Saletan, William. "Created Equal." SLATE November 18, 2007.

Last month, James Watson, the legendary biologist, was condemned and forced into retirement after claiming that African intelligence wasn't "the same as ours." "Racist, vicious and unsupported by science," said the Federation of American Scientists. "Utterly unsupported by scientific evidence," declared the U.S. government's supervisor of genetic research. The New York Times told readers that when Watson implied "that black Africans are less intelligent than whites, he hadn't a scientific leg to stand on." . . . Read the rest here: http://www.slate.com/id/2178122/entry/2178123/. (Thanks to Egberto Almenas for the link.)

Leiter, Brian, and Michael Rosen, eds. OXFORD HANDBOOK OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY. Oxford: OUP, 2007.

Contents: 1. Introduction , Brian Leiter and Michael Rosen Part I: Problems of Method 2. Phenomenology as Rigorous Science , Taylor Carman 3. Hermeneutics , Michael N. Forster 4. Philosophical Aestheticism , Sebastian Gardner 5. The History of Philosophy as Philosophy , Michael Rosen 6. Historicism , Frederick Beiser 7. What Have We Been Missing? Science and Philosophy in Twentieth-Century French Thought , Gary Gutting 8. Marxism and the Status of Critique , Alex Callinicos Part II: Reason and Consciousness 9. Serpentine Naturalism and Protean Nihilism: Transcendental Philosophy in Anthropological Post-Kantianism, German Idealism, and Neo-Kantiasm , Paul Franks 10. Dialectic, Objectivity, and the Unity of Reason , Fred Rush 11. Overcoming Epistemology , Herman Philipse 12. Individual Existence and the Philosophy of Difference , Robert Stern 13. Consciousness in the World: Husserlian Phenomenology and Externalism , Peter Poellner Part III: Human Being 14. Nihilism and the Meaning of Life , Julian Young 15. nullThe Presentation of the Infinite in the Finitenull: The Place of God in Post-Kantian Philosophy , Stephen Mulhall 16. Being at Home: Human Beings and Human Bodies , Maximilian de Gaynesford 17. Freedom as Autonomy , Kenneth Baynes 18. The Legacy of Hellenic Harmony , Jessica N. Berry 19. Critical Theory and Practical Philosophy: On the Normative Credentials of Frankfurt School Social Criticism , Gordon Finlayson 20. Morality Critics , Brian Leiter 21. The Humanism Debate , Thomas Baldwin Bibliography Index Authors, editors, and contributors: Edited by Brian Leiter, The University of Texas at Austin and Michael Rosen, Harvard University Contributors: Kenneth Baynes is Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University. Frederick Beiser is Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University. Jessica N. Berry is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University. Alex Callinicos is Professor of European Studies at King's College, London. Taylor Carman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Barnard College and Columbia University. Gordon Finlayson is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. Michael N. Forster is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Paul Franks is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. Sebastian Gardner is Professor of Philosophy at University College London. Maximilian de Gaynesford is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Reading. Gary Gutting is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Brian Leiter holds the Hines H. Baker & Thelma Kelley Baker Chair in Law and Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin. Stephen Mulhall is Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at New College, Oxford University. Herman Philipse is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utrecht. Peter Poellner is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Michael Rosen is Professor of Government at Harvard University. Fred Rush is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Robert Stern is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Julian Young is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland. Thomas Baldwin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York.

Smith, Barry. "What's Wrong with Contemporary Philosophy?" TOPOI 25.1-2 (2006): 63-67.

Philosophy in the West now divides into three parts – Analytic Philosophy, Continental Philosophy and History of Philosophy. Analytic Philosophy (AP), although it comes in many varieties, has four striking properties. First, it is cultivated with every appearance of theoretical rigour. Second, its practitioners do not, by and large, believe that philosophy is or can be a science, i.e., they do not believe that it can add to the stock of positive human knowledge. Third, the philosophers who until very recently were the most influential models in the pursuit of philosophy as a theoretical enterprise – Chisholm, Davidson, Armstrong, Putnam, Kripke, Searle… – have no obvious successors. Finally, AP has succeeded in the institutional task of turning out increasing numbers of highly trained, articulate and intelligent young philosophers. Each of these properties reflects a relatively uncontroversial empirical claim. Continental Philosophy (CP) comes in almost as many varieties as does AP but is always decidedly anti-theoretical. This is particularly true of those varieties which sport the name “Theory”, but it holds in general of all those CP philosophical traditions in which political goals are more or less preeminent. The heroes of CP – Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida – also belong to the past and they, too, have no obvious successors. The History of Philosophy (HP) is pursued by both analytic philosophers and their Continental consoeurs. In Continental Europe – with the exception of Scandinavia and Poland – philosophy is, in large measure, just the history of philosophy. In the Anglosaxophone world most philosophers are not historians of philosophy. The almost total identification of philosophy with its history in Continental Europe reflects massive scepticism about any theoretical ambitions on the part of philosophy. These claims are also uncontroversial, as an examination of the publications of philosophers in Continental Europe easily shows. . . . Read the rest here: http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/WhatsWrong.pdf. (Thanks to Ed Brandon for the link.)

