, Hegel allows the confession of un-undoable evil to be answered -- not without a crucial delay (123) -- by an act of forgiveness that purports to undo past crime (146): "The wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind" (129). This response marks, for Comay, the advent (in every sense of the term) of absolute knowing. Whether Hegel succeeds in reconciling Lady Macbeth's thesis with his own antithesis -- a veritable antinomy in Comay's juxtaposition of the two -- is the difficult question posed by Mourning Sickness.

As the title of her book indicates, Comay represents Hegel's philosophical response to the French Revolution in the vocabulary of psychoanalysis: trauma, repetition compulsion, mourning, melancholia, introjection, incorporation, etc. This approach is justified by the fact that the Phenomenology of Spirit prefigures (both conceptually and lexically) psychoanalytic descriptions of the experience of loss (96). Comay does not seek to psychologize Hegel's dialectical analyses of shapes of consciousness, but rather to bring out their "normative" significance (6). As she says of her guiding concept: "by 'trauma,' I don't mean anything psychological. . . . My interest is philosophical: to explore trauma as a modal, temporal, and above all a historical category" (4). This raises the stakes, inviting us to wonder not only about the philosophical significance of psychoanalytic concepts, but about what it might mean to absolve them of psychological significance. . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23549.

"Beyond Spinoza," Goldsmith's College, University of London, July 2011.

Beyond Spinoza invite proposals for 30 minute presentations which trace or explore the presence of Early Modern philosophical concepts in contemporary philosophy and psychoanalysic theory. These could include, but are not limited to:
Spinoza and French philosophy (Badiou, Deleuze),
Spinoza and psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan),
Spinoza and politics (Balibar, Macherey),
Spinoza and self-transformation (Foucault, Lacan),
Spinoza and schizoanalysis (Guattari, Deleuze),
Leibniz and French philosophy (Deleuze, Gueroult),
Leibniz and contemporary art,
Leibniz and maths.

Beyond Spinoza is a collective of London-based postgraduate students who wish to enrich and deepen their understanding and enjoyment of contemporary philosophy by exploring its historical and conceptual roots.

The series will run once a week, for three consecutive weeks, at Goldsmiths College in July 2011. Each session will comprise two 30 minute presentations followed by discussion and drinks. The series will be followed later in the year by a publication of revised papers.

Cfp: "Theoretical Turbulence: a Paradigm Shift in Intercultural Communication?", 18th Symposium, Nordic Network for Intercultural Communication (NIC), Helsinki, December 1-3, 2011.

In intercultural communication, where are we theoretically and where could or should we go? Is there theoretical turbulence that is unique to this field? If so, what kind of turbulence? Are there paradigms in intercultural communication, and if so, are we in the middle of a paradigm shift?

The conference theme asks for critical evaluations and larger paradigmatic discussions of intercultural communication research and education. The concerns and questions suggested by the theme are shared in different disciplines (media and communication, education, business studies, organizational and management studies, linguistics and sociolinguists, sociology, cultural studies) in Nordic countries and all over the world.

Presentations could touch upon, but are not limited to the following themes:

• Theoretical choices in intercultural communication research;
• Critical evaluations of theories of intercultural communication;
• Pedagogical applications of theoretical knowledge in teaching and consultation;
• Examples of the application of interpretive or critical theories of intercultural communication in intercultural education and training;
• Alternative perspectives for intercultural consultation or multicultural leadership;
• Redefining key concepts in intercultural communication, for example, multicultural identity, culture, nation, diversity, intercultural communication, adaptation, intercultural skills or competence;
• Challenges for intercultural communication (theories) set by the global world and individual multicultural experiences.

Visit: http://www.helsinki.fi/nic2011/.

"Global Perspectives on Habermas," University of Groningen, April 27-28, 2011.

[This conference is over but the information might still be useful to some.]

WEDNESDAY 27 APRIL

ZITTINGSZAAL (FACULTY OF THEOLOGY, OUDE BOTERINGESTRAAT 38)

9.00 Welcome
9.30 Prof Joost Herman, University of Groningen: Globalisation Studies
9.45 Dr Vivienne Matthies-Boon and Dr Andrej Zwitter, University of Groningen: Research in Ethics and Globalisation
10.00 Dr Tom Bailey, John Cabot University and LUISS, Rome: Editor’s Introduction
11.00 Dr Vivienne Matthies-Boon, University of Groningen: Exporting Democracy to the Middle East: Habermas and Bush’s Neoconservatives (Discussant: Dr Andrej Zwitter)
12.00 Lunch
13.00 Dr Péter Losonczi, University of Antwerp: The Global Ambiguity of Habermas' Post-secular Thesis (Discussant: Dr P. Boele van Hensbroek)
14.00 Dr Kevin Gray, American University of Sharjah: What is Living and What is Dead in Habermas’ Secularization Hypothesis? (Discussant: Dr Vivienne Matthies-Boon)

15.00 Coffee break

15.30 Dara Salam, LUISS, Rome: The Diversity of Public Spheres: The Case of Iraq (Discussant: Mohamad Forough)

THURSDAY 28 APRIL
ROOM T7, TURFTORENSTRAAT (NEXT TO THE HARMONIE BUILDING)

09.00 Dr William Smith, Chinese University of Hong Kong: Deliberation Without Democracy? Reflections on Habermas, the Public Sphere and China (Discussant: Dr Frank Gaensmantel)
10.00 Dr Vincent Yohanes Jolasa, University of Indonesia: Habermas on
Distortion, Communication and Depth Hermeneutics (Discussant: Dr Timo Juetten)

11.00 Coffee break

ROOM T6, TURFTORENSTRAAT

11.30 Dr Kanchana Mahadevan, University of Mumbai: Feminist Solidarity: Communitarian Challenges and Post-national Prospects (Discussant: Prof Jaap de Wilde)
12.30 Prof Jaap de Wilde, University of Groningen: Closing remarks

12.45 Lunch

Enquiries: Tom Bailey (tbailey@johncabot.edu)

Cfp: Annual Conference, International Society for the Study of Narrative, Las Vegas, March 15-17, 2012.

Plenary Speakers:

Steven Mailloux, Loyola Marymount University
Ramón Saldívar, Stanford University
Vanessa Schwarz, University of Southern California

Contemporary Narrative Theory Session Speakers:

Heather Dubrow, Fordham University
Margaret Homans, Yale University
Deirdre McCloskey, University of Illinois Chicago
Mark McGurl, UCLA
Alan Nadel, University of Kentucky
Peggy Phelan, Stanford University

Conference Coordinators:

Eddie Maloney, Alan Nadel, James Phelan, Robyn Warhol

Call for Papers:

We welcome proposals for papers and panels on all aspects of narrative in any genre, period, discipline, language, and medium.

Deadline for Receipt of Proposals: Monday, October 17, 2011

Proposals for Individual Papers:

Please provide the title and a 300-word abstract of the paper you are proposing; your name, institutional affiliation, and email address; and a brief statement (no more than 100 words) about your work and your publications.

Proposals for Panels:

Please provide a 700-word (maximum) description of the topic of the panel and of each panelist’s contribution; the title of the panel and the titles of the individual papers; and for each participant the name, institutional affiliation, email address, and a brief statement (no more than 100 words) about the person’s work and publications. Please send proposals by email in PDF, Word, or WordPerfect to: narrative@georgetown.edu.

All participants must join the International Society for the Study of Narrative.

For more information on the ISSN, please visit: ttp://narrative.georgetown.edu/.

Visit: http://narrative.georgetown.edu/conferences/2012_Narrative_Flyer.pdf.

