"Nietzsche on Mind and Nature," Friedrich Nietzsche Society, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford, September 11-13, 2008.

Plenary speakers: Prof. Günter Abel, Faculty of Philosophy, TU Berlin, Germany. Prof. Brian Leiter, Faculty of Law, University of Chicago, USA. Prof. Graham Parkes, Faculty of Philosophy, Cork, Ireland. Dr. Peter Poellner, Faculty of Philosophy, Warwick University, UK. Prof. Bernard Reginster, Faculty of Philosophy, Brown University, USA. Prof. John Richardson, Faculty of Philosophy, NYU, USA. St. Peter’s College: http://www.spc.ox.ac.uk/ Directions and transport to St. Peter’s College http://www.spc.ox.ac.uk/downloads/165/maps.html Conference organizers: Dr. Manuel Dries (manuel.dries /at/ philosophy.ox.ac.uk) Dr. Peter Kail (peter.kail /at/ philosophy.ox.ac.uk) Faculty of Philosophy University of Oxford 10 Merton Street Oxford OX1 4JJ Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/events/nietzsche_mind_conference.

Wilson, A. N. "The Archbishop's Dostoevsky." TLS October 8, 2008.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s views on religion are notoriously hard to pin down with confidence. If you collected up the criticism devoted to Tolstoy, there could be no doubt about what he believed at any stage of his journey. Yet in the history of Dostoevsky criticism we find, for example, Henry Miller reading Dostoevsky as a great social revolutionary, whereas others have seen him as a diehard conservative. Rowan Williams, in his latest book, quotes (and rebuts) William Hamilton, who sought to enlist Dostoevsky as a forerunner of “Death of God” theology; Georges Florovsky, who saw Dostoevsky as an exemplar of Russian Orthodoxy; Malcolm Jones, who has linked him to “post-atheism” in contemporary Russia, and judged him to exemplify the workings of “minimal religion”. Clearly, all these contradictory readings cannot be right. Or can they? Is that precisely the nature of the difficulty? We need a guide who combines the gifts of a literary critic and a trained theologian to work out how far the novels of Dostoevsky can be used as vehicles for such explorations. We also need a guide who is deeply versed in the ethos and spiritual traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church to place Dostoevsky, and the tormented exchanges of his characters, within some intelligible historical framework. Luckily, the Archbishop of Canterbury combines all these qualities, and more. . . . Read the rest here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article4905068.ece.

Schiff, Stacy. "The Woman Who Never Stopped Talking: the Secret of Madame de Stael's Success" SLATE MAGAZINE October 6, 2008.

Gray, Francine du Plessix. Madame de Stael: the First Modern Woman. Atlas, 2008. I'll be honest: First Modern Woman does not constitute what I would call a dream job. Someone had to step up, however, and—assuming royal and Ptolemaic women are off limits—one looks to Enlightenment Europe for volunteers. French residency if not nationality was a plus. A fortune was de rigueur. It helped to be an only child; generally one goes further in the absence of pesky male heirs. And what never hurts—arguably even today—is an adoring, intellectually inclined father. Such were the blessings showered on Germaine de Stael, and though I might argue that Mesdames du Chatelet and de Charrière challenge her title —and the subtitle of Francine du Plessix Gray's new biography—few have done as much with those advantages as Madame de Stael. Certainly no one caused as much trouble. . . .

Read the whole review here: http://www.slate.com/id/2201499/pagenum/all.

Early, Gerald L. "The End of Race as We Know It." CHRONICLE REVIEW October 10, 2008.