Vatter, Miguel. "Review of Claude Lefort's LE TEMPS PRESENT: ÉCRITS, 1945-2005." NDPR December 2, 2007.

Claude Lefort has never quite made it to the rank of the French "maîtres à penser" like Sartre and Lacan, Althusser and Foucault. Nevertheless, during the second half of the 20th century he became France's most important practitioner of political theory, in the North American understanding of the term, as defined by the likes of Arendt, Strauss, and Sheldon Wolin. This volume collects over eighty texts by Lefort, written from 1945 to 2005, composed for the most part of journal and newspaper articles, interviews, and conference papers. They provide a fascinating exercise in what Foucault once called the project of an "ontology of the present." Until his break in 1958 with the journal Socialism or Barbarism, which he founded together with Cornelius Castoriadis, Lefort was active in the "revolutionary" Left, first as a Trotskyite, later as an advocate of people's self-government in the form of workers' councils. The texts in this collection written in the thirty years from 1945 to 1975 reflect the changes that brought Lefort to completely reject what he calls the "myth" of the Revolution found in the Marxist-Leninist tradition, and to espouse the non-Marxist, yet radical democratic theory for which he is best known. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=11823.

Babich, Babette E. "On the Analytic-Continental Divide in Philosophy: Nietzsche's Lying Truth, Heidegger's Speaking Language, and Philosophy."

(From A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy. Ed. C. G. Prado. New York: Humanity Books, 2003. 63-103.) . . . What are we doing and what do we mean when we name a being defined utterly beyond human comprehension? Can we think of God? What do we think of when we think we do? How can we know something we cannot know? Can we conceive a divinity, a being greater than which is not to be imagined, an infinite, omnipotent, self-caused creator of the world and everything in it? Or is our monotheistic thought of God, as Nietzsche wondered if it might be, nothing more than a de-deification of a god-filled world, a "monotono-theism" [74] - as Nietzsche named it - little better than, and more than half way to the disenchanted universe of a science bent on replacing divinity with a singularity at the beginning: the big bang as the boy scientist's idea of God. The rationalistic justification of atheism however is itself only another kind of "better knowing." As Nietzsche would say the claim to know and the claim not to know are both overweening claims, presuming in each case to know too much. And the question of freedom, tied to the question of self or the subject, who is it that speaks whenever one speaks? One is not transparent to oneself, one has no more certain knowledge of oneself than one has of the universe, of the past or the future. If one wills one's subjugation is one less or no less subject? If we have discovered mirror neurons, have we solved the problem of consciousness or do we merely presume it, once again? If there are unconscious motivations, if we are beings whose thoughts are manifestations of brain and body functions, what can be said of freedom? What is an illusion, what is truth? what is lie? Nietzsche, who began to raise questions of this kind, as we have seen, reaped a harvest of contradictions in his philosophy - but more insights into the nature of truth and indeed of human beings who use language to think about truth than many other, more sanguine and clear philosophers. To questions like these, and certainly to ones far better framed, analytic philosophers have answers, rather a lot of them, carefully repeated in the literature. For their part (and this should be kept in mind when reading authors like Heidegger and Nietzsche), continental philosophers tend less to answer or conclude inquiry than to compound their own (and our responding) questions - adverting to ambiguity, unclarity, complexity and all the detail that ultimately is required to begin to think philosophy as the meaning of life. It is significant that of the analytic answers given, none would seem to have purchase or staying power, not even for the analysts themselves. Hence and seemingly having exhausted their own mandate and with it their own project, analytic philosophy has begun to turn toward continental philosophy. Not, alas as rapprochement, not by inviting practitioners of continental philosophy to join the discussion, but only and all by themselves, and as if bored to tears by their own analytic themes, taking up the themes (and the names, like Nietzsche, like Heidegger and Deleuze) of continental philosophy. For the analytic tradition is intentionally bankrupt (this is the internal logic of the analytic method) but although rendered moribund at its own hand, within the profession (aka academic and editorial control) it enjoys the power of the majority or dominant tradition. To keep itself going it means to seize (but not to "think") the spiritual capital of a tradition whose own authority is denounced as that of non- or "bad" philosophy. The claim then, as it may be heard from Brian Leiter to Simon Critchley and Manfred Frank but also in almost every analytic book and review on the topic, is that anything continental philosophy can do, analytic philosophy can do better, much better.What makes it so much better is, it goes without saying in this assertion, its much vaunted clarity. But it is a claim that remains ultimately unclear, not only because unclarity belongs to the essence of what it is that continental philosophers do (and because unclarity, the very idea, is anathema to analytic philosophy) but also because the analytic method is ineliminably self-dissolving: whatever it takes into its mind, it ends up clarifying, that is, in Skorupksi's and not only Skorupski's account of it: analyzing away. Analytic philosophy as the clarification of questions or as the enterprise of problem solving works elegantly for idle problems of logic - one thinks of Russell's "tea-table" [75] - or for crossword and other puzzles (or within a closed system or defined universe of variables) but it may be that there is still yet more in heaven (and out of it) than dreamt of in such a philosophy. And continental philosophy in its best practitioners still does know this. Although there has yet to be an authentic conversation between analytic and continental philosophy, so that one justifiably speaks of a dubious estrangement - it still seems to the present author that the best way to resolve this estrangement is not to deny to acknowledge differences between one's own and another's language and theoretical concerns, all for the sake of a "conversation," if we may use Gadamer's all-too ordinary language for this indispensable and fundamentally hermeneutic engagement of one scholar with another. Not in spite of the differences but because of these differences, we might begin by speaking to one another, recognizing the divide between analytic and continental, and so including both in philosophic discourse. Read the rest here: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/babich02.htm.

