In this latest book, renowned philosopher and scholar Robert B. Pippin offers the thought-provoking argument that the study of historical figures is not only an interpretation and explication of their views, but can be understood as a form of philosophy itself. In doing so, he reconceives philosophical scholarship as a kind of network of philosophical interanimations, one in which major positions in the history of philosophy, when they are themselves properly understood within their own historical context, form philosophy’s lingua franca. (...) Examining a number of philosophers to explore the nature of this interanimation, he presents an illuminating assortment of especially thoughtful examples of historical commentary that powerfully enact philosophy. After opening up his territory with an initial discussion of contemporary revisionist readings of Kant’s moral theory, Pippin sets his sights on his main objects of interest: Hegel and Nietzsche. Through them, however, he offers what few others could: an astonishing synthesis of an immense and diverse set of thinkers and traditions. Deploying an almost dialogical, conversational approach, he pursues patterns of thought that both shape and, importantly, connect the major traditions: neo-Aristotelian, analytic, continental, and postmodern, bringing the likes of Heidegger, Honneth, MacIntyre, McDowell, Brandom, Strauss, Williams, and Žižek—not to mention Hegel and Nietzsche— into the same philosophical conversation. By means of these case studies, Pippin mounts an impressive argument about a relatively under discussed issue in professional philosophy—the bearing of work in the history of philosophy on philosophy itself—and thereby he argues for the controversial thesis that no strict separation between the domains is defensible. (shrink)

Alasdair MacIntyre noted that we appear to face a dilemma when engaging with the history of philosophy. Either we interpret great works “so as to make them relevant to our contemporary problems” or we read them “in their own terms, carefully preserving their idiosyncratic and specific character.” The former involves reshaping great thinkers into “what they would have been” had they been our philosophical contemporaries, and risks overlooking, downplaying, or distorting those features of their work that resist such efforts. The (...) latter approach, by contrast, threatens to resign the texts to a state such that “they cannot emerge into the present except as a set of museum pieces” (“The Relationship of Philosophy... (shrink)

The deconstruction of stupidity [in French bêtise] plays a crucial role in Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign. Through the concept of stupidity/bêtise the violence of our relationship with others, as inseparable from our relation to animality comes into view. “Stupidity” is deeply political, but also directly connected to the trace and, thus, cannot be simply overcome. While Sartre claimed that there are no fools, but just wicked men, Derrida embraces an uncanny version of stupidity. In this paper, guided by (...) Derrida’s reflections, we will examine the many paradoxes that undermine the pseudo-concept of stupidity, as well as several key moments of its history in Schelling’s, Nietzsche’s, Sartre’s, and Deleuze’s philosophies. Eventually our purpose will be to display the ethical statements which can be extrapolated from Derrida’s perspective: when the world is gone, how can we carry stupidity? (shrink)

This paper explores the ontological bases for ethical behaviour between human animals and non-human animals drawing on phenomenology and Buddhist philosophy. Alongside Singer and utilitarianism, I argue that ethical behaviour regarding animals is most effectively justified and motivated by considerations of sentience. Nonetheless, utilitarianism misses crucial aspects of sentience. Buddhist ethics is from the beginning focused on all sentient beings, not solely humans. This inclusivity, and refined interrogations of suffering, means it can furnish more nuanced understandings of sentience. For phenomenology, (...) sentience includes the capacities for self-awareness and, I will argue, a plural self-awareness; the ‘I’ belongs to a ‘we’, and the ‘we’ is constitutive of the ‘I’. This ‘primordial we’ provides the basis for rethinking the moral relations between human animals and non-human animals. I contend finally we thus have an ontological basis in ‘interanimality’ to explain why we most often do and should care about all sentient beings. (shrink)