Pub: Harold Bloom, THE ANATOMY OF INFLUENCE.

Bloom, Harold.  The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life.  New Haven: Yale UP, 2011.

"Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it," writes Harold Bloom in The Anatomy of Influence, "is in the first place literary, that is to say, personal and passionate."

For more than half a century, Bloom has shared his profound knowledge of the written word with students and readers. In this, his most comprehensive and accessible study of influence, Bloom leads us through the labyrinthine paths which link the writers and critics who have informed and inspired him for so many years. The result is "a critical self-portrait," a sustained meditation on a life lived with and through the great works of the Western canon: Why has influence been my lifelong obsessive concern? Why have certain writers found me and not others? What is the end of a literary life?

Featuring extended analyses of Bloom's most cherished poets—Shakespeare, Whitman, and Crane—as well as inspired appreciations of Emerson, Tennyson, Browning, Yeats, Ashbery, and others, The Anatomy of Influence adapts Bloom's classic work The Anxiety of Influence to show us what great literature is, how it comes to be, and why it matters. Each chapter maps startling new literary connections that suddenly seem inevitable once Bloom has shown us how to listen and to read. A fierce and intimate appreciation of the art of literature on a scale that the author will not again attempt, The Anatomy of Influence follows the sublime works it studies, inspiring the reader with a sense of something ever more about to be.

Visit: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300167601/ref=pe_143810_19570760_snp_dp.

Hertzberg, Lars. Review of James C. Klagge, WITTGENSTEIN IN EXILE. NDPR (April 2011).

Klagge, James C.  Wittgenstein in Exile.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.

In Wittgenstein in Exile, James Klagge discusses the tendency of philosophers from the time of Wittgenstein down to this day to find his thought either difficult to understand, hard to accept, or both. He argues that the difficulty is not so much one of style or method, but rather of the spirit in which Wittgenstein worked, and he suggests that the problem should be seen in the light of the intellectual distance between Wittgenstein and his cultural surroundings, a distance that he himself was painfully aware of and that can be characterized by means of the metaphor of exile. Wittgenstein, Klagge claims, was an exile in space but also in time: in Spenglerian terms, Wittgenstein saw himself as the representative of a culture that was already a matter of the past, while his audience belonged to its present state of decline. (At this point, it might be objected that Wittgenstein saw himself as torn between the old and the new; thus, he worried about the fact that he was not carrying out the kind of work the great classical philosophers had done.) While on this theme, one might ask whether Wittgenstein's sexual orientation may not have contributed to his sense of exile. . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23409.

Marder, Elissa. Review of Peggy Kamuf, TO FOLLOW. NDPR (April 2011).

Kamuf, Peggy.  To Follow: the Wake of Jacques Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010.

Peggy Kamuf long ago established herself as one of Jacques Derrida's most discerning readers and finest translators, but in To Follow: the Wake of Jacques Derrida, she offers her readers a rare opportunity to follow her as she works through critical questions in Derrida's thinking in the wake of his death. The book comprises seventeen beautifully written and delicately interwoven chapters, composed before and after Derrida's death in October 2004. In each chapter, Kamuf picks up on a word or phrase (what she calls a "watchword") in Derrida's writings in order to attend to the critical inventions and political interventions called forth by and in his thought.

This illuminating and moving book is also explicitly a work of mourning. Following Derrida's life-long work on mourning, Kamuf begins her book by pointing out that mourning does not begin with the other's death but is at work from the beginning in the names by which we come to know ourselves and through which we are called by others: "From the very first, every name, anyone's name, names a site of mourning to come." And if, as Kamuf suggests, the name is itself another name for mourning, this is because every name bears the trace of a division within: to be what we call a name, a name must be repeatable in the absence of the one to whom it ostensibly "belongs" and therefore must always be able to live on after the death of its bearer. In this sense, then, a proper name is not the property of the person named as it is also borne and carried by those who follow. It will follow from this that mourning is always already at work in every relation with the other. Mourning conditions all ethical positions and political actions and cannot be relegated to a uniquely personal experience in spite of (or perhaps even because of) the singular unbearability that attends each person's "personal" experience of loss.

Thus, although To Follow is punctuated by several poignant "personal" anecdotes (culled from her long professional and personal relationship with Derrida as critic, translator, and friend), its primary critical focus (and philosophical appeal) resides in the way that Kamuf cares for Derrida's legacy by caring about the ways in which his own inimitable texts are themselves responsive readings to the question of what it means to inhabit or inherit a tradition. Inheritance, Kamuf reminds us, is not a positive value that is passively received, but rather requires attentive and attuned reading. Throughout the book, Kamuf explores how Derrida's legacy takes the form of haunting questions that ask us to keep watch for what cannot be seen, known, or understood in advance: "The watch watches for -- it knows not what may come. This vigilance does not anticipate or expect an arrival that will put an end to or interrupt its waiting, but nonetheless it watches for another's coming to interrupt it" (11). . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23389.

"Hegel Now?," Department of Philosophy, Middlesex University, May 5, 2011.

Society is divided, and the social order is riddled with contradictions. Does Hegelian philosophy provide the basic method for understanding the way societies are structured by their own contradictions? Is it possible to be a Hegelian now? Could it even be necessary to be a Hegelian now? Or is it impossible to be a Hegelian, especially now? And what is a Hegelian? This workshop will assess the ongoing relevance of Hegelian thought for the 21st century.

Schedule

2.45 Welcome
3.00 Ali Alizadeh, ‘Why Hegel Now?’
4.00 Slavoj Zizek, ‘Is it Still Possible to be a Hegelian Today?’
6.00 Break
6.30 Katerina Deligiorgi, ‘Hegelian Individualism’.
8.00 Ian Jakobi, ‘The Lacerated Dialectic: On Madness and Subjectivity in Hegel's Encyclopaedia’
Inquiries: c.kerslake@mdx.ac.uk

Cfp: "Thinking the Absolute: Speculation, Philosophy and the End of Religion," Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion, Liverpool Hope University, June 29-July 1, 2012.

Keynote Speakers: Ray Brassier, Levi Bryant, Iain Hamilton Grant and Catherine Malabou

‘The contemporary end of metaphysics is an end which, being sceptical, could only be a religious end of metaphysics.' Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: an Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2008).

Meillassoux identifies the ‘turn to religion' in contemporary continental philosophy with a failure of thinking. The Kantian refusal to think the absolute leads to scepticism about reality in itself. Ironically, this lends itself to ‘fideism', the decision to project religious meaning on to the unknowable beyond. According to Meillassoux, a philosophy obsessed with mystery becomes the accomplice of irrational faith. The solution is to find ways of once more thinking the absolute in its reality, severed from its dependence upon a knowing subject, or upon language and social norms. At the same time, new possibilities for thinking religion (exemplified by Meillassoux's own Divine Inexistence) are emerging.

This conference invites proposals which critically consider this speculative turn in philosophy and its implications for thinking about religion. To what ‘end' is speculation leading? Does it simply announce the closure of religion and its subordination to a philosophy of the absolute, nature or the ‘All'? Can it open new lines for a philosophy of religion which is not wedded to the Kantian horizon? Is speculation itself open to Kierkegaardian critique as yet another move to position and reduce ethical and religious claims, sacrificing the future on the altar of abstract possibility? Does renewed attention to the canon of speculative idealism offer a way beyond the impasse between relativism and dogmatism?

