This medievalist perspective reflects on the paradoxical relationship between Modernity and the Middle Ages, based on the author’s research into temporalities in the central Middle Ages. When dealing with modernity, she argues, medievalists encounter an ‘already here’-feeling on two instances: the medieval roots of everything modern, and the dynamics of historical development, typically attributed to modernity. This particularly concerns dealings with the future: While the idea of an open, malleable future may in fact be the characteristic feature (...) of modernity, both ‘temporal consciousness’ and the shaping of the future are also characteristics of medieval temporalities. More precisely, different concepts of time can be distinguished among different social groups and spaces. Although they all ultimately operated within the framework of providential history, the future was conceived in very different ways and as something that could be planned. Medieval temporalities provide examples of alternative, non-linear concepts of time. However, we can only recognise and utilise the alterity of such concepts if we retain the concept of ‘modernity’, against which we can delineate the differences. Therefore, ‘the modern’ and ‘the medieval’ can only be thought of reciprocally. (shrink)

In _The_ _Morality of Everyday Life_, Thomas Fleming offers an alternative to the enlightened liberalism espoused by thinkers as different as Kant, Mill, Rand, and Rawls. Philosophers in the liberal tradition, although they disagree on many important questions, agree that moral and political problems should be looked at from an objective point of view and a decision made from a rational perspective that is universally applied to all comparable cases. Fleming instead places importance on the particular, the local, and (...) moral complexity. He advocates a return to premodern traditions, such as those exemplified in the texts of Aristotle, the Talmud, and the folk wisdom in ancient Greek literature, for a solution to ethical predicaments. In his view, liberalism and postmodernism ignore the fact that human beings by their very nature refuse to live in a world of universal abstractions. While such modern philosophers as Kant and Kohlberg have regarded a mother’s self-sacrificing love for her children as beneath their level of morality, folk wisdom tells us it is nearly the highest morality, taking precedence over the duties of citizenship or the claims of humanity. Fleming believes that a modern type of “casuistry” should be applied to these moral conflicts in which the line between right and wrong is rarely clear. This volume will appeal to students of ethics and classics, as well as the general educated reader, who will appreciate Fleming’s jargon-free prose. Teachers will find this text useful because each chapter is a self-contained essay that could be used as the basis for classroom discussion. (shrink)

The modern philosophers and freedom -- Autonomy -- Equality and freedom -- Rights and freedom -- The contradiction of liberalism -- Liberalism and utilitarianism -- Liberalism and some logical considerations -- A classical understanding of freedom -- Recapitulations--modern -- The premodern alternative.

The first book for which I had title-envy was Peter Laslett's The World We Have Lost (1965). At once mysterious and memorable, the phrase on the cover promised (at least to my undergraduate eyes) a kind of history that was shadowy and unfamiliar. Thanks to the success of the social history it launched, the work now looks surprisingly straightforward: its facts and figures documenting premodern English society—its class structures, marriage practices, literacy rates, and so on—make the past feel found. So (...) much so that the very existence of so much data threatens to belie the claim of the title.But loss, for Laslett, is not absence; it is, rather, the condition of change through time, and his book was written to show precisely how much England had been transformed during the long course of the Industrial Revolution. In this sense, his title might serve for almost any account of people, places, or things that are no longer as they were.Worlds do nonetheless get lost, and we do not have to travel very far back into the past to become aware of the gaps in the record. Martin Mulsow has written a book that, finally, does justice to the precarious nature of what becomes history, and this new translation (sensitively rendered and beautifully produced) will prevent this magisterial work of German intellectual history from being lost on Anglophone readers. As a title, Knowledge Lost is not, to be sure, as catchy as Laslett's formulation. Nor does it capture the nuance of the name given to the original German publication (issued by Suhrkamp in 2012): Prekäres Wissen. What Mulsow recovers with a combination of historical narrative, historiographical analysis, and good old-fashioned sleuthing is the fragility of knowledge (and of those who traded in it) in early modern Europe.In a nice neologism, Mulsow names this group the Wissenprekariat (or “intellectual precariat”): his “knowledge underclass” includes radicals, obsessives, and cranks, but also mainstream scholars who simply became what Michel Foucault liked to call “infamous”—both scandalous, that is, and obscure. What makes the book essential reading even for those with little interest in the fringes of the Renaissance or Enlightenment is the anatomy of precarity itself, a state that shadows knowledge in many times and places. With a nod toward the “material turn” in historical writing, Mulsow pays particular attention to the risks involved in certain media or types of transmission. But he also looks at the social, disciplinary, and ideological forces that drive certain forms of knowing—and the figures with whom they are associated—underground.Thus his book amounts to nothing less than an alternative intellectual history of the early modern period, one that offers countless correctives to the received narratives that continue to favor the successful publications of major thinkers. But it is also a book for our own time. Mulsow's “Concluding Word” attempts to be optimistic, and he ends with a tantalizing list of the other unwritten histories that this one calls for—including “a history of maskings,” “a history of the ways knowledge could be appropriated on note cards that could easily be lost,” and “a history of the generational transfer of embarrassing knowledge.” His final paragraph acknowledges that “many kinds of precarity have declined” since the seventeenth century: now “we can insure ourselves against many risks, and... packages are reliably delivered.” Written only ten years ago, these words seem to come from another world we have lost, one before disrupted supply chains and the resurgence of populist politicians bringing back forms of precarity we thought we had left behind. If ever a book needed a new afterword, it is this one. (shrink)