The way people come to report private stimulation arising within their own bodies is not well understood. Although the Darwinian assumption of biological continuity has been the basis of extensive animal modeling for many human biological and behavioral phenomena, few have attempted to model human communication based on private stimulation. This target article discusses such an animal model using concepts and methods derived from the study of discriminative stimulus effects of drugs and recent research on interanimal communication. We discuss how (...) humans acquire the capacity to identify and report private stimulation and we analyze intra- and interspecies differences in neurochemical mechanisms for transducing interoceptive stimuli, enzymatic and other metabolic factors, learning ability, and discrimination learning histories and their relation to psychiatric and developmental disabilities. (shrink)

The aim of our study is to show the ways in which family members coordinate their minds, bodies and language in a functional and goal-oriented manner when they are jointly remembering shared events that they had experienced together as a group. So far, little attention has been paid to the influence that the interplay of multiple behavioral channels have in collaborative remembering in small groups. Our goal is to specifically examine the central role that direct questions have when they act (...) as embodied reminders through the interanimation of multiple behavioral channels in family interactions. The video data for analysis comes from an ongoing project on how collaborative remembering takes places among small groups of Argentinean Spanish speakers as each group recalls a vacation taken together several years ago. (shrink)

Everyday joint remembering, from family remembering around the dinner table to team remembering in the operating theatre, relies on the successful interweaving of multiple cognitive, bodily, social and material resources, anchored in specific cultural ecosystems. Such systems for joint remembering in social interactions are composed of processes unfolding over multiple but complementary timescales, which we distinguish for analytic purposes so as better to study their interanimation in practice: faster, lower-levelcoordination processesof behavioral matching and interactional synchrony occurring at timescale t1; mid-rangecollaborative (...) processeswhich re-evoke past experiences in groups, unfolding at timescale t2; cooperative processesinvolved in the transmission of memories over longer periods occurring at timescale t3; and cultural processesand practices operating within distributed socio-cognitive networks over evolutionary and historical timeframes, unfolding at timescale t4. In this paper we survey studies of how the processes operating across these overlapping and complementary timescales constitute joint remembering in social interactions. We describe coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and culture as complementary aspects of interacting to remember, which we consider as a complex phenomenon unfolding over multiple timescales. (shrink)

Husserl’s phenomenology entails the absolute thesis that there could not be a world without a subject. My intention in this paper is to show that the consistent development of a phenomenological approach can establish that such a transcendental subject must be defined as a fundamental open intersubjectivity and more radically as interanimality. I intend to demonstrate that anthropomorphism cannot be a serious threat and that Einfühlung [empathy] is a valid method for studying animality. In this regard, I will contrast (...) a Husserlian-inspired and a Merleau-Pontian approach with Heidegger’s reflections on animals. This method will allow me to study the intertwinement between humans and other animals. On the one hand I will show that we necessarily find animality within us, in the latent multiplicity of a body which is built through introjections and projections. On the other hand I will wonder if it is possible to decenter ourselves into other living beings so as to sense what they think and to build a world with them. It will then appear, through a reflection on Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible as well as on recent ethological studies, that openness to the other and to indeterminacy is an essential characteristic of animals in general. (shrink)

This article explores two central notions of ‘dialectics’ and ‘dialogics’ based on the work of Vygotsky and Bakhtin respectively, as well their varying interanimations within Stalin-Marxist Russian societyIt is proposed that these two positions are incommensurably located alongside one another in contemporary education. I argue that Bakhtin offers diametrically oppositional educational provocations to those of Vygotsky.The implications of these interpretations will be explored with consideration of their underlying philosophical incompatibilities and contradictions, as well as the opportunities such a consideration pose (...) for educational practice today. (shrink)

Joint remembering relies on the successful interweaving of multiple cognitive, linguistic, bodily, social and material resources, anchored in specific cultural ecosystems. Such systems for joint remembering in social interactions are composed of processes unfolding over multiple but complementary timescales which we distinguish for analytic purposes with the terms ‘coordination’, ‘collaboration’, ‘cooperation’, and ‘culture’, so as better to study their interanimation in practice. As an illustrative example of the complementary timescales involved in joint remembering in a real-world activity, we present a (...) micro-qualitative analysis of an interactional sequence in which two members of a fourperson team of video designers crafted a memory- scaffolding tool. In order to find the temporal structure of the crafting of the memory-scaffolding tool, we used software for pattern recognition. The analysis suggests that coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and culture reveal complementary aspects of interacting to remember, which should be considered as complex phenomenon unfolding at multiple interanimating timescales. (shrink)