The organisers welcome proposals which examine the roots and extensity of recent speculative thinking, and which critically consider its impact - direct and indirect - on philosophy of religion. Relevant thinkers and themes might include Quentin Meillassoux on God and the absolute, Alain Badiou's ontology, Catherine Malabou on Hegel and plasticity, Francois Laruelle's ‘future Christ', Iain Hamilton Grant on Schelling's Naturphilosophie and the thinking of the All, Ray Brassier's nihilism. However, we are particularly looking for contributions which creatively use or depart from the speculative turn to offer original insights into the nature and content of the field.

Visit: http://www.hope.ac.uk/acpr/call-for-papers.html.

Ralon, Laureano. Interviews at FIGURE / GROUND COMMUNICATION.

Figure/Ground Communication’s scholarly interview series amounts to a number of in-depth conversation with emerging and established university professors about various topics related to education, technology and society. The primary goal of this section is to help graduate and undergraduate students become acquainted with the work, research interests and activities of various authors and scholars, as well as to inquire about their views on some of the challenges (attention span, evolving notions of selfhood, changing conceptions of originality, the quest for authenticity, etc.) associated with an “age of interruption” characterized by information overload. In so doing, I hope to make a contribution to understanding the changing nature of scholarship and academia in an age governed by digital interactive media. . . .

Access the interviews here: http://figureground.ca/interviews/.

Brandom, Robert. "Knowing and Representing: a Reading of Hegel’s Introduction to the PHENOMENOLOGY." Hegel Lectures, LMU Munich, May 30-June 1, 2011.

The philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel is a major focus of Robert Brandom's work. Brandom makes Hegel's thought accessible to analytic philosophy by developing a semantic interpretation of the Phenomenology of Spirit. In his Munich lectures, Brandom is going to present new texts on the "Introduction" of Hegel's Phenomenology for the first time.

• Monday, May 30, 2011, 18 h (LMU main building, room A 140):
  Lecture One: "Conceptual Realism and the Semantic Possibility of Knowledge"
• Tuesday, May 31, 2011, 18 h (LMU main building, room A 240):
  Lecture Two: "Representation and the Experience of Error"
• Wednesday, June 1, 2011, 18 h (LMU main building, room A 140):
  Lecture Three: "Determining Meaning and Truth: The Emergence of the New, True Object"

On Wednesday, June 1, from 10-12 h, Brandom is going to give an additional seminar, in which the topics of the lectures will be discussed. In order to participate in the seminar, please register with Kristina Maschek.

Visit: http://www.philosophie.uni-muenchen.de/lehreinheiten/philosophie_2/forschungsprojekte/society/english_version/lectures/index.html.

Pub: SPECULATIONS: JOURNAL OF SPECULATIVE REALISM 2 (2011).

Download the volume here: http://www.publicpraxis.com/speculations/?page_id=326.

Cfp: Eleventh Annual International Gathering in Biosemiotics, International Society for Biosemiotic Studies, Rockefeller University for Biomedical Research, June 21-26, 2011.

Biosemiotics is an interdiscipline that seeks naturalistic understandings of metalistic phenomena, grounded in biology, and, in turn, seeks understandings of biological processes in terms of a general semiotics.

What can be learned about human semiosis, interpretation, communication, creativity and meaning-making by studying less complex but analogous phenomena in cellular signaling, chemotaxis, zoosemiotics, embryonic development, or the immune system? Can the pervasive metaphoric usages of chemical “message,” genetic “information,” and ”signaling” in contemporary biology be defined more precisely by taking them literally? While human symbolic representation may be species-specific–or at least unique to unusually big-brained animals–it must have emerged out of less complex semiotic processes and proto-semiotic processes. What are the antecedents of human semiosis? And how can the exploration of these antecedents help bridge the unnatural gap between body and mind that was imposed centuries ago more for religious than scientific reasons? Participants from various fields in the sciences and humanities will explore these and other questions at the June gathering. All are welcome to attend.

Visit: http://dactylfoundation.org/?page_id=3026.

Patterson, Steve. "Sexism and the Idea of the Great Speech: the GUARDIAN's Classicist on Rhetoric." RAIL February 27, 2011.

Many in the field of rhetoric, I’ll wager, are happy to see an article about their discipline at all in a major newspaper like the Guardian. Being a philosopher myself I sympathize with the sort of small-town-ish “Hey! They’re talking about US!!” feeling engendered by articles like Mary Beard’s What makes a great speech? The article itself, however, is rather a letdown in terms of what it communicates to the reader about rhetoric.

Let me begin in fairness by noting that Mary Beard is a well-known classicist in the UK. Thus it is not surprising that her treatment of rhetoric here focuses primarily on sources and examples drawn from Greco-Roman antiquity. Be this as it may, she speaks in a general voice here about rhetoric and so her discussion is disturbingly incomplete. Rather than showing rhetoric as the very active and modern discipline that it is, her focus on the ancients gives the impression that the study of rhetoric ended with Cicero. She makes no mention at all of any figures in the history of rhetoric between antiquity and the present day. Not even foundational figures of contemporary rhetoric like Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, get a mention, to say nothing of figures lesser known outside rhetoric but equally if not more important within it like Burke, Richards, Toulmin, or Henry Johnstone Jr.. Though to her credit she avoids rehashing the standard Platonist objections to rhetoric, Beard’s presentation is rendered somewhat shallow by her lack of modern sources. . . .

Read the rest here: http://railct.com/2011/02/27/sexism-and-the-idea-of-the-great-speech-the-guardians-classicist-on-rhetoric/.

Beard, Mary. "What Makes a Great Speech?" GUARDIAN Ferbruary 26, 2011.

When the Greeks read of Demosthenes speaking through the pebbles, or trying to make himself heard above the waves, or declaiming loudly as he climbed up hill, almost out of breath, they were grasping an important truth of ancient culture: that the art of public speaking could be learned, that the techniques of oratory were teachable. In a culture in which oral persuasion counted for almost everything in politics, it was crucial to believe that public speaking was a skill that could be acquired by almost anyone who was prepared to put in the hard work.

Ancient literature was full of advice to would-be orators. Although they are little read now, even by the most devoted students of Latin and Greek, volumes of this stuff survives, dealing with everything from how to move your hands or when to make a joke, to the rhythms, cadences and structures of effective oratory. And Roman boys (the rich ones at least) spent most of their school days practising the art of speech-making. Some of these school exercises still survive: "Defend Romulus on the charge of having killed Remus", the kids were asked; or "Make a speech advising Agamemnon whether or not to sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia". The Roman equivalent of the national curriculum was committed to training boys to speak persuasively, even on these flagrantly fictional topics.

The modern world has largely inherited the ancient view that oratory is a matter of technique. True, we do have a romantic notion that some people are "naturals" at public speaking – whether it is something in the air of the Welsh valleys that produces the gift of the gab, or the "natural" sense of timing that great orators share with great comedians. But modern speech-writers always stress the importance of technique, and they advocate many of the same old tricks that the ancients used ("group your examples into threes", they advise – that's the classical "tricolon", which was taken to extremes in Blair's famous "education, education, education" soundbite). . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/26/kings-speech-oscars-mary-beard.

Joseph, John E. "What If Derrida Was Wrong About Saussure?" TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT April 14, 2011.

Daylight, Russell.  What If Derrida Was Wrong About Saussure?.  Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011.

This book is the first systematic analysis of all of Derrida's published pronouncements on Saussure's Cours, including its impassioned rejection of writing as only a secondary representation of language, the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign and the problem of its existence in time. The last is, more precisely, one of the topics pursued seriously by Saussure that Derrida never took up - thus allowing him to depict Saussure as implying certain ideas that in fact he directly rejected.