It is commonly observed that behind many of the political and cultural issues that we face today there are impoverished conceptions of freedom, which, according to D. C. Schindler, we have inherited from the classical liberal tradition without a sufficient awareness of its implications. Freedom from Reality presents a critique of the deceptive and ultimately self-subverting character of the modern notion of freedom, retrieving an alternative view through a new interpretation of the ancient tradition. While many have critiqued the (...) inadequacy of identifying freedom with arbitrary choice, this book seeks to penetrate to the metaphysical roots of the modern conception by going back, through an etymological study, to the original sense of freedom. Schindler begins by uncovering a contradiction in John Locke's seminal account of human freedom. Rather than dismissing it as a mere "academic" problem, Schindler takes this contradiction as a key to understanding the strange paradoxes that abound in the contemporary values and institutions founded on the modern notion of liberty: the very mechanisms that intend to protect modern freedom render it empty and ineffectual. In this respect, modern liberty is "diabolical"--a word that means, at its roots, that which "drives apart" and so subverts. This is contrasted with the "symbolical" (a "joining-together"), which, he suggests, most basically characterizes the premodern sense of reality. This book will appeal to students and scholars of political philosophy (especially political theorists), philosophers in the continental or historical traditions, and cultural critics with a philosophical bent. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Criticism of Culture and the Culture of Criticism:At the Intersection of Postcolonialism and Globalization TheoryRevathi Krishnaswamy (bio)Why have culture in general and literature in particular emerged as key terms in critical theory today? Are we witnessing a dissolution of these categories similar to the earlier dissolution of the category of history, or are we witnessing an entirely novel consolidation of these categories? Has materialism essentially changed the semiotic (...) such that culture is now simply another commodity available for consumption on the world market, or has the semiotic radically subsumed the social such that cultural representation has become one with material reality itself? Has the relationship between the cultural and the economic altered in ways yet untheorized? Finally, what exactly does the culturalist turn in critical theory mean for the practice of postcolonial cultural/literary studies? And precisely what does it portend for the ongoing politics of decolonization?1 I shall attempt to engage these questions by focusing on two dominant theoretical discourses that regulate contemporary knowledge production in the humanities and social sciences: postcolonialism and globalization. While the "culturalist turn" in contemporary criticism has infected many disciplines, these two theoretical fields have been most influential in asserting the primacy or the constitutive role of the cultural in history, economics, and politics. Yet there has so far been relatively little explicit or systematic scrutiny of the links between postcolonialism and globalization theory.2The links are at once considerable and complicated. Despite differences in disciplinary origin (globalization theory in the social sciences, particularly sociology, and postcolonial theory in the humanities, particularly literary criticism), both discourses emerge at the intersection of imperialism, capitalism, and modernity. Both are concerned with the effects of unequal power relations between different geopolitical locations on the globe: postcolonial theory focuses primarily on a (Eurocentric) colonial past and studies how subaltern practices and productions in the non-Western peripheries respond to Western domination, while globalization theory concentrates mainly on [End Page 106] an (Americocentric) post/neocolonial present and examines how contemporary Western practices and productions affect the rest of the world. Furthermore, both theoretical paradigms have sought to question the universality attributed to Western modernity in metropolitan developmental theory by drawing attention to premodern, nonmodern, or alternatively modern formations in the margins. This attempt to dislocate Western modernity (from the theoretical center) has typically taken the form of dismantling those categories deemed to be central to the narrative of Western modernity—categories such as "nation," "nation-state," "culture" and so on. Consequently, both postcolonial and globalization studies have frequently focused on various forms of economic, political, social, and cultural flows that exceed the boundaries of the nation-state and operate in a deterritorialized or transnational fashion. Through these accounts, postcolonial theory has emphasized the cultural basis of history (the cultural constructedness of history as well as the archival value of cultural productions)3 while globalization theory, in turn, has highlighted the cultural basis of the economic (the economic value of cultural productions as well as the cultural production of economic value).But "besides their shared cultural grammar," the relationship between globalization and postcolonialism "is not very clear," notes Simon Gikandi in "Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality," a provocative essay that represents one of few attempts to explicitly articulate the relationship between the two discourses [628]. It is indeed unclear whether contemporary globalization theory has been made possible by the postcolonial challenge to older Eurocentric forms of globalization premised on the centrality of the nation and narrated in terms of modernization or whether postcoloniality itself is a consequence of a globalization premised on the marginalization of the nation, especially in the domain of the cultural and the imaginary. It is unclear whether the postcolonial and the global are one and the same, whether the postcolonial precedes and provides the foundations for global or transnational cultural studies [Eng and Stratton], or whether globalization created the historical and material conditions that both enabled the production of postcolonial theory and eroded its political purchase through incorporation into the Western academy [Ahmad]. What is clear, however, as Gikandi recognizes, is that the cultural and the literary have risen to new levels of prominence in both theoretical fields.The... (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 25, Issue 2, pp 279 - 304 In his influential _Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory_, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi analyzed brilliantly the transition in Jewish conceptions of Jewish history from premodern to modern times. The present paper discusses a number of alternative perspectives on this transition. Yerushalmi argued convincingly the importance of the traditional conception of Jewish history, which he labeled “Jewish memory,” for Jewish survival. This paper challenges the terminology, agrees with the role played by (...) the traditional Jewish thinking in Jewish survival, and emphasizes the premodern circumstances that made the traditional thinking so vital and effective. With respect to modern conceptions of Jewish history, which Yerushalmi associates with Jewish history writing, this paper argues that an examination of the circumstances of modernity reveals the creativity of this altered view of the Jewish past and the ways in which it in turn has fostered Jewish survival in the face of radically new challenges. (shrink)

This study addresses two desiderata of historical emotion research: reflecting on the interdependence of textual functions and the representation of emotions, and acknowledging the interdependence of studies on the premodern and modern periods in the history of emotion. Contemporary research on the history of emotion is characterised by a proliferation of studies on very different eras, authors, themes, texts, and aspects. The enthusiasm and confidence with which situations, actions, and interactions involving emotions in history are discovered, however, has led to (...) overly direct attempts to access the represented objects (emotions/feelings/affects); as a result, too little attention has been paid to the conditions and functions of their representations. That is why this study engages with the emotion research of historians from an unashamedly philological perspective. Such an approach provides, among other things, insights into the varied, often contradictory, observations that can be made about the history of emotion in modernity and premodernity. (shrink)