In our bull sessions, some of us would talk about jihad, or righteous war, against the whites. (It was all talk.) Some of us actually became Muslims (very few — we were Christians to the bone, despite our chatter about "the white man's religion") or joined some Eastern religious sect and adopted certain garb and mannerisms. Many of us wore wild Afros, making them wilder with blowout kits, and thought we were revolutionaries of a sort. After all, some of the black upperclassmen among us had seized buildings in protest, and a few even brandished weapons during the sieges. Looking at The New Yorker cover as a middle-aged, black baby boomer, far removed from any of the Orientalism and racial and political romanticism of my youth, reminded me of a certain kind of silliness, but it also, strangely, moved me deeply. The cover told the story of a rite of African-American passage that occurred at a particular time for the generation of blacks who would become the most successful in the history of the group, and the most integrated. The relatively difficult years that my generation endured integrating white institutions — difficult not in any material sense, but in the sense that we were not very well prepared academically or emotionally to cope with our surroundings (we were given more than we knew what to do with, so much that one felt simultaneously intoxicated by the riches and stressed to the breaking point by how alien it all felt) — made us clutch at any sort of feeble identity protection we could muster. We had to "act black" because, after all, that is why we were at the university in the first place: to provide diversity in the only way we knew how. Basically, entrapped in our excessive and youthful self-consciousness, our special sort of juvenile insecurity, we were trying, ironically, to show that we belonged, to protect ourselves from being considered "dumb niggers," or, even worse, "charity cases," the ragtag tail end of the American bourgeois elite. Some succeeded (by graduating). Many didn't. It is a modern story about integration in America — not the bloody civil-rights struggle of gaining access, but rather how people can sometimes be killed by kindness, paddled by paternalism, undone by philanthropy. I think back on it all as a remarkable form of self-hazing. . . . The presidential campaign of Barack Obama has raised the question of what happens to the black American meta-narrative of heroic or noble victimization if he wins. (Presumably nothing happens to it if he loses; the loss can be blamed on racism, as it will, in fact, be another example of victimization. White folks will always find a way to cut down a successful black man, to not let him get too far, is the common belief. That sort of black cynicism, expressed in different political and aesthetic modalities, underscores both the blues and rap. If Obama loses, he becomes, in black folklore, John Henry, the "natural" man with the courage to go up against the political machine. The moral of the tale, in politics as in life, is that the machine always wins.) . . . Many of us black professionals, members of the black elite, keep the embers of our victimization burning for opportunistic reasons: to lev-erage white patronage, to maintain our own sense of identity and tradition. In some respects, this narrative has something of the power in its endurance that original sin does for Christians. In fact, our narrative of victimization is America's original sin, or what we want to serve as the country's original sin, which may be why we refuse to give it up. We have used it shamelessly — especially those who are least entitled to do so, as we have suffered the least — hustled it to get over on whites, to milk their guilt, to excuse our excesses and failures. Being the victim justifies all ethical lapses, as the victim becomes morally reprehensible in the guise of being morally outraged. Being the victim has turned into a sucker's game, the only possible game that the weak can play against the strong with any chance of winning. Nonetheless, the narrative does a kind of cultural work that serves our purposes in some profound ways, and it may be good for the country as a whole in reminding everyone about the costs of American democracy, its fragile foundation, its historically based hypocrisy. The conservatives are right: Freedom isn't free, and the black victim narrative reminds us all of that. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i07/07b01101.htm.

"Literary Reading and Emotion," Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts, July 13-14, 2008.

