In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Skeptical View of IntegralismElizabeth CoreyNo observer of the American right could say that the past decade has been boring. In recent years, people who formerly called themselves conservatives have become integralists, "national conservatives," "common good" conservatives, and "postliberals." They reject the fusionism that formerly brought libertarians into alliances with paleo- and neo-conservatives. They argue that principles of limited government and individual rights no longer suffice in an age (...) that has suffered the left's Gramscian march through the institutions (Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, 1891–1937).Among the most prominent of the new dissenters are certain Catholic conservatives who argue not only that "liberalism" has failed, but that that the remedy for its failure lies in a reintegration of religion and politics. Many of these writers argue that liberalism itself is a religion, or at least a quasi-religion, that should be opposed by real religion, which is Catholic Christianity.1 Liberalism's political liturgy, they maintain, is one of individual rights, freedom, and unfettered choice; but liberalism is a bad religion that leads to moral decline. It must be resisted by holding to the true liturgy, an [End Page 919] authentically religious one of obedience to Catholic doctrine and a revival of traditional morality in the public square. Who is responsible for enforcing this new liturgy? Why the new theorists themselves, of course, who believe that they are the recipients of privileged gnosis.These theorists have no qualms about asserting the desirable unity of politics and religion. Indeed, their primary interest in government seems to be in prescribing a religiously inspired morality for those they would govern. No mere rule-of-law regime will do. As journalist Sohrab Ahmari has boldly asserted: "Civility and decency are secondary values. They regulate compliance with an established order and orthodoxy. We should seek to use these values to enforce our order and our orthodoxy."2The confidence of these former conservatives is remarkable, and they are in fact making converts of young men everywhere. The clarity of their moral vision is undeniably attractive to a certain kind of soul. If the highest good for mankind is salvation, as Christians believe it is, then why not strain every nerve to achieve it, not only in worship but also in political action? Chad Pecknold has summarized the postliberal integralist view as follows: "We must recognize that our cities simply are religious. Our most fundamental political conflicts are religious and theological. Thus, Christians who care about their neighbor must not be indifferent to the sacred bonds of the city, but must oppose civic sacrilege, and work to reorient the domestic and civic altars alike to God's heavenly city." He concludes with a rousing peroration: "As pilgrims with our faces set towards Christ, the bright sun of justice itself, our cause is just. We have a great hope even in this temporal order which is passing away; we have a high calling to order not only our souls, but also to order our cities rightly, on earth as it is in heaven."3 The only task that remains, on this telling, is to put this vision into practice.It is never easy to follow the words of Jesus himself in the Lord's Prayer. Yet the skeptic in politics might be excused for a bit of throat-clearing and perplexity about precisely what is being argued, and about how such a grand vision is to be accomplished, or whether it is even desirable. In the pages that follow, I identify an alternative way of thinking about politics that is significantly less exalted than integralism. This more "skeptical" alternative is potentially capable of achievement, given the political institutions currently in place in the United States. It is also significantly more respectful of the political and moral pluralism that now exists and seems unlikely to disappear. [End Page 920]Following the lead of British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, I consider two opposed ways of thinking about politics, which Oakeshott called, in On Human Conduct, "enterprise and civil association," and elsewhere "faith and scepticism." With this framework in mind, I consider the dark and pessimistic view of modern society held by the postliberal integralists. I... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Surviving American Culture:On Chuck PalahniukEduardo MendietaIn an age in which American culture has become the United States' number one export, along with its weapons, low intensity conflict, carcinogenic cigarettes, its "freedom," and pornography, it is delightful and even a sign of hope that there are writers who have taken on the delicate and perilous task of offering a prognosis of what ails this culture. In the following essay (...) I argue that Chuck Palahniuk's works ought to be read as a mortician's report on American culture. Chuck Palahniuk broke into the literary world by way of the movie version of his first novel: Fight Club (1995). He has gone on to write six other novels: Survivor (1999), Invisible Monsters (2000), Choke (2001), Lullaby (2002), and Diary (2003). He also has published an interesting travel book, Fugitives and Refugees; A Walk in Portland, Oregon (2003), but since this is not properly fiction, I will not discuss it in this essay.1Clearly, Palahniuk has already produced a corpus worthy of careful consideration and analysis. Yet, as a west coast writer, far from the literary circles and brokers of the east coast, indeed far away from the clubs of self-promotion and self-monitoring that censure and hold in tight grip the monopoly of criticism that highlights "worthy literature," Palahniuk has not attracted a lot of critical attention. It is only with his most recent work Choke that he has began to be widely reviewed and commented on. In the following I provide a thematic reconstruction of each one of the six published novels, in chronological sequence. I will argue that Palahniuk is not trying to write the "great American novel," although he is profiling himself as a quintessential "American" writer in the midst of post–Cold War megalomania and celebrated Pax Americana. He has taken on a culture that has become so gargantuan, [End Page 394] fragmented, and differentiated but at the same time so rich, so self-reflexive, so historicized and also so mimicked that one novel cannot tell its story in one narrative with one dramatic thread. Many novels, many short cuts, many vignettes, are necessary: one polyphonic, asynchronous, temporally bi-directional, hyper-textual, and cyber-encyclopedic novel made up of individual novels, where each novel is the Bildungsroman of an American hero but told in reverse. These heroes, I will argue, are testimonies to the resilient power of individuals to resist even the most invasive and persistent onslaughts by culture on the physic life of freedom and individuality. I will also argue that he is neither a commercial nor academic writer; that is, he is not the kind of writer who writes either in order to maintain a living or secure tenure. He is a writer with a mission, a vision, and a very distinctive style. The stories that Palahniuk tells are stories that begin at the end, and end at the beginning: they are turned around Bildungsromans. They are, in other words, about unmaking, uncoupling, and disentangling our selves from the normal self into which we have been socialized. These stories are, thus, about the discovery of moral resources that lay dormant in the very simplicity of human solidarity and trust in our will to survive morally untainted, or at least redeemable. I will conclude by arguing that Palahniuk's novels are about surviving American Culture, and about how deviance is the health of the individual in a sick society.One could characterize Fight Club as the intelligent man's response to Robert Bly's Iron John (1990),2 or the fictionalized version of the Michael Kimmel's Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1996).3 Alternatively, one could argue that Fight Club is the fin-de-sieclé response to Barbara Ehrenreich's prognosis in her The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (1983) of 1970s and 1980s narcissistic and hedonistic masculinity.4 Chuck Palahniuk's first novel is a biting and poignant look at men in American culture after the end of affluence and the simultaneous "feminization" of masculinity. It is at the same time about the struggle for a viable sense of masculinity in an age in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Task of the Name: A Reply to Carol PosterJason HelmsIn the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows.—Walter Benjamin, Arcades N1, 1 (1999)Logos, in whose lighting they come and go, remains concealed from them, and forgotten.—Martin Heidegger, “Aletheia” (1975, 122)One of the first things learned in the most rudimentary attempt at stargazing (...) is that the utmost effort must be paid in neglecting to gaze at stars. Instead, one must gaze near them. Owing to the physiological organization of the eye, night vision is enhanced toward the periphery of vision rather than the center. Consequently, one can actually perceive one’s own lack of perception by staring at a star, finding it disappear, and then staring near the star only to see it reappear. What follows, in this light or darkness or tension of these two extremes, is not empirical in any sense of the word, which is given to its own extremes. Rather, I hope through various a/(i)llusions and sidelong tangents to glance offthe surface of my target. As you may guess, superficial puns—like star(e)—provide one of the most reflective surfaces offof which to bounce/riff. [End Page 278]Carol Poster’s recent article, “The Task of the Bow: Heraclitus’ Rhetorical Critique of Epic Language” (2006), provides much fruitful ground for a rhetorical critique of Heraclitus and a Heraclitean critique of rhetoric—many surfaces offof which to glance. However, her analysis is often in a decidedly unharmonious tension with itself. Accordingly, this essay constitutes an attempt to tune by ear. In the course of this response I will outline at which points I diverge from her argument, offering my own listening relation to, and consequently my own reading of, Heraclitus, and propose alternative, but perhaps corrective, views of Heraclitus’s relation to the Logos and his practiced rhetorics. Let us first start at the end before proceeding through Poster’s argument.Poster’s ConclusionsAt the end of her article, Poster offers five conclusions that afford us now an ingress for her essay. For the sake of brevity (and, of course, clarity and sincerity) I have shortened them and added a sixth with which she concludes the article:1. Heraclitus focuses on the problem of correctness of names substantially before Prodicus and Protagoras.... Heraclitus thus prefigures two themes discussed more extensively by later writers. First, Heraclitus seems concerned with the art of what came to be called “orthoepeia” (the study of correctness of names) for which the sophists Prodicus and Protagoras later became famous. Second, he at least considers the possibility that one can learn something about the nature of things by examining the nonliteral senses of their names, a position that is articulated in its most extreme form by the Heraclitean Cratylus in Plato’s dialogue of that name.2. Heraclitus is an early example of logos philosopher, in the Gadamerian sense, in that he believes that investigation of language can provide information that is not exclusively or trivially linguistic. He is an early example of the “linguistic turn” in Greek thought.3. For Heraclitus, the instability of language is part of a radical instability of the world. Since things change too quickly to be examined, their stable names are all that is available for investigation. While surfaces change, hidden harmonies, which are both concealed and revealed in words, remain. And yet even names themselves, if temporally fixed, are still interpretively unstable. [End Page 279]4. Each positively attributed name or statement should be read two ways simultaneously in a sustained and irresolvable tension, literally and nonliterally, with the opposing figurative statement both contradicting and yet sustaining the literal one.5. These considerations lead Heraclitus, in his own prose, to a constant tension between rejection of epic vocabulary and ideas as inaccurate and frequent use of them; even when Homer and Hesiod are partially rejected, inquiry into them remains a valid means of investigation. Heraclitus does not simply suggest that epic should be entirely ignored in favor, for example, of direct examination of or experimentation on physical objects, nor purely internal (Cartesian... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:570 BOOK REVIEWS like reasonable rule for economic life. This effort is worthy of more attention than is possible here, but let it be noted that it must inevitably suffer the same fate as any ethical calculus: someone must decide for others what is their due and what is not. How much wealth, for example, makes for a concentration [of wealth] that would be " demonstrably detrimental to some (...) people's exercise of their generic rights "? His is ultimately an entitlement or rights ethic, rather than an aitial ethic of goal-purposive fulfillment for the individual, projected outwards for a common good scenario. While his rejection of goal ethics's inability to detail principles for distribution of goods is noteworthy, it does not appear that a tightened version of generic rights theory will come closer to either of Phillips's desiderata: a justification of moral reasoning apart from any theory of nature or a calculus for its application. Desan and Phillips wish to think against the limits of the human situation. For Desan, rising above limitation is a moral task and obligation facing us each, if there is to be a common future. His call is to be World Citizen in a Polis of Nations. Phillips's vision is more concrete, a distribution of benefits to benefit all with well-being and freedom. But this mundane task is no less difficult than Desan's transcendent one. Indeed, according to Augustine, even the Divine Mind must utilize an artifice in dealing with human creation: "He loves each of us as though there were only one of us." Both ethicists have striven to show us how we might think this vision for ourselves, i.e., for each other of us. ]OIIN B. DAVIS, O.P. ' Detroit, Michigan Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans: Seventeenth-Century Essays. By HUGH TREVOR-ROPER. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. Pp. xiii + 317. $27.50 (hardbound). Even to list the changes and events which occurred in seventeenth century England is a difficult task: the century spans the period from the death of Queen Elizabeth to the Glorious Revolution and beyond, through the Civil War, the accession and exile (twice) of the Stuarts, the rise of science, the transformation of the theological and religious issues of the English Reformation, to name only the most obvious. To conceive a book, in the form of occasional essays, which not only addresses these changes and events but does so by establishing the connections which were present with European currents at the same time surely tempts fate, even when it does not tempt reviewers. BOOK REVIEWS 571 But Hugh Trevor-Roper is a master, both of the period under survey and of the form of the essay. With one exception, each of these essays began as a lecture or seminar paper, and the pleasantly legible style in which they are written must bear some trace of that origin. The occasional flashes of wit, mixed with rthe fairly non-technical style, make the book a joy to read and a welcome escape from the usually constipated style of scholarly prose. In his Introduction, the essayist clearly sets forth his thesis that English intellectual history does not exist apart from the currents of European intellectual history (a thesis for which Trevor-Roper has already staked a claim). That leads to what may very well be the major problem with these essays: its end is in its beginning. The list of names cited in these essays only partially coincides with the list of names in the index; the former is much longer than the latter. And while the style of the essay welcomes the reader to the period, it also throws up more names and places and events than can be explained or even annotated adequately. This occurs both on a large and on a small scale. The first essay, on "Nicholas Hill, the English Atomist" contains such a vast array of names that at times it becomes the prosopo· graphical equivalent of a telephone book. On a large scale, there is the problem with a definition of Arminianism. No definition, at least no formal definition, is attempted-and this is probably wise. But, particularly in... (shrink)