In this new collection of essays, Andrew Feenberg argues that conflicts over the design and organization of the technical systems that structure our society shape deep choices for the future. A pioneer in the philosophy of technology, Feenberg demonstrates the continuing vitality of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. He calls into question the anti-technological stance commonly associated with its theoretical legacy and argues that technology contains potentialities that could be developed as the basis for an alternative form (...) of modern society. Feenberg's critical reflections on the ideas of Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-François Lyotard, and Kitaro Nishida shed new light on the philosophical study of technology and modernity. He contests the prevalent conception of technology as an unstoppable force responsive only to its own internal dynamic and politicizes the discussion of its social and cultural construction. This argument is substantiated in a series of compelling and well-grounded case studies. Through his exploration of science fiction and film, AIDS research, the French experience with the "information superhighway," and the Japanese reception of Western values, he demonstrates how technology, when subjected to public pressure and debate, can incorporate ethical and aesthetic values. (shrink)

The search for knowledge has been the driving force behind mankind's existence since the dawn of civilization, and different cultures have developed their own theories of knowledge. _Searching for the Way: Theory of Knowledge in Premodern and Modern China_ deals with the analyses and interpretations of modern Chinese philosophical discourses, especially those concerning theories of knowledge. The author looks at how contemporary Chinese philosophy is awakening from a long slumber and substantiates the hypothesis that this new awakening is fully prepared (...) for fruitful confrontations with the new challenges presented by a globalized world. The study of 20th-century Chinese philosophy has not been the subject of any extensive and systematic discussion in neither the West in general nor in Western Sinology in particular. Hence, this book will be of immense interest to those who are interested in the emerging fields of comparative philosophy, Chinese studies and theology. (shrink)

The crisis of modern reason culminates in Nietzsche's proclamation of nihilism. Drawing upon Nietzsche, postmodernists suggest that reason itself is defective, while “premodernists” argue we can regain our balance by returning to premodern rationalism. Peter Berkowitz suggests, however, that Nietzsche is a contradictory thinker who fails in his attempt to combine ancient rationalism with modern voluntarism. Postmodernism thus rests upon a defective foundation. Berkowitz's critique of postmodernism is telling, but he does not recognize dangerous millenarian elements in Nietzsche's thought. Moreover, (...) the concept of ancient reason he holds up as an alternative is underdeveloped and undifferentiated. (shrink)

Focusing on the sixteenth-century Oriya Lakshmi Purana by Balaram Das, this essay shows how distinctly “modern” values are being explored and elaborated in this religious poem. Das’s narrative develops the notion of a self-critical individuality that is distinct from—rather than merely embedded in—the dominant social structure and its patriarchal and caste-based value system. The LP provides a feminist and anticaste critique of patriarchal behavior and defends the value of the work done by women and others who are socially marginalized. This (...) literary-critical analysis is a contribution to contemporary scholarship on “alternative” or “precolonial” modernities, especially in the Indian context. (shrink)

This article intends not only to comment on Heidegger’s question of technology, but also to designate technics as the sign of the rationalization of the world. A confrontation is then required against the technical world, in which it is inscribed the whole history of western metaphysics. This tradition, with the arrival of the technology age, proves to be nihilist, and, as such, demands from Heidegger, especially in his Contributions to philosophy (of the Event), to overcome the whole western tradition into (...) another beginning. It is also considered that it is particularly in Modernity where the outcomes of the western rationality are most perceived, which conflates with the liberal order that reigns today. Therefore, we can contemplate the political dimension in Heidegger’s thought, in its broadest sense, and then to propose a confrontation with the whole western tradition, which blooms completely in the technological world and in the domination of Liberalism. (shrink)

The normative figure in Western feminism remains the liberal autonomous individual of modernity. ‹Other’ women are those who have their freedom to choose restricted. Typically, ‹other’ women are those burdened by culture and hindered by their communities from entering modernity. If we remain in the terrain of thinking about women as vulnerable or imperilled, and some women as particularly imperilled, as we generally do of Muslim women, we remain squarely within the framework of patriarchy understood as abstracted from (...) all other systems. A modernity/premodernity distinction will continue to invade any projects intending to help Muslim women. This paper shows the persistence of the modernity/premodernity distinction in contemporary debates around applying Sharia law to the settlement of family law disputes under the Arbitration Act in Ontario, Canada. I argue below that in their concern to curtail conservative and patriarchal forces within the Muslim community, Canadian feminists (both Muslim and Non-Muslim) utilized frameworks that installed a secular/religious divide that functions as a colour line, marking the difference between the modern, enlightened West, and tribal, religious Muslims. I suggest that feminist responses might have helped to sustain a new form of governmentality, one in which the productive power of the imperilled Muslim woman functions to keep in line Muslim communities at the same time that it defuses more radical feminist and anti-racist critique of conservative religious forces. I end by exploring how this effect could have been restricted. (shrink)

Plurality, Conjunction and Events presents a novel theory of plural and conjoined phrases, in an event-based semantic framework. It begins by reviewing options for treating the alternation between `collective' and `distributive' readings of sentences containing plural or conjoined noun phrases, including analyses from both the modern and the premodern literature. It is argued that plural and conjoined noun phrases are unambiguously group-denoting, and that the collective/distributive distinction therefore must be located in the predicates with which these noun phrases combine. More (...) specifically, predicates must have a hidden argument place for events; the collective/distributive distinction may then be represented in the part/whole structure of these events. This allows a natural treatment of `collectivizing' adverbial expressions, and of `pluractional' affixes; it also allows a unified semantics for conjunction, in which conjoined sentences and predicates denote groups of events, much like conjoined noun phrases denote groups of individuals. (shrink)