The essay focuses on the concept of mimesis Theodor W. Adorno developed in his Aesthetic Theory. After outlining key motifs of Adorno’s critical theory so as to provide the overall intellectual context, it explains why for Adorno mimesis enacts an ethical relation to the (non-identical) other. Mimesis for Adorno, the paper suggests, counters the violence that reason inflicts on the objects of its cognition by reconstituting the latter in terms of reason’s concepts. The essay discusses mimesis also in relation to (...) other aesthetic concepts that dialectically interanimate in Adorno’s explication. It ends with very provisional thoughts on the possibilities, or lack thereof, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory offers for the aesthetic practices of historically marginalized constituencies. (shrink)

Gadamer’s hermeneutic project is an effort to rejoin what he called the “unbroken tradition of rhetorical and humanist culture” to its own thought. My focus here is on the distinctive hermeneutic schematism of persons and culture in conjunction with the Renaissance doctrine of prudence. The complex hermeneutic understanding of human community requires a balancing act that privileges the agency of language and culture by denying the dominion of the sovereign self. Further, it employs a reflux or interanimation that refuses to (...) diminish the dignity of the person. Classical and Christian humanism already had something of this complex notion of agency that served as a seedbed for the hermeneutic achievement. By reading that earlier conception through the lens of his own time, Gadamer’scomplex voicing of personhood expresses the dispersion and unity of human being as a unique balance of classical and modern insight. (shrink)

This study considers Paul Ricoeur’s theory of discourses within the context of a phenomenology of religion. I focus on the eighth study of La métaphore vive, wherein Ricoeur explores the possibility of interanimation between speculative and poetic discourses. While Ricoeur is willing to consider the interactions between religious and philosophical discourse in a number of essays, he does not develop the further possibility of the interanimation between religious and speculative thought. I take up this unexplored possibility by suggesting that metaphors (...) are capable of slipping between discourses and animating speculative and religious discourses. Specifically, I use Jean-Louis Chrétien’s metaphor of “wounding” as a case study wherein the phenomenal form of paradox defines one meaning of wounding, while another meaning is connected to a poetic expression that refers to our belonging in the world. Together, the two meanings of the metaphor enliven Chrétien’s phenomenology of religion. (shrink)

In 1968 Donald M. MacKinnon (1913-94), the Scottish philosopher and theologian, posed the rhetorical question: "Does not metaphysics sometimes emerge as the attempt to convert poetry into the logically admissible?"1 An elucidation of this implicit assertion may bring to light a useful perspective on the nucleus of the metaphysical enterprise that promotes the interanimation of philosophy and theology. At least, that is the ambition of a longer-term project.2However, in this essay,3 I will presuppose an affirmative response to MacKinnon's question and (...) concentrate on three goals: (1) show that Peirce's Normative Sciences are an appropriate prism through which to investigate the cogency of a trajectory from poetry to .. (shrink)

Husserl’s phenomenology entails the absolute thesis that there could not be a world without a subject. My intention in this paper is to show that the consistent development of a phenomenological approach can establish that such a transcendental subject must be defined as a fundamental open intersubjectivity and more radically as interanimality. I intend to demonstrate that anthropomorphism cannot be a serious threat and that Einfühlung [empathy] is a valid method for studying animality. In this regard, I will contrast (...) a Husserlian-inspired and a Merleau-Pontian approach with Heidegger’s reflections on animals. This method will allow me to study the intertwinement between humans and other animals. On the one hand I will show that we necessarily find animality within us, in the latent multiplicity of a body which is built through introjections and projections. On the other hand I will wonder if it is possible to decenter ourselves into other living beings so as to sense what they think and to build a world with them. It will then appear, through a reflection on Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible as well as on recent ethological studies, that openness to the other and to indeterminacy is an essential characteristic of animals in general. (shrink)