In his book Beyond Art, Dominic McIver Lopes presents a multitude of arguments about main problems in the philosophy of art but centred on the problem of defining what is art and what is a work of art. He argues for “buck passing” theory of art. According to this theory, the task is passed to philosophical theories which, first, have to find necessary and sufficient conditions, or at least, some non-trivial conditions what makes each kind of art exactly (...) that kind of art. It has a form: “X is a work of art if and only if X is a work of K, where K is an art”. Lopes offers support for his theory through many arguments around problems of aesthetic appreciation, aesthetic properties, value, appreciative kinds and practices, media used in various artforms, etc. He tries to show that theory is more viable and more informative than its competitors. I present and critically assess some of the claims from the book; it seems that, according to a form of the theory, we can do without the concept of “art” altogether. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.3 (2002) 285-286 [Access article in PDF] Depersonalization and Feelings of Unreality:Significant Symptoms With a Variety of Meanings Kjell Modigh Evaluations and diagnostic procedures in clinical psychiatry depend mainly on how the patient communicates his or her subjective experiences and on the psychiatrist's ability to understand that message. This is critical not only for understanding and offering proper treatment, but also for developing diagnostic classifications. (...) Hence the paper by Radovic and Radovic deals with an important topic, aiming to clarify the variety of meanings of the closely related terms unreality and depersonalization. The latter occurs as a symptom in connection to some psychiatric disorder and also constitutes a separate syndromeI agree with the authors that the rather intense renewing of the diagnostic criteria is seldom balanced by corresponding ambitions to analyze and improve the distinctness of the words for the experiences and symptoms which define the diagnoses.It is indeed a difficult task to demarcate what should be included in the concepts feelings of unreality and depersonalization and even to decide whether they are synonyms or distinguishable. There is at least one clear agreement in the different diagnostic systems: psychotic, delusional experiences are excluded. The border between unreality feelings with largely intact reality-testing ability and psychotic disorders with grossly disturbed reality-testing is, however, not absolute and patients with psychotic disorders may of course experience feelings of unreality or depersonalizationThe authors present a useful scheme by which different meanings of derealization are separated and that also points out the differences between depersonalization and derealization, although they are mutually dependant. Category (a), which come closest to depersonalization, includes experiences related to the self, whereas category (c) refers to impressions that the external world is unreal. Category (b), in their scheme, refers to altered bodily sensations: "the body part of the self" (Are there any body parts of the self? Perhaps all psychoanalysts would not agree).In my view, this scheme is useful and corresponds to clinical realities. Symptoms belonging to category (a) can, for instance, occur in affective disorders of almost psychotic depth, due to a [End Page 285] pathologically changed self-esteem. Symptoms belonging to category (b)—experiences of having moved outside one's own body—mainly belong to the diagnostic category dissociative disorders and can be understood as defense reactions to earlier traumatic experiences. The self escaped from the body during repeated experiences of sexual abuse. The diagnosis of depersonalization disorder consequentlybelongs to the group of dissociative disorders. Conditions where the outer world seems unreal (category [c]) can occur when the amount of internal stimuli is increased beyond what is possible to handle and therefore the capacity to recognize the environment is limited. So is the case in severe panic anxiety. Feelings of unreality as part of grief reactions may also belong, at least partly, to category (c): when dramatic and emotionally unacceptable events occur in the environment. As the authors point out, expressions of unreality feelings during grief more often can be understood as metaphors or existential reflections. In conclusion, categories -(a) and (c) can serve to separate depersonalization experiences with different psychopathologic origin, although they are closely related.As a second step, the authors examine how the terms unreal and feels unreal can be understood. Two interpretations of unreal, "nonexistent" and "artificial," have high psychiatric relevance; a third meaning, relating to "quality," mainly has linguistic connections to the experiences on unreality and depersonalization. The word feels communicates the experience of something that appears unreal although the subject has an intact ability of reality testing.The authors propose an additional interpretation, which they describe as a quasisensory experience. They give the example that dreams with unrealistic contents in some meaning, probably related to their intensity, appear "real." A further connection to dreams is that a situation, when awake, may have dreamlike qualities because of intensity or similarities to fragments of dreams. Events that occur in an unusual sequences, for example, corresponding to ones aims and wishes ("to good to be true") perhaps have similarities to dreamlike experiences. One may... (shrink)

Technological imagination and actual technological achievements have always been two very different things. Sudden and unpredictable events always seem to intervene between our visions regarding possible futures and the subsequent concrete realizations. Thus, our ideas and projects are continually being redirected. In the field of naturoids—that is, artificial systems designed to simulate certain features of natural ones—the above-mentioned tendency is particularly frequent and illuminating, giving all prophecies a flavor of fiction rather than of reliable technological forecast. The dream of (...) reproducing complete natural systems—man included—by means of technological strategies clashes with the “nature” of artificial objects and also with that of natural exemplars. The only certainty is that the future will exhibit growing rates of variety and heterogeneity, and we cannot know, from our present standpoint, what this will imply for our species, or, at least, for our cultures. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.3 (2003) 277-300 [Access article in PDF] Toward a Fragmatics, or Improvisionary Histories of Rhetoric, the Eternally Ad Hoc Cornelia Wells "Even historical truths are on the move, or truth is not the question." —my self "We don't / know much, and are / professors of it." —from Heather McHugh, "Professional Hazard," in McHugh (1987) In writing a history of rhetoric, we might want to know (...) before anything else both what rhetoric is and why we should care to be writing about it. Or we might begin with a notion of or motive for history or, more precisely, for doing or writing (a) history or histories (as opposed of course to History with a capital H, History proper, the "true whole" story and nothing else) of, specifically, rhetoric. 1 Or we might begin with a notion of subjectivity, of who this we is that concerns itself with this writing activity. Or we might focus on the writing itself, asking the question What is writing? or Who can do it? or What can it do? or What is it about? all of which may be much like answering or debating similar questions frequently asked about/of/through rhetoric. Indeed, rhetoric and writing, rhetoric and discourse, tend to be confused, or ecstatically intermingled, terms.Or fixating, as history so frequently does, on the oxymoronic notion of "final" origins, which function backward(ly) as destinations, we might begin with the question/justification of where or when rhetoric itself geographically/historically began and therefore establish the "proper" beginning place for our story of rhetoric to start. But as the contemporary poet Heather McHugh suggests, "where" may be "a narrow inquiry," and also when, for something always came before and generally from somewhere else, so that, ultimately, when and where never can be finally arrived at. 2 So we might, and probably will, follow the indirection or dereliction (as [End Page 277] opposed to direction) of the goddess Dike to Parmenides: "It is all one to me where I begin, for I shall return again." 3 Like Robert Frost, however, I doubt if I shall ever come back. Or not by the same road, believing with Heraclitus, "One cannot step twice into the same river" (or, perhaps less obviously, twice onto the same road) and that anyway it is "weariness to toil at the same tasks and be always beginning," at least beginning in the same place(s) (1979, Fragments LI and LIII). As they commonly say in Australia, a change is as good as a holiday. And anyway change arrives inevitably.So we may as well (as well as not) change our mind and change our route before it changes itself or us. We may as well turn away, before returning, pause from thinking about writing this particular history of rhetoric, about how or where or why to begin such a task in the "first" place (as if we have never previously occupied any other task or place), and consider instead some of the ways that histories of rhetoric have already been written or told or invented. But why should we make this turn? Well, for reconnaissance, I suppose. To get the lay of the land. To see the other side of the mountain. To show we've done our research. Or because a discipline demands continual recounting. To remain intact or stay in touch. Or for auld lang syne. Or so that improvisionarily, at least, "we shall have agreement on [']known['] premises, and the pursuit of further knowledge" (Rorty 1984, 67). Or to take stock. To see what's missing (as if we could say when the universe is full). Or to justify a point of departure. Or a point of entry into a conversation that preceded and therefore necessarily in some residual sense preempted or determined us. Or for just (only?) or unjust (not only?) cause. Or to establish ethos. Or just because. To show we "know." Auguring or augering (not arguing) a procedure Perhaps the best turn is to turn this essay, literally my attempted say, inside out... (shrink)

A System of philosophy, a comprehensive world-view, is a work of art, although it is also more than that. Already Plato described the philosopher as a poet, and Plato himself was a great poet as well as a great philosopher. In recent years Professor Alexander has explained, on various occasions, that there is artistry involved in all scientific and philosophic thought. They demand creative intellectual construction of a high order. In so far as this is true, as I believe it (...) is, it should be possible, sometimes at least, to contemplate a great system of philosophy as a work of art, to enjoy it in a spirit of detachment, above the noise and the tumult of conflicting personal convictions.It is more or less in this spirit that I propose on this occasion to deal with some of the fundamental ideas of Spinoza. That, I believe, is in accordance with his own wishes. He wanted his works to be published anonymously, so that his philosophy might be considered impersonally, entirely on its own merits. Such a method of treatment may in any case be most suitable on this occasion when, in spite of probably great divergences in our individual views, we have come together to do honour to his memory. This kind of personal tribute may be contrary to his own wishes. But we owe it to ourselves, and to mankind at large, to keep alive the remembrance of one of the greatest masters of the art of high thinking and plain living. (shrink)

People of Socrates' time were frequently aghast at the questions he would ask. Their responses were of the sort elicited by very dumb or ex tremely obvious questions: "Don't you know? Everyone else does. " Socrates was hardly alone in his knack for asking such questions. Phi losophers have always asked peculiar questions most other people would never dream of asking, convinced as the latter are that the answers were settled long ago in the collective "wisdom" of society, including (...) ques tions about woman: should women be educated? should they rule socie ties? should they be subordinate in marriage? do women and men have the same virtues, or are there separate virtues for each? which of the dif ferences between women and men are conventional, and which are natu ral? is there a woman's work? do women and men have different types or degrees of rationality? Philosophers of the most diverse periods have raised these questions and their answers were often quite creative, not merely reflecting the conventions and mores of their societies. With the publication of this anthology, their writings will be brought together in a single volume for the first time. This anthology differs from others not just in its inclusiveness. It also contains several translations of material previously unavailable in English. (shrink)