Leiter, Brian. "'Analytic' and 'Continental' Philosophy." PHILOSOPHICAL GOURMET REPORT 2006 - 2008.

"Analytic" philosophy today names a style of doing philosophy, not a philosophical program or a set of substantive views. Analytic philosophers, crudely speaking, aim for argumentative clarity and precision; draw freely on the tools of logic; and often identify, professionally and intellectually, more closely with the sciences and mathematics, than with the humanities. (It is fair to say that "clarity" is, regrettably, becoming less and less a distinguishing feature of "analytic" philosophy.) The foundational figures of this tradition are philosophers like Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, the young Ludwig Wittgenstein and G.E. Moore; other canonical figures include Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Kripke, Rawls, Dummett, and Strawson. "Continental" philosophy, by contrast, demarcates a group of French and German philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries. The geographical label is misleading: Carnap, Frege, and Wittgenstein were all products of the European Continent, but are not "Continental" philosophers. The foundational figure of this tradition is Hegel; other canonical figures include the other post-Kantian German Idealists (e.g., Fichte, Schelling), Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Gadamer, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, and Foucault. Continental philosophy is sometimes distinguished by its style (more literary, less analytical, less reliance on formal logic), its concerns (more interested in actual political and cultural issues and, loosely speaking, the human situation and its "meaning"), and some of its substantive commitments (more self-conscious about the relation of philosophy to its historical situation). . . . Read the rest here: http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/analytic.asp.

Mulligan, Kevin. "The Great Divide." TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT June 26, 1998, 6-8.