A prevalent scholarly view holds that Orthodox Judaism in the twentieth century was opposing or challenging modernity, since it refused to assign religion its appropriate modern place as a distinct sphere of values. The goal of this review essay is to reconsider the connection between Orthodox Judaism and modernity. Based on four recent works on Orthodox Judaism during the first decades of twentieth century, which are devoted to political mobilization, gender, theocracy, and law, the essay explores, first, the (...) modern methods whereby Orthodoxy attempted to gain a foothold in the public sphere and, second, the political philosophy of Orthodoxy, which challenges the separation of religion and state. It argues that Orthodox Judaism is a project of an alternative modernity, which strives to gain power in order to conduct a promethean reconfiguration of its surroundings. (shrink)

Insofar as the postcolonial project is one of the elaboration of "the plurality of modernity, and the agency multiplying its forms", my project is a contribution to this larger one in the form of a postcolonial theory of multiculturalism (Ashcroft, 2009, p. 85). Drawing from minority standpoints, arguments, and narratives, I focus on the lives and perspectives of a few broad groups in particular: indigenous peoples in Canada, Muslim women, and East Asian "immigrant" minorities. I take up a critical (...) theory approach to framing multicultural theory and the questions it asks from the standpoints of minorities themselves, foregrounding the challenges and perspectives of racialized groups for whom their ethno-culture is morally salient and central to their own understanding of their identities and aims. This framework draws on the insights of feminist theorists of deliberative democracy but also departs from them in the crucial respect of affirming a conception of culture and identity that accepts some basic "communitarian" ideas of morality and culture, while conceiving these within a postcolonial project of cultural reclamation rather than a republican framework of the public sphere. My project is organized into two parts: The first section systematically critiques the dominant liberal multiculturalist model based on Canadian multicultural policy and theorized by Kymlicka, which is oriented by the liberal state's perspective in its aims of integrating minorities. In the first chapter, I reject his universalist principle of liberal neutrality as the standard for justice in favour of a pluralist democratic standard that accommodates "thin" theories of the good. In the second and third chapters, I reformulate Kymlicka's categories of "national minorities" and "polyethnic minorities" respectively in order to take account of postcolonial indigenous sovereignty and the transnational scope of ethnic identity. The second section develops a pluralist account of agency in its descriptive (Chapter 4), normative (Chapter 5), and prescriptive (Chapter 6) aspects (Deveaux 2006 p. 179). This is developed as a constructive critique of liberal standards of autonomy, particularly feminist proposals for a standard of procedural autonomy, as unable to adequately describe and assess heteronomous agency. (shrink)

The term “Marginocentric cities” has been used to describe those multiethnic nodal cities “that at favorable historical conjunctions have rewritten the national cultural paradigm from the margin, ascribing to it a dialogic dimension, both internally and externally ”. Whereas this map of marginocentric cities is restricted to East-Central Europe, this paper, focusing on the novel The Last Days of Old Beijing, insists that the concept of “marginocentric city” is also operative for Beijing city as a nodal space of cultural exchanges (...) in which boundaries might be more elusive and national geographies dislocated. At the same time, I propose the constitutive dialectics of being simultaneously central and marginal should be regarded in relation to the complex relationships taking place in Beijing, different from the Western modernity, as it appears in this cross-cultural novel which also combines tradition and modernity. (shrink)

In public opinion it is accepted to distinguish three main stages in the development of the European cultural consciousness, more precisely - three spiritual situations in the history of Europe - premodern, modern and postmodern. Religions have also undergone an epochal change in their paradigms here. As noted by the famous Swiss theologian Hans Küng, "in terms of religion, a paradigm shift means a change in the basic pattern, the basic structure, the basic model according to which one perceives himself, (...) society, world and God." However, thinking about religious premodernity, modernity and postmodernity, we cannot temporarily and essentially relate these stages to the multi-denominational evolution of the spiritual life of the whole world, because these situations have not found a clear expression in the development of each of the religions that exist in it. (shrink)

This paper concerns Carnap’s early contributions to formal semantics in his work on general axiomatics between 1928 and 1936. Its main focus is on whether he held a variable domain conception of models. I argue that interpreting Carnap’s account in terms of a fixed domain approach fails to describe his premodern understanding of formal models. By drawing attention to the second part of Carnap’s unpublished manuscript Untersuchungen zur allgemeinen Axiomatik, an alternative interpretation of the notions ‘model’, ‘model extension’ and (...) ‘submodel’ in his theory of axiomatics is presented. Specifically, it is shown that Carnap’s early model theory is based on a convention to simulate domain variation that is not identical but logically comparable to the modern account. (shrink)

Modern, Stevie At its annual general meeting in May this year, the Council of Australian Humanist Societies voted in support of volunteer ethics teachers entering public schools and teaching ethics programs to students as a secular alternative in religious education. The motion was put to the meeting by the NSW Society with the support of the Humanist Society of Victoria. The motion was opposed by the Queensland, Western Australian and South Australian Societies. Here is why the motion is a (...) grave mistake, and why Western Australia moved its own motion against it. (shrink)

The article sketches an approach to the sociology of the stranger which is based on historical semantics, on comparative studies of social structures of premodern societies and on a reconsideration of the `classical sociology of the stranger' and of marginality (Simmel, 1908; Michels, 1929 and others; Schütz, 1944; Park, 1964). The guiding hypothesis of the article is that there is a discontinuity in the modern experience of the stranger which has not been reflected sufficiently in the classical sociology of the (...) stranger. Whereas in premodern societies membership criteria are binary codes such as `kin' vs. `stranger', `friend' vs. `enemy', and elaborate arrangements were then necessary for institutionalizing a third status (e.g. for internal strangers) between the binary alternatives, the modern experience is wholly different. Modern society is no longer a membership organization. The third status (i.e. being neither `friend' nor `stranger') has become constitutive of our everyday experience of other persons. And this everyday experience is that of indifference as our normal attitude towards most persons living in the world. A modern sociology of the stranger has to explore the facets of indifference. Indifference can be described as an interactional achievement in situations of fleeting contact. And it can be examined in its macrostructural consequences in a modern societal order in which motivations for societal engagements and therefore any willingness to care for the other are unavoidably scarce. (shrink)