The woman at the heart of Pearl Jam’s “Better Man” (Vitalogy, 1994) is trapped. She has committed herself to a relationship that makes her miserable, but she sees no viable alternative to staying in it. She mourns a past self who might have been able to leave and dreams of a dierent way things might be, but remains unable to move on. It is tempting to view her with a mixture of pity and frustration (reecting some of the personal circumstances (...) -- Eddie Vedder’s mother’s second marriage -- informing its composition). As a moral being, she appears to be hopelessly compromised by her situation, even as she is also doing her best to survive under conditions designed to undermine her autonomy and keep her trapped (as abusive relationships do). The song is not so much critical of her choice to stay as it is confused by and resigned to it. -/- What keeps a person where she so clearly does not want to be? -/- The song itself was, at least early in its recorded life for Pearl Jam, similarly compromised. Vedder appears to have thought of it as too “accessible”, too much of a pop hit for the kind of musical vision he had in mind either for Vs. (for which it had originally been intended) or for Vitalogy; by this point in the band’s career, he was ever more actively resisting success, accessibility, and everything that went with the version of rock star life imposed collectively on the band and on him as an individual. The form that resistance took was an exercise of artistic and other forms of control, sometimes exercised in ways that were destructive or damaging (to the band and its internal relationships, its fame or success, its image, its artistic identity, etc.). -/- What keeps an artist or a band where they so clearly do not want to be? In this chapter, I oer a loose exploration of some possible philosophical approaches to answering the question of what keeps us where we are, like it or not, worked out in parallel through the lyrics of “Better Man” and the circumstances of the song’s eventual arrival Vitalogy. My main interest is in examining the ethical dimensions of the question itself -- what, if anything, are we morally required or expected to do under compromised or compromising conditions? My main suggestion is that answering the question might require of us a messier, more ambivalent, and perhaps more compassionate notion of moral agency, inspired by Simone Weil’s work on affliction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Logic of the SiteAlain Badiou (bio)Translated by Steve Corcoran (bio) and Bruno Bosteels (bio)The Commune Is a Site 1. Ontology of the CommuneTake any world whatsoever. A multiple that is an object of this world—whose elements are indexed by the transcendental of this world—is a site, if it happens to count itself within the referential field of its own indexation. Or again: a site is a multiple that happens (...) to behave in the world with regard to itself as with regard to its elements, in such a way as to be the support of being of its own appearance.Even if the idea is still obscure, we can begin to see its content: a site is a singularity, because it convokes its being in the appearing of its own multiple composition. It makes itself, in the world, the being-there of its being. Among other consequences, the site gives itself an intensity of existence. A site is a being that happens to exist by itself.We will ask: can we give a more concrete idea of what a site is? Is there a site?Let us consider the world "Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870." We are in the month of March 1871. After a semblance of resistance, and shot through with fear of revolutionary and worker Paris, the interim government of bourgeois "Republicans" capitulates to Bismarck's Prussians. In order to consolidate this political "victory"—very comparable to Petain's reactionary revenge in 1940 (where preferring an arrangement with the external enemy to exposure to the internal enemy)—it has an assembly with a royalist majority hastily elected by a frightened rural world, an assembly that sits in Bordeaux.Led by Thiers, the government hopes to take advantage of the circumstances to annihilate the political capacity of the workers. But on the Parisian front, the proletariat is armed in the form of a National Guard, owing to its having been mobilized during the siege on Paris. In theory the Parisian proletariat has many hundreds of cannons at its disposition. The "military" organism of the Parisians is the Central Committee, at which assemble the delegates of the various battalions of the National Guard, battalions [End Page 141] that are in turn linked to the great working-class quartiers of Paris—Montmartre, Belleville, and so forth.Thus we have a divided world whose logical organization—what in philosophical jargon could be called its transcendental organisation—reconciles intensities of political existence according to two sets of antagonistic criteria. Concerning the representative, electoral, and legal dispositions, one cannot but observe the preeminence of the Assembly of traditionalist Rurals,1 Thiers's capitulard government, and the officers of the regular army, who, having been licked without much of a fight by the Prussian soldiers, dream of doing battle with the Parisian workers. That is where the power is, especially as it is the only power recognized by the occupier. On the side of resistance, political intervention, and French revolutionary history, there is the fecund disorder of Parisian worker organizations, which intermingles with the Central Committee of the twenty quartiers, the Federation of Syndicate Chambers, a few members of the International, local military committees. In truth, the historical consistency of this world, which had been separated and disbanded [délié] owing to the war, is held together only by the majority conviction that no kind of worker capability for government exists. For the vast majority of people, including often the workers themselves, the politicized workers of Paris are simply incomprehensible. These workers are the inexistent aspect [l'inexistant propre] of the term "political capacity" in the uncertain world of the spring of 1871. But for the bourgeoisie they are still too existent, at least physically. The government receives threats from the stock exchange of this sort: "You will never have financial operations if you do not get rid of these reprobates." First up then, an imperative task, and a seemingly easy one to carry out: disarm the workers and, in particular, recuperate the cannons spread throughout working-class Paris by the military committees of the National Guard. It is this initiative that will make... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"WITH A ROD OR IN THE SPIRIT OF LOVE AND GENTLENESS?" PAUL AND THE RHETORIC OF EXPULSION IN 1 CORINTHIANS 5 Dizdar Drasko Australian Catholic University II "n 1 Corinthians 5 Paul is dealing with a serious case of sexual.misconduct. He is understood to be urging the expulsion ofa member of the church for incest. Incest is, of course, a serious sexual crime, universally abhorred and prohibited. It has (...) the potential to cause much harm to a community. Not only does it bring disrepute to any who are accused of it, but also to any who appear to condone it. It is scandalous: a cause or at least a symptom—of deep social disease, division, and even disintegration. That Paul should urge—indeed, command—the immediate and uncompromising expulsion ofthe incestuous evildoer, without even the hint of any kind of due process of inquiry and trial for the accused, seems obvious. Does it? To whom? And why? This article will reread 1 Cor 5 as part of Paul's response to what he saw as the attempt ofthe divided Corinthian community (see 1 Cor 1:10-13, 11:18, 2 Cor 10- 13) to regain its lost unity in the only way it knew how: by cleansing itself of undesirable elements among their number and thereby re-establishing harmony by means of the tried and true method, the scapegoat mechanism. The main thesis ofthis article is that Paul, far from joining in a bit of classical scapegoating, shows it up for what it is: puffed up arrogance, or "inflation." as he calls it (5:2), and a blind mimicking of the very sacrificial system the Corinthians, as "spiritual people" (see 1 Cor 3:1), so self-righteously think they are above. Since this article is methodologically informed by the work ofthe literary critic and cultural theorist René Girard, our preliminary task will 1 62Dizdar Drasko be to outline his method, establishing aworking hermeneutical context. We will focus on five key ideas in Girardian theory that have immediate relevance for our reading of 1 Cor 5, namely: the mimetic nature ofdesire; the often resulting rivalry and conflict; the role of scandal; the accusatory principle; and the scapegoat mechanism ofthe sacrificial system. We then need to establish the textual context that precedes 1 Cor 5 by offering a brief summary ofthe letter leading up to the text under discussion. That will enable us to engage in a close rereading ofthe said passage, for which our main exegetical dialogue partner will be the recent commentary on First Corinthians by Raymond F. Collins. Desire's Double-Bind: Mimesis, Rivalry, and the Victim The important anthropological role??mimesis, or imitation, goes back to the Greeks. Aristotle noted in his Poetics (1448b, 4-10) that the greater human capacity for imitation is what distinguishes humanity from all other animals. By imitation we acquire not only language, and therefore the ability to reason, but our very sense of self in and through our relationship to the rest ofthe world: in short, personhood and culture (see Alison 1990, 18-21.). How? Given the current climate of individualism, it comes as something ofa surprise to hear the claim that it is through the imitation of another's desire. According to Girard, our desires are neither original nor spontaneous to us; they are learned by imitating the desires of others.1 Human beings are intrinsically mimetic, imitating one another's desire. This leadsto rivalry. Mimetic rivalry leads to conflict, which, ifunchecked, degenerates into an all-against-all violence. This, in turn, threatens the complete disintegration ofthe group. So a problem arises: how is order (cosmos) to be re-established out of chaos? Once humans had evolved beyond the submission/domination mechanism (that still works for the other higher primates), our primal ancestors were in real danger of"species 1 A word of clarification before we proceed to explore this claim in the hope of averting a simple misunderstanding: desire is not to be confused with appetite They are related, obviously; but they are not the same. What is the difference? At the risk ofover-simplifying, simply put: appetite is about needs; desire is about wants. Needs are instinctive, automatic... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 327 Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion: A Contemporary Theodicy. By WENDY FARLEY. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990. 150 pp. Wendy Farley sets herself an ambitious task in her book. She is dissatisfied with past theodicies, which account for evil and suffering as punishment for sin, as counterpoints in a larger aesthetic cosmic harmony, as means of purification and formation of character, or something that (...) will be as compensated for by other-worldly vindication and reward. These four theories may explain some forms of evil and suffering, but in the face of " radical suffering " they are " unable to exorcise the demons that whisper that life is futile, suffering is meaningless, and the cosmos an empty and evil void " (p. 22). By " radical suffering " Farley means that kind of suffering which debases and destroys the human dignity of the sufferer: " Radical suffering pinches the spirit of the sufferer, numbing it and diminishing its range. The distinctiveness of radical suffering does not lie in its intensity or its injustice but its power over the sufferer" (p. 54). Radical suffering drives the person to self-loathing and despair and therefore destroys her or his capacity to resist it. Despite its massive destructive power radical suffering is not rare; it occurs in familial, cultural, poli· tical, and economic relations under the forms of, e.g., child abuse, sexism, racism, violation of human rights, poverty, and starvation. To account for radical suffering, Farley proposes that (a) one place suffering rather than sin at the center of the problem of evil; (b) one replace the notion of a primordial fall with that of tragedy; (c) one repudiate the idea of divine omnipotence in favor of that of divine compassion (pp. 12-13). The second and third proposals are captured in the title of the book, " Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion." Farley's first proposal leads one to expect that she would do away with the notion of sin altogether, hut this is not the case. Strangely, she devotes a good deal of attention to sin, describing it as " catastrophic because it introduces chaos and disharmony into history " (p. 43). She sees sin as (self)-deception, callousness, bondage, and guilt (pp. 4451 ). Whereas traditional theology perceives a causal link between sin and suffering, the logic of Farley's alternative proposal entails her locating the origin of suffering elsewhere, namely, the tragic character of human existence: "... tragic vision locates the possihilirty of suffering in the conditions of existence and in the fragility of human freedom " (p. 29). A tragic vision of life does not, Farley claims, rationalize (radical) 3~8 BOOK REVIEWS suffering, nor is it atheistic. It recognizes, honestly and bluntly, that " the conditions of finite existence include conflict and fragility " (p. 31). Multiplicity ·and' variety enrich creation hut they inevitably lead to division and.separation; relationships warm the heart hut they must include some and exclude others; values sometimes conflict, such as mercy and justice; embodiment allows us to enjoy the pleasures of life but it leads to decay and death. Even human freedom, Farley points out, is infected with fragility caused by anxiety and desire: "Freedom is the tragic flaw of human existence, at once the stamp of its greatness and its destruction " ·(p. 37). What should one do in face of inevitable suffering? One must have compassion. Farley takes compassion to mean an enduring disposition horn of sympathetic knowledge of another person's suffering leading to love (which is a liberation from egocentrism that enables one to care for others) and working for justice (especially removing social in· justice). In contrast to dominating power, compassion empowers the sufferers to speak and act in their own defenses. It rejects the tempta· tion of passivity before evil and the use of violence to overthrow it. Rather, it empowers sufferers to resist evil. For Farley, God's power must he understood as compassion or love. As a noncoercive form of power, divine love (a) creates a tragic world in which radical suffering is inevitable and (b) because of suffering redeems it. Hence, divine compassion is both creative and redemptive. But why does God go through this seemingly redundant exercise? Why doesn't God create... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Capitalism in “Wealthy Hellas”? PETER W. ROSE Josiah ober has taken on the very ambitious task of analyzing a vast swath of ancient Greek history— precisely the periods—as his opening quotation from Byron (1) implies—most admired by those who have devoted any time to the study of Greek antiquity: Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth! Immortal, though no more! Though fallen, great!1 At the same time, again (...) as suggested by the repetition of Byron’s lines (206, also mentioned on 293), Ober’s book falls within the large category of celebratory works about ancient Greece—like Werner Jaeger’s once popular three volumes of Paideia or, at the outset of the twentieth century, Alfred Zimmern ’s The Greek Commonwealth.2 It does not, on the other hand, fit in with a plethora of relatively recent, relatively short (as opposed to George Grote’s twelve volumes) histories of Greece aimed at the potentially lucrative textbook market for general more comprehensive overviews of Greek civilization.3 As such, the basis on which Ober celebrates ancient Greece merits close scrutiny. history and the overriding thesis ober’s conception of “history” here is heavily weighted towards the theoretical elaboration and justification of an Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Princeton University Press 2015), hardback, 415 pages. A truncated, arbitrarily reorganized version of this review appeared in New Left Review 103 (2017) 139–49. Thanks to Daniel Tompkins for full comments on an earlier version, and to Peter Green and Stephen Hodkinson for clarifications on specific points. arion 26.3 winter 2019 overriding thesis. Five initial chapters of a total of eleven are devoted to that task before five chronologically focused chapters, which offer a cursory romp through Greek history from ca. 1000 BCE to 334 BCE and some brief suggestions about the period down to the decisive takeover of Greece by Rome, usually dated to 31 BCE. The volume is capped by a final summary and overview chapter. Ober is admirably forthright about his agenda. Immediately in his preface he declares, “in states where citizens keep rulers in check, public authority protects individual rights and the rule of law pertains most of the time. These political conditions promote economic growth. The conjunction of democratic politics and a strong economy is, in practice, available only to affluent citizens of highly developed countries.... Democracy and growth define the normal, although not yet the usual, conditions of modernity” (xiii, my emphasis).4 This somewhat utopian conception of the present-day interface of democratic institutions and economic growth—posited as an unquestioned desideratum in sublime disregard of “ecology” in the literal sense5—underlies Ober’s whole project. While acknowledging the obvious negatives of ancient slavery,6 “denial of rights to women, and glorified war,” he argues “if we are interested in the conjunction of political and economic exceptionalism, we must start somewhere, and classical Greece was the society in which the wealth-and-democracy package first emerged in a form that can be studied in depth” (xv). Athenian democracy has been at the center of Ober’s impressive scholarly career at least since the publication of his study of fourth-century BCE Athenian rhetoric, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (Princeton 1989). “Athens” or “democracy” have featured in the titles of all his subsequent book publications7—not to mention the extraordinary output of more specialized essays in multiple venues. One overriding question about his latest book is whether the unique phenomenon of Athenian democracy is being unduly generalized to “Classical Greece.” 142 capitalism in “wealthy hellas”? The special focus of his interest here in ancient Greece, the “conjunction of political and economic exceptionalism,” is further clarified in his opening chapter which begins with the quotation from Byron cited above: “Byron’s vision of greatness was inspired by ancient Greek cultural and intellectual achievement: art and architecture, literature, visual and performance art, scientific and moral thought.... Hellas was great because of a cultural accomplishment that was supported by sustained economic growth. That growth was made possible by a distinctive approach to politics” (1–2). Greek cultural achievements, however, are bracketed (and in practical terms dismissed)8 in favor of the “wealth-anddemocracy... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Bridge From Analysis to Action:Psychodynamic Analyses of Religion and Michael S. Hogue's American ImmanenceAJ Turner (bio)I. IntroductionThe purpose of this essay is to work constructively with Michael S. Hogue's groundbreaking American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World to demonstrate how psychodynamic analyses of religion are essential theoretical allies in the fight for resilient democracy. The "revolution in mind"1 that psychodynamic approaches contribute, especially in their analyses of religion, (...) both complements and complicates socio-political theory as a whole. In the improvisational spirit of "yes-and," the goal here is not to identify and decry the failures and shortcomings of Hogue's theopolitical vision but rather to inspire the recovery of a sibling discourse—a kind of "rebirth of a forgotten alternative"2—that also draws deeply from the American immanental tradition in order to add psychodynamic depth to Hogue's timely and important analysis. Psychodynamic theories of religion shed light on how symbolic identifications, including and especially ultimate concerns, structure personal and collective experience. By engaging religion and theology sympathetically, constructively, and creatively, theorists such as Rollo May, Gordon Allport, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and Ernest Becker departed from the skepticism, reductionism, and dismissal that characterized psychoanalytic analyses of religion in the wake of Freud.3 Each of these figures, and especially Becker whose work will be a focus in this essay, are noteworthy interlocutors for extending Hogue's theopolitical theorizing of resilient democracy, particularly in how they drew unique inspiration from the American immanental tradition [End Page 44] in their social analyses. In this respect, they provide a more robust theorization of the psychosocial conditions of the associational ethos needed to connect Hogue's conception of resilient democracy with forms of agonistic organization and democratic activism. Briefly stated, psychodynamic approaches are a helpful bridge for connecting these proposals to strategies of organization, their impediments, and collective action.In this way, both psychodynamic analyses of religion and Hogue's theopolitical innovation insist that no revolutionary political change is possible, and certainly not of the kind or scale needed to counter our wickedly entangled global crises, without a deep engagement with theological imaginaries. They differ, however, in their theoretical aims. Whereas Hogue compellingly argues for the political upshot of a theology deriving from the American immanental tradition, psychodynamic analysts of religion focus on the function of ultimate concerns in individual and collective life. In other words, American Immanence rests on a methodology of analyzing the philosophical and theological assumptions that have contributed to our climate crises and then presenting clear and compelling articulation of an alternative paradigm meant to open up new ways of being. In contrast psychodynamic analyses leverage conceptual clarity of psychic reality for the fundamentally therapeutic aim of transformation. At their best, both approaches share what could be called an etiological orientation to ontological questions in order to provide liberative alternatives through rational understanding and clarification, but the terrain, and thus the problems they hope to mitigate in their analyses are focused differently. Extending the visual metaphor, they are different lenses highlighting different areas of the same landscape. Furthermore, it must be said that neither are sufficient in themselves, but the psychodynamic theorists of religion to be highlighted in this essay share deeply with Hogue's heading in American Immanence.II. A Problematic AssumptionIn emphasizing and attempting to explain4 the role of non-rational processes in the both individual and social processes of perception and organization of experience, psychodynamic theories confound a widely held and problematic assumption that the triumph of rational analysis is the hallmark for building the society to which we should aspire. Political theory in general, [End Page 45] especially as it has taken its cues from a rationalist legacy about the inherently liberating force of Reason, has been weighted toward an assumption that its task of exposing the mystifications of power would suffice in inspiring more "rational" and therefore necessarily equitable social organization. This speaks to the longstanding socio-political interest in "consciousness raising" tactics, which are often meant to dispel "false consciousness." It even comes across in the emphases of Deweyan pragmatists on education. Psychologists of all stripes point out that this approach... (shrink)