Daylight patiently combs through the fine silk weave on which Derrida has painted his broad brushstrokes. He leads us step by step through each of Derrida's readings of Saussure, then sometimes back again through the same texts as we proceed to the next set of Derridean claims. Daylight sees his task not as defending Saussure from falsehoods, but showing that Derrida's interpretation is by no means the only possible one. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=415785&c=1.

Cfp: 6th Annual Meeting, North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics, Boston College, September 15-17, 2011.

NASPH was formed in 2005 in order to further the study of philosophical hermeneutics. While honoring the rootedness of philosophical hermeneutics in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, NASPH also recognizes that the future of such thinking depends on engaging with a diverse range of figures and issues. Our intention is to promote dialogue focusing on both the sources of, and the prospects for, philosophical hermeneutics.

James Risser will give the Keynote Address.  Other invited speakers will include Theodore George, Drew Hyland, Dennis Schmidt, and Charles Scott.

"Simone de Beauvoir Now: a Symposium to Mark the 25th Anniversary of Simone de Beauvoir's Death," Centre for Philosophy and Literature and Department of Women's Studies, Duke University, September 23, 2011.

Confirmed Speakers:
Emily Apter (French, New York University)
Stella Sandford (Philosophy, Kingston University, UK)
Ursula Tidd (French, University of Manchester, UK)
Linda Zerilli(Political Science and the Center for Gender Studies, University of Chicago)

Respondents:
Nancy Bauer (Philosophy, Tufts University)
Toril Moi (PAL; Literature, Duke University)

Visit: http://www.duke.edu/web/philartslit/events.html.

Seminar Series on the Philosophy of Literature, Royal Holloway College, University of London, February-March, 2011.

During the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, the characteristics of the philosophical approach to literature have undergone some important changes. Alongside the continuation of the traditions of Continental thought, representatively symbolized by the work of Badiou and Rancière, can be detected a move back to elements that were challenged 40 years ago by the generation of Barthes, Lacan, Foucault and Derrida. The death of the author is now being countered by the notion of the author as intentional subject; the disconnection between life and art-work is giving way to a new interest in biography; the notion of the self-contained work of art, or of art-as-textuality, is being displaced in favour of a view of literary language as a hard-wired element of human cognition. From Marion’s version of phenomenology to Currie’s Arts and Minds, the philosophy that might underlie literature is being re-appraised.

Session 1 (23 February 2011) : The Intentional Subject
Session 2 (16 March 2011): (T)exteriors
Session 3 (23 March 2011): The Intentional Act

Visit: http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2011/03/the-philosophy-of-literature/.

"No Quarrels: Literature and Philosophy Today," Humanities Foundation, Boston University, April 1-2, 2011.

[This conference is over but readers may still wish to know about it.]

Our speakers are literary critics and philosophers thinking at the intersection between traditions. Working from the details of particular literary and philosophical texts, they will consider the present state of some ancient quarrels:

• Does literature offer some kind of “truth” as philosophy has traditionally sought to do?
• Is literary art an exercise of rational capacities, or does it extend beyond the formal enclosures of reason?
• Is the effect of literary art to stir up the passions and blind us to reality, as Plato and others have warned, or can it also be part of a legitimate moral and political education?
• How might literature and philosophy expose one another’s limits?
• What is the future of their relationship, both institutionally and intellectually?

Visit: http://www.bu.edu/litphil/.

Sinnerbrink, Robert. Interviews on Deleuze. THE PHILOSOPHER'S ZONE.

Part 2: At the Movies April 2, 2011:

This week, The Philosopher's Zone goes to the movies. In the second of two programs devoted to the great French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, we examine what he had to say about cinema. He was one of the first philosophers to turn their attention to films and he saw film as a philosophical medium. But what did that mean and why, in his view, did film become more philosophical after World War II?

Part 1: Who was Gilles Deleuze? March 26, 2011:

Gilles Deleuze, who died by his own hand in 1995, was one of the most influential and prolific French philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. He wrote influentially not just on philosophy, but on literature, film, fine art and the environment as well. But his writing style - highly allusive, peppered with neologisms - is not easy-going. This week, we try to get to grips with a significant and important thinker.

"Hermeneutics and Translation Studies," University of Applied Sciences, Cologne, May 26-27, 2011.

Even though Translation Studies and Hermeneutics share a common interest in the mediating processes, these two disciplines have co-existed and developed since the advent of Translation Studies in the mid 20^th century with strikingly little interaction. The purpose of this symposium is to explore avenues in which Hermeneutics and Translation Studies could complement one another, thereby strengthen research on both oral and written mediation and the mediating processes. The symposium is conceived of as a forum for posing and discussing questions of relevance to these two disciplines. In particular, the purpose of the symposium is to begin developing the contours and goals of and simultaneously setting limits to the scope of an emerging discipline, Translational Hermeneutics, which could be developed by merging these heretofore distinct research strands.

Suggested Topics:

1. A Retrospective: Hermeneutics and the Development of Translation Studies

2. The Future: the New Field of “Translational Hermeneutics”
3. Didactics of Translation and Interpreting from a Hermeneutical Point of View
4. Translation in Practice – Specialized Texts versus Literature
5. Hermeneutics, Culture and Postcolonial Translation Studies
6. Synergies: Hermeneutics and Cognitive Linguistics
7. Hermeneutics, Corpus Studies and Empirical Research – Conflicting Paradigms?

Visit: http://philosophyoftranslation.blogspot.com/2010/11/call-for-papers-hermeneutics-and.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PhilosophyOfTranslation+%28Philosophy+of+Translation%29&utm_content=FeedBurner.

Cfp: "Space, Place and the McLuhan Legacy," Twelfth Annual Convention, Media Ecology Association, University of Alberta, June 23–26, 2011.

McLuhan gave much attention to the changing environment of the city in the wake of technological change. As he stated in an article published in Canadian Architect in June 1961,“[t]oday the entire human community is being translated into ‘auditory space,’ or into that ‘field of simultaneous relations,’by electric broadcasting. It behooves the architect and town planner, above all, to know what this means” (p. 52).

For McLuhan, the city is a “technological composite,” a patchwork of media and technologies built up over time and space. In this context, new technologies may be imagined as “punctuations” in our historical landscape, inaugurating irreversible cultural, social, and economic changes. Locating the MEA convention in the heart of Edmonton’s urban centre will provide an occasion to reflect on the significance of this Western Canadian city in shaping McLuhan’s early explorations of perspective as a fundamental artistic and communicational principle.

The 12th Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association will include papers, panels, and creative projects exploring space, place, and city in the context of the McLuhan intellectual legacy. How might media ecology inform today’s architecture and city planning? What is the relationship between urban and virtual media realities? What is the meaning of the city in the “global village”? How do new media technologies intertwine, intersect, and reform today’s urban landscapes?

A suite of themes have been developed for the Centenary, presented in the form of five probes or heuristics, which McLuhan often used in his teaching and public addresses:

• Media as extensions of the human senses
• Media as “punctuations” in history (bias of time, bias of space)
• Figure and ground as a means of achieving a deep understanding of changes in perception occasioned by new media
• The city as a technological composite
• The city as classroom

Visit: http://mea2011.org/.

Cfp: "Philosophies of Travel: Exploring the Value of Travel in Art, Literature, and Society," University of Sydney, September 30-October 1, 2011.