If one looks at the controversial premises of analytical approaches to fascism according to Roger Griffin, it is not surprising that a yawning distance has opened up between Marxist and non-Marxist schools of interpretation. In this situation whereby two camps are mutually ignorant of one another, it is certainly suggestive that the liberal British theoretician of fascism should put himself forward to play the role of a ‘mediator’, even if he faces the danger of significant criticism from both schools of (...) interpretation. But Griffin’s attempt takes place on a predominantly theoretical level. The author of this essay instead places the notion of revolution in historical-empirical perspective, in order to distinguish it from the account associated with (liberal) representatives of the ‘new consensus’. He then examines, in particular, whether National Socialism represented a utopia which satisfied revolutionary aspirations. The author further asks whether fascism could separate itself from its (early) conservative support to an extent that would permit commentators to meaningfully identify a revolutionary breakthrough. And finally he clarifies what the modernizing achievements of fascism during its time in power actually were. Against this background, there does seem at least the possibility of a dialogue between the two approaches that would advance each of them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 66.4 (2005) 483-506 [Access article in PDF] Lorenzo Valla and the Traditions and Transmissions of Philosophy C. S. Celenza Johns Hopkins University What is "philosophy"? Who is a "philosopher"? These questions underlay much of Salvatore Camporeale's work, and they are deeper than one might suppose. We can begin with one of Camporeale's favorite figures, Lorenzo Valla, and listen to one of the ways (...) he answered these questions. In the introduction to his work reforming Aristotelian logic, the Repastinatio totius dialectice, Valla situates the debate on wisdom by recalling the case of Pythagoras.1 "What a marvelous praise of modesty it was," Valla wrote, when Pythagoras, asked whether he considered himself wise, replied that he was not "wise," but was rather a "lover of wisdom"—not sophos, but philosophos.2 Valla uses here a humanistic trope, found also in Petrarch's advice to Luigi Marsili, to the effect that Marsili should shape the practice of his life in order to become a "verae sapientiae amator," a "lover of true wisdom."3These citations from Petrarch and Valla alert us to the well-studied fact that, in the view of some humanists, academic "philosophy" had usurped the name "philosophy" and the self-searching meaning behind it. Certain humanists were proposing an alternative notion of what wisdom signified and consequently of what philosophy itself—the "love of wisdom"—represented. It seemed that wisdom needed to be located in a more persuasive way in the world of human beings, history, and language, rather than in one of eternal [End Page 483] suprahuman essences; in short, "philosophy" had to be brought closer to rhetoric and philology.The goal of this paper is to examine this idea in a twofold manner: through the history of terms and concepts as these are refracted by and through the history of institutionalized learning; and through a brief foray into Valla's preface to his great critique of western logic. There has been a lot of challenging and interesting work on this topic in the last few decades. At the same time, there may be cause to wonder whether relatively recent historians have unwittingly become too bogged down in names, failing to see the real conflict. They have tended to assume that the modern, sharp separation of humanistic "disciplines," such as rhetoric and philosophy, existed in the same way and with the same force of conviction in the premodern era. True, there are famous ancient, medieval, and early modern examples of self-defined "philosophers" differentiating themselves from "philologists" and vice versa, most notably Seneca, who—lamenting the professionalization of education in his day—complained in a letter that "what was once philosophy, has become philology" (Ep. 108.23). Yet, the more one investigates this problem, and the more one peers beneath the surface of the seemingly stark divisions between "philosophy" and "philology," the more difficult this strong separation is to maintain.This notion of the possible interpenetrability of "philosophy," and "philology," and "rhetoric" as concepts was probably easier to understand in the Renaissance than it is now. The differences between the Renaissance and our own era lie in institutional context and personal approach, both of which have been, for about six or seven intellectual generations now (but no more than that), supported by a fourfold set of assumptions about what "real" or "professional" philosophy represents: first, that philosophy is primarily about metaphysics and ontology, or rather that there exists a hierarchy in which metaphysics and ontology stand at the top; other things, such as history, language, or rhetoric are "just not philosophy." Second, a retrospectively understood Cartesian split between mind and body is basically true (and that it is legitimate to project that dualistic split back onto thinkers who did not hold the same sort of dualism as axiomatic); and consequently third, that epistemology should be privileged, that is, that knowing and the study of how knowing happens are primarily what philosophy is about. Hence "philosophy" is regulative, a master-discipline that oversees the truth claims of all... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 66.4 (2005) 483-506 [Access article in PDF] Lorenzo Valla and the Traditions and Transmissions of Philosophy C. S. Celenza Johns Hopkins University What is "philosophy"? Who is a "philosopher"? These questions underlay much of Salvatore Camporeale's work, and they are deeper than one might suppose. We can begin with one of Camporeale's favorite figures, Lorenzo Valla, and listen to one of the ways (...) he answered these questions. In the introduction to his work reforming Aristotelian logic, the Repastinatio totius dialectice, Valla situates the debate on wisdom by recalling the case of Pythagoras.1 "What a marvelous praise of modesty it was," Valla wrote, when Pythagoras, asked whether he considered himself wise, replied that he was not "wise," but was rather a "lover of wisdom"—not sophos, but philosophos.2 Valla uses here a humanistic trope, found also in Petrarch's advice to Luigi Marsili, to the effect that Marsili should shape the practice of his life in order to become a "verae sapientiae amator," a "lover of true wisdom."3These citations from Petrarch and Valla alert us to the well-studied fact that, in the view of some humanists, academic "philosophy" had usurped the name "philosophy" and the self-searching meaning behind it. Certain humanists were proposing an alternative notion of what wisdom signified and consequently of what philosophy itself—the "love of wisdom"—represented. It seemed that wisdom needed to be located in a more persuasive way in the world of human beings, history, and language, rather than in one of eternal [End Page 483] suprahuman essences; in short, "philosophy" had to be brought closer to rhetoric and philology.The goal of this paper is to examine this idea in a twofold manner: through the history of terms and concepts as these are refracted by and through the history of institutionalized learning; and through a brief foray into Valla's preface to his great critique of western logic. There has been a lot of challenging and interesting work on this topic in the last few decades. At the same time, there may be cause to wonder whether relatively recent historians have unwittingly become too bogged down in names, failing to see the real conflict. They have tended to assume that the modern, sharp separation of humanistic "disciplines," such as rhetoric and philosophy, existed in the same way and with the same force of conviction in the premodern era. True, there are famous ancient, medieval, and early modern examples of self-defined "philosophers" differentiating themselves from "philologists" and vice versa, most notably Seneca, who—lamenting the professionalization of education in his day—complained in a letter that "what was once philosophy, has become philology" (Ep. 108.23). Yet, the more one investigates this problem, and the more one peers beneath the surface of the seemingly stark divisions between "philosophy" and "philology," the more difficult this strong separation is to maintain.This notion of the possible interpenetrability of "philosophy," and "philology," and "rhetoric" as concepts was probably easier to understand in the Renaissance than it is now. The differences between the Renaissance and our own era lie in institutional context and personal approach, both of which have been, for about six or seven intellectual generations now (but no more than that), supported by a fourfold set of assumptions about what "real" or "professional" philosophy represents: first, that philosophy is primarily about metaphysics and ontology, or rather that there exists a hierarchy in which metaphysics and ontology stand at the top; other things, such as history, language, or rhetoric are "just not philosophy." Second, a retrospectively understood Cartesian split between mind and body is basically true (and that it is legitimate to project that dualistic split back onto thinkers who did not hold the same sort of dualism as axiomatic); and consequently third, that epistemology should be privileged, that is, that knowing and the study of how knowing happens are primarily what philosophy is about. Hence "philosophy" is regulative, a master-discipline that oversees the truth claims of all... (shrink)