This paper takes as its queer object a serialized podcast. With its story about John B. McLemore, a clockmaker from Woodstock, Alabama, S-Town is a blockbuster success from the producers of Serial and This American Life. Against both affirmative and negative reception of S-Town – responses that tend to position the podcast either as transcending or as reproducing the idea of a backwards or lagging South – this paper argues that S-Town is an intermedial narrative incorporating various media that themselves (...) comprise competing temporalities. Indexing these alternative temporalities are the intricate designs of clocks and sundials that tell of mythological time and seasonal and diurnal rhythms. There are also tattoos and other inscriptions that mark both bodies and sundials. My argument attends to the animate and inanimate forms narratively contained within the podcast, touching on Rebecca Schneider’s idea of “interanimation” and Elizabeth Freeman’s challenges to “chrononormativity” in the process. From within this intermedial structure, John emerges as an intermediary whose engagement in processes of self-objectification and historical re-enactment complicates a normative timeframe and confounds conventional subject/object relations. Through a consideration of what I call the queerly intermedial form of the S-Town podcast, the essay looks beyond both discrete forms and regional/national concerns to gesture toward the significance of broader networks and spheres for thinking about time, space and being. (shrink)

Ecofeminist philosophy and literary theory need mutually to enhance each other's critical praxis. Ecofeminism provides the grounding necessary to turn the Bakhtinian dialogic method into a critical theory applicable to all of one's lived experience, while dialogics provides a method for advancing the application of ecofeminist thought in terms of literature, the other as speaking subject, and the interanimation of human and nonhuman aspects of nature. In the first part of this paper the benefits of dialogics to feminism and ecofeminism (...) are explored; in the second part dialogics as method is detailed; in the third part literary examples are discussed from a dialogical ecofeminist perspective. (shrink)