Journey, pilgrimage, linear narration; what are the paradigms of travel and how do we think on them? The philosophies of travel make vital revelations about the cultures from which travellers emerge. Do we travel, to change ourselves or as Samuel Johnson argued, to “regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are”? Or do we use the journey to ‘turn back’ on things reflectively, or, as Pliny wrote, “to see what we disregard when it is under our own eyes.” From the ‘temple tourists’ of Augustan Rome, to Thomas Cook’s dreams of a tourism-enabled sobriety, to iPod™-wielding backpackers in the ashrams of India, travel has been understood as education, forging, exploration (both of the worlds of others and of the self), as well as frivolity, hedonism, and colonialism. Tourists have even been called the “barbarians of our Age of Leisure” (Turner and Ash 1975). This conference will look at the habits, traditions, and writings of travellers from the past and the present in order to build a picture of what travel is and has been understood to be for the traveller.

Abstracts for papers of 20min length are welcome on any of the following subjects:

• Philosophical justifications of/explanations of the impulse to travel
• Pilgrimage, religious tourism, and spiritual tourism
• Identity, meaning, and tourism 
• The aesthetics of travel in art, literature, or film
• Ideals of travel/ideals of journeying
• Reactions against travellers/travel

Abstracts of no more than 250 words, as well as a short paragraph with biographical information, should be submitted by 30 June 2011 to Alex Norman (Alex.Norman@sydney.edu.au).

Cfp: Meeting (in Conjunction with 2011 Annual Meeting of Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy), International Association for Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (IAPCS), Philadelphia, October 19, 2011.

We invite abstracts for papers that explore issues at the intersection of phenomenology and the cognitive sciences. This includes, but is not limited to, developing approaches to naturalized phenomenology, neurophenomenology, and the treatment of various issues (e.g., embodied cognition, perception, intersubjectivity and social cognition, etc.) that foster communication between the continental phenomenological tradition, analytic philosophy of mind, and empirical cognitive science. Phenomenology is here understood as a philosophical discipline and method in the tradition started by Edmund Husserl, and including the work of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and numerous others.

Abstracts (maximum 500 words) should be sent as email attachments no later than May 16 to:
joelk@hum.ku.dk.

Cfp: "Transforming Human Nature in Science, Technology and the Arts," Dublin City University, October 21-23, 2011.

Update (April 18, 2011):

The venue has changed from Bahrain (due to the political unrest) to Dublin, Ireland. We are also extending the CFP deadline until June 1st. Please see the new details on our website: www.transformingthehuman.org. (Refresh the webpages if you have visited us before to clear your browser cache and see the updated pages.)

Original Post (January 26, 2011):

From genomics to virtual reality, technology has been changing the way human beings interact and navigate in the world at an ever increasing pace. During the last two decades, advances in technological integration are calling for special attention from thinkers across the disciplines and around the world. As the technological characteristics of the human condition impact our understanding of "the human", we are faced with radical changes in self-undersatnding and human identity. In short, through technology we are transforming human nature.

Possible Topics could include, but are not limited to:

· Bioethics, bioconservatism, bioliberalism, enhancement
· Posthumanist anthropology, aesthetics, ecology, feminism, critical theory
· Representation of human performance in technology and the arts
· Transhumanism and/or posthumanism in science fiction, fantasy, dystopian/utopian literature
· Enhancement and political discourse, regulation, and rights
· Humanism, transhumanism, and posthumanism in philosophy
· Poststructuralism, postmodernism, and posthumanism
· Transhuman and posthuman impact on ethics and/or value formation
· Phenomenology and postphenomenology
· Embodiment relations and identity
· Globalization and the spread of biomedicine and transhumanism
· Economic implications of transhumanist projects
· Popular culture and posthumanist representations
· Theology, enhancement, and the place of the posthuman
· Technology, robotics, and ethics
· Cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality
· Cyborgs and democracy
· Humanity, human, biotechnology

Visit the conference website: http://www.transformingthehuman.org/.

Hodge, Joanna. Review of Michael Ehrmantraut, HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHIC PEDAGOGY. NDPR (March 2011).

Ehrmantraut, Michael.  Heidegger's Philosophic Pedagogy.  London: Continuum, 2010.

There is, of course, a mountain of commentary on the thinking of Martin Heidegger, and claims to open up a genuinely new line of enquiry can be only rarely made out. Nevertheless, Michael Ehrmantraut does bring into focus a new angle of entry: the question of the importance for Heidegger's enquiries of the process of teaching philosophy. This question is then narrowed down again, for Ehrmantraut does not propose to pursue the interpretation given by Heidegger of Plato's practice in general, nor yet of the famous readings of the allegory of the cave in both GA 34 (Lectures on Plato's Allegory and on the Theaetetus) and in the second set of lectures from GA 36/37 (recently translated as Being and Truth by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt). The question is focused rather on Heidegger's own activity as teacher. In this Ehrmantraut proposes to provide a motivation for Heidegger's otherwise unexplained enthusiasm for Graf Yorck von Wartenburg's contribution to a discussion of historicality, expressed in the latter sections of Being and Time (1927), and it is with Heidegger's response to Yorck that Ehrmantraut begins his study. Against Dilthey, Yorck insists on the ontological status and futural orientation of historicality, and Ehrmantraut shows Heidegger seizing on the notion of historicality as a virtuality awaiting actualisation. That actualisation is to take place through the task of educating the next generation to take up a stance in the world as oriented towards another kind of future. In this task, philosophy in general, and more specifically the radically transformative philosophy proposed by Martin Heidegger, is to play a significant role.

The role in the enquiries of Being and Time of Dasein and Sein, of Seinsverständnis and das Man, are well enough known; those of the privilege to futurity over pastness and presentness, and to historicality over everydayness and within-timeness, less so. The stance of radical self-appropriation in the moment of Entschlossenheit, the defining moment of opening up to this futurity and historicality has been the focus of controversy for decades, at least since the decisive intervention of Ernst Tugendhat. In his magisterial Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl and Heidegger (1968), Tugendhat argues that the departure from a close tie between meaning, truth and expressibility in language renders the notion of Entschlossenheit otiose. This is a serious criticism; but what it precisely refuses to engage with is Heidegger's implicit appeal to future meanings, conjured into existence by that very stance which, in time, appropriates to itself both past, present and, more importantly, future conditions for meaningfulness. This very basic disagreement concerning truth is matched by a less obvious but no less basic challenge posed by Heidegger to the commonly understood notion of practice. The fallen, everyday notion of practice presumes that there is a theoretical orientation and specification of aims of living, given in advance of activity, and that there is then a subsequent turn to their practical realisation. Heidegger's proposal in Being and Time is to up-end this ordering, in line with the up-ending of the notion of truth: the practical orientation, a willingness to be put in question by being, precedes all determination of Dasein as self-questioning with respect to its circumstances, its past, its present and its future engagements. The radicality of these two moves comes to the fore in Ehrmantraut's analyses. . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23190.

"Speculative Philosophies and Religious Practices: New Directions in the Philosophy of Religion and Post-Secular Practical Theology," Centre for Faiths and Public Policy, University of Chester, June 1, 2011.