Under the title of ‘the axiom of existence’, hereafter, John R. Searle has reduced to compact dictum a view to which many philosophers subscribe: ‘Whatever is referred to must exist’. In this paper I shall offer two major arguments against adopting, at least on certain assumptions. There have been a number of defenses of, among them those arguing that it is fundamental to any systematic philosophy of language or logic. With the exception of discussing some of Searle's remarks in (...) part Ill of this paper I shall not comment on any of these defenses. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Melon and the Dictionary:Reflections on Descartes's DreamsAlan Gabbey and Robert E. HallThe interpretation of dreams is rarely answerable to either evidential or settled theoretical control. When the phantasms of the dreaming mind seem unaccountable, as they often do, they seem to belong to a mental world beyond the reach of historical, philosophical, or scientific analysis, a world for which the rules of methodological engagement seem inappropriate, rather than (...) merely impossible to observe. So in advance we ask the reader's indulgence if we appear somewhat to ignore the historian's normal duty to transmute favored speculations into well-argued conclusions based on solid evidence. We do have evidence to present, however, and indeed one or two conclusions that seem to us compelling. But if skeptics question their value, at least they will do so without envy, since they will not want to chase after our speculations on the Dreams—unless with the intention of chasing them and us out of the Cartesian arena altogether.Most of that arena is set aside for exegetical tussles with the respectable philosophizing of the Meditations, the Discourse on Method, and The Principles of Philosophy or The Passions of the Soul. But for some of the liveliest Cartesian games, you must move to that part of the arena where biographers, psychologists, psychoanalysts, and historians have fun with the "petit registre en parchemin," as the Stockholm Inventory describes it.1 This notebook contained [End Page 651] the twelve-page Olympica, in which Descartes recounted the three Dreams, announced his discovery of the foundations of "a wonderful science," and in the margin of the manuscript noted a year later his emerging understanding of "the foundation of a wonderful discovery." Later we'll rerun a few of the Olympian performances of previous interpreters, as preliminaries to a couple of our own interpretative games.First let us recall what happened on Saint Martin's Eve, the night of 10 November 1619, in Descartes's twenty-fourth year.2 In the days preceding that night Descartes's concern with the search for truth gave him much mental torment which the society of his friends could not dissipate. This tired him so much that his brain became inflamed: "he fell into a kind of enthusiasm, which left him in such a state that his depressed spirit was ready to receive dreams and visions." Retiring to bed "full of enthusiasm" from "having found that day the foundations of a wonderful science," Descartes (Baillet tells us) had three dreams "which he imagined could have come only from on high." In Dream I, while he was walking through the streets, his imagination was haunted by terrifying phantoms (fantômes). A severe disabling weakness in his right side forced him to bend over to his left so that he could continue toward his destination. Ashamed of walking in that way, he tried to straighten up, but a strong whirlwind spun him round three or four times on his left foot. Still more terrifying was the thought that he was falling at every step because of the difficulty in dragging himself through the streets.Then seeing a college with open gates, he entered, seeking relief from his afflictions, and intending to pray in the college chapel. But he had passed someone he knew without hailing him. He tried to return to greet him and was hurled back by the wind blowing against the chapel. At the same time he saw in the middle of the college courtyard another person who greeted him civilly by name, and told him that if he cared to look for Monsieur N., "he had something to give him." "M. Descartes imagined that it was a melon that someone had brought from some foreign country." But even more surprising was the fact that those who gathered round him to talk were standing straight and firm on their feet, whereas he was still bent over and staggering about, even though the wind which had threatened several times to blow him over had now greatly abated. At this point he awoke to feel a pain that made him fear that all this was the [End Page 652] work of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.2 (2002) 153-174 [Access article in PDF] LSDNA: Rhetoric, Consciousness Expansion, and the Emergence of Biotechnology Richard Doyle I had to struggle to speak intelligibly. —Albert Hofmann on his self-experiment with LSD-25 Finding a place to start is of utmost importance. Natural DNA is a tractless coil, like an unwound and tangled audio tape on the floor of the car in the dark. —Kary Mullis on (...) the invention of Polymerase Chain Reaction 1. Undoing life What happened is this: Once upon a time there was a narrative of vitality. Ok, not a narrative, but an apprehension, a fear, a vision. It didn't have a beginning, middle, or end. It was. Its contours were no more determinable than those of consciousness. Indeed, our consciousness, as humans, was our sole alleged difference from it. From something called "life." We were more than life, but were also, tragically, confined to it. You know the story all too well. Some of its major authors were Cuvier, Lamarck, Darwin, Bichat. Even Shelley.Just because this sudden transformation happened on paper doesn't mean it was easy to endure. Enormous numbers of humans went on tranquilizers just to deal with the effects. Others, elsewhere, knew nothing but rumors. Nonetheless, they became increasingly implicated in its effects, the effects of understanding and experiencing both "life" and "consciousness" as informatic events. Suddenly—and it is sudden, a real surprise—both our vitality and our thought were distributed, scattered across a network and nowhere in particular. Timothy Leary and Francis Crick were speaking the same language, the language of information where the organic and the machinic enfold each other helically and, sometimes, the capacity for replication goes through the ceiling. This new language of information would [End Page 153] introduce a novel response and abyss: the pleasures and hells of eternal replication. The distribution of both life and consciousness enabled a dream of immortality from which we have not yet awakened, as the mere specter of infinite clonal replicants provokes entropies of identity even as it preserves the self from onslaughts of decay. 1In at least one of its characteristics this shift toward an informatic understanding of life is perhaps not really so novel. The seductions of control are hardly, historians of science tell us, foreign to the practices and effects of technoscience. Evelyn Fox Keller makes this point concisely and precisely in her not-quite eponymous essay, "From Secrets of Life to Secrets of Death," itself a self-professed sequel to her 1986 "Making Gender Visible." Here the scientific "impulse" is underwritten by a perennial motif that underlies much of scientific creativity, namely, the urge to fathom the secrets of nature and the collateral hope that, in fathoming the secrets of nature, we will fathom (and hence gain control of) our own mortality (Secrets, 29).Surely Keller is correct that the nascent practices of molecular biology were cryptographic in character, an espionage project unknowingly launched by Erwin Schrodinger during the Second World War. Surely it is crucial to this moment that while Schrodinger's 1943 Dublin lectures were introducing audiences to the concept of the code-script, Alan Turing again brilliantly decrypted a modified U-boat code, giving the Allies code superiority for the remainder of the war. 2 But in this segment on that strange growth called "biotechnology," I want to focus on what Keller has called the "collateral" of hope in this cryptographic impulse, namely the collateral equation between inquiry and control, specifically the control of mortality.For is "fathoming" a secret identical to the exercise of control? The very cadence and rhetorical encryption of Keller's formulation here, a general parenthetical syllogistic conclusion within and alongside a hyphenated invocation of particularity, suggest that concepts and practices of secrecy are more unstable than Keller implies with her invocation of Feynman's "disease" of lock picking: "One of my diseases, one of my things in life, is that anything that is secret, I try to undo" (40).For Keller, Feynman's confession is emblematic of a desire to control life and death... (shrink)