At the turn of the century, Russell, Husserl and Couturat singled out Leibniz the logician as an important precursor of the way they thought philosophy should be done. Like their most gifted contemporaries they conceived of philosophy as essentially argumentative and - as Russell put it in a 1911 talk in French - analytic. Unsurprisingly, the search for the best arguments and analyses meant that good philosophy was cosmopolitan. William James and Ernst Mach were read everywhere. James studied Mach and the pupils of Brentano, whom Stout introduced to Cambridge. Moore recognised the deep kinship between his work on ethics and that of Brentano. Russell was influenced by Peano, used and criticised Meinong and was attacked by Poincaré. Pragmatism was subjected to a series of criticisms by realists in German and in English but gradually began to win adherents, for example in Italy, where Vailati and Calderoni introduced both pragmatism and Austrian philosophy of mind. Philosophy at the end of the century presents a very different aspect. Two very different complex (families of) philosophical traditions occupy the scene - Analytic and Continental philosophy. The terminology is neither happy nor stable. John Searle likens distinguishing between philosophies in this way to the claim that America has two parts, Kansas and business; Bernard Williams compares it to the distinction between cars which are Japanese and those with front-wheel drive. Members of the first tradition hesitate between "analytic" and "analytical" and many of their heroes were in fact from the continent. A short list of such heroes would include the names of Russell and Moore, Wittgenstein, Carnap and Tarski, Quine, Davidson, Kripke, Lewis, Putnam, Nozick and Rawls, Strawson, Armstrong, Dummett, Wiggins, Williams and Evans. Behind them stands the tradition's grandfather, the great German logician and philosopher Gottlob Frege. Among Frege's earliest readers were Couturat and Russell - who immediately proclaimed his importance - and Husserl - who maintained a strange silence on the subject. . . . To read the rest of the essay, please visit the following URL: http://www.unige.ch/lettres/philo/enseignants/km/doc/GreatDivide.pdf.

Rockmore, Tom. "Remarks on the Structure of Twentieth Century Philosophy." METAPHILOSOPHY 35.4 (2004): 466-478.

The first step in considering the structure of twentieth century philosophy is to limit the discussion in identifying the important philosophical movements, those that must be included on any list of what went on in that period. In one sense the answer is simple enough. If we limit the question for the moment to roughly the last hundred years, we know that towards the beginning of the twentieth century, at a time when other philosophical tendencies were in the ascendant, three important movements emerged independently, movements which for different reasons rapidly came to dominate the debate: American pragmatism, so-called continental philosophy, and Anglo-American analytic philosophy. These three tendencies are very different, independent, and cannot be reduced to each other. Much of the discussion over the ensuing century takes the form of a contest for hegemony between them fought out in the philosophical space. Each of these tendencies has its own undeniable charms. It would be a mistake not to be knowledgeable about one or the other. It would be just as mistaken to think that one has a decisive advantage over its philosophical competition. I further think that at a minimum all three of them must be taken into account to have any hope of arriving at a viable understanding of the evolution of the recent debate. Anything less, an account which fails to consider one or another of these tendencies, presents a false view of the debate in the twentieth century. In different ways and to different degrees, these three tendencies have dominated the philosophical debate since they emerged. Their fortunes have been very varied. As a result of a variety of pressures, after they emerged each of them later changed in ways that perhaps could not have been foreseen. Analytic philosophy, which for about a half century has clearly been the dominant tendency in English-speaking countries, although that may be changing, emerged in part through a struggle against British idealism in England. This struggle was pioneered by Russell and Moore, classmates at the University of Cambridge and the thinkers most responsible for the emergence of analytic philosophy in England. Ever since Frege, analytic philosophy has been concerned with the semantic problem under the heading of reference (or what Russell called denotation). About a century later, analytic philosophy seems to be in the process of abandoning a theoretical approach to reference, hence the very problem as originally understood, while turning to pragmatism and curiously to Hegel. In different ways, for Quine, Putnam, Rorty, and Brandom, though not for McDowell a neo-analytic form of pragmatism is increasingly seen as the most viable alternative to a formal theory of reference. Continental philosophy emerged in Husserl’s breakthrough to phenomenology and continued through Heidegger, then later through such others as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, and Derrida. Yet understood as phenomenology it was severely tested by Heidegger, and seems, with some exceptions, to have sharply declined after his death. Heidegger’s theories, which he officially constructs on his reading of Husserl – Being and Time, his major work, is dedicated to Husserl – seem less to continue than rather sharply to oppose a number of central tenets of Husserl’s position, such as reduction, essential intuition, and the claimed link to Cartesianism. There is a lot of confusion about what ‘phenomenology’ means. Yet if the truth be told, Heidegger contributes less to prolonging than to putting an abrupt end to what has been called the phenomenological movement. Although there are still many philosophers committed to phenomenology, it is unclear that, beyond the term, they share anything approaching a central doctrinal commitment. Pragmatism, which is the only indigenous American philosophical movement, nearly came to a halt when Dewey died. Although it was still studied after Dewey, there was little original work from the time of his death in 1952 until, say, the end of the 1970s, when it was taken up and transformed by a number of important analytic thinkers. It has lately been revived in very different form, mainly through Rorty’s efforts, through the migration, or conversion, of such analytic stalwarts as Quine, Putnam and Rorty to neo-analytic pragmatism. Peirce, the inventor of pragmatism, was a strong critic of Cartesian epistemological foundationalism, which he criticized in a series of articles in the 1880s. Pragmatism, which emerged in the wake of Peirce’s canonical critique of Descartes, has always been a very pluralist movement centered on the concern to continue the discussion of knowledge on a non-foundationalist basis (see Rescher 2000). Yet neo-analytic pragmatism arguably consists in a collection of theories which bears little direct relation to the views of Peirce, who founded the movement. In simplest terms, pragmatism has now split into scholarly discussion of first-generation American pragmatists such as Peirce, James and Dewey, and so-called neo-analytic pragmatism, including such thinkers as Rorty, Putnam, and now Brandom, concerned to appropriate selected pragmatic themes for their analytic concerns, on the other. . . . For the rest of this essay, please visit the following URL: http://www.arsdisputandi.org/index.html?http://www.arsdisputandi.org/publish/articles/000128/index.html.