This workshop is a one-day workshop exploring the intersection between recent trends in continental philosophy of religion and realist versions of public theology. It is an interrogation of the implications – whether political, theological or practical – of the turn to the Real in recent thought. From the perspective of public and practical theology, this involves bolstering the realist strands of the discipline (Manchester Realism and the William Temple Foundation) with the resources of philosophy, constructing a philosophical toolkit for realist public theologians. John Reader and Christopher Baker’s Entering the New Theological Space, for example, has already started drawing on post-Derridean philosophies as theoretical background to their theological enterprises, moving beyond the sociological and pragmatic basis that public theologians have traditionally found sufficient; there is a growing realisation, however, that a new generation of philosophers – the philosophers of the speculative turn – may well be more fruitful for deepening and broadening public theology’s self-understanding. Therefore and from the perspective of philosophy of religion, this interrogation of the Real involves thinking through the consequences of continental philosophy of religion’s recent flirtations with a more realist brand of speculation. The philosophies of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant and Quentin Meillassoux are beginning to be felt throughout the humanities, and the papers in this workshop, following the lead established in Smith and Whistler’s After the Postsecular and the Postmodern, will begin to think through the broader impact of this new tendency, especially as it impacts on philosophy of religion. In other words, the guiding question for the day is: what has the speculative turn in continental philosophy of religion to do with religious practice? This workshop brings together public theologians and philosophers of religion to inhabit the intersection between philosophical theory and religious phenomena.

See: http://www.chester.ac.uk/sites/files/chester/Speculative%20Philosophies%20and%20Religious%20Practices%20-%20vs%202.pdf.

Pub: Timothy Bewes, THE EVENT OF POSTCOLONIAL SHAME.

Bewes, Timothy.  The Event of Postcolonial Shame.  Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010.

In a postcolonial world, where structures of power, hierarchy, and domination operate on a global scale, writers face an ethical and aesthetic dilemma: How to write without contributing to the inscription of inequality? How to process the colonial past without reverting to a pathology of self-disgust? Can literature ever be free of the shame of the postcolonial epoch--ever be truly postcolonial? As disparities of power seem only to be increasing, such questions are more urgent than ever. In this book, Timothy Bewes argues that shame is a dominant temperament in twentieth-century literature, and the key to understanding the ethics and aesthetics of the contemporary world.

Drawing on thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Theodor Adorno, and Gilles Deleuze, Bewes argues that in literature there is an "event" of shame that brings together these ethical and aesthetic tensions. Reading works by J. M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Nadine Gordimer, V. S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Zoë Wicomb, Bewes presents a startling theory: the practices of postcolonial literature depend upon and repeat the same structures of thought and perception that made colonialism possible in the first place. As long as those structures remain in place, literature and critical thinking will remain steeped in shame.

Offering a new mode of postcolonial reading, The Event of Postcolonial Shame demands a literature and a criticism that acknowledge their own ethical deficiency without seeking absolution from it.

Visit: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9321.html.

Cfp: "Feminist Epistemology and Philosophical Traditions," Society for Women in Philosophy, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, November 18-19, 2011.

The aim of this conference is to reflect critically on the relation of feminist epistemology to the various philosophical traditions that generated it and those that have nourished it intellectually and challenged it in the past three decades. These traditions include that of epistemology itself (of course), but also more generally the analytical philosophical traditions, the continental philosophical traditions, feminist philosophical traditions, and other philosophically inflected theoretical traditions, for example psychoanalytical theory. It is to be hoped that responses to the call for papers will add to this list.

Questions to be addressed include:

• What, currently, is the relation between feminist epistemology and the more mainstream traditions of epistemology?
• What influence has feminist epistemology had on the more mainstream traditions of epistemology, if any?
• Is there any unity to ‘feminist epistemology’ across its relation to different philosophical traditions (for example the analytical and the continental traditions)?
• How have other theoretical traditions influenced and challenged feminist epistemology?
• What is the significance of the mainly Anglo-American constitution of the field of feminist epistemology?
• 'What, if anything, remains distinctive about 'feminist epistemology'? That is, when is 'feminist epistemology' simply 'epistemology'?

Plenary Speakers:

• Kirsten Campbell (Goldsmiths, University of London), ‘Feminist Epistemology and Psychoanalytical Theory’ -- Respondent: Stella Sandford (Kingston University)
• Miranda Fricker (Birkbeck College, University of London), ‘Feminist Epistemology as Social Epistemology’ -- Respondent: Stella Gonzalez Arnal (University of Hull)
• Gillian Howie (University of Liverpool), ‘Is There a “Continental” Feminist Epistemology?’ -- Respondent: Alison Stone (Lancaster University)
• Alessandra Tanesini (Cardiff University), ‘From Margin to Centre: Feminist Epistemology asv Socially Responsible Epistemology’ -- Respondent: Kathleen Lennon (University of Hull)

Contact: Stella Sandford (S.Sandford@Kingston.ac.uk).

Clough, Sharyn. Review of Alexandra L. Shuford, FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY AND AMERICAN PRAGMATISM . NDPR (April, 2011).

Shuford, Alexandra L.  Feminist Epistemology and American Pragmatism: Dewey and Quine.  London: Continuum, 2010.

Feminist Epistemology and American Pragmatism: Dewey and Quine by Alexandra Shuford is the third in a recent series of books from Continuum that will be of interest to those following debates within feminist epistemology and philosophy of science (the other two books are Rationality and Feminist Philosophy by Deborah K. Heikes, reviewed earlier this year in NDPR, and Objectivity in the Feminist Philosophy of Science by Karen Cordrick Haely). Each of these three books is authored by philosophers new to these debates, consistent with Continuum's mission to "actively seek out the emerging generation." These slim volumes are not inexpensive ($120.00 each and not available in paperback), but each contains something of value.

The strength of Shuford's presentation is her application of Dewey's theory of inquiry to the problem of the high rate of caesarean sections in US hospitals. This latter problem is serious and Shuford's analysis is a welcome addition to feminist attempts to address it. This key chapter, "Feminist Pragmatist Inquiry," is the last of six that also include "Birthing Feminist Pragmatist Epistemologies," "Quine's Naturalized Epistemology," "Antony's Analytic Feminist Empiricism," "Nelson's Holistic Feminist Empiricism," and "Dewey's Theory of Inquiry."

Shuford's main thesis is that Nelson and Antony's feminist use of Quine, though in the right pragmatist spirit, still fails to acknowledge fully the embodied nature of knowing that is captured by Dewey and is necessary for understanding and criticizing phenomena. . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23309.

Palmer, Jason. "Language Universality Idea Tested With Biology Method." BBC NEWS April 15, 2011.

A long-standing idea that human languages share universal features that are dictated by human brain structure has been cast into doubt. A study reported in Nature has borrowed methods from evolutionary biology to trace the development of grammar in several language families. The results suggest that features shared across language families evolved independently in each lineage. The authors say cultural evolution, not the brain, drives language development. . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13049700.

Cfp: "Uncanny Homecomings: Narrative Structures, Existential Questions, Theological Visions," University of Iowa, August 26-28, 2011.

The 2011 Religion, Literature and the Arts conference encourages participants to investigate the subject of home and homecoming. Poets and philosophers have long identified the human yearning to find a geographic and emotional environment that allows for a feeling of integration, where we understand our place in the greater whole. If we linger with this notion, however, the paradoxical nature of our desire for homecoming emerges: the home that we remember from our past is not the place that we are ever able to find in our present, and the places that we find or create in our present that have an aura of "home" are frequently disconcerting in their ability to provide comfort. There is something unheimlich in returning home, a lesson learned by individuals from Odysseus or the Prodigal Son in the Western tradition to those facing crises of homecoming in 21st century Palestine or Algeria.

Several different and helpful frames emerge as ways of investigating our longing for home. Narrative structures reveal the stories that shape and alter our trajectories, helping us to find a home in and through language, to root ourselves in a plot of land. Existential questions disclose the historical, philosophical, political, psychological and temporal desire for locating ourselves in a home. Theological visions incorporate the depth dimension of the human desire for integration within the rich tapestry of religious narratives that frame our cycles of exile and return.