This article examines two distinct ways in which anticolonial thinkers in early twentieth-century Korea reconstructed their nondemocratic tradition in an attempt to justify (rather than take for granted) the claim of self-determination. The exposure to modern education and ideas of democracy prompted these thinkers to critically engage their tradition in the struggle for self-determination. That said, they could not simply abandon the cultural foundation of their nation. Japanese colonial rule drew its legitimacy from not only an assimilation ideology that the (...) Japanese and Koreans shared the same ethnic origin but also a developmentalist conception of the colonized that they were premodern and incapable of self-rule. To reject imperial domination, Korean anticolonial thinkers needed to invent out of their country’s nondemocratic tradition (1) an unassimilable nation/people (2) capable of self-rule. Drawing upon the political writings of two early twentieth-century thinkers in colonial Korea, Yi Kwang-su (1892–1950) and Cho So-ang (1887–1958), I discover from their political thought two nuanced approaches to this project of inventing “the people” in the colonial world. I argue that while Yi succeeded in rebutting the colonial ideology of assimilation, he fell into the trap of developmentalism. I contend that Cho, on the contrary, sidestepped this trap with his revisionist reading of the Confucian past as a history of democratic transformation, thus providing an immediate alternative to imperial sovereignty. (shrink)

Defending the role that science must play in democratic society--science defined not just in terms of technology but as a way of approaching problems and viewing the world. In this collection of original essays, experts in political science, the hard sciences, philosophy, history, and other disciplines examine contemporary anti-science trends, and make a strong case that respect for science is essential for a healthy democracy. The editors note that a contradiction lies at the heart of modern society. On the one (...) hand, we inhabit a world increasingly dominated by science and technology. On the other, opposition to science is prevalent in many forms--from arguments against the teaching of evolution and the denial of climate change to the promotion of alternative medicine and outlandish claims about the effects of vaccinations. Adding to this grass-roots hostility toward science are academics espousing postmodern relativism, which equates the methods of science with regimes of "power-knowledge." While these cultural trends are sometimes marketed in the name of "democratic pluralism," the contributors contend that such views are actually destructive of a broader culture appropriate for a democratic society. This is especially true when facts are degraded as "fake news" and scientists are dismissed as elitists. Rather than enhancing the capacity for rational debate and critical discourse, the authors view such anti-science stances on either the right or the left as a return to premodern forms of subservience to authority and an unwillingness to submit beliefs to rational scrutiny. Beyond critiquing attitudes hostile to science, the essays in this collection put forward a positive vision for how we might better articulate the relation between science and democracy and the benefits that accrue from cultivating this relationship. (shrink)

Ibn Khaldun and Ernest Gellner have both developed comprehensive yet very different theories of social cohesion. Whereas Ibn Khaldun traces the development of intense group solidarity to the ascetic lifestyles of nomadic warriors, for Gellner social cohesion is a product of different material conditions. In contrast to Ibn Khaldun?s theory, where all social ties are generated through similar social processes, in Gellner?s model the patterns of collective solidarity change through time, that is, different societies produce different forms of social cohesion. (...) While Ibn Khaldun argues that asbiyyah is the backbone of group unity in all social orders, Gellner insists that modern societies are underpinned by very different type of collective solidarity than their premodern counterparts. In this paper I offer a critique of Ibn Khaldun?s and Gellner?s theories of social cohesion and develop an alternative explanation, which situates the social dynamics of group solidarity in the organisational and ideological legacies of warfare. (shrink)