Hardt, Hanno. "Cruising on the Left: Notes on a Genealogy of 'Left' Communication Research." FAST CAPITALISM 2.2 (2007).

This essay traces the idea of "left" communication research in the United States, with references to the writings and practices of American authors and critics of mass communication and in the context of historical developments from nineteenth century philosophical and theoretical influences to the rise of the New Left in the 1960s. Not unlike the Old Left, which never achieved holding political power and realizing its political goals—but whose ideas have made a difference in reforming American society—"left" communication research never dominated the research culture in the United States, but its contributions continue to enrich the landscape of communication studies. The idea of "left" communication research is typically contained in the notion of "critical" communication research. Although potentially different (in terms of ideology), both share an understanding of communication as relations of power, which they address in their critique of the relations of media and society, for instance. There is a tolerance of inclusion (of left perspectives) among those writing about "critical" communication research, like Leslie T. Good, who sees even a moral imperative at work in "critical" communication research on the demystification of power relations with the goal of creating a climate of interrogation among "critical" researchers (or theorists). While Sue Curry Jansen writes about the implementation of a "media-critical" theory to suggest a broad based critique of media practices, W. J. T. Mitchell's ideas about "dialectical pluralism," with its notion of "pushing divergent theories and practices toward confrontation and dialogue" become the inspiration for the mission of a new journal, Critical Studies in Mass Communication. The work in a Marxist tradition of communication research, one thinks of Herbert Schiller or Dalles Smythe, for instance, remains isolated in its critique of society and reappears later with the rise of a Marxist tradition in a new and perhaps more hospitable environment of Cultural Studies, inspired by the work of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, in particular, and legitimized by their intellectual standing. Mainstream—or traditional—communication research, on the other hand, represents a different understanding of communication, one that is compatible with the ruling ideology. The latter embraces relations of power for the purpose of creating and maintaining community or democracy by preserving a pluralism of shared responsibilities, or consensus in a Deweyan sense. Under these conditions of existence, communication studies describes representative relations of power among social, economic, and political or cultural institutions in pursuit of a common good. Its research practices are embedded in the positivism of the traditional social sciences and provide empirical evidence, whose decontextualized and ahistorical nature invites a growing critique during the 1980s, in particular. All the while "left" communication research is marginalized in the disciplinary discourse; it is either considered a foreign product—based on European philosophical or theoretical propositions regarding democracy and society—or a Marxist project, which occupies only a fleeting moment in the American experience, when leftist ideas influenced the cultural and intellectual life of some communities before repression and the McCarthyism of the 1950s destroyed the sense of a collective mission. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/2_2/hardt.html.

Byatt, A. S. "Novel Thoughts." TIMES November 28, 2007.

. . . During my lifetime we have used various metaphors for the activity of the mind – when I was a girl it was seen as a telephone exchange. Later it became fashionable to describe the brain as a computer – though a computer was constructed by a brain. In the past few years the work of Jean-Pierre Changeux has furnished us with descriptions, both purely physical and philosophically theoretical, of the way the brain puts the mind together. When he describes the relations between axons, dendrites, perception, memory, concepts and the world outside a brain, I feel I am reading a description of what I always sensed was happening, but could not describe. He is interested both in a biological and chemical 'grammar' or algebra, and in the way in which things we perceive are retained – by the neurones – and combined to make “images” and “concepts” which are made by strengthened and stabilized collections of neurones, related both by the “pruning” of the sensory input and the combinations resulting from the way the mental objects are linked. This may seem a little abstract in the context of a paper on the novel. A novel is made of language, and arouses both feelings and thoughts in its readers, as it should depict both feelings and thoughts in its people and its microcosm. Changeux’s descriptions of the cells of the brain and the way they combine and recombine give me a sense of understanding the excitement, the drive, the pleasure, I get out of making worlds with words. We have had a lot of the body as desire, and listened to many professors of desire. There is something else – the human capacity to think, and to make feelings into thoughts. It is a way out of narcissism. The full article is here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article2960112.ece.