Papers can speak about a particular historical figure or group, event, practice, text or work of art, reflecting on its capacity to disclose the provocative problem of homecoming in relation to human well-being. They can reflect on the nature, origin and effects of this desire in human history, using resources from any of the disciplines represented at the conference, and discussing how particular religious or secular communities have understood, interpreted, or reused myths, symbols or ideas about homecoming. Session papers should be 20 minutes long, with 10 minutes reserved for questions and answers. Please submit your abstract into the most appropriate of the following categories: Religious Studies, Literature, Art and Art History, Popular Culture, Postcolonial Approaches.

More information is available on the website at: http://rla2011.blogspot.com/.

Cfp: "Space and Place," Mansfield College, University of Oxford, September 14–16, 2011.

Questions of space and place affect the very way in which we experience and recreate the world. Wars are fought over both real and imagined spaces; boundaries are erected against the “Other” constructed a lived landscape of division and disenfranchisement; and ideology constructs a national identity based upon the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion. The construction of space and place is also a fundamental aspect of the creative arts either through the art of reconstruction of a known space or in establishing a relationship between the audience and the performance. Politics, power and knowledge are also fundamental components of space as is the relationship between visibility and invisibility. This new inter- and multi-disciplinary conference project seeks to explore these and other topics and open up a dialogue about the politics and practices of space and place. We seek submissions from a range of disciplines including archaeology, architecture, urban geography, the visual and creative arts, philosophy and politics and also actively encourage practioners and non-academics with an interest in the topic to participate.

We welcome traditional papers, preformed panels of papers, workshop proposals and other forms of performance – recognising that different disciplines express themselves in different mediums. Submissions are sought on any aspect of space and place, including the following:

1. Theorising Space and Place

* Philosophies and space and place
* Surveillance, sight and the panoptic structures and spaces of contemporary life
* Rhizomatics and/or postmodernist constructions of space as a “meshwork of paths” (Ingold: 2008)
* The relationship between spatiality and temporality/space as a temporal-spatial event (Massey: 2005)
* The language and semiotics of space and place

2. Situated Identities

* Gendered spaces including the tension between domestic and public spheres
* Work spaces and hierarchies of power
* Geographies and archaeologies of space including Orientalism and Occidentalism
* Ethnic spaces/ethnicity and space
* Disabled spaces/places
* Queer places and spaces

3. Contested spaces

* The politics and ideology of constructions and discourses of space and place including the construction of gated communities as a response to real/imagined terrorism.
* The relationship between power, knowledge and the construction of place and space
* Territorial wars, both real and imagined.
* The relationship between the global and the local
* Barriers, obstructions and disenfranchisement in the construction of lived spaces
* Space and place from colonisation to globalisation
* Real and imagined maps/cartographies of place
* Transnational and translocal places

4. Representations of place and space

* Embodied/disembodied spaces
* Lived spaces and the architecture of identity
* Haunted spaces/places and non-spaces
* Set design and the construction of space in film, television and theatre
* Authenticity and the reproduction/representation of place in the creative arts
* Technology and developments in the representation of space including new media technologies and 3D technologies of viewing
* Future cities/futurology and space
* Representations of the urban and the city in the media and creative arts
* Space in computer games

Organising Chairs:

Shona Hill; Shilinka Smith
Conference Leaders
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
New Zealand
E-mail: shs@inter-disciplinary.net

Colette Balmain
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
London, United Kingdom
E-mail: cb@inter-disciplinary.net

Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Network Leader,
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
E-mail: sp@inter-disciplinary.net.

Pub: Gianni Vattimo, A FAREWELL TO TRUTH.

Vattimo, Gianni.  A Farewell to Truth.  Trans. William McCuaig.  New York: Columbia UP, 2011.

With Western cultures becoming more pluralistic, the question of "truth" in politics has become a game of interpretations. Today, we face the demise of the very idea of truth as an objective description of facts, though many have yet to acknowledge that this is changing.

Gianni Vattimo explicitly engages with the important consequences for democracy of our changing conception of politics and truth, such as a growing reluctance to ground politics in science, economics, and technology. Yet in Vattimo's conception, a farewell to truth can benefit democracy, exposing the unspoken issues that underlie all objective claims. The end of absolute truth challenges the legitimacy of policies based on perceived objective necessities -- protecting the free market, for example, even if it devastates certain groups or classes. Vattimo calls for a truth that is constructed with consensus and a respect for the liberty of all. By taking into account the cultural paradigms of others, a more "truthful" society -- freer and more democratic -- becomes possible.

In this book, Vattimo continues his reinterpretation of Christianity as a religion of charity and hope, freeing society from authoritarian, metaphysical dogmatism. He also extends Nietzsche's "death of God" to the death of an authoritarian God, ushering in a new, postreligious Christianity. He connects the thought of Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx, and Karl Popper with surprising results and accommodates modern science more than in his previous work, reconciling its validity with an insistence that knowledge is interpretive. Vattimo's philosophy justifies Western nihilism in its capacity to dispense with absolute truths. Ranging over politics, ethics, religion, and the history of philosophy, his reflections contribute deeply to a modern reconception of God, metaphysics, and the purpose of reality.

Visit: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0231153082/ref=pe_5050_19265340_snp_dp.

"Naturalism," Annual Conference, Hegel Society of Great Britain, University of Oxford, September 5-6, 2011.

This year's Hegel Society of Great Britain annual conference will be on the theme of Naturalism: Was Hegel a naturalist or an anti-naturalist and can he shed light onto how we think about these issues in philosophy today.

The speakers will be:

Will Dudley (Williams College) 'Hegel's Critical Naturalism'
Alexis Papazoglou (Cambridge) 'Hegel, the Space of Reasons and the Realm of Nature'
Paul Redding (Sydney) 'Hegel: Naturalist-leaning Forms of Idealism and Idealist-leaning Forms of Naturalism'
Sebastian Roedl (Basel) 'The Self-Determining Concept'
Alison Stone (Lancaster) 'Hegel, Philosophy of Nature and Naturalism'
Kenneth Westphal (UEA) 'Aspects of Philosophical Naturalism in Hegel's 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit'

For more information, contact Alexis Papazoglou on ajp83@cam.ac.uk.

Cfp: "Historicising Narrative Theory." JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE THEORY.

The Journal of Narrative Theory (JNT) seeks submissions for an upcoming special issue, "Historicizing Narrative Theory."

Essays (max. 10,000 words) should address themselves to the relationship(s) of contemporary narrative theory to ethnic and/or postcolonial studies, and may examine both literary and cultural texts (visual and digital mediums, music, ethnographies, tourism guides, etc).

Structuralist, or classical, narrative theory – in the vein of Roland Barthes, Gerard Genette, and Tzvetan Todorov – sought to articulate a taxonomy of narrative, taking as its principle examples canonical texts of European and American literature, e.g. Genette on Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. While feminist narrative theorists, such as Susan Lanser and Robyn Warhol, have demonstrated that gender and sexuality are constitutive considerations of texts, rather than simply extra-formal considerations, similar theoretical engagements with narrative theory in terms of race, capital, imperialism, and class still need to take place. Narrative theory remains only partly decolonized despite the increasing globalization of the contemporary novel, in form and content as well as production, distribution, and consumption. We know that race, nation, and class matter to literary form, but how and why do we account for it in narrative theory? And how does narrative theory have to change/reconsider itself in order to truly decolonize?