Human vision briefly retains a trace of a stimulus after it disappears. This trace—iconic memory—is often believed to be a surrogate for the original stimulus, a representational structure that can be used as if the original stimulus were still present. To investigate its nature, a flicker-search paradigm was developed that relied upon a full scan (rather than partial report) of its contents. Results show that for visual search it can indeed act as a surrogate, with little cost for alternating (...) between visible and iconic representations. However, the duration over which it can be used depends on the type of task: some tasks can use iconic memory for at least 240 ms, others for only about 190 ms, while others for no more than about 120 ms. The existence of these different limits suggests that iconic memory may have multiple layers, each corresponding to a particular level of the visual hierarchy. In this view, the inability to use a layer of iconic memory may reflect an inability to maintain feedback connections to the corresponding representation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HAPPINESS: THE NATURAL END OF MAN? KEVIN M. STALEY St. Anslem Oollege Manchester, New Hampshire I AONG THE QUESTIONS the philosopher considers, none perhaps ris more important than that of ' the good life.' This question looks for the distinguishing marks of a. life which is fully human and which constitutes the actualization of one's uniquely human potential. For the ancient philosophers, such a life was considered the highest (...) good that one could achieve, the end and the raison d' etre of one's activity. This end was known as happiness. As a Christian theologian well versed in the writings of the ancients, Thomas Aquinas also had occasion to reflect on the nature of happiness. His inquiry possessed a dimension which was completely lacking to the ancients, namely, the belief that man is destined to enjoy the ' face to face ' vision of God. Thomas left no doubt that this, man's most ultimate end, was to be possessed after death through the gifts of grace. On the other hand, in his Sententia Libri Ethicorum he gives Aristotle his due, commenting with approval on many 0£ Aristotle's conclusions. In his discussion of happiness in the Summa Theo~ logiae, one can also find the Philosopher's doctrine of happiness, here distinguished from ·supernatural beatitude as imperfect from perfect beatitude. Are we to assume then that inquiry rinto the nature of happiness is twofold, admitting of a. theological and philosophical dimension? A philosopher would, on this showing, be concerned ·with the natural, albeit imperfect, end and the theologian with the supernatural end of man. Many philosophers within the Thomistic tradition have ~15 216 KEVIN M. STALEY been comfortable with this assumption. Recently, for example, John Finnis has stated, St. Thomas very plainly says, the task of ' considering and determining the ultimate end of human life and human affairs' belongs to the principle practical science; Aristotle called it ethics and Thomas moral philosophy.1 Others do not share Finnis' confidence in this regard. Alan Dona.gan, for example,,argues to the contrary that Thomas' final word on the end of man was that Aristotle was simply mistaken. According to Donagan, Thomas saved Aristotle's thesis that the ultimate end of human life is eudaimonia by two drastic amendments. First, he reinterpreted eudaimonia as what he called beatitudo: the total satisfaction of desires of an intellectual creature by a vision of God's essence.... Secondly, he denied that human beings could either attain beatitudo, or even learn what it really is, except by grace.2 If Donagan is correct, then the philosopher is clearly not competent to discuss the end o£ man, since the consideration of supernatural beatitude lies beyond the power of unaided.reason. Finnis recognizes the distinction between perfect and imperfect beatitude, and his position need only entail that it is the latter which is the concern of philosophy proper. However, although the notion of 'imperfect beatitude' served well Thomas' purpose of integrating the thought of the Philosopher within the framework of Christian theology, the fact remains that Thomas did not disengage this notion from its theological context. That is rto say, he did not carry out 'an explicit treatment of imperfect beatitude as the natural end of man. In itself, this need not imply that such an inquiry is impossible or ill-conceived. Nevertheless, the notion of ' imperfect beatitude ' (construed as some sort of natural end of man 1" Practical Reasoning, Human Goods, and the End of Man", Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Society, v. 58, 1984, p. 26. 2 Human lilnds and Human Actions (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1985), p. 38. HAPPINESS: THE NATURAL END OF MAN? 217 amenable to philosophical treatment), is still quite problematic ; and Finnis himself has recognized the difficulty. Happiness signified, even for Aristotle, a good which is perfect and in every way final.3 Finnis observes that "the 'perfect,' the 'fully satisfactory,' is what the concept of eudaimooia /bemitudo is about; an 'imperfect beatitude' is, by definition, a state which is not ' adequate to the aspira.tion of human nature '." 4 Thus, the very concept of ' imperfect happiness ' appears at best to be paradoxical, at worst self-contradictory -at least to the philosopher. This... (shrink)

The academic community in the West tends to be suspicious of Russian philosophy, often relegating it to another category, such as “ideology” or “social thought.” But what is philosophy? There is no simple universal definition, and many thinkers consider it impossible to formulate one. The most credible attempt is nominalistic: philosophy is the practice in which Plato and Aristotle were involved. As Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a (...) series of footnotes to Plato.”If so, then Russian thought needs to be understood as an important part of the Western philosophical heritage, given that it offers perhaps the most elaborate set of footnotes to Plato's most mature and comprehensive dialogues: the Republic and the Laws. The status of ideas in Russian philosophy mirrors Plato's vision of them as ontological and political entities, “laws,” or ideal principles—as distinct from mere epistemic units or tools of cognition. The Platonic tendency to integrate and implement religious, philosophical, and political teachings culminated in twentieth-century Russia. In the Soviet state, perhaps more than anywhere else in history, philosophy became a supreme legal and political institution, acquiring the power of a suprapersonal, universal reason. Hence thought itself, in the moment of its triumph, became a prisoner in the social structures that Soviet ideocracy erected on a philosophical foundation. In discussing Russian philosophy, we inevitably consider the practical application of Platonic conceptions by the Soviet ideocracy to a state in which philosophy was called upon to rule.According to Sergei Averintsev, the emphasis on Platonism in the Russian intellectual tradition is nothing to be proud of; it should rather be lamented and repented. Despite the obvious Platonic preferences of Russian thinkers (from Ivan Kireyevsky to Aleksei Losev), Averintsev asks whether even now we might be able to reorient the tradition toward Aristotle instead—toward a more secular, tolerant, and analytic philosophy of human nature. “If Plato is the first utopian,” Averintsev writes, “Aristotle is the first thinker to look the spirit of utopia right in the eye and overcome it.... Aristotle's technique of thought is more neutral toward religion than is Plato's ecstasy.” Characteristically, the name index to the Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought contains almost twice as many mentions of Plato as of Aristotle.Each national tradition has its own “strange attractor,” as they say now in complexity theory. English empiricism, French rationalism, German Idealism, American pragmatism... However stereotypical these generalizations are, they help to clarify the nations’ distinctive contributions to philosophy. Where does Russia stand in this row? I think that Caryl Emerson is correct to pinpoint, among the most distinctive features of the Russian intellectual tradition, the striving for “wholeness” (tselostnost’). Many Russian thinkers seem to evade definitive and particular “isms,” preferring to find ways of complementing (and thus diluting) those that are on offer. Faced with the claims for rationalism, for example, the Russian response tends to be that true rationality is or should be coupled with fullness of feeling. The characteristic Russian “ism” is at best “holism,” at worst “totalitarianism,” and is usually directed against Western thought. Kireyevsky declares: There [in the West] is a bifurcation [razdvoenie] of the spirit, a bifurcation of thoughts, a bifurcation of the sciences, a bifurcation of the state, a bifurcation of estates, a bifurcation of society, a bifurcation of family rights and duties, a bifurcation of morality and the heart.... In Russia, on the contrary, there is a predominant tendency toward the wholeness of the inner and the outer, of public and moral being.Vladimir Solovyov held that the goal of all knowledge was to comprehend “total unity” and to overcome all kinds of unilateralism, which he referred to as “abstract elements” (otvlechennye nachala). These one-sided elements included Realism, rationalism, empiricism, and positivism, all of which had been advanced by Western philosophical movements.Reading the Handbook, I was struck by how steadily, from one thinker to another, the concept of “unity” is reiterated in various synonyms and contexts: “all-unity,” “wholeness,” “totality,” “integrity,” “edinstvo,” “tsel'nost,’” “tselostnost,” “sobornost,” and so forth. Russian thinkers endeavor not to create something original and special but to unify everything that has already been done and known. Consider opponents, like the Slavophiles and Westernizers; take Petr Chaadaev and Vissarion Belinsky, Kireyevsky and Alexander Herzen, Dostoevsky and Solovyov—all are united by this “super-idea,” proclaiming its embodiment to be the all-embracing vocation of the Russian people. At the same time, they sharply reject all “private principles” and “trashy certainty” (Belinsky's driannaia opredelennost’)—anything that restricts and divides individuals or nations. All these forms of privacy and particularity must be overcome on the way to a universal whole that is even greater in scale than Western Catholicism. According to this logic of totality, we would be better off left with nothing than to be content with the particular and the limited. The first original Russian thinker, Chaadaev (1794–1856), makes the salto mortale of declaring Russia a country that has given nothing to the world, then proclaiming that Russia's destiny is to rise above the rest of the world and resolve all its contradictions. From nothing to everything: such are the philosophical foundations for the totalitarian aspiration of Russian thought, which eventually expressed itself in the revolutionary movements and communist experiments of the twentieth century.As is well known, Russian literature is considered in the West a far more powerful and original expression of philosophical ideas than Russian philosophy as such. Characteristically, then, almost half of the Handbook, its entire second part, is devoted to the dialogue of Russian philosophy with literature and art. As M. N. Forster remarks in the Handbook's concluding essay: “It is natural to wonder why this striking asymmetry between relatively modest achievements in pure philosophy and spectacularly high achievements in literature came about.” To the literary focus of Russian philosophy, we can add a political focus. At least a third of part one of the Handbook is devoted to Russian political and revolutionary philosophy, to Lenin and other Marxists, to Ivan Ilyin, and so on. In this context, both literature and politics assumed philosophical dimensions, often overshadowing philosophy itself.Bertrand Russell lamented that the system of philosophical categories in the West featured mostly nouns (being, consciousness, idea, matter, substance, and so forth), omitting adjectives, verbs, prefixes, and other parts of speech. This criticism should be applied to the category philosophy itself. Why the noun philosophy rather than the adjective philosophical, which can be applied to many areas of activity and creativity, including literature and politics?In Russian intellectual history, the philosophical, rather than philosophy, is the predominant category. The state, ideology, economics, politics and geopolitics, literature, art, warfare, space exploration—all these spheres in Russia and the USSR have been and remain abundantly philosophical, subordinated to certain philosophical tasks, though philosophy as such has never been as developed and sophisticated as in the West. As a discipline, Western philosophy “outsourced” itself to Russian disciples, leaving it to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Lenin and Trotsky, to test in literary and political practices a host of Western philosophical ideas, from those of Plato, Rousseau, and Hegel to those of Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche.Likewise, the verb to philosophize is used in ways unusual and awkward in the West. “It is characteristic of the Russian people to philosophize [filosofstvovat'],” as Nikolai Berdyaev observed: “An illiterate Russian peasant likes to pose questions of a philosophical nature—about the meaning of life, about God, about eternal life, about evil and untruth, about how to realize the Kingdom of God.” The philosophical and philosophizing, as attributes and actions of the state and society, overpowered philosophy as a noun—as an academic discipline, if you will. Russian philosophy has had a very modest impact on the West, but the impact of the philosophical has been immense. Nineteenth-century Russian literature influenced Western culture with its philosophical interrogations and existential dilemmas, just as, in the twentieth century, the USSR influenced the West with the philosophical ideas (Marxism, materialism, dialectics, collectivism, socialism, communism) that determined Soviet ideology, politics, and economics.In the USSR of the 1920 and 1930s, for instance, philosophy as an independent academic subject was in a subdued position, as a servant of party ideology. But, meanwhile, the sphere of the philosophical spread to such distant domains as theater (Stanislavsky), physiology (Pavlov), and agriculture (Michurin), with all such activities glorified and sponsored by the state as “philosophically correct”—as faithful to “materialism” and “Realism.” Paradoxically, in the quintessentially philosophical state that was the USSR, the state of philosophy, with the repression of all independent thought and thinkers, was miserable. The fateful and often disastrous originality of Russian philosophy consisted precisely in its dissemination to other areas, in an act of kenosis or self-transcendence that can be viewed both as an aggressive philosophical appropriation of politics, economics, ideology, and literature—and as philosophy's sacrificial devotion to the world beyond its professional boundaries.So there are three features that make Russian thought relevant and dangerous: its Platonic utopian aspiration; its spirit of totality; and its tendency to transcend the boundaries of academic philosophy and to philosophize society, politics, and life in general. Russian philosophy has not been as good at explaining the world as at changing it, sometimes ethically and poetically, sometimes violently and aggressively. Teachers and students of Russian culture should be deeply motivated to draw more attention to the philosophical in Russia and to raise its status in the Western academy. In my view, we would do better service to Russian philosophy if we are frank enough to qualify it as dangerous, sometimes very toxic and addictive, fraught with totalistic tendencies. This philosophy is the voice of the “underground,” both in the Dostoevskian and Leninist senses.At the same time, however, the antidotes concocted in the Russian metaphysical laboratory are of enormous value: the Russian versions of personalism, existentialism, secular and religious liberalism, neorationalism, culturology, conceptualism, and postmodernism. These movements, which counteract totalization, need to be studied precisely because they were cooked up and tested under the same extreme conditions in which the most dangerous intellectual poisons have been produced. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reconsidering Buster Keaton’s HeroinesBarbara E. SavedoffIt has become commonplace to acknowledge that art tends to reflect the prejudices and presuppositions of the age in which it is produced. Such acknowledgement can serve not only to place the prejudicial attitudes expressed by artists and authors in their proper context, it can also reassure us that we have avoided the same prejudices, or at least, that we have achieved a (...) greater awareness of and sensitivity to them. But we should not be too easily reassured by these thoughts of our own enlightened progress, for the prejudices that we think we discover in works of art may sometimes be of our own making.Prejudice is, at least in part, a problem of distorted perception. Freeing oneself of prejudice is thus not simply a matter of disposing of false beliefs; it requires new habits of perception—becoming able to see what one could not see before. Since habits of perception can be deeply ingrained, we may find it difficult to recognize their persistence. Therefore even as we attempt to repudiate prejudicial attitudes, we may find ourselves misled by their continuing distortion of our vision. This can lead not only to continuing bias on our part, it can also lead to unwarranted charges of bias against others. For instance, the distorted vision that can pervade our evaluation of people in real life can also pervade our evaluation of characters in films or novels. When this happens, we may unfairly charge the film or novel with the perpetuation of negative stereotypes. There are also other ways in which we may be misled by our own biases. For example, if we expect to find negative stereotypes in the products of a given age, this may lead us to see the stereotypes that we anticipate—whether they are really there or not. The work of art can thus become a mirror of our own prejudices and preconceptions. [End Page 77]This is, I believe, what has occurred with much of the criticism of the portrayal of women in Buster Keaton’s films. Critical essays, commentaries, and even film-schedule blurbs tend either to downplay the strengths of the heroines in his films or brand them unfairly as stupid and incompetent. This unjust characterization of the heroines has become an unquestioned myth planted early in the minds of Keaton’s audiences. For example, some prints of The General contain an “educational” introduction which, among other things, describes Annabelle as yet another one of Keaton’s scatter-brained heroines. 1 The audience is thus primed to see Keaton’s heroines in this light.In my discussion I will expose the gap between the myths surrounding Keaton’s heroines and the actual characterization of those heroines in the films. I will then explore possible explanations for the durability of the myths by looking at whether there is something about Keaton’s films that provokes these prejudicial readings.IKeaton’s short film, The Balloonatic, begins in an amusement park with the hero vainly pursuing one woman after another until he is finally given a black eye by a young woman he has annoyed with his attentions. Discouraged, he wanders over to watch the launching of a hot air balloon, where he is given a pennant to attach to its top. His task completed, he finds himself atop the runaway balloon. When his rash attempt to shoot a bird perched on the balloon brings him rapidly back down to earth, he discovers himself stranded in the wilderness.The hero quickly sets out to adapt to his wilderness environment, but he is thwarted in his efforts by his inexperience and incompetence in the role of outdoorsman. He tries to fish, but when he casts his line, he catches the hook on his pants. He then dams up a stream so that he can pick up the stranded fish, but unbeknownst to him, they fall through a hole in his creel as soon as he puts them in. When he finally does realize what is happening, his dam breaks and he is carried helplessly down stream by the rush of water. Later in the film, we see the hero trying to... (shrink)

