The goal of this dissertation is to generate a theoretical perspective and a political vocabulary capable of giving an account of political action proper in the context of modern democracy. The first step is that of tracing back to the origins of the theory and practice of modern democracy the appearance of the features that gave shape to the institutional constellation we now understand as democratic politics. This looking back from the perspective of the main institutions of contemporary democracy is (...) structured along the lines of the process that Lefort describes as a split of the theological and the political in early modern times. In Weber, this split takes the form of a multiplication and secularization of prophets, creating the need for a domesticated and democratized version of charismatic leadership that assumes normative standards in his idea of parliamentary democracy. Weber's solution is, of course, the opposite to that of Hobbes': the plurality of gods and demons manifested in the multiplication of prophets should be institutionalized, not eradicated. This dissertation shows that the breakdown of theological regimes and the birth of modern democracy is simply another way to describe the embracement of the fact of plurality. ;With Merleau-Ponty I thus give theoretical consistency to the emergence of modern democratic practices and institutions. In Habermas, on the other hand, I find the difficulties that a model that dismembers the strategic and communicative dimensions of human agency confronts when the task at hand is not that of a moral theory concerned with universal agreement but that of a political theory concerned with the socially enabled fact of plurality. Specifically, I show in my dissertation that Habermas's contempt for Austin's perlocutionary dimension of speech acts and his suggestion that Arendt's notions of action and speech are somehow parallel to his model spring from a still operating uneasiness with political speech and modern democracy in their phenomenal appearance. This dissertation concludes by showing that the theoretical consistency acquired with Merleau-Ponty does indeed provide a theoretical perspective and political vocabulary that puts in relief political action as a fundamental aspect of contemporary democratic politics. (shrink)

The notions of “concepts of the political” and that of “political concepts” refer to different but intertwined phenomena. As I will argue in this article, the concepts of the political refer to the self-institution of societies, while political concepts are those that emerge in the realm of politics, a field some societies institute as precisely the site in which the reversibility of the political takes place. This article will argue that the concepts of the political and the political concepts coming (...) out of South America in its contemporary history spring from the main events and processes—the political and social history—that dominated the period. The events and concepts first discussed will be those related to the conquest and its legacy, only to later move fully to the past fifty years of dictatorships, transitions to democracy, and the emergence of the neopopulist political form. (shrink)

¿Como llegamos hasta este punto en que la democracia tal como la conocimos en las últimas cuatro décadas corre peligro? Las intervenciones de Martín Plot, recorriendo los conflictos centrales de los últimos 12 años de la política argentina, ofrecen una respuesta. En un nivel que podemos llamar discursivo con la condición de entender que el autor retiene en ese nivel todos los hechos económicos, sociales y políticos relevantes del período, podrán captarse, junto a la reaparición de la virulencia del autoritarismo (...) liberal, los efectos trágicos de la captura del progresismo y el peronismo en un faccionalismo excluyente escenificado como hostilidad a la renovación de figuras, ideas y repertorios políticos. Pero al mismo tiempo, bajo la argumentación precisa y al mismo tiempo poética de los textos, podremos discernir una arquitectura que funda un poderoso y poco discutido punto de mira sobre el proceso político: la concepción de éste como una disputa acerca del régimen político-constitucional – entendida como una disputa social por su interpretación – que se une al uso operativo de lo más actual de la filosofía política para entender la coyuntura. (shrink)

Although Merleau-Ponty’s early phenomenology of perception and his essays on art, politics, and language already showed an affinity between the aesthetic phenomena of expression and style and the political and cultural dynamics of society at large, this paper specifically focuses on his late theorizing of the notion of flesh and its relevance to his late understanding of politics and democracy. The emergence of flesh as a concept was contemporary to Merleau-Ponty’s break with Marxism as a philosophical model and with revolutionary (...) dialectics as a political project. It is by showing that such a break was consistently grounded on his theorizing of the being flesh of both the body and of society that this paper shows Merleau-Ponty’s unique contribution to democratic theory and to contemporary political philosophy. In the course of this analysis, it will become clear that in philosophically breaking with the position of a “no that is a yes”—i.e. the model of the revolution, which implies a total negation of the given that becomes a total affirmation of the new order (dictatorship) once in power—he would politically embrace the Weberian “heroic liberalism”—or his “non-communist left”—of parliamentary democracy. (shrink)

Sections of the mass media report so closely on political decision-making that politicians cannot ignore the media when making decisions ; this book questions whether the decision-making process is now more important than any political action deriving from the decisions. Media appearances are no longer adjuncts to the political process ; they are the process.