Lianos, Michaelis, ed. "Pierre Bourdieu: a Critical Tribute in Times of Uncertainty." SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH ONLINE 12.6 (2007).

Essays include:

• Prefaceby Michaelis Lianos;
• Pierre Bourdieu: Episteme, Polity and Critique by Michaelis Lianos;
• Que Reste-T-Il Des Héritiers Et De La Reproduction (1964-1971) Aujourd'hui? Questions, Méthodes, Concepts Et Réception D'une Sociologie De L'éducation by Jean-Claude Passeron;
• Cultural Capital, Cultural Knowledge and Ability by Alice Sullivan;
• Towards a Theory of Constrained Relativism: Comparing and Combining the Work of Pierre Bourdieu, Mary Douglas and Michael Thompson, and Alan Fiske by Marco Verweij
• La Distinction Indifférente by Christian Papilloud;
• Habitus and Reflexivity: Restructuring Bourdieu's Theory of Practice by Nicos Mouzelis
• Critical Sociology and Social History by Eric Hobsbawm;
• Raisonnements Circulaires : Retour Nostalgique à Lévy-Bruhl by Mary Douglas; and
• Bourdieu and Postcommunist Class Formation by William Outhwaite.

To access the entire issue, click here: http://www.socresonline.org.uk/12/6/contents.html.

Cohen, Patricia. "Freud Is Widely Taught at Universities, Except in the Psychology Department." NEW YORK TIMES November 25, 2007.

PSYCHOANALYSIS and its ideas about the unconscious mind have spread to every nook and cranny of the culture from Salinger to South Park, from Fellini to foreign policy. Yet if you want to learn about psychoanalysis at the nation’s top universities, one of the last places to look may be the psychology department. A new report by the American Psychoanalytic Association has found that while psychoanalysis — or what purports to be psychoanalysis — is alive and well in literature, film, history and just about every other subject in the humanities, psychology departments and textbooks treat it as “desiccated and dead,” a historical artifact instead of “an ongoing movement and a living, evolving process.” . . . The primary reason it became marginalized . . . is that while most disciplines in psychology began putting greater emphasis on testing the validity of their approaches scientifically, “psychoanalysts haven’t developed the same evidence-based grounding.” As a result, most psychology departments don’t pay as much attention to psychoanalysis. At the same time, wondrous advances, in neuroscience, for instance, have attracted new students and resources, further squeezing out psychoanalysis. Outside the university setting, the refusal of most insurance firms to pay for extended psychoanalytic therapy has limited its reach. . . . But Mark Edmundson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author of “The Death of Sigmund Freud,” said, “Freud to me is a writer comparable to Montaigne and Samuel Johnson and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, writers who take on the really big questions of love, justice, good government and death.” Scholars in the humanities, he said, use Freud “skeptically and provisionally and don’t think of him as scientist at all, but as an interpreter.” . . . For the full article, go here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/weekinreview/25cohen.html?_r=1&oref=slogin.

Smith, Joanna. "Pursuing a PhD? Consider Wii Studies." TORONTO STAR November 24, 2007.

Future Play 2007, an international conference organized by Algoma University College last week, was an odd sort of conference. The kind of conference where it was perfectly normal for [one participant] . . . to brag about the pants her video-game character was sporting before launching into an elaborate thought experiment involving a feathered monster, collecting beeswax and charging $14.98 to her credit card to buy a bunch of gold. Everyone was there to talk and learn about video games and their psychological, sociological, political, technical, metaphorical – what have you – dimensions, which are all lumped together in the emerging field of game studies. That's right: video game studies, which is busy establishing itself as a bona fide academic field. Scholars might spend hours discussing avatars – the identities people adopt in online virtual reality games – but they are doing so in post-secondary institutions, peer-reviewed journals and in societies of the learned, such as the Digital Games Research Association, which held a large conference in Tokyo this year, or the fledgling Canadian Game Studies Association, which publishes a mostly online journal called Loading. Aside from specific areas of research like the oft-discussed studies linking video game violence to aggression in children, this worldwide phenomenon is still flying mostly under the public radar. Read the full article here: http://www.thestar.com/News/Ideas/article/279372.