This chapter bears on the concepts of the animal epiphany and therioanthropy. The concrete, real animals in interaction interrupt humanism and human solipsism by showing animal protagonism in the world and by reflecting narcissistic human images back to them with a difference. This looking-glass-self or mirror with difference and continuity is a crucial dimension to the human relationship to nonhuman animals, which cannot be thought without an understanding of this co-belonging. Drawing on Portmann, who is also central to Merleau-Ponty’s account (...) of interanimality and Derrida’s concerns about animals and visuality, therioanthropy considers the particular dimensions of this “being-to-be-seen” and what it means for human–animal interactions. It links to animal subjectivity, an open reading of the Umwelt, and to the concept of animal epiphany. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty recognized that phenomenology's methodological coherence required that it reject anthropocentricity and extend its scope beyond the human realm. But he also recognized that this does not change the central role played by human consciousness in phenomenology, which he thus construed as a practical, humanistic project based on 'ontological faith'. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological contributions concerning animals, then, and in particular his notion of 'interanimality', need to be understood as 'generative' contributions toward the realization of a singular common world. While this (...) does not address issues of interspecific justice directly, it does reveal the underlying ontology of interspecificity to be a normative projection of a decentred humanism, an insight that has the potential to productively rethink the nature of our ethical relations with animals. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to evaluate Quine's arguments for the thesis of the indeterminacy of translation. After formulation of the thesis, Quine's four main arguments are described and evaluated. The arguments are: (1) the argument from the underdeterminacy of physical theory, (2) the argument from the inscrutability of terms, (3) the argument from the conjunction of the Peircean notion of meaning and the Duhemian thesis about the interanimation of sentences, and (4-) the argument from the linguist's reliance on (...) sets of analytical hypothesis. It is contended that none of these arguments is successful in supporting the thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, and that Quine has offered no reason to believe that the degree of determinacy of translation is different from that of physical theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 719 Metaphor and Religious Language. By JANET MARTIN SosKICE. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1985. Pp. 191. Cloth, $25.00. This book combines two excellent studies: the first is a critical analysis of theories of metaphor and topics in contemporary philosophy of language which are especially relevant to theories of metaphor; the second is an examination of the way in which models and the metaphorical language based on them (...) are understood in a critical realism concerning scientific explanation, and so can support the possibility of a critical realism in theology. The second study is premised on the first, but the first (Chapters I-V) can be read independently and is valuable in its own right whether or not the reader has theological concerns. Though the author's ultimate aim is to provide a defense of the "theist's right to make metaphysical claims" (a defense of "theological realism") by arguing for the "conceptual possibility" of a referential religious language (148), she is well aware that any adequate account of religious language has to be informed by a proper understanding of the variety of forms (literal and non-literal) our non-religious language takes. In particular, "no philosophical account of religious language will be either complete or sufficient if it fails to take account of the way forms of figurative discourse, like metaphor, function in the task of saying that which cannot be said in other ways " (63). The first five chapters of the book then are devoted to a detailed and comprehensive analysis of metaphor in ordinary language, beginning with classical accounts (Ch. 1), distinguishing metaphor both from non-linguistic entities and from other figures of speech (Chs. II and IV), and critically examining standard theories of metaphor (Ch. III) and issues concerning' metaphorical meaning,' 'metaphorical truth,' and the irreducibility of metaphor (Ch. V). Soskice begins (and ends) by defining metaphor as a "figure of speech whereby we speak about one thing in terms which are seen to be suggestive of another" (15, 49) and argues for an "interanimative" account of metaphor (which is presented as a refinement of the insights of I. A. Richards). In relatively small compass she presents a formally comprehensive survey and critical analysis of competing theories of metaphor. The criticisms are simple, straightforward, and radical. For example, she concludes that, at bottom, emotive accounts are inadequate because " there must be some guiding cognitive features which the emotive response is the response to" (27). (This sort of consideration later figures in her criticism of accounts which see a merely affective role for models.) She argues that theories which see the heart of metaphor in a self-contradictory at- 7~0 BOOK REVIEWS tribution ignore those acknowledged metaphors which do not imply logical conflict, those metaphors which are such only because of context or intention; however, they fail adequately to distinguish such logical conflict from nonsense (32ff). Substitution theories and comparison theories fail to see that " the very thinking is undertaken in terms of the metaphor " (25)-there are not two things antecedently known. Here begins her criticism of a thesis-the 'two subjects' thesis-which underlies much theorizing about metaphor. The criticism is an important and sustained one; it is addressed to sophisticated versions of the potentially promising "interactive " accounts of metaphor, like Black's (46ff), and comes into play '..:1 her analysis of Ricoeur's work on metaphor (Ch. V). Though I have only pointed in a sketchy way to the kind of criticism the author offers of the major theories of metaphor, I should emphasize that her criticism is detailed, careful, and cogent, and engages in illuminating give-and-take with contemporary philosophical discussions of metaphor and related linguistic issues (a la Davidson, Searle, et al.). It is, moreover, presented with such clarity and helpful examples as to make it both an excellent introduction to the topic and a useful study for those with some familiarity with the contemporary debate. The " interanimative " theory of metaphor which Soskice proposes holds that metaphor is in an important sense 'two ideas for one,' though it does not involve a duality of reference. Metaphor is not generated simply by " conflict of meaning" or by " interaction of two... (shrink)

Reason is the object of understanding. Cause is the object of explanation. The original aspect of this study, which argues that reasons are in some sense causes, is that it discusses the distinction between reason and cause in the context of agency. It first explains the logical arguments that reasons cannot be causes and that reasons must be causes, and then presents an ontological argument concerning the pre-linguistic and irreducible continuity of phenomenal existence, in which critical realism and phenomenology work (...) together. In discussing the manifestation of reasons in the form of beliefs, memories, and dream interpretations, the focus is on the irreducible phenomenological-psychological level between humans as an organic set of molecules and humans as beings emerging from a social network of meanings. Finally, non-human agency is discussed and the thesis is made that the capacity for agency is not a social gift. (shrink)