(This conference has already taken place but I include information on it for readers who might be interested in the intersection of literary criticism and cognitive science.) The Literary Reading and Emotion symposium is designed to bring scholars together in an informal environment to discuss the role of emotional response in literary reading and explore avenues for further research. Some issues for consideration are indicated below. Modern theories of cognition and emotion and increasing knowledge about the workings of the human mind provide possibilities for more systematic approaches to the role of feeling in literary response than have been the case in literary scholarship in the past. Among literary scholars the feelings of readers have so far received little attention (exceptions include Opdahl, Robinson) and they have largely been overlooked by the new discipline of cognitive poetics (but see Tsur). Yet a number of important features of literary response appear to depend on feeling. Empirical studies have shown that it correlates reliably with stylistic and other foregrounded features in texts (Miall & Kuiken, 1994); it increases the “depth of response” to literary texts (Eva-Wood); it is reflected in the absorption or “transport” that enables readers to imagine themselves in a scene or as a given character (Gerrig, Green), with consequent influence on some readers’ ethical understanding (Hakemulder); and feeling for some readers can be self-modifying, a wider concept than catharsis, bringing renewed understanding of the self and its social context (Miall & Kuiken, 2002). In addition, feeling presents us with some puzzling paradoxes that point to its independence from cognitive functions: we feel real feelings for characters in narrative or poetry that we know to be fictional (Carroll); we often feel as vividly on second or subsequent readings of a narrative when we know the outcome; and we appear to seek out and take pleasure in experiencing negative emotions, as in tragic drama (Nussbaum). This proposal to study feeling is also timely. Given that literary studies is now “after theory,” it provides an opportunity to renew our understanding of how literary reading influences the ordinary reader, and to re-engage with questions of what it means to experience literature rather than interpret it. In a time of declining readership in North America (NEA report, Reading at Risk, June 2004), the study of feeling may also lead to a better understanding of literature in the classroom, and help retrieve the literary experience for readers of the future. The colloquium will include literary scholars working in poetics or empirical studies of literary reading, as well as scholars from other fields interested in questions about feeling and literature: philosophers, psychologists, linguists, and neuropsychologists. Some specific issues: 1. Does feeling have precedence in the early phases of literary response? What is the nature and scope of feeling in the first seconds of response, especially in the first 300 msec prior to conscious awareness? What do event-related potentials (ERPs) show about early language processing, and how far is this relevant to our understanding of the response to foregrounding, the array of unusual textual features (sound effects, metre, figurative expressions, etc.) that readers often find striking? Is there evidence of “pre-categorical processing” of foregrounding, as proposed by Tsur (1992)? Does foregrounding, in Barfield’s (1964) words, create “the strangeness” that has “an interior significance,” that is “felt as arising from a different plane or mode of consciousness” (pp. 170-1)? 2. Does literary reading have a creative, self-modifying power? Does literature have a role in creating novel feelings, and if so what are their implications? There is evidence from historical documents of readers appearing to experience new feelings (Rose, 2001; Long, 2003). Among contemporary empirical studies, Cupchik and his colleagues (1998) reported that readers experienced “fresh” feelings in response to certain passages in Joyce’s short stories; compared with emotion memories, such feelings were more frequent both in response to descriptive passages and when readers were identifying with a character; and they also tended to occur in response to passages later in the text. Frijda (2007) suggests that emotions generate fresh feelings: “Emotion experience provides novel motivations and new knowledge that lead to novel emotions and actions” (p. 221). 3. What role does empathy play in literary reading? Empathy is often cited as a benefit of literary reading. This raises the paradox that we feel real emotions for fictional characters, i.e., it conflicts with the Law of Apparent Reality proposed by Frijda (2007). Can empathy be characterized by Oatley’s (1994) proposal that readers are simulating, “taking on the character’s goals, and experiencing emotions as these plans meet vicissitudes”(66)? Are Theory of Mind approaches relevant here, and if so does simulation (which seems supported by the finding of mirror neurons) or the theory-theory approach provide the better account of empathy? How far is empathy to be distinguished from sympathy, compassion, or emotional contagion (Keen, 2006: pp. 208-9)? Read more on the conference here: https://sites.google.com/a/case.edu/myrifield/Home/symposia/literary-reading--emotion. For more on the Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts, visit: https://sites.google.com/a/case.edu/myrifield/Home.

"Many Marxisms," Annual HISTORICAL MATERIALISM Conference, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, November 7-9, 2008.

Ever since its foundation in 1997, Historical Materialism has sought to contribute to the intellectual recomposition of the global Left by serving as an international venue for critical Marxist research. The journal's initial wager - that Marxism remains a vital, and heterogeneous and many-faceted political and theoretical tradition - has been borne out in a conjuncture where Marxist thinkers have amply demonstrated the critical resources at their disposal (witness recent debates on imperialism and neoliberalism). Within the academy, the facile dismissal of Marxism seems to have run out of steam, and the attitudes of new generations of students and researchers have changed accordingly. Marxist intellectuals are no longer simply forced to survive in hostile conditions or to retreat into isolated academic subcultures, despite an often adverse global political context. In this setting, they face new challenges, which this conference seeks to address. How can we develop the plurality of Marxist debates, fields and schools without making concessions to eclecticism, narcissism or compartmentalisation? How do we square the concrete multiplicity of Marxisms with the strong commonalities in intellectual vocabularies, theoretical sources and political aims? Hasn't the question of the diversity of Marxism - of many Marxisms - accompanied the tradition’s entire development, a testament both to its internationalist horizon, and to the inexhaustible potential of its many critical insights and conceptual formulations? What strategies can allow us to confront, and perhaps overcome, some of the disparities or even misunderstandings born of these processes of differentiation? Having tried to foster a form of critical cosmopolitanism and debate in past conferences, bringing together thinkers working in different fields, and out of different traditions, this year's Historical Materialism conference wants to emphasise problems and opportunities raised by the existence of 'Many Marxisms'. To this end, it aims to take stock of recent developments in Marxist thought, surveying the most vibrant recent debates; to confront critical moments in the historical development of Marxism; to identify crucial concepts and areas of research that can cut across any preconceived academic specialisation or geographical isolation of Marxism; to reflect on the ways in which Marxism has and continues to intervene in mainstream intellectual debates; and, finally, to generate a space in which the outlines of the many twenty-first century Marxisms may be delineated. For more information, visit the conference homepage: http://mercury.soas.ac.uk/hm/conference2008.htm.