Grammatology of Images radically alters how we approach images. Instead of asking for the history, power, or essence of images, Sigrid Weigel addresses imaging as such. The book considers how something a-visible gets transformed into an image. Weigel scrutinizes the moment of mis-en-apparition, of making an appearance, and the process of concealment that accompanies any imaging. Weigel reinterprets Derrida's and Freud's concept of the trace as that which must be thought before something exists. In doing so, she illuminates the threshold (...) between traces and iconic images, between something immaterial and its pictorial representation. Chapters alternate between general accounts of the line, the index, the effigy, and the cult-image, and case studies from the history of science, art, politics, and religion, involving faces as indicators of emotion, caricatures as effigies of defamation, and angels as embodiments of transcendental ideas. Weigel's approach to images illuminates fascinating, unexpected correspondences between premodern and contemporary image-practices, between the history of religion and the modern sciences, and between things that are and are not understood as art. (shrink)

Identifying the limitations in earlier attempts for comparing Euro-American philosophy with Indian, the paper distinguishes its approach and makes a case for an alternative approach. This consists of bending the Euro-American philosophy, without breaking it, for use in India. Following the discussion of major and minor literatures by Deleuze and Guattari in the context of Kafka in Europe, the paper shows the variance between its claims in the context of minor literature and the reality. In this context, it establishes (...) a close relation between modernity and art and literature in Europe, where the latter is sought to reclaim what is rejected by the modern. Modernity rejected the premodern as embodying non-reason. Without abandoning this relation between minor and major, it seeks to show its relevance in India through Indian National Movement and M. K. Gandhi. This paper, thus, discusses an instance where alien is a better ground for growth and relevance than the origin. (shrink)

Things do not begin to live except in the middle.--Gilles Deleuze, DialoguesA Land of UnlikenessThe English novel The Go-Between begins a tale of memory and loss with two sentences a historian could love: "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." The novel's narrator should know: he is a librarian, someone who, as the memory ghost of his twelve-year-old self will remind him, spends his days cataloguing the relics of the book-past. And many who now live with (...) the past for a living might nod in recognition: the metaphor slips on comfortably, like a well-worn shoe. The past can feel like a place as much as it does a time -- a foreign place, outside the doors of the familiar, beyond the gate and the gatekeepers of the now.Especially beyond the pale is the Middle Ages, definitional whipping boy for generations of citizens of the present who have needed an "all-purpose alternative" against which to define themselves. The difference of medieval doing is embedded already in the names we still give the time: the "Middle Ages" makes parenthetical death of the interval between Classical life and its humanist "rebirth." "Premodern" gives life only in anticipation of the modern, directing the period toward a telos of recognizability in the now that the premodern, as such, will always fail to satisfy.The Middle Ages were invented to be a foreign country. The indigenous peoples are dead, and they didn't even know they were medieval -- they thought they were living in modern times. They thought it was now: "There is no other age than ours," Raymond de l'Aire of Tignac told the inquisitors nosing for heresy in his town around 1320.But this is "now," and there are elements about the "Middle Ages" that feel foreign -- foreign in this modern, postmodern, or maybe even post-postmodern land we still call "now." Everyone who has ever read a medieval book cold or taught one to cold undergraduates has felt this foreignness intimately in his or her suddenly awkward flesh. All those quotations, all that Catholicism, all those arguments and counterarguments; not to mention those old words, weird verb forms, erratic spelling, and all that damn Latin.There's no question that the Middle Ages is an other, perhaps even a foreign place, someplace, as the etymology indicates, beyond our own doors . What are we doing when we go there? What happens to "here" and "there" when we go? The question isn't whether medieval people did things differently than we do now; the question is what we as putative nonmedievals are going to do with the difference. What stories do we tell ourselves about it? What do they do to and for us?When medievalists talk about medieval otherness, it can feel like a slap in the face; it can feel like a come-on; it can of course be both at once. Take, for example, Paul Zumthor's monumental Essai de poétique médiévale. Published in 1972, the Essai set medieval poetry in dialogue with what was then high literary theory. The dialogue made the foreignness of medieval poetry accessible to a mid-1980s graduate student like me; it taught me that medieval texts could be active participants in the theoretical discussions I was learning to have with friends, professors, and texts. Returning to the Essai now with the theory-midwifed births of "New Philology" and "New Medievalism" in the past, I was surprised to find that this text that I thought bridged temporal gaps begins by blowing up more bridges than it builds. "We are cut off from the Middle Ages by a divide that we should not attempt to ignore, but that we should rather see as an impassible abyss," Zumthor announces in his second paragraph. Why, then, even write the book, students I once read this with wanted to know, and it's a good question.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Secular AgeJerry WallulisA Secular Age by Charles Taylor. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. x + 874. $39.95, cloth.It is almost a philosophical truism that the phenomenologist who is able to see more in the phenomenon will be wise to do so. While Charles Taylor may not explicitly advocate such a truism in The Secular Age, he is adamantly opposed to "subtraction stories" regarding the secularization (...) process in modern Western societies. His alternative narrative involves "seeing" a meaning to secularity that is deeper and truer to the past and present lived experience of both believers and nonbelievers. The length of that narrative (800+ pages) is obviously demanding but also arguably rewarding—even to the philosophical or social theoretical temperament initially inclined to see less in the process.A "subtraction story" of secularization describes the transition to modernity in terms of discarding or outgrowing a framework of beliefs that typically is viewed as an impediment. Such a story is normally situated within the context of one of the two most recognized meanings of "secularity." The first of these meanings involves freeing modern political organizations and other forms of public life from explicit connections to religious beliefs and institutions. The second meaning refers to a decline in religious belief and practice as measured, for example, in falling church attendance. Particularly with respect to the second meaning, a subtraction story is likely to attribute secularity to progress in scientific and normative inquiry that supplants and even replaces earlier religious thinking, action, and politics. [End Page 302]The third and deeper meaning of secularity involves what Taylor terms the "conditions of belief." The whole context of understanding what it is to believe has changed in the past five hundred years "from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others" (3). For Taylor this momentous transition is misunderstood as a subtraction process in contrast to a richer historical tracing of the sources of meaningful belief and unbelief. According to this rival account, religious belief continues and alters, even as a strong alternative to faith emerges ("exclusive humanism") but also, and equally, a plenitude (or "nova") of intermediate views or human possibilities.The dramatic change in the conditions of belief is accompanied by an equally marked historical shift in the situation of the self that is experiencing this transition. After the change a clear distinction is made between the mind and the body and between the self and the world. The strong distinctions between the "mental" and the "physical" and the "subjective" and the "objective" serve to mark firm boundaries in our experience. These boundaries function as "buffers" so that things that go beyond our mental states and subjective feelings do not need to cross over and upset or disorient us.For Taylor the premodern situation of the self was not characterized by firm boundaries but rather by "porous" ones. The difference is that the inside of earlier lived experience was neither just inside nor cordoned off from the outside of experience. Thus a powerful emotion was not limited to mind or self but was porous to the influence of outside powers that boded well or ill. Indeed the force of such outside things could be experienced as so strong and the vulnerability of the self so great as to make urgent the need for propitiation of or defense against a friendly or evil spiritual power.The transition from enchantment to disenchantment is not simply a change in beliefs, but in sensibilities within lived experience that affect what it is to believe. We find enchantment so difficult to comprehend because we are "buffered selves" who are open to kinds of meanings with clearly delineated boundaries. Earlier "porous selves" were open, by contrast, to the possibility of being dominated by a spirit or being taken over by a medium. Disbelief is difficult to imagine for porous selves, since "God figures in this world as the dominant spirit, and moreover, as the only thing that guarantees that in this awe-inspiring and frightening field of forces, good will triumph" (41... (shrink)