In earlier work I wrestled with the question of the “ontological status” of organisms. It proved difficult to come to a clear decision, because there are many candidates for what such a status is or would be and of course many definitions of what organisms are. But what happens when we turn to theoretical projects “about” organisms that fall under the heading “organicist”? I first suggest that organicist projects have a problem: a combination of invoking Kant, or at least (...) a Kantian “regulative ideal,” usually presented as the epistemological component (or alternately, the complete overall vision) of a vision of organism – as instantiating natural purposes, as a type of “wholeWhole, wholes” distinct from a merely mechanistically specifiable set of parts, etc. – and a more ontological statement about the inherent or essential features of organisms, typically presented according to a combination of a “list of heroes” or “laundry list” of properties of organisms. This amounts to a category mistake. Other problems concern the too-strict oppositions between mechanism and organi(ci)sm, and symmetrical tendencies to “ontologize” (thus objectifying) properties of organisms and to “subjectify” them (turning them into philosophies of subjectivity). I don’t mean to suggest that no one should be an organicist or that Kant is a name that should be banished from civilized society. Rather, to borrow awkwardly from Sade, “organicists, one more effort!” if one wants a naturalistic, non-foundationalist concept of organicism, which is indeed quite active in recent theoretical biology, and which arguably was already alive in the organismic and even vitalist theories of thinkers like Goldstein and Canguilhem. (shrink)

Our eyes, bodies, and perspectives are constantly shifting as we observe the world. Despite this, we are very good at distinguishing between self-caused visual changes and changes in the environment: the world appears mostly stable despite our visual field moving around. This, it seems, also occurs when we are dreaming. As we visually investigate the dream environment, we track moving objects with our dream eyes, examine objects, and shift focus. These movements, research suggests, are reflected in the rapid (...) movements or saccades of our sleeping eyes. Do we really see the dream world in the same way that we see the real world? If we do, how could dreaming, usually assumed to be mind-generated hallucinations, replicate such an experience? This problem would be deflated if dreams are not hallucinations at all, but rather imagination, illusion or simply unrealistic. I argue that imagination and illusion views do not satisfactorily explain away the problem of vision and action in sleep. The imagination model is not a complete description of dreaming that is consistent with empirical research, and it is unlikely that the visual dream world is an illusion. Given that the dreaming visual experience is most likely active, hallucinatory, and at times a realistic world simulation, there are important implications for our understanding of visual perception and its relationship to movement. Evidence suggests that our dream eyes investigate the dream world as our waking eyes investigate the waking world. If changes to the unconsciously generated dream environment are perceived as external and unintentional while dream body movements are perceived as self-generated and intentional, current theory of visual perception may have to be expanded to account for how the dreaming mind generates a stable world in which we track and visually explore mind-generated objects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Encounters with Ovid: Gavin Douglas’s The Palis of Honoure and Derek Walcott’s “The Hotel Normandie Pool” CAROLE E. NEWLANDS In sixteenth-century Rome, humanist scholars of ancient material and religious culture were exploring the ruins and inscriptions of ancient Rome with a copy of Ovid’s Fasti in hand.1 In London at the same time, Shakespeare was entertaining audiences and inspiring other poets with plots and characters drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. (...) Reception studies of Ovid often focus on these great metropolitan centers. In this article, however, I will explore transformative encounters with Ovid by two poets living on the geographical margins: Gavin Douglas, the Scottish poet whose major work, the Eneados, completed in 1513, was the first translation of Virgil’s Aeneid in the British Isles, and Derek Walcott, the Caribbean Nobel-prize winning poet best known for his epic poem Omeros, published in 1990. As a poet of a small northern country that had fraught political and cultural relations with its much more populous neighbor, England, Douglas can be considered to some extent, like Walcott, within a postcolonial critical paradigm. For despite their stark differences in geographical locale and in period of time, these poets have significant commonalties. Both men were natives of places geographically distant from the major metropolitan center of London. Both were also classically learned poets. They thus shared anxieties relating to their temporal distance from Graeco-Roman culture as well as to their physical distance from the powerful English-language literary center of their day. And significantly, both Douglas and Walcott present transformative visions of Ovid in indiarion 26.3 winter 2019 vidual, early poems, The Palis of Honoure and “The Hotel Normandie Pool” respectively. These imagined but direct encounters with the Roman poet occur in poems before Douglas and Walcott composed the works for which they are chiefly known, in Douglas’s case the translation of the Aeneid, and in Walcott’s Omeros. Ovid appears in both the Palis of Honoure and “The Hotel Normandie Pool” initially, at least, as an outsider, a poet of exile, but not, however, as a self-pitying poet in decline or, as recent scholarship would have it, as a skilled manipulator of the tropes of poetic decline.2 Rather, in Douglas’s and Walcott’s poems Ovid is a figure who authorizes marginality as a vital source of poetic re-creation. As both insider and outsider Ovid can offer positive redirection to these authors whether within or beyond their geographical boundaries. Through their visions of Ovid, both Douglas and Walcott are offered the possibility of personal change and generic innovation. For each poet the encounter with Ovid is a form of poetic initiation that leads him to his more ambitious work in the heroic genre. gavin douglas’s THE PALIS OF HONOURE i will start with Gavin Douglas (c. 1474–1522). Douglas is generally classed as one of the “Makars,” a term used to refer to a cluster of brilliant, experimental Scottish poets of the late 15th and early 16th century. Among these were Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas, three poets who thrived under the rule of King James IV of Scotland, an active patron of the arts who sought to make his court a center of cultural excellence that would rival the English court.3 Douglas’s Palis of Honoure is a youthful, ambitious poem, composed in 1502, twelve years before his major achievement, his translation of the Aeneid.4 Dedicated to King James, The Palis comprises 2169 decasyllabic lines with several demanding rhyme schemes.5 It is written in a manner that combines the “aureate” style, that is elegant and Latinate, with down-to-earth Scottish vernacular 74 encounters with ovid diction and forms of expression, and it is also suffused with Ovidian myth and concepts.6 Its format derives from the medieval dream vision, a form employed notably, for instance, by Douglas’s famous English predecessor Chaucer.7 Scholars tend to find The Palis of Honoure less polished than Douglas’s mature work, the Eneados. Conor Leahy, however, describes the youthful poem as bold and dynamic: “In the hundred years following the death of Chaucer, no other dream vision... (shrink)

Unpleasant dreams occur much more frequently than many people realise. If one is a hedonistic utilitarian – or, at least, one thinks that dreams have positive or negative moral value in virtue of their experiential quality – then one has considerable reason to try to make such dreams more positive. Given it is possible to improve the quality of our dreams, we ought to be promoting and implementing currently available interventions that improve our dream experiences, and conducting research (...) to find new, more effective interventions. (shrink)