Nobel Prize in Literature 2008.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2008 has been won by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, the French writer. For more information, visit: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2008/press.html.

CAHIERS POUR L'ANALYSE Workshop Series, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, 2008-2009.

The aim of this series of six workshops is to discuss the central ideas developed in the French philosophy journal Cahiers pour l’Analyse (1966-1969). The first three sessions will be introductory, and will be focussed on an explication of the concept of ‘suture’, developed by Jacques-Alain Miller in the first volume of the journal, and elaborated and criticised across the remaining volumes by Serge Leclaire, André Green, Luce Irigaray, Jean-Claude Milner and Alain Badiou amongst others. There will be two or three short presentations at each session, but the emphasis will be on group discussion. Translations of each of the core texts are available from c.kerslake@mdx.ac.uk. Thursday 23 October 2008: The Concept of Suture in the Cahiers Reading: Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Suture: Elements for a Logic of the Signifier’ (CPA 1.3), trans. J. Rose, Screen, 18, 1978. Discussants: Peter Hallward, Christian Kerslake, Knox Peden Friday 14 November 2008: Lacanian Psychoanalysis in the Cahiers I Reading: André Green, ‘The Logic of Lacan’s objet (a) and Freudian Theory’ (CPA 3.2), trans. K. Kleinert & B. Schlossman, in J.H. Smith & W. Kerrigan, Interpreting Lacan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). Discussants: Lorenzo Chiesa, Rosa Nogues Thursday 4 December 2008: Lacanian Psychoanalysis in the Cahiers II Reading : Luce Irigaray, ‘Linguistic and Specular Communication: Genetic Models and Pathological Models’ (CPA 3.3), trans. G. Schwab, in Irigaray, To Speak is Never Neutral ( London: Continuum, 2002). Discussants: Stella Sandford & tba Meetings are from 2-4 pm in the Saloon, Mansion Building, Trent Park campus, Middlesex University, Bramley Road, London N14 4YZ.

Morris, Michael. "Review of Nathan Ross' ON MECHANISM IN HEGEL'S SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY." NDPR (October 2008).

Ross, Nathan. On Mechanism in Hegel's Social and Political Philosophy. London: Routledge, 2008. Nathan Ross's book examines the role of mechanism -- as a metaphor and a logical category -- in Hegel's political philosophy. He argues that careful attention to Hegel's comments on mechanism should help us (a) to position Hegel's political philosophy within contemporary debates between liberals and communitarians, and (b) to understand Hegel's critique of civil society in relation to his conception of the state. With regard to these objectives, Ross counters the more traditional conception of the Hegelian state as an organic totality, a conception that, in his opinion, both skews Hegel's political philosophy in the direction of contemporary communitarianism and too closely associates it with the views of Romantic thinkers like Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. In taking this position, Ross continues a marked trend in recent Anglophone scholarship on Hegel. This vigorous trend, one represented with a high degree of sophistication in the works of philosophers like Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard, seeks to rehabilitate the more individualistic and socially critical elements of Hegel's political philosophy. This form of rehabilitation seems to be the sine qua non for any sympathetic reconstruction of Hegelian political philosophy as a genuine option within the context of contemporary debates. Even the casual reader of the Philosophy of Right will see the motivation behind this rehabilitation and, at the same time, the challenges that such rehabilitation must face. In at least apparent conflict with theories about the sanctity and autonomy of the individual, Hegel claims that the ethical community -- the highest sphere of social reality -- consists in "powers" or forces to which "individuals are related as accidents to substance." Further, in at least apparent conflict with the kind of social criticism we expect from politically engaged intellectuals, Hegel praises "rectitude" as the "simple conformity" of the individual with "the duties of the station to which he belongs." He then goes on to contrast "rectitude" with "morality," attributing the latter attitude, with its critical and detached standpoint vis-à-vis the established norms of society, to the individual's "craving to be something special." While Ross does not directly address difficult passages such as these, his general argument against communitarian interpretations of Hegel clearly presents an attempt to assuage concerns about Hegel's apparent anti-individualism. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14385.

CFP: Annual Meeting, Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric, McGill University, July 22-26, 2009.

The Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric (CSSR) invites you to submit proposals for papers at its annual conference to be held at McGill University in Montréal. These proposals should be sent by October 31, 2008. The meeting will include a special session entitled 'The Embodiment of Rhetoric / The Rhetoric of Embodiment.' Other open topics are listed below. Please note that this conference will be held in conjunction with the conference of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric [ISHR], July 22-26 2009. Information on fees for the 2-day CSSR conference and the 6-day joint CSSR/ISHR conference will be posted on the ISHR website. As always, papers concerning more general aspects of rhetoric are welcome: * Rhetorical theory * Rhetorical criticism * History of rhetoric * Rhetoric in popular culture * Media communication * Discourse analysis * Rhetoric of political and social discourse * Pedagogy of communication * Rhetoric and the media * Sociolinguistics and pedagogy * Semiotics * Professional and technical communication Special Session: 'The Embodiment of Rhetoric / The Rhetoric of Embodiment' Session Chair: Pierre Zoberman, Université Paris 13 The Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric invites proposals for a special session entitled "The Embodiment of Rhetoric / The Rhetoric of Embodiment" at its annual conference. Papers for this session should engage questions of embodiment, broadly defined, and rhetoric. A contested term in contemporary thought, "embodiment" signifies in various ways the experience of our own flesh, the intimate fit of social space around bodies, physiological presence and the habitus, perceptive experiences of our own physiologies: it might be seen to describe phenomenological processes that appear in language, that occasion description and redescription, that question individual agency and its social exigencies. Philosophers, theorists, and historians have explored questions of embodiment in the past, but frequently neglect the rhetorical elements of embodied selves, the ways in which bodies appear and function in discourse, and the multiple and variegated meanings of 'the body' historically. Possible topics might include, but are not limited to, the following: * bodies and souls * bodies and gender * bodies and identity * the rhetoric of gesture * the rhetoric of sickness and health * medical discourse * bodies politic * having/being a body: rhetorical perspectives * bodies and the history of rhetoric * rhetoric and the history of bodies * the body and argument Deadline: October 31, 2008 How to submit a proposal: Your proposal may be submitted in either English or French. It may be up to 300 words in length and it will be printed in the program if your project is accepted. The presentation should be no more than 20 minutes. Please include the title of your paper. Please indicate clearly methodology, the texts or phenomena under scrutiny (a complete bibliography is not necessary), and the central importance of rhetoric to the inquiry. Work from various disciplines and from across all historical periods is welcome. If you need electronic equipment for your presentation, please send a request along with your proposal. Preferably, please send your proposal by e-mail to Shannon Purves-Smith. In addition, proposals will be accepted by mail to the following address: Shannon Purves-Smith 31 Arthur St. N. Elmira, Ontario N3B 1Z6 CANADA (519) 669 - 1327 Inquiries may be made by telephone to: (519) 669-1327. In order to present a paper, you must be a member of the CSSR. Membership fees should be paid before the presentation of the paper (at the conference is fine). Presenters are strongly encouraged to take part in discussions that follow the papers. Our members thoroughly enjoy the fruitful discussion that often arises. Please make every effort to attend the papers in your session.

(New) Journal: SUBJECTIVITY (formerly INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CRITICAL PSYCHOLOGY).

Subjectivity (previously International Journal of Critical Psychology) is an exciting and innovative transdisciplinary journal in the social sciences. Re-launched by Palgrave Macmillan in 2008, it examines the socio-political, cultural, historical and material processes, dynamics and structures of human experience. Subjectivity has been an important concept for academic research as well as for intervening in social and political life since the 1960s and 1970s. The idea of subjectivity had a catalytic impact in changing the terms of the debate in the social sciences: in anthropology, geography, psychology, sociology, post colonial theory, gender studies, cultural and media studies, social theory as well as the humanities. Subjectivity attempts to capture ongoing debates and activities and to foster a discourse on subjectivity which goes beyond traditional dichotomies between the various disciplines. The journal aims at a re-prioritization of subjectivity as a primary category of social, cultural, psychological, historical and political analysis. It wishes to encourage a variety of transdisciplinary engagements with this topic in theory as well as empirical research, and, accordingly, to advance the potential of engagement with subjectivity/subjectivities as a locus of social change and a means of political intervention. Free access to 22.1 (2008): Editorial: "Creating Subjectivities" by Lisa Blackman, John Cromby, Derek Hook, Dimitris Papadopoulos and Valerie Walkerdine Abstract Full Text PDFTop of page Original Articles: "I Eat an Apple: on Theorizing Subjectivities" by Annemarie Mol Abstract Full Text PDF "Experimenting with Refrains: Subjectivity and the Challenge of Escaping Modern Dualism" by Isabelle Stengers Abstract Full Text PDF "What Divides the Subject? Psychoanalytic Reflections on Subjectivity, Subjection and Resistance" by Lynne Layton Abstract Full Text PDF "Subjectivity or Psycho-Discursive Practices? Investigating Complex Intersectional Identities" by Margaret Wetherell Abstract Full Text PDF "I Just Don't Know What Got into Me: Where is the Subject?" by Nigel Thrift Abstract Full Text PDF "A. N. Whitehead and Subjectivity" by Paul Stenner Abstract Full Text PDF "Intersubjectivity and Intercorporeality" by Thomas J. Csordas Abstract Full Text PDF Visit the journal homepage here: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/sub/index.html.