En los capítulos que conforman este trabajo, me propuse analizar la relación entre los efectos de los atentados terroristas del 11 de sep- tiembre de 2001 y el funcionamiento de la democracia estadounidense. La estrategia seguida fue, en varias oportunidades, la de contrastar los acontecimientos y procesos ocurri- dos en los Estados Unidos con la experiencia de las dictaduras del Cono Sur sudamericano de los años setenta y comienzos de los ochenta; en particular con el caso argentino.

In this paper, I go back to French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s influence on Claude Lefort’s theory of democracy in order to offer a revised understanding of political regimes as coexisting and competing horizons of politics. These horizons develop from differing positions regarding the political enigma of the institution of society—its staging, its shaping, and its making sense of itself. A theological understanding of such political institution of society will be described as fundamentally voluntaristic, while an epistemic understanding will be described (...) as, in its radical iteration, potentially totalitarian. This theorization is triggered by an interpretive perplexity: what happened to the United States in the aftermath of 9/11, in its War on Terror, in its committing of the supreme international crime of aggressive warfare, in its embracement of a massive policy of executive, global targeted assassinations and of a white nationalist, xenophobic politics? Is the theologico-political horizon becoming once again dominant in America? Is the epistemic, plutocratic regime taking over instead? Are they coordinated in their effort to undermine an egalitarian understanding of the American republic? These are the interrogative driving forces behind this investigation. (shrink)

This study uses new arguments to reinvestigate the relation between aesthetics and politics in the contemporary debates on democratic theory and radical democracy. -/- First, Carl Schmitt and Claude Lefort help delineate the contours of an aesthetico-political understanding of democracy, which is developed further by studying Merleau-Ponty, Rancière, and Arendt. -/- The ideas of Merleau-Ponty serve to establish a general "ontological" framework that aims to contest the dominant currents in contemporary democratic theory. It is argued that Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, and Rancière (...) share a general understanding of the political as the contingently contested spaces and times of appearances. However, the articulation of their thought leads to reconsider and explore under-theorized as well as controversial dimensions of their work. -/- This search for new connections between the political and the aesthetic thought of Arendt and Merleau-Ponty on one hand and the current widespread interest in Rancière's aesthetic politics on the other make this book a unique study that will appeal to anyone who is interested in political theory and contemporary continental philosophy. (shrink)

Chaos and Cosmos offers a new and unique interpretation of Argentine essayist and fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges as a thinker of what continental twentieth century political theory called the political. While not a political writer in the traditional sense, Borges was indeed an author whose response to the advent of totalitarianism, in particular in its Nazi form, generated the most experimental, insightful, and rigorous short fiction and non-fiction political interrogation. -/- As is well known, Borges’ writing went beyond originality; (...) it created a genre of its own, and the Borgesian style is not limited to form. This Borgesian style fundamentally relates to how his response to the advent of totalitarianism led to sharp and philosophically sophisticated interrogations-in-fiction of the political, understood in this book as related to three main distinctive dimensions: that of the question of the forms of society, that of the relationship between the imaginary and the real, and that of the relationship between the same and the other. -/- Chaos and Cosmos introduces the reader to Borges as an experimental writer, as an Argentine citizen, as a thinker of global political phenomena, and as a South American Pragmatist. The book also makes incursions in a political theorizing of its own, intertwining an interpretation of Borges’ essays and fiction pieces from the 1930s and 1940s with the central concerns of philosophers and political thinkers such as William James, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hannah Arendt, Claude Lefort, Michael Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Judith Butler. (shrink)