What would a “postcolonial” or “marxist” narratology look like? Is an “ethnic,” “postcolonial,” or “marxist” narrative theory even possible or desirable? What are the dangers/pitfalls of ghettoization and/or co-optation in engaging classical narrative theory? What kinds of questions does narrative theory need to ask in order to be historicized? For example, Dan Shen, Ming Dong Gu, and others have sought to articulate Chinese narrative theory that takes into account both specific Chinese aesthetic and cultural histories as well as considers mutual artistic and theoretical influences with the West. In his work on Latino comics and postcolonial writing, Frederick Luis Aldama argues for the universality of not only the narrative tools available to writers and graphic novelists, but also the very cognitive processes that inform our subjectivity and creativity. Michael McKeon’s 2000 anthology, Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, treats narrative historically but focuses only on fiction and includes only three essays on postcolonial writing.

We are looking for essays that engage with the limitations/possibilities of current narrative theory(s), either through explicit theoretical engagement with narrative theory and/or the practice/revisiting of it through innovative interpretations of texts.

Information about the journal can be found at the following address: http://www.emich.edu/english/jnt.

Contributors should follow the MLA style (7th edition), with footnotes kept at a minimum and incorporated into the text where possible.

Please send a copy of the submission by email attachment to each of the editors – Sue J. Kim (skim666@gmail.com) and Priyamvada Gopal (pg268@cam.ac.uk) – by July 15, 2011.

McWhorter, Ladelle. Review of Timothy O'Leary, et al., eds. FOUCAULT AND PHILOSOPHY. NDPR (March 2011).

O'Leary, Timothy, and Christopher Falzon, eds.  Foucault and Philosophy.  Oxford: Blackwell, 2010.

"Philosopher" was a label that Michel Foucault sometimes resisted, especially in the earlier decades of his career, but Timothy O'Leary and Christopher Falzon have assembled an excellent anthology of articles demonstrating Foucault's engagement with and contributions to contemporary philosophical practice throughout his life's work. The book examines and situates Foucault's work in relation to several major strands of philosophical tradition. It consists of an introduction and one paper each by the editors and an additional nine papers by well-known Foucault scholars including Gary Gutting, Jana Sawicki, Amy Allen, and Paul Patton, among others. There is no lack of interpretive disagreement in the group, which is especially notable in Gary Gutting's explicit critique of Béatrice Han-Pile's work and Barry Allen's implicit challenge to C.G. Prado. However, the disagreements and alternative perspectives are informative and thought-provoking.

Obviously it is impossible in one review to do justice to all eleven articles, and O'Leary and Falzon do an excellent job of summarizing them in their introduction. Here I will simply discuss four themes, each of which runs through several different papers. The first is Foucault's relation to his predecessors, including Hegel (Gutting), Nietzsche (Hans Sluga), and Heidegger (Timothy Rayner). The second is Foucault's relationship to and, in some cases, value for contemporary philosophical debates, including critical theory (Falzon and Amy Allen) and queer theory (Sawicki), as well as other discussions less easily categorized (Prado and O'Leary). Aligned with the second theme, the third theme that emerges very strongly in this collection is the question of truth and Foucault's epistemological positions. This comes out to some extent in Rayner's article on Heidegger, but it is foregrounded in Barry Allen's essay entitled "Foucault's Theory of Knowledge." Finally, I will conclude this review with a look at the theme of political theory and practice, with a focus on Paul Patton's essay, "Foucault and Normative Political Philosophy: Liberal and Neo-Liberal Governmentality and Public Reason." . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23091.

Pub: Jeffrey High, et al., eds. WHO IS THIS SCHILLER NOW?

High, Jeffrey, Nicholas Martin, and Norbert Oellers, eds.  Who Is This Schiller Now?  Essays on His Reception and Significance.  Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011.

The works of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) -- a dramatist and poet for the ages, one of Germany's first historians, and an important aesthetic theorist -- are among the best known of German and world literature. Schiller's explosive original artistry and feel for timely and enduring personal tragedy embedded in timeless sociohistorical conflicts remain the topic of lively academic debate. The essays in this volume address the many flashpoints and canonical shifts in the cyclically polarized reception of Schiller and his works, in pursuit of historical and contemporary answers to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's expression of frightened admiration in 1794: "Who is this Schiller?" The responses demonstrate pronounced shifts from widespread twentieth-century understandings of Schiller: the overwhelming emphasis here is on Schiller the cosmopolitan realist, and little or no trace is left of the ultimately untenable view of Schiller as an abstract idealist who turned his back on politics. Ehrhard Bahr, Matthew Bell, Frederick Burwick, Jennifer Driscoll Colosimo, Bernd Fischer, Gail K. Hart, Fritz Heuer, Hans H. Hiebel, Jeffrey L. High, Walter Hinderer, Paul E. Kerry, Erik Knoedler, Elisabeth Krimmer, Maria del Rosario Acosta López, Laura Ann Macor, Dennis F. Mahoney, Nicholas Martin, John A. McCarthy, Yvonne Nilges, Norbert Oellers, Peter Pabisch, David Pugh, T. J. Reed, Wolfgang Riedel, Jörg Robert, Ritchie Robertson, Jeffrey L. Sammons, Henrik Sponsel.

Visit: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1571134883/ref=pe_5050_19213940_snp_dp.

Paul Redding, Review of Randall E. Auxier, et al., THE PHILOSOPHY OF RICHARD RORTY. NDPR (March 2011).

Auxier, Randall E., and Lewis Edwin Hahn, eds.  The Philosophy of Richard Rorty.  Chicago: Open Court, 2010.

The Philosophy of Richard Rorty is the thirty-second volume in the Library of Living Philosophers series, which commenced with a volume on the philosopher with whom Rorty is most often compared, John Dewey. With this volume, the series title serves as a sad reminder of Rorty's death at the age of 75 in 2007, while the collection was still in preparation. For many who, like the reviewer, were in the early stages of a university career in philosophy at the time, the publication of Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in 1979 was a very significant event indeed. I imagine that the attitude towards Rorty expressed by James Edwards in his contribution to the volume is far from unusual: "I am one of those who admire the work (and the man) almost without reservation; one of those who would not want to imagine what recent . . . philosophy would have been if Rorty had not been around to shake things up and to forge some unexpected linkages" (658). Of course not everyone, even from that particular generation, reacted to this work, and the stream of writings following it, with admiration. While many saw in Rorty a Socratic gadfly, to another wing of the profession he was closer to an ancient sophist. And even among those who do admire, admiration rarely means whole-hearted agreement -- many admirers still find troubling elements within Rorty's philosophy, as Edwards himself seems to.

With Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and the series of collections of essays that started with Consequence of Pragmatism in 1982, Rorty's thought-provoking ideas began to find a wide readership beyond the bounds of professional philosophy and started to attract the combination of applause and condemnation that has continued to this day. In fact, collections of critical essays on Rorty, similar in conception and format to the Library of Living Philosophers series, have been appearing on a reasonably regular basis since Alan Malachowski's Reading Rorty in 1990. Even omitting non-English language volumes and ones with very specific themes, such as one on "Rorty and Confucianism", there have been, on my count, seven prior to this volume. Of these, a number, like the Malachowski volume, have followed the LLP practice of having paired replies by Rorty to the interpretative and critical pieces. Both Malachowski's collection and the impressive 2000 volume edited by Robert Brandom, Rorty and His Critics, while large at around 400 pages each, are dwarfed by the LLP volume. With the standard introductory "Intellectual Autobiography", twenty-nine substantial essays, most with replies by Rorty, and an extensive bibliography of Rorty's writings, it is roughly the size of the other two combined. . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23070.