CFP: "Greenscapes: Sense and Meaning: Fields of Dreams (Landscapes of Myth and Imagination)," Brock University, October 1-3, 2009.

Our landscapes have long been the unconscious repository of cultural hopes, fears and desires. From the Garden of Eden to aboriginal Dreamtime, societies have perceived their surrounding natural environment to express cultural values reflected in their myths, legends, sacred texts and belief systems. The occupation, transition, or representation of landscape constitutes an imaginative exercise for both subject and object. Yet imagination is not a consciously controllable process, and dreams can be unsettling portents as well as expressions of wish-fulfillment. We welcome papers that explore landscapes of myth and imagination in real and virtual sites, literary texts, images, and installations and invite proposals on the following topics: • Landscapes of allusion (texts, myths, folktales, legends) • Sacred and Secular Utopias • Profane imagination: ruin, decay and social transgression • Gardens of the ‘first time’: origin myths and social legends • Dream landscapes: fear, desire, and exploring the unconscious. Please send abstracts (up to 250 words) and a brief biography to greenscapes@brocku.ca by January 5, 2009. . . .

CFP: "In Statu Nascendi: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, Psychotherapy," Vilnius, October 28–November, 2009.

6th Central & Eastern European Conference on Phenomenology, The conference is aimed at clarifying the heuristic potential as well as the limits of the phenomenological method in the fields of pedagogy and psychotherapy. They are the fields, where corresponding theoretical reflection is immediately rooted in a certain social-cultural practice which, in its turn, deals with becoming and ‘renaissance’ of the Self. Moreover pedagogy and psychotherapy are intersubjective experiences of a special kind because both of them presuppose a constitutive asymmetry which conditions the very possibility of helping the Other in her/his self-renewal. What does the contribution of phenomenology to pedagogical and psychotherapeutic activity consist in? To what extent does (or should) the pedagogical/psychotherapeutic work involve the phenomenological one? These questions must be answered in the dialogue of the representatives of philosophy as well as psychology and pedagogy. Further information may be found here: http://phenomenology.ro/newsletter/pages/CFP_In_statu_nascendi.pdf.

Campbell, James. "Derek Walcott: a Life in Writing." GUARDIAN October 4, 2008.

As a poet, Walcott stands in opposition to many of his contemporaries. Whereas the prevailing tone of modern poetry is idiomatic and conversational, he repeatedly returns to traditional forms, risking exotic flights in language (leaving him open to the charge of being airily rhetorical). Few of the younger Caribbean poets have aligned themselves with the Walcott manner; many prefer forms tailored to live performance - rap, dub, narrative. In the 1970s, Walcott came under attack from the Black Power movement on Trinidad, and later, on St Lucia, a group of performance poets staged a protest against his traditional loyalties - which are always in danger of being misread as "English" or "colonial" allegiance. When his name was mentioned in connection with the vacant post of Poet Laureate a decade ago, he did nothing to discount himself. On a visit to St Lucia in 2004, the New Yorker journalist Hilton Als observed that while the central square in Castries, the main town of St Lucia, was renamed Walcott Square after the Nobel award, local bookshops still failed to stock his books. (To date, Walcott has published more than a dozen collections of poetry, including The Castaway, The Star-Apple Kingdom, Another Life and Tiepolo's Hound, illustrated with his own paintings.) In the US, where he taught for many years before retiring recently from Boston University, Walcott was frequently accused of being not black enough. Bruce King, author of the biography Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life, observes that while Walcott was "much in demand on the Black Studies circuit", he regarded cultural black separatism as "continuing segregation". For his own part, Walcott dismisses the misconception of a white/black dichotomy in the Caribbean, preferring to stress the ethnic variety. "My generation produced some terrific writers, from all over, and the great thing about it is that they were all mixed in race." Harry Ross, the managing director of Manning Camerata, points out that "Derek was very keen that there not be an all-black cast for The Burial at Thebes. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/04/poetry.derekwalcott.

Wood, Ellen Meiksins. "Why It Matters." LRB September 25, 2008.