This book focuses on Andrew Arato’s democratic theory and its relevance to contemporary issues such as processes of democratization, civil society, constitution-making, and the modern Executive. Andrew Arato is -both globally and disciplinarily- a prominent thinker in the fields of democratic theory, constitutional law, and comparative politics, influencing several generations of scholars. This is the first volume to systematically address his democratic theory. Including contributions from leading scholars such as Dick Howard, Ulrich Preuss, Hubertus Buchstein, Janos Kis, Uri Ram, Leonardo (...) Avritzer, Carlos de la Torre, and Nicolás Lynch, this book is organized around three major areas of Arato´s influence on contemporary political and social thought. The first section offers a comprehensive view of Arato’s scholarship from his early work on critical theory and Western Marxism to his current research on constitution-making and its application. The second section shifts its focus from the previous, comprehensive approach, to a much more specific one: Arato´s widespread influence on the study of civil society in democratization processes in Latin America. The third section includes a previously unpublished work, ‘A conceptual history of dictatorship (and its rivals,)’ one of the few systematic interrogations on the meaning of a political form of fundamental relevance in the contemporary world. Critical Theory and Democracy will be of interest to critical and social theorists, and all Arato scholars. (shrink)

In order to summarize a story, it is necessary to access a high level analysis of the story that highlights its central concepts. A technique of memory representation based on plot units appears to provide a rich foundation for such an analysis. Plot units are conceptual structures that overlap with each other when a narrative is cohesive. When overlapping intersections between plot units are interpreted as arcs in a graph of plot units, the resulting graph encodes the plot of the (...) story. Structural features of the graph then reveal which concepts are central to the story, and which concepts are peripheral. Plot unit analysis is currently being investigated as a processing strategy for narrative summarization by both computer simulation and psychological experiments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Plot Taxonomies and IntentionalityJon AdamsEver popular among the various topics occupying non-academic conversations about literature—such as the identity of the real author of the plays attributed to "Shakespeare"—is the notion that there exists only a finite number of storylines, and that all the stories we know are only ever complications or rehearsals of these few, elementary plots. What is the status of that claim? The issue gains a (...) renewed relevance in light of literary criticism's recent interest in the possibilities of employing evolutionary psychology as a means of naturalising literary study, but interest in plot taxonomies stretches a long way back. Why might we seek to categorise plots into a finite taxonomy? And what are the implications of the claim if true?Organising literature into any classificatory scheme is an attempt to achieve something like the coherence that the natural sciences have achieved—in chemistry and physics with the composition of the periodic table, and in biology with Linnaean classification. Much of science's epistemic prestige is rooted in the enormous success with which they have organised and categorised their subject of study. In searching for mechanism and pattern, the natural sciences proceed confidently from the belief that those mechanisms and patterns exist to be discovered, and that (relatively) simple rules underlie the manifest complexity of natural phenomena.Unfortunately, the study of literary fiction has no such security. There are two senses here in which we can talk of literature being patterned. At the micro-level, we have the question of whether individual works can be thought of as internally patterned. Usually, this type of patterning is easy enough to establish and recognise, and something the author is (or ought to be) in a good position to control. But, of course, internal [End Page 102] structures are not always conspicuous, and readers faced with an overtly complex text, like Pound's Cantos, or Finnegans Wake, have no guarantee that there is sense to be made of it. Surface complexity may shield a profound and subtle architecture, or the work may be as unstructured, fragmentary, and chaotic as it initially appears. A frustrated Wayne C. Booth draws attention to the problem: "One can't be sure that Finnegans Wake is not a great novel; perhaps someday readers will discover that the complex structure they now dream of and quarrel about is a realizable structure, an experienced structure. I doubt it, but it may happen. Until then, each new intricacy discovered... reveals precisely nothing more than that: a new intricacy."1 What's missing is a conceptual centre around which overall coherence might be achieved from what had seemed to be unconnected parts. Even so, if this sort of centre cannot be found in the individual work, it may yet obtain between works. In other words, The Cantos or Finnegans Wake may yet occupy nodal roles in a larger system, within which they acquire a previously unrecognized unity and order. This type of organization is something the individual author is obviously in a much less suitable position to control. Nonetheless, mapping out this larger, macro-level order is a task that literary criticism might want to take on. There is the example Borges uses of how Kafka's work retrospectively confers a familial similarity upon previously unconnected works. The quality of being "Kafkaesque" is the only thing common to the pieces, but was not apparent (or rather—the paradox that excites Borges—did not exist) prior to Kafka's writing.2 This is the second sense in which literature might be thought of as patterned; that is, not within works, but across them. On the larger scale, is it possible that literature as a whole could be understood as patterned?The notion that literature can be understood "as a whole," and its corollary, that a literature so understood would submit to taxonomical classification, is an enduring one. Anthropologists and art historians have long acknowledged that there appear to be recurring themes, motifs, and commonalities across world cultures, and consequently, commonalities among the narratives those cultures construct and consume. Cataloguing these similarities has produced a variety of classificatory systems.In the mid-nineteenth century, German scholar Adolf... (shrink)