There is the famous anecdote about Freud: upon being reminded by a disciple that to smoke cigars is clearly a phallic activity, Freud, cigar in hand, is said to have responded, “Sometimes a good cigar is just a good cigar.” The anecdote demonstrates, it seems to me, a problematic central to psychoanalysis: the discipline which insists on transference and, perhaps even more significantly, on displacement as fundamental principles, ultimately must insist in turn on seeing everything as being “really” something else. (...) Such an ideology of metamorphosis is so much taken for granted that unlike the rest of the world, which generally has difficulty in being convinced that a pipe, for example, is not necessarily a pipe at all, psychoanalysis needs at times to remind itself, in a type of return to an adaequatio, that it is possible for a cigar really to be a cigar. Psychoanalysis, in other words, has not only an economy which is hydraulic , but has as well an economy of seepage: each apparent object, whether in dream, literature, or psychic narrative, splashes over onto at least one “something else.” Not only is there always a remainder, but the remainder generally proliferates, multiplies, from more than one quotient, such that the original “thing” in question becomes merely the agent for production. Its status as thing-in-the-world is easily lost.Such seepage has, of course, appeared almost everywhere. Psychoanalysis has infiltrated such diverse areas as literature , linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, history, feminism, psychology, archeology, neurology, to name some. And it is in the notion of “some,” perhaps, that lies the crux of the problem. For there is in psychoanalysis an overt conviction that it exists as the ultimate totality, of which everything else is a part. Not content to see itself as one in a number of enterprises, the psychoanalytic project has at its foundation a vision of itself as the meaning which will always lie in wait; the truth which lies covered by “the rest.” Jacques Derrida has, of course, pointed to this tendency. Psychoanalysis, he noted, wishes a peculiar logic for itself, one in which “the species would include the genus.”1 Moreover, says Derrida in the same essay, once psychoanalysis has discovered itself, what it then again proceeds to discover around it is always itself.2 What happens, then, is that psychoanalysis becomes a ubiquitous subject, assimilating every object into itself. But it is also a Subject which sees itself as omnipresent, omniscient, and without a center—precisely the terms in which God has been described. It is not then by chance that the unconscious is likened to a divinity: always present but revealing itself only obliquely and at privileged moments, the unconscious takes the place of the Judeo-Christian God. It is within every being, but inaccessible unless it “chooses” to manifest itself. And in a peculiar reversal of the notion of the partitive, psychoanalysis would have the unconscious reveal itself in fleeting moments and fragments, thereby suggesting its fullness and totality; and it would have “other” intellectual enterprises be only apparent totalities which are revealed through psychoanalysis alone to be “really” incomplete because they exist without recognizing the unconscious and its mother, psychoanalysis itself. 1. Jacques Derrida, “Graphesis,” “The Purveyor of Truth,” trans. Willis Dominggo et al., Yale French Studies 52 : 32.2. See the syllogism with which Derrida opens his “Purveyor of Truth,” p. 31. Part of what I am calling the “syllogism” appears at the beginning of Stephen Melville’s article in the present issue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Dialogic Interpretation of Hume's Dialogues William Lad Sessions For all ofits prominence in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of religion, Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion continues to provoke divergent readings, especially as regards its author's intentions and beliefs. Most writers today, following Norman Kemp Smith's masterful analysis, accept some version ofwhat I will call "the standard interpretation": Hume aimed to discredit religion—natural and revealed religion alike, but especially the "experimental (...) theism" represented by Cleanthes' so-called "design argument." Hence, the sceptic "Philo represents Hume's views onreligiousbelief,"even though Cleanthes (occasionally) and Demea(rarely) also speakfor Hume.1 But a significant minority have given divergentinterpretations: some have held that Pamphilus, the narrator of the Dialogues, is Hume;2 some have given credence to Hume's remark in a letter that "I make Cleanthes the Hero of the Dialogue";3 others think that none of the characters represent Hume, at least not consistently, either because the characters represent types, not individuals,4 or because none are "wholly consistent, completely clear-headed, and unmuddled throughout,"5 or because "it is the whole of the dialogue which represents Hume."6 One interpreter has even gone so far as to declare that "I shall take it that Hume in the Dialogues is any speaker who appears tobe makingagood philosophical point,"7 whichis tantamount to identifying Hume with any self-assured philosophical reader of the Dialogues] My chief purpose in this essay is not to take issue with these interpretations, nor to propose a novel interpretation of the text—though I will do both—but rather to promote a different kind of interpretation altogether: what I will call a "dialogic" interpretation, since it views the literary form as contributory and indeed essential to the philosophical message.8 Still, the particular dialogic interpretation I propose may be of interest. On it, the Dialogues are not chiefly a diatribe against theism, much less a polemic against all (theistic or Christian) religion. Rather, the book at its most searching level is a careful rational examination of"true" vs. "false" religion, with the virtues ofthe former commended even as the vices ofthe latter are condemned. In short, Hume gives us an eighteenth century discussion ofreligiousfaith in relation to human Volume XVII Number 1 15 WILLIAM LAD SESSIONS reason, a discussion wherein reason is not automatically the enemy of faith (in all its guises). More specifically, Philo's and Cleanthes' apparent disagreements on the results and utility ofnatural theology mask a more fundamental and considerably more important harmony in their views concerning "the proper office ofreligion."9 Contrary to the standardinterpretation, they fundamentally agree on the nature and value of natural piety, which is the other component of natural religion besides natural theology.10 In the end, then, Pamphilus is not wrong to judge that Cleanthes' principles "approach still nearer to the truth" than Philo's, and not merely for reasons of filial piety (he is, after all, Cleanthes' house-guest, his loyal student, and his "adopted son"). No doubt Philo does tend to "win" his skirmishes in natural theology with Cleanthes (not to mention those with Demea!), but though Philo triumphs tactically, Cleanthes is the victor in the wider war for Pamphilus' heart and mind: critical scepticism may be a useful safeguard for careful thinkers against the "superstition" endemic to "false" and harmful piety, butitsutilityislimited; Philo's prophylaxisis muchless effective than Cleanthes' empirical theism at the vitally important task of inculcating and nurturing "true" natural piety in a young person such as Pamphilus. However, before supporting this controversial view of the Dialogues, I need to make clearer the nature, limits and value of a dialogic interpretation, by way of contrast with the more common approaches. I. Standard Hermenéutica Most philosophical interpretations of the Dialogues share several assumptions—or perhaps one should say "presumptions." First, they all focus on the propositions, beliefs, and arguments expressed by characters in the Dialogues—their claims, assertions, speculations, suggestions, rejections, replies, reasons, rebuttals, and the like—and they seek to extract from the discussion those expressed or implied beliefs and arguments which current interpreters believe most worthy of continuing philosophical adherence, development, demolition, or at least discussion. Literary... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Written on the Body, Written by the SensesJennifer L. Hansen"Explore me," you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I'm free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognize myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged (...) in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon's wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know.1Ever since Plato wished to banish the poets from the republic (Republic 607b2),2 philosophy has stood in a vexed relationship to literature. There seem to be at least three reasons for philosophy's traditional contempt for literature as a reliable means to truth: (a) because literature engages the passions of a reader, it may cloud the reader's ability to deliberate calmly and rationally about any given account of how things really are; (b) literature most commonly deals with the particular and concrete and therefore cannot claim to a more general or universal truth, and; (c) literature is too open-ended and ambiguous in its meaning, which, again, obstructs the reader's view of how things really are. Though the writer is imitating the world, is holding up a mirror to it—a speculum mundi—literature's images are mere appearances.Philosophy, on the contrary, aims for a kind of "transcendental vision." Either philosophy looks beyond the particular appearances of things in the world to find the one structure which unites all instances of the thing, or philosophy claims that the structure of each object is supplied by consciousness, which then delimits and bounds each object, and places it in space and time so that the scientist can better dissect, measure, and catalogue it. That is, either philosophers, in the [End Page 365] tradition of Parmenides, aim to find the one in the many—as Socrates explains in the Republic "we are accustomed to assuming one Form in each case for the many particulars" (596a4–5)—or as in Kant's Copernican revolutionary thinking, consciousness renders the object of experience a knowable thing.While this transcendental vision proves quite useful for the scientist who deals with the empirical, it proves less useful where the task would be to conceptualize what is not a possible object of experience. While the scientist can indeed dissect and probe the body to understand how it functions, the scientist is less likely to discover what it means for a body to love, or to be free. In the "The Antinomy of Pure Reason" in the first Critique, Kant, in fact, left us with a choice about what philosophy's true object should be: either we restrict philosophy to the empirical world and its logic, or we pursue metaphysical questions about God or Freedom which cannot be grasped.3 On pain of contradiction, we cannot have both. In chapter three of the Transcendental Doctrine Judgment, "The Ground of the Distinction of all Objects in General into Phenomena and Noumena," Kant uses a wonderful metaphor to illustrate the dangers of Pure Reason venturing into metaphysical questions, and thereby employing the categories beyond the empirical: "This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself with unalterable limits. It is the land of truth—enchanting name!—surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion" (CR, 257). If we allow ourselves to be allured by the deceptive appearance of farther shores, then we are not engaged in philosophy, but speculation or mysticism. We cannot provide an account for such knowledge in universal terms, in arguments, in logic. And yet, as Kant himself very well knew, these are questions that we are, as humans, compelled to raise. At the outset of the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant makes clear that reason will ineluctably be led... (shrink)

We live in a world of one-size-fits-all law. People are different, but the laws that govern them are uniform. "Personalized Law" - rules that vary person by person - will change that. Here is a vision of a brave new world, where each person is bound by their own personally-tailored law. "Reasonable person" standards would be replaced by a multitude of personalized commands, each individual with their own "reasonable you" rule. Skilled doctors would be held to higher standards of (...) care, the most vulnerable consumers and employees would receive stronger protections, age restrictions for driving or for the consumption of alcohol would vary according the recklessness risk that each person poses, and borrowers would be entitled to personalized loan disclosures tailored to their unique needs and delivered in a format fitting their mental capacity. The data and algorithms to administer personalize law are at our doorstep, and embryos of this regime are sprouting. Should we welcome this transformation of the law? Does personalized law harbor a utopic promise, or would it produce alienation, demoralization, and discrimination? This book is the first to explore personalized law, offering a vision of law and robotics that delegates to machines those tasks humans are least able to perform well. It inquires how personalized law can be designed to deliver precision and justice and what pitfalls the regime would have to prudently avoid. (shrink)

Psychoanalytic literary criticism has always been something of an embarrassment. One resists labeling as a “psychoanalytic critic” because the kind of criticism evoked by the term mostly deserves the bad name it largely has made for itself. Thus I have been worrying about the status of some of my own uses of psychoanalysis in the study of narrative, in my attempt to find dynamic models that might move us beyond the static formalism of structuralist and semiotic narratology. And in general, (...) I think we need to worry about the legitimacy and force that psychoanalysis may claim when imported into the study of literary texts. If versions of psychoanalytic criticism have been with us at least since 1908, when Freud published his essay on “Creative Writers and Day-dreaming,” and if the enterprise has recently been renewed in subtle ways by post-structuralist versions of reading, a malaise persists, a sense that whatever the promises of their union, literature and psychoanalysis remain mismatched bedfellows—or perhaps I should say playmates.The first problem, and the most basic, may be that psychoanalysis in literary study has over and over again mistaken the object of analysis, with the result that whatever insights it has produced tell us precious little about the structure and rhetoric of literary texts. Traditional psychoanalytic criticism tends to fall into three general categories, depending on the object of analysis: the author, the reader, or the fictive persons of the text. The first of these constituted the classical locus of psychoanalytic interest. It is now apparently the most discredited, though also perhaps the most difficult to extirpate, since if the disappearance of the author has been repeatedly announced, authorial mutants ceaselessly reappear, as, for instance, in Harold Bloom’s psychomachia of literary history. Like the author, the fictive character has been deconstructed into an effect of textual codes, a kind of thematic mirage, and the psychoanalytic study of the putative unconscious of characters in fiction has also fallen into disrepute. Here again, however, the impulse resurfaces, for instance in some of the moves of a feminist criticism that needs to show how the represented female psyche refuses and problematizes the dominant concepts of male psychological doctrine. Feminist criticism has in fact largely contributed to a new variant of the psychoanalytic study of fictive characters, a variant one might label the “situational-thematic”: studies of Oedipal triangles in fiction, their permutations and evolution, of the roles of mothers and daughters, of situations of nurture and bonding, and so forth. It is work often full of interest, but nonetheless methodologically disquieting in its use of Freudian analytic tools in a wholly thematic way, as if the identification and labeling of human relations in a psychoanalytic vocabulary were the task of criticism. The third traditional field of psychoanalytic literary study, the reader, continues to flourish in ever-renewed versions, since the role of the reader in the creation of textual meaning is very much on our minds at present, and since the psychoanalytic study of readers’ responses willingly brackets the impossible notion of author in favor of the acceptable and also verifiable notion of reader. The psychoanalytic study of the reader may concern real readers or the reader as psychological everyman . But like the other traditional psychoanalytic approaches, it displaces the object of analysis from the text to some person, some other psychodynamic structure—a displacement I wish to avoid since, as I hope to make clear as I go along, I think psychoanalytic criticism can and should be textual and rhetorical. Peter Brooks is the Tripp Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, where he is also director of the Whitney Humanities Center and chairman of the French department. His most recent book is Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, which has recently been reissued in paperback. His work in progress concerns psychoanalysis and story-telling. (shrink)