Skinner, Quentin. Hobbes and Republican Liberty. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. Is it possible, Quentin Skinner asks, that an entire tradition of political thought, including the most influential conception of freedom in anglophone political theory in the past half-century, ‘has been insensitive to the range of conditions that can limit our freedom of action’? A reasonable question, one might think, not only about Isaiah Berlin’s influential defence of ‘negative’ against ‘positive’ liberty but about the whole tradition of liberalism. Yet Skinner’s own understanding of liberty is not immune to the same awkward question. The contest between republicanism and liberalism has had continuing currency in Anglo-American political theory; and no one has contributed more than Skinner, a hegemonic figure in the study of political thought, to promoting the republican tradition. He has challenged Berlin’s conception of ‘negative’ liberty not by endorsing the ‘positive’ but by counterposing the liberal version of negative liberty to what he has preferred to call the ‘neo-Roman’ idea. Hobbes has long been his principal villain. He is, for Skinner, the philosopher who systematically replaced the ‘neo-Roman’ – or republican – conception of free citizenship with the restricted notion of liberty as nothing more than the absence of external impediments to action. Hobbes effected this theoretical transformation, at a particularly turbulent historical moment, with deliberate polemical intent. In his new book, Skinner traces in scrupulous detail the refinements and changes in Hobbes’s ideas about freedom as the English Civil War proceeded. . . . Read the rest of the review here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n18/wood06_.html.

Olivier, Bert. "Foucault on Intellectuals." THOUGHT LEADER September 23, 2008.

In "Truth and Power" (1980), Michel Foucault elaborates on different kinds of intellectuals – the ‘universal’ and ‘specific’ intellectual, respectively – in the context of the question regarding the political status of science and its potential ideological functions, especially within universities. The issues raised by this are summed up by Foucault in ‘two words: power and knowledge’. The ‘political significance’ of science has to be seen against the backdrop of what he says about propositions (scientific or otherwise) being ‘governed’ by a ‘discursive régime’ – broadly speaking, the implicit rules according to which certain utterances may be accepted as being legitimate and meaningful. For example, within patriarchal discourse certain utterances, such as those predicated on the autonomy of women, do not make any sense. It is essential that Foucault’s understanding of ‘discourse’ be grasped, otherwise his distinction between the ‘universal intellectual’ and the ‘specific intellectual’ cannot be understood, in so far as each is situated within a different ‘régime of discourse’. Moreover, he believes that the ‘régime’ relevant to the universal intellectual has made way for a different discursive ‘régime’, within the ambit of which such intellectuals no longer have a place. So what is discourse, for Foucault? Get the answer here: http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/bertolivier/2008/09/23/foucault-on-intellectuals/.

Pappas, Nickolas. "Review of Marcel Detienne's THE GREEKS AND US." BMCR (September 2008).

Detienne, Marcel. The Greeks and Us: a Comparative Anthropology of Ancient Greece. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Marcel Detienne's new book does not systematize fields of information in the manner of his most renowned earlier works.1 While visibly engaged in the same enterprise as, say, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, The Greeks and Us is a more programmatic and polemical book. It proposes a double-disciplinary approach to the ancient Greeks in which history conjoins with anthropology, so that while continuing to amass and assess historical knowledge of the Greeks in particular, one also looks at them as at one culture among many, always available for comparative study with other human communities at varying distances (temporal, spatial, conceptual distances) from the modern West. Detienne characterizes the enterprise he proposes as comparative (4) and experimental (10). Comparison first of all means denying oneself the indulgence of "uniqueness"- thinking, whether that be the thought of the Greeks' own appearance in history or of a modern nation's special status as heir to the Greek legacy. Comparing means denying the singularity of the thing compared. "[C]omparativism is more vibrant and more stimulating if ethnologists are able and willing to lend an ear to dissonances that at first seem 'incomparable'" (12). The comparative method so described might recall Aristotle's distinction between history and poetry, history telling what things did happen to which individuals and poetry what general kinds of things might happen. But although Detienne's history does play a recognizably Aristotelian role, the anthropology he calls for does not search for poetry's generalizations. The empiricism at work in his book is rather the kind that seeks out differences among observed phenomena. Detienne pursues the stubborn datum that a hastier theorist would force into generalizations, that he instead will inspect for the ways it does not fit such generalizations. He speaks of anthropology's "taste for dissonance," a taste that leads one to examine "the components of neighboring configurations, each of which, with its own particular differential features, may help an attentive comparativist to spot the deviation from the norm that distinguishes . . . the particular formula of one micro-configuration of politics" (125). Each political possibility is marked by such a deviation. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.bmcreview.org/2008/09/20080945.html.