Chartist historiography is inevitably inflected by the political desires of its authors. This desire, combined with the contingent nature of history, imparts a fictive dimension to Chartist historiography. In support of these claims, this article applies the literary concepts of plot and character to Mark Hovell’s The Chartist Movement. It argues that Hovell’s political desire leads him to construct a tragic and entropic plot for Chartism, which is often contradicted by his own assessment of the movement’s vitality. Similarly, Hovell’s plotting (...) is also driven by his reading of Chartism as a conflict between two characters, a flawed hero and a villain. The article closes with a close reading of Hovell’s characterisation of O’Connor, which demonstrates the skill with which he interweaves fact and interpretation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Necropolitical arrangements of bifurcations delineate those ontological antagonisms that code Blackness as ontological lack (as non-position). In this article, I attempt to think about this evacuation of being in terms of the necropolitical’s fleshy excess, as what Alexander Weheliye’s work names “habeus viscus.” In so doing, I explore the implications, for our understanding of the “repressed proximities” of which the necropolitical consists, of arrangements that always-already include entanglements with their fleshy excess. In other words, if the nonposition of the (...) excluded is always positioned within, then living in/against the death-logics of necropolitics is always happening from that “nonposition within.” Hence, a reading of Achille Mbembe’s account of necropolitics must reckon with what Katherine McKittrick names “the creative consequences of the plot and the plantation,” with the implications of the inextricable proximal entanglements between the killing of life and the living that persists, despite. This article focuses on this “living despite.” Through a constellation of thinkers like Katherine McKittrick, Alexander Weheliye, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (to name a few), it aims to show that there are, perhaps, other futures that are already “now,” shattering what Édouard Glissant refers to as the “stone of time,” shattering (necropolitical) history as destiny. (shrink)

Poincaré plot is a return map which can help perform graphical analysis of data. We can also fit an ellipse to the plot shape by determining descriptors SD1, SD2 and SD1/SD2 ratio to study the data quantitatively. In this paper we show examples of application of Poincaré plots in analysis of various kinds of biomedical signals: RR intervals, EMG, gait data and EHG.

This chapter contains sections titled: Allotment Associations The Allotment Site New Relationships: Councillors and Gardeners Conclusions Notes.