Some Interesting Essays on Topics in Continental Theory, COSMOS AND HISTORY 3.1 (2007).

The newest issue of Cosmos and History is online. Take a look at the following essays in particular:

• Gare, Arran: The Primordial Role of Stories in Human Self-Creation;
• Arnett, Ronald C., Janie Harden Fritz, and Annette M. Holba: The Rhetorical Turn to Otherness Otherwise than Humanism;
• Hirst, Angela: Levinas Separates the (Hu)man from the Non(Hu)man, Using Hunger, Enjoyment and Anxiety to Illuminate the Relationship.

Some Essays on Various Topics in Continental Theory, MINERVA 11 (2007).

The newest issue of Minerva is now online. Take a look at the following essays in particular:

• Kane, Carolyn Lee: Aisthesis and the Myth of Representation;
• Tomasi, Alessandro: Nihilism and Creativity in the Philosophy of Nietzsche;
• Bolanos, Paolo: Nietzsche, Spinoza and the Ethological Conception of Ethics.

CFP: "Phronesis and Political Rhetoric: Campaigns, Compromise, and the Crusade for Civic Discourse," Texas Woman's University, February 8, 2008.

Phronesis (Greek: φρόνησις) from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is the emphasis on practical wisdom that combines elements of wisdom, knowledge, virtue, and decorum... Sloane, Thomas O., ed. Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (601)

The Rhetoric Symposium is now accepting proposals for papers and panels from faculty, graduate students, and independent scholars which address contemporary concerns with and applications of phronesis and political rhetoric. We define the theme broadly to include topics related to political rhetoric, civic discourse, public political speeches, private political discourses, technology, and critical theory. Additionally, we welcome submissions from all areas of study including, but not limited to: Rhetorical Theory, Rhetorical History, Discourse Analysis, Genre Analysis, Composition Theory, Political Science, Communication Studies, Orality, English, Journalism, Education, History, Government, Film Studies, Media Studies, Art, Psychology, Sociology, Disability Studies, Gender Studies, and Minority Studies. For further information, please visit: http://www.donnasouder.com/frs08/call_for_papers.htm.

Forthcoming Events Sponsored by Volcanic Lines, the Deleuzean Research Group, Greenwich University.

Here are some of the forthcoming events:

• John Protevi (Louisiana) "Water," Greenwich University, December 11, 2007 (http://deleuzeatgreenwich.blogspot.com/2007/01/if-you-plan-to-attend-this-event-and.html);
• Reading Group on Anti-Oedipus: meetings, all held at Greenwich University, commence October 31, 2007 (http://deleuzeatgreenwich.blogspot.com/2007/10/to-register-for-event-please-e-mail.html);
• "Philosophy after Deleuze," Graduate Conference, Department of Philosophy, University of Dundee, April 11-12, 2008 (http://deleuzeatgreenwich.blogspot.com/2007/01/what-is-philosophy-after-deleuze.html).

For further information on Volcanic Lines, please visit: http://www.deleuzeatgreenwich.blogspot.com/.

See also the blog Dialogues at Greenwich (http://www.dialoguesatgreenwich.blogspot.com/) for more detailled discussions of and reports on these and related Deleuzean events occuring at Greenwich University.

Worth, Sarah. "Review of William Irwin and Jorge J. E. Gracia, eds. PHILOSOPHY AND THE INTERPRETATION OF POP CULTURE." NDPR November 19, 2007.

Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture is an edited collection resulting from a conference on the topic held in Buffalo in April, 2004. From the list of contributors alone it is clear that this is an issue that is getting some serious attention by the world of academic philosophy. Heavy hitters such as Noël Carroll, Ted Cohen, Richard Shusterman, Jorge Gracia, and Gareth Matthews are all contributors to the volume. What I think is especially notable about the list of contributors more generally is that they are not all aestheticians, but are well-known philosophers in an array of fields. But this collection is not just another group of essays connecting various aspects of popular culture to philosophical topics. This is meta-philosophy of pop culture -- philosophy about philosophy of pop culture. For this reason, it stands apart from the other books, which examine philosophy through some particular aspect of pop culture. As Irwin says in the introduction, philosophy as a discipline has "had a public relations problem for a couple of centuries now, so engagement with popular culture is not an opportunity we can afford to miss" (3). This collection examines carefully how we might best cultivate this developing relationship between philosophical insight and popular culture in an interesting and effective way. The book is divided into two sections: the first on "Philosophy and Popular Culture," and the second on "Interpretation and Popular Art Forms." The first deals with the theoretical issues, concerns, and limitations of the interaction of the two fields, and the second includes essays in which philosophers deal with a specific artistic medium of popular culture. These media include television, horror films, children's literature, comic books, Rock' n' Roll, and photography. I found the first section considerably more interesting and useful than the second, as it dealt with the meta-issues of what the possibilities are with the courting of philosophy and popular culture in general. The books on the various popular topics "and philosophy" for the most part do not deal with the theoretical issues that concern the limitations of the philosophical use of popular culture, so these essays are particularly helpful in considering the value of doing this kind of philosophy. The second half of the collection focuses less on theoretical issues generally than on issues of interpretation that arise within particular genres of popular art. Although some might assume that popular art might be more transparent than high art and is in no need of interpretation, Irwin suggests in his introduction that this view is mistaken. The hermeneutic issues raised here are not necessarily novel ones, but as they are raised here they give the reader a good sense of how some of the classic problems in philosophy (and in particular in aesthetics) get fleshed out when applied in a new way. These essays are particularly helpful in understanding the unique issues connected with each medium. I will give a short summary of the issues dealt with in each of the essays in what follows. . . . Please read the full review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=11783.

More on the Amis-Eagleton Spat in the Editorial, STABROEK NEWS November 29, 2007.

. . . It would be disingenuous to claim, after such a destructive century, that we cannot judge religious and political ideologues on their stated aims and their actions. But what is moral superiority worth if it reconciles us to new horrors, like the catastrophic war which is currently breeding the very terrorism it was meant to curb? Easy judgements, however correct, are often the prologue to perilous simplifications: we tend to feel superior long after we have forgotten our morality. Read the rest here: http://www.stabroeknews.com/index.pl/article?id=56534130.

Noel-Smith, Kelly. "Harry Potter's Oedipal Issues." PSYCHONALYTIC STUDIES 3 (2001): 199-207.

By adopting a psychoanalytic perspective - and acknowledging that this is only one of many ways of approaching the question of the books’ popularity, or notoriety - it is hoped to show that the extraordinary success of the Harry Potter books is due, in part, to the universal phantasies they contain, in particular, those deriving from the Oedipal period. Freud suggested that creative writers, whose unconscious often fuels their writing, entice us to read about their creations by offering us the chance to enjoy our phantasies without self-reproach or shame (Freud 1908). It follows that, the more common the phantasy, the more popular the work of literature will be which allows us to engage with it, whether consciously or not. The author need not be aware that her works contain these phantasies: indeed, J. K. Rowling in a recent article said: “The most frequently asked question you get as an author is ‘where do you get your ideas from?’ I find this frustrating because I haven’t got the faintest idea where my ideas come from, or how my imagination works. I’m just grateful that it does, because it gives me more entertainment than it gives anyone else.” (The Sunday Times, 21 May 2000). Freud discusses phantasy in detail in his papers on creative writers and daydreaming (Freud 1908) and in his paper on the formulations of the two principles of mental functioning (Freud 1911). He suggests that phantasising is what we do when our ego, acting in accordance with the reality principle and taking into account the often frustrating external world, comes into conflict with the pleasure principle, which seeks immediate fulfilment of id demands. Phantasy represents a compromise between the two: it creates an internal world which represents the external world as we should like it to be. Hanna Segal suggests that writers, and other artists, can afford to let their phantasies run free because their art provides them with a secure link to reality (Segal 1994). Similarly, a book can provide the reader, as well as the writer, with this link to reality, this security. Alice climbing through the looking glass, the back of the wardrobe in an old house providing a doorway into Narnia, flying out of a nursery window then ‘second to the right and straight on till morning’: the reader’s link to reality is the point of entry into a world which does not really exist, from fictional reality to fictional phantasy, from a room in a house to Wonderland, Narnia or Never-Never Land. Works of fiction appease the reality principle-we know that what we are reading about is not really happening-so allow fulfilment of id phantasies, through our immersion in the book, without the danger to the ego which would arise were the phantasies acted out. . . . The rest is here: http://www.human-nature.com/free-associations/harrypotter.html.