The humanity-nature divide is a modern Western construction based on the notion that matter (nature) is dead, while consciousness (humanity) is alive, rational, and positioned to use matter (nature) to achieve its ends. In contrast, in the world views of the indigenous Maμori of New Zealand and Aborigines of Australia, nature is not separate from humanity and all is infused with consciousness. The ecofeminist and Goddess movements which emerged in the last decades of the twentieth-century, share with many indigenous religions (...) the perception that all of nature is alive and that human beings must respect other beings within the web of life. Yet these are postmodern rather than premodern movements with an explicit critique of the assumptions of modernity. Process philosophy, especially when understood through the “feminist process paradigm” proposed here, is a postmodern philosophical system that affirms the insights of indigenous peoples, as well as Goddess and ecofeminists, that humanity must situate itself within the web of life. At the same time, process philosophy provides the tools for reconciling “premodern” insights with the findings (but not the assumptions) of modern science. Each of these resources can help us to provide alternatives to the humanity-nature divide. (shrink)

Since the 1970s the internationalization of China’s higher education system has been driven by a desire for modernization through economic reform, to be precise, HE reform would lay the founda...

Western liberal democracies praise themselves for protecting a full range of differences among individuals and groups. The origin of this ongoing process is thought to be Locke’s Epistola de Tolerantia. Before the Reformation, it is assumed, “a multiplicity of beliefs was deemed to be dangerous, as well as evil; diversity was, so to speak, the devil’s work, and where it existed it was to be stamped out”. Yet, although flattering to liberalism, the conceit of a modern liberal discovery of liberty (...) of conscience is both conceptually simplistic and historically misleading. The main virtue of this volume is to challenge this tale of Western political history. The essays presented seek to demonstrate that premodern thinkers generated alternative theories of toleration; and to contribute to a philosophical analysis of tolerance. (shrink)

These original essays offer new perspectives for science educators, curriculum theorists, and cultural critics on science education, French post-structural thought, and the science debates. Included in this book are chapters on the work of Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, and Jean Baudrillard, plus chapters on postmodern approaches to science education and critiques of modern scientific assumptions in curriculum development.

This article argues that we can improve the way we teach early modern political philosophy if we introduce students to alternative views about the development of the state. First, it summarizes the work of contemporary philosophers and historians who are critical of the modern state. Second, it points out ways in which early social contract theorists take the state for granted. Third, it argues that alternative views about the development of the state can help students take a more (...) critical perspective on standard works of early modern political philosophy. Fourth, it argues that these alternative views will help students better understand dissenting voices in early modern political philosophy. (shrink)

This collection of papers is from the Ninth European Conference on the Philosophy of Religion held at the University of Aarhus, Denmark in August 1992. The theme of the conference was theism and its modern alternatives. Why alternatives? There is no agreement on the answer to that question. Before outlining the nature of the disagreements, there is a need to distinguish theism, where it means some belief in God, and theism as a certain kind of philosophical response to that belief. (...) If theism is to be spoken of in both contexts, the following question arises -- is philosophical theism an adequate response to religious theism? (shrink)

In this issue, our authors examine premodern art and theories of art, which preceded Descartes and the onset of philosophical modernity.

Zhou Zuoren, a pioneer of the New Culture Movement, became a collaborator and classicist poet during the Second Sino-Japanese War. This article attempts to bridge the gap between two periods of Zhou’s life: his later return to Chinese lyric classicism and his earlier career as a pioneer of vernacular poetry, translator of Japanese haiku, and literary critic championing a “Short Verse Movement.” I argue that Zhou’s wartime doggerels consisted of a modernist project in classicist guise, a continuation of his endeavor (...) to lend expression to the immediacy and the transience of the moment through a native linguistic medium. Reflecting the urgency of self-expression under the Japanese occupation, Zhou’s esoteric doggerels represent a lyric subjectivity in crisis vis-à-vis the epic of history. By participating in a global moment of literary modernity, they also represent an “alternative lyric modernity” for China. (shrink)