Released 3 years after the death of political philosopher Claude Lefort and contributing to the rectification of a “notoriously slow”Martín Plot, “Introduction”, Claude Lefort: Thinker of the Political (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 1. release of English translations and secondary material regarding Lefort’s work, Claude Lefort: Thinker of the Political aims to both outline Lefort’s oeuvre, as well as to explore potential impacts of this thought on contemporary and future debates. Comprising essays written by Lefort’s closest contemporaries, it is difficult (...) to imagine a book that is more relevantly assembled; the contributors are not only some of the foremost experts on Lefort’s work, but many also knew him personally. This combination of social and theoretical familiarity contributes a type of intimacy to the book that goes beyond admiration for Lefort (although this is present), and is but one way in which the collection embodies a position of multiplicity. Even setting aside. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Berel Lang PLOTTING PHILOSOPHY: BETWEEN THE ACTS OF PHILOSOPHICAL GENRE When Hegel wrote that philosophy's Owl of Minerva takes wing only at the falling of dusk, he did not mean that philosophy is always tardy, only that it comes late in the day. It may, however, seem both late and tardy to call attention now to the role of genres in philosophical writing, and still more beside the point (...) to assess the importance of philosophical genres to our philosophical and not only to our literary understanding. Even if we find a way past the varieties of aesthetic nominalism for which any allocation to genres is a snare and a trap— recall here Croce's declaration of"eternal war" against the obscurantism of genres1—we confront the growing skepticism of literary theory as it now disputes not only the formalism presupposed in the taxonomic distinctions of genre, but also the mimetic or representational function of discourse more generally.2 If texts as such can no longer rely on a mimetic ground, it would be impossible for the formal features ofgenre, rooted in the then archaic distinction between form and content, to represent a literary (or indeed any kind of) idea; that is, it would be impossible for them to be philosophically significant. This difficulty only intensifies, of course, for philosophical writing: philosophy, we learn, ought no longer to delude itself with hopes for success as a "mirror of nature" (in Rorty's phrase of opprobrium),3 and it would then be delusion added to delusion to believe that the genres of philosophical discourse might, at another remove, mirror an object which philosophy had mistakenly been supposed to represent in the first place. That original "representation" turns out now to represent nothing at all—and Plato's attack on the deceptions ofart thus discovers a new and finer object in philosophy itself: his indictment of art at least 190 Berel Lang191 supposed that there was something for art to be deceptive about. On this postmodernist account, then, there could be no philosophical point in plotting the course of philosophical genres; and indeed there could hardly be any other point except perhaps for antiquarians intent on finding a place for genres among the other historical curiosities which philosophers, quite inexplicably, once took seriously, like Descartes's piece of wax or Plato's aviary or Berkeley's tar water. Such intimations of the death of genres, however, may be not only premature but misdirected in rather a special way. For even in a less suspicious age, when the prima facie claims for the existence of genres might have been accepted at face value, their role was shadowy, fixed in a rhetorical limbo. Evidently (or so I would argue), there have existed generic conventions of which philosophical writers have been aware and to which their writings conformed. But even among writers in whom this pattern is most explicit and self-conscious, it is not as though the writer, after first reviewing a list of genres, would then simply choose the one among them that most recommended itself. No doubt, a writer's style—including the genre of his writing—is deliberate, in some sense a matter of choice. But the conception of "choice" in this context is an unusual one. Plotting genre could not be like trying on suits until one finds a likely fit— because this would imply that when the philosopher is trying out various possibilities, what he measures them by exists in his own mind as a philosophical Ur-genre, something which itself transcends the requirements of genre. We might suspect the presence here of the genre of all genres that is not itself, however, the member of a genre. And although it is possible that such a philosophical bedrock exists—this would be, in a way, a true philosopher's stone—all that philosophers have turned up in their history as a matter offact is a considerable number and variety of—well, we have to say it—philosophical genres. Genres, in other words, have rarely been read or written as "natural kinds," and yet they have surely been read and written. The distinctions among them and even the broad tide... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.1 (2001) 1-16 [Access article in PDF] The Plot of History from Antiquity to the Renaissance Eric MacPhail In the Poetics Aristotle introduced the notion of plot or mythos as a distinctly poetic form of rationality and coherence absent from history. In the course of antiquity and the Renaissance Aristotle's notion of plot underwent a curious inversion by which history came to supplant (...) poetry as the main literary form of emplotment. To account for the readjustment or even reversal of Aristotle's distinction between history and poetry, we will examine the notions of order, causality, and chance expounded by classical historians and literary theorists before tracing their influence to Renaissance writers. In the Renaissance the transmission, conflation, and distortion of Aristotelian doctrine exerted a profound influence on historiography and literary criticism, particularly in the latter part of the sixteenth century. It is even possible to understand some of the new and hybrid forms of Renaissance fiction as a reaction to this transference of the idea of plot from poetry to history. While history may indeed possess no coherent plot, as Aristotle speculated, literary history can nevertheless reconstitute the genealogy of competing notions of plot and order in Renaissance narrative.We can situate Aristotle's definition of plot in the context of his inquiry into cause and coincidence. In book two of the Physics Aristotle proposes a rigorous typology of cause, distinguishing between formal, material, efficient, and final causes, and he also considers the status of chance and fortune as accidental causes or aitia kata symbebekos (197a5-6). 1 The Metaphysics takes up the question of to kata symbebekos, translated alternately as accident or coincidence, and in doing so develops several arguments that pertain to the treatment of plot in the Poetics and to the larger issue of the coherence of fiction and history. As Richard Sorabji points out, the key to Aristotle's notion of coincidence is the [End Page 1] paradox of existence without genesis or without coming into being. 2 Metaphysics VI, 2 maintains that "of things which are in other senses there is generation and destruction [genesis kai phthora], but of things which are accidentally [kata symbebekos] there is not" (1026b24). Metaphysics VI, 3 argues that if this were not so, if nothing existed without genesis, then everything would be of necessity in the sense that every future event could be traced back to a present cause. Genesis thus seems to signify an unbroken chain of causes while to symbebekotos, the coincidental, represents a break in the causal chain. For Aristotle the coincidental or the fortuitous "goes back to some starting point (arche), which does not go back to something else" (1027b12-14). A coincidence is an uncaused cause.Aristotle's Poetics furnishes a definition of plot or mythos that provides a link between the metaphysical discussion of cause and the fictional inquiry into chance. For Aristotle the dramatic plot is the integration of various actions, or synthesis ton pragmaton (1450a5), into a whole or olon consisting of a beginning, a middle, and an end (1450b27). The unity of action does not admit of any accidents within the plot as it moves continuously from beginning to middle to end, and yet the plot as a whole exemplifies the metaphysical notion of a coincidence. Aristotle defines the beginning of the plot or the arche as "that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity but after which something naturally is or comes to be" (1450b28-29). Thus the mythos, like the coincidence, originates in an uncaused cause, that scandal abhorred by rationalism. Aristotle further complicates the question of causality when he denies to historical events the type of probability or necessity that he associates with dramatic actions. Chapter 23 of the Poetics exhorts the epic poet to emulate tragedy and shun the example of histories (1459a17-22), for while historical events may possess a chronological unity, they do not form any causal chain and thus do not exhibit any unity of action.In chapter 9 of the Poetics Aristotle... (shrink)