Shea, Christopher. "Against Intuition." CHRONICLE REVIEW October 3, 2008.

"If anything can be pursued in an armchair, philosophy can," the esteemed Oxford philosopher Timothy Williamson told the Aristotelian Society, of London, a few years ago. That may sound like an innocuous truism: No one pictures Bertrand Russell doing his philosophical cogitation anywhere but in a club chair, or perhaps in bed, postcoitally (given his adventurousness in that arena). But, in fact, Williamson's remarks are fighting words these days, thanks to the rise of a cohort of philosophers who believe that the armchair arguments of philosophers need to be probed and tested through surveys of ordinary people and laboratory experiments using human subjects. If philosophers want to demonstrate that their arguments comport with how the mind really works, say the proponents of experimental philosophy, they need to get off their duffs. Does that sound like an incendiary charge? Indeed, an armchair in flames has become the informal symbol of the experimental-philosophy movement, also known as "x-phi." Online you can buy a burning-armchair T-shirt or watch a burning-armchair YouTube video, accompanied by the x-phi alt-rock anthem. The aggressive symbol is only partly tongue-in-cheek: some experimental philosophers believe they are simply augmenting and supplementing traditional philosophical work, but others view themselves as overturning a significant number of philosophical projects. They think they are calling into question methodologies that philosophers have made use of "for 2,400 years," as the Rutgers philosopher Stephen Stich, a pioneer of x-phi, puts it. Experimental philosophy has percolated on the edge of the discipline for several years, yet remains dogged by this question: Will it mature into a central, respected strand of philosophy or remain a semi-fringe endeavor, viewed from the mainstream as the kind of work that should be done (if at all) in psychology departments — with the results perhaps pondered later by "real" philosophers? . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=ymjzflppxc1tw7sv18k5fsvdw0yk8136.

McLemee, Scott. "The Playboy Philosopher." INSIDE HIGHER ED October 1, 2008.

In Paris, it’s just the done thing to bash BHL. . . . Recently I featured an awesome graphic that went along with a BHL piece on Sarah Palin in New York magazine — an image of Palin getting bopped on the head with a baguette — and I included a link to the NY mag article, because hey, I re-used their graphic, I owed them a link. The comments that followed amounted to taking the baguette and turning it on BHL!” (Well, at least it wasn’t a cream pie.) Usually the expressions of exasperation are “all in good fun,” says Elkin. But one item at her blog — linking to a BHL piece on Simone de Beauvoir — provoked an exceptionally pompous display of aggravation from a French journalist. “You and your fellow Americans,” he wrote, “should realize that BHL is not a philosopher but a clown and a buffoon. You want real French philosophy, read Derrida, Foucault, Badiou, Baudrillard, if you are a right winger, read Aron, but please forget about this pompous arrogant shmuck BHL and his unending and shameless self-promotion. As a Frenchman, I am ashamed of BHL. . . . Read the rest here: http://insidehighered.com/views/2008/10/01/mclemee.

Bourdeau, Michel. "Auguste Comte." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY October 1, 2008.

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) is the founder of positivism, a philosophical and political movement which enjoyed a very wide diffusion in the second half of the nineteenth century. It sank into an almost complete oblivion during the twentieth, when it was eclipsed by neopositivism. However, Comte's decision to develop successively a philosophy of mathematics, a philosophy of physics, a philosophy of chemistry and a philosophy of biology, makes him the first philosopher of science in the modern sense, and his constant attention to the social dimension of science resonates in many respects with current points of view. His political philosophy, on the other hand, is even less known, because it differs substantially from the classical political philosophy we have inherited. Comte's most important works are (1) the Course on Positive Philosophy (1830-1842, six volumes, translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau as The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte); (2) the System of Positive Polity, or Treatise on Sociology, Instituting the Religion of Humanity, (1851-1854, four volumes); and (3) the Early Writings (1820-1829), where one can see the influence of Saint-Simon, for whom Comte served as secretary from 1817 to 1824. The Early Writings are still the best introduction to Comte's thought. In the Course, Comte said, science was transformed into philosophy; in the System, philosophy was transformed into religion. The second transformation met with strong opposition; as a result, it has become customary to distinguish, with Mill, between a “good Comte” (the author of the Course) and a “bad Comte” (the author of the System). Today's common conception of positivism corresponds mainly to what can be found in the Course. . . .

Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/comte/.