There are two related problems in the Poetics : Aristotle’s contradictory statements about size, and Aristotle’s confusing use of two terms for size, μέγεθος and μῆκος. I argue that both problems can be solved if we understand that Aristotle only uses μέγεθος to refer to the size of the plot in relation to the size of the larger whole, and μῆκος to refer to absolute size (number of lines, run-time, fictional time, or number of plot parts), unrelated to any larger (...) whole. (shrink)

Using research into learning from sequences of examples, we generate predictions about what cultural products become widely distributed in the social marketplace of ideas. We investigate what we term the Repetition‐Break plot structure: the use of repetition among obviously similar items to establish a pattern, and then a final contrasting item that breaks with the pattern to generate surprise. Two corpus studies show that this structure arises in about a third of folktales and story jokes. An experiment shows that jokes (...) with this structure are more interesting than those without the initial repetition. Thus, we document evidence for how a cognitive factor influences the cultural products that are selected in the marketplace of ideas. (shrink)

If evolutionary history were to be replayed from the beginning, what would be the same, and what would be likely different? Would there be a human-like species, multicellularity, or even DNA? There is a great variety in the answers biologists give to this question, despite having the same access to empirical data and biological theory. For instance, Stephen J. Gould has claimed that evolutionary history is radically contingent, while Conway Morris holds that it converges onto specific biological structures that are (...) favored by natural selection. Others such have proposed that evolutionary history is characterized by an inexorable increase in complexity, while others see it as an evolutionary arms race. In this dissertation I investigate the fundaments underlying claims biologists make about contingency and directionality in evolutionary history as a whole. The topics of convergence and contingency have received attention from philosophers of biology in recent years, but the foundations of interpretations of evolutionary history as a whole remains a relatively neglected field. Hence the primary objective of this dissertation was not to defend this or that account, but rather to show a method by which these fundamental issues can be identified and analyzed constructively. The dissertation is organized into two parts, each dedicated to a single problem. The first part concerns the problem of ‘description dependence’: claims about the contingency of evolutionary outcomes depend on how these outcomes and the evolutionary process itself are described. I set out to map the different ways in which the contingency of outcomes changes as the phenomena are described in more and in less detail, and as broader or narrower subsets of evolutionary history are taken into account. That such an analysis is useful to pursue, I attempt to show by applying it to two of the most prominent interpretations of evolutionary history, those of Gould and Conway Morris. According to how their claims about evolutionary history are analyzed, one can arrive at opposing conclusions about the contingency of evolutionary outcomes. The second part concerns the problem of ‘causal complexity’: evolutionary history is a complex mess of unrelated causal processes, and for every generalization there is an exception. This raises the question whether non-speculative generalizations over evolutionary history as a whole are even possible. Limiting the scope of the investigation to the mechanism of natural selection alone, I consider first whether and how natural selection may be expected to give rise to trends at all. Some philosophers reject that natural selection is a cause at all, and that all evolution is simply an accumulation of births and deaths. If any trend occurs at all, it is due to a confluence of unrelated causal processes that could easily not have occurred. I argue against this by showing that these philosophers overlook the issue of time-scale: causal processes may make a difference for reproductive outcome at a time-scale of a single generation without them making a difference at the time-scale of multiple generations. With this distinction in mind, one can argue that natural selection causes a population to tend towards equilibrium. If a yet longer time-scale is taken – not that of multiple generations in a single environment, but that of many species and genuses across many environments – the challenge of causal complexity becomes much more difficult to overcome. Drawing on the phenomenon of phenotypic plasticity and niche construction, I argue that selection for plasticity ‘feeds’ on this complexity and variability in the environment. The trend in plasticity is unique in this regard, since trends in other types of adaptation are interrupted by the variability of complex environments. (shrink)

A great deal of the humor that we encounter is narrative in form. This is obviously the case with many, if not most, jokes. But humor also occurs in more expanded narrative frameworks, including plays, novels, films, short stories, TV programs, comic books, and so forth. The purpose of this paper is to explore the question of whether there are any plot structures—of magnitudes greater than that of the joke—that might be thought of as comic in virtue of their narrative (...) form. (shrink)

In the story of Luke's Gospel, the primary conflict at the human level is that between Jesus and the religious authorities. This conflict, while it reaches its culmination in the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, comes to its head in the episode of Jesus on the cross. Whereas the authorities believe that Jesus' death vindicates them as Israel's rightful rulers, the reader knows that, ironically, the cross is the place where Jesus is at once publicly proclaimed as Israel's Messiah-King (...) and anticipates the onset of his glorious reign of salvation. (shrink)

Critics of literary Darwinism like to point out the weaknesses of its scientific scaffolding, but the real flaw in this research program is its neglect of literary history and stylistic evolution. A full-fledged scientific approach to literary criticism should incorporate the kind of work being done by Franco Moretti at the Stanford Literary Lab—a quantitative analysis of the history of literary form. While Moretti and the literary Darwinists are almost never mentioned together, I contend that their work is not only (...) compatible but also necessarily so for a more consilient literary criticism. The Darwinian aesthetics promoted by Denis Dutton can help to unite these two approaches. (shrink)