À travers une vision gestaltiste, déjà à l’oeuvre dans la philosophie de Maurice Merleau-Ponty, cet article essaie de montrer que toutes les difficultés propres à l’interprétation de la problématique du rapport à autrui, notamment celle concernant le fait de ne pouvoir jamais avoir un accès complet à autrui, peuvent être surmontées ou, du moins, peuvent être mises en discussion. Toute la question est de savoir si ce rapport est basé sur une constitution mutuelle, une constitution réductible à ceux qui (...) le constituent, moi ou autrui, ou si ce rapport va au-delà, étant plus et autre chose que les sujets qui entrent en relation, puisqu’il est lui-même quelque chose d’irréductible. Ni réductibilité à moi, comme chez Husserl, ni réductibilité à autrui, celui totalement autre, comme chez Levinas, mais une irréductibilité conciliante de ce rapport qui, en tant que forme, dépend des éléments qui le constituent et, néanmoins, est autre chose qu’eux et leur demeure irréductible.Through a Gestaltist vision, already present in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, this article attempts to show that all difficulties inherent in the interpretation of the problems concerning the relationship to the Other, especially the fact that we can never have complete access to the Other, can be overcome, or at least, put into discussion. The most important question is to know whether this relationship is based on a mutual constitution, one that is reducible to its terms, self or Other, or if this relationship goes beyond its subjects and is something irreducible in itself. This relationship is not reducible to the self, as in Husserl’s work, nor is it reducible to the Other, as something completely Other, as in Levinas, but is a relationship of reconciliatory irreducibility which, while entirely dependent on its constitutive elements, is nevertheless something else irreducible to both.Attraverso una visione gestaltista, già all’opera nella filosofi a di Maurice Merleau-Ponty, cercheremo qui di mostrare come tutte le difficoltà tipiche della problematica del rapporto all’altro, specie quella relativa al fatto che non possiamo mai avere un accesso completo all’altro, possano essere superate o almeno rimesse in questione. L’intero problema dipende da un’opzione di fondo: se cioè tale rapporto sia basato su una reciproca costituzione, ovvero su una costituzione riducibile a coloro che lo costituiscono, cioè l’io e l’altro; o se tale rapporto vada al di là, sia qualcosa di più, o di diverso, rispetto ai soggetti che entrano in rapporto, essendo il rapporto stesso qualcosa di irriducibile. Né riducibilità a me, dunque, come in Husserl, né riducibilità all’Altro, come in Levinas, ma conciliante irriducibilità del rapporto in quanto forma, che pur dipendendo dagli elementi che la costituiscono è altro dagli elementi stessi. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Life of Virtue as an Act of Worship:On the Eucharistic Orientation of the Moral LifeMichael A. WahlThe Second Vatican Council's sole mention of moral theology, which occurs in the decree on priestly formation Optatam Totius, consists in a brief but unmistakable call for its renewal (§16). The need for such renewal stems from the state of moral theology in the mid-twentieth century, dominated by the manualist tradition that (...) had emerged after the Council of Trent. The manuals were increasingly thought to be inadequate in at least two important respects. First, they framed the moral life primarily in juridical terms of duty and obligation.1 As the author of one early-twentieth-century manual put it, the manuals do not "hold up a high ideal of Christian perfection for the imitation of the faithful. Rather, they deal with what is of obligation under pain of sin; they are books of moral pathology."2 Second, the focus of the manuals was principally on resolving cases of conscience rather than on treating the theological principles at the heart of Christian ethics, and the method they employed in this task was primarily philosophical, occasionally supplemented by biblical citations. What resulted from this approach is what one contemporary moral theologian describes as a "stifling of the theological imagination," a severing of moral theology from its place within [End Page 1399] the larger context of Christian theology and its self-relegation to the domain of problem-solving.3Given this context, the Council's summons to renewal would entail a significant reorientation of moral theology in at least two ways. First and perhaps most pressingly, the Council's injunction that moral theology "should shed light on the loftiness of the vocation of the faithful in Christ" calls on moral theologians to re-conceive the moral life in positive terms, as the pursuit of beatitude through growth in holiness, rather than solely in the minimalist terms of avoiding sin (Optatam Totius §16). Second, the Council's insistence that moral theology "should be renewed by a more living contact with the mystery of Christ" and "more nourished by Sacred Scripture" demands a recovery of the properly theological character of moral theology and its more intentional integration with Scripture, dogmatic theology, the liturgy, and spirituality (§16).Over the past seventy-five years—in the time both leading up to and following the Council—Catholic moral theologians have returned to the sources of Christian ethics in fresh and creative ways in order to renew moral theology.4 One crucial component of this renewal, especially in the wake of Pope John Paul II's 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor—approximately the midpoint between the end of the Council and the present—has been the resurgence of virtue ethics, including and especially the virtue ethics of Thomas Aquinas, in Catholic moral theology.5 This return to virtue has incorporated several important elements of the Council's call for renewal. For example, many virtue ethicists have emphasized the teleological character of the moral life by emphasizing the call to supernatural beatitude as the foundation for moral theology.6 In addition, contemporary works in [End Page 1400] theological virtues ethics have given special consideration to the relationship between Scripture and the moral life.7 For these reasons and others, many scholars regard virtue ethics as the most promising way forward for developing a theological approach to the Christian moral life aligned to the vision of the Council.There remains, however, one of the Council's desiderata for moral theology's renewal to which virtue ethics has devoted less attention. While theological virtue ethics has striven to "shed light on the loftiness of the vocation of the faithful in Christ" and to ensure that it has been "more nourished by Sacred Scripture," comparatively less consideration has been given to ensuring that moral theology is put in "living contact with the mystery of Christ." To be sure, several recent contributions to Catholic virtue ethics have emphasized the role of grace, the infused virtues, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit in order to highlight the properly supernatural character of the Christian moral life.8 But at the same time, virtue ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Daring and Disappointing Dreams of Transhumanism's Secular EschatologyMichael Baggot L.C.IntroductionAlthough it is a largely secular movement, contemporary transhumanism borrows heavily from both Christian orthodoxy and heresies to construct a vision for human happiness. This article traces the roots of transhumanism's soteriology and eschatology and then examines the underlying anthropological problems that drive the hoped-for salvation through digital immortality. Unfortunately, the admirable desire to extend life sacrifices an (...) appreciation for the integral harmony of the human person's animal and spiritual dimensions. Since human actions manifest the person's intrinsic corporeality, attempts to detach the human personality from the body through digitalization would produce replicas of the dead without achieving true immortality. The surprising quasi-religious thrust of contemporary transhumanism's secular eschatology presents an opportunity to rediscover the Catholic patrimony's reflection on authentic divinization through the transhumanizing effects of divine grace. The article thus concludes with a Thomistic theosis-centered reorientation of secular transhumanism's eschatological aspirations for immanent immortality toward true human flourishing. [End Page 841]The Secular Eschatology of Contemporary TranshumanismThe leading transhumanist philosopher, Oxford University professor Nick Bostrom, thinks that his movement will provide real solutions to the perennial problems of humanity that traditional religions have tried and failed to address:While not a religion, transhumanism might serve a few of the same functions that people have traditionally sought in religion. It offers a sense of direction and purpose and suggests a vision that humans can achieve something greater than our present condition. Unlike most religious believers, however, transhumanists seek to make their dreams come true in this world, by relying not on supernatural powers or divine intervention but on rational thinking and empiricism, through continued scientific, technological, economic, and human development.1Yet, for all its protests against antiquated creeds, secular transhumanism frequently tends toward quasi-religious expressions. For instance, Meghan O'Gieblyn finds striking parallels between the evangelical and transhumanist worldviews she has embraced and abandoned during her life.2 Her writing explores her harrowing transition from Christian fundamentalism to trans-humanism and her eventual disillusionment with the techno-movement. Bible school had taught her about the various epochs of salvation history and her position within the "dispensation of grace" that marked the final preparation for the longed-for "millennial kingdom." As an adult, she spurned the false promises of organized religion and sought a more rational organization for her life. Later, a book recommendation plunged her into the thought of Google guru Ray Kurzweil and his narrative of evolutionary eras pointing toward an imminent "singularity" in which intelligent machines would emerge from an informational explosion. Such advanced robots would bring digital immortality through mind uploads and a nanotech new earth [End Page 842] that would put Eden to shame. Through his projects, Kurzweil purports to continue the Enlightenment tradition of empirical science and rational rigor. Similarly, many transhumanists tend to follow their Enlightenment predecessors in chiding traditional religion for obscurantist opposition to scientific progress. Nonetheless, O'Gieblyn discovered that the very movement that pretends to supplant the superstitions of the old-time religion is itself "a secular outgrowth of Christian eschatology."3The Christian-trained author could not help but detect familiar religious themes in the technocentric movement. Before it spread through the offices of Silicon Valley, the term "transhuman" first appeared in Henry Francis Carey's 1814 version of Dante's Paradiso, where the poet pilgrim recognizes that not even his own genius can describe the joy of risen life when he writes, "words may not tell of that transhuman change."4 Recent efforts to substitute supernatural resurrection with technological advancement find antecedents in the thirteenth-century friar Roger Bacon's quest for an elixir of life. Later, the nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox philosopher Nikolai Fedorov claims humans should use technology to control Darwin's unguided evolutionary process. Similarly, the twentieth-century Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin predicted a global machine network that would merge consciousnesses worldwide and prompt the Omega Point of transphysical union with the divine.The Eugenicist Julian Huxley strips such notions of their religious trappings to present a secular transhumanist project that will "overcome limitations…to arrive at... (shrink)

A Hobbesian utopia might sound paradoxical. Hobbes never prescribed a utopia per se, and he is well-known for his practical and pragmatic approach to human nature and to politics. Yet, this article identifies several utopian elements in Hobbes, starting with the ways in which his contemporaries thought of his work as utopian. Following Galileo and others, Hobbes might have been part of a utopian moment, or at least believed that he was, especially due to his novel and historic philosophy. (...) Behind his dystopian description of the state of nature there is a utopian vision of a civilized, peaceful, and industrious society, the result of true moral philosophy. Finally, the differences between Hobbes and Plato notwithstanding, there might be one overlooked similarity: if Plato designed a republic where Socrates would not have been persecuted, Hobbes might have designed a commonwealth that would produce and allow future Galileos to work without hindrance. (shrink)

The many constraints of outer space experience challenge the human ability to coexist. Paradoxically, astronauts assert that on the international space station there are no conflicts or, at least, that they are able to manage their differences, behavioral as well as cognitive, in full respect of human rights and the imperatives of cooperative living. The question is: Why? Why in those difficult, a-terrestrial, and therefore almost unnatural conditions do human beings seem to be able to peacefully and collaboratively live (...) together? What is there beyond terrestrial boundary conditions that allows for such a result? And what can we learn from the astronauts’ experience about the effectiveness of human rights on Earth? My proposal is that the a-terrestrial dimension deeply alters the mind/body indexical framework and, in this way, disentangles the human inclination to semiosis from the cognitive and behavioral habits of categorization and territorialization inherent in the experience on Earth. If analyzed through the spectrum of an interdisciplinary approach involving anthropology, semiology, law, and human geography, I think that outer space enterprises can offer many insights into the cognitive and ethical/political hindrances to the effectiveness of human rights and their intercultural uses. Meanwhile the compulsive greed for a possessive territorialization of outer space and celestial bodies is growing by leaps and bounds. It haunts and imbues both astropolitics and space law. The astronauts’ semio-anthropological experience of human rights and cooperative coexistence seems to have been left in orbit. The future requires awareness and action by anthropologists, semioticians, cognitive scientists, geographers and lawyers, working all together in an interdisciplinary effort to move beyond approaching the experiential with a territorial mindset. The hope is that the “dark dream” of human exploitation/colonization of outer space will not turn from a political and legal speculation into a future reality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dramatic Frame and Philosophic Idea in PlatoWilliam A. JohnsonIn a minority of plato's dialogues the central philosophic discourse is presented indirectly, refracted through the lens of a dramatic frame of more or less complexity.1 Scholars typically divorce the question of the dramatic frame from the philosophy of the dialogues: the frame is often simply set to one side by analytic philosophers, and tends to be considered in terms of (...) characterization, narrative technique, intratextual associations and the like by students of the "literary Plato."2 I here consider the four dialogues that mark Plato's most ambitious experiments in construction of a complex narrative frame: Phaedo, Symposium, Parmenides, and Theaetetus. By focusing on the effect that the indirect narration has on the reader, I construct a view of these narrative experiments that puts them together with the philosophic program of the dialogues. Baldly stated: I argue that the elaborate indirectness of the dramatic frame means to reflect, and to make vivid for the reader, not only the remove between written representation and the doing of philosophy, but also the remove between perceptible and Ideal world as suggested in Plato's vision of the Ideas.PhaedoAt the beginning of Plato's Phaedo, Echecrates asks Phaedo to tell him about the last hours of Socrates' life. He points out, "None of the people in Phlius go to Athens much these days, and it is a long time since we had any visitor from there who could give us any definite information, except that he was executed by drinking hemlock" (57a–b).3 The reader thereby comes to realize: (1) the conversation is situated in Phlius, a somewhat remote town on the Peloponnesus far from Athens (and far from anyone who might be able to correct or verify Phaedo's account); (2) since "no Phliasian goes to Athens much these days" and "it is a long time since we had any visitor from Athens who could give us any definite information," Phaedo's arrival in Phlius comes at a significant temporal distance from Socrates' death; (3) on the same grounds, the reader is led to wonder how long a time might have lapsed between this conversation and its report to Plato back in Athens (if indeed this is based on a report, on which see below); (4) on the other hand, Phaedo, as an intimate of Socrates, is presumed to be able to provide "definite information" (σαφές τι). Echecrates goes on to ask Phaedo to "be kind enough to give us a really detailed account" (σαφέστατα, 58d2) of Socrates' last day. When Phaedo says that he is willing, Echecrates urges again: "Now try to describe every detail as carefully as you can" (, 58d8). The bulk of Phaedo will be this account, told by Phaedo to Echecrates. The desire for accurate detail is emphasized. But Echecrates' insistence on accuracy sits uneasily with the spatial and temporal remove introduced at the beginning. How accurate, really, is Phaedo's account?The answer to this question—is the account accurate?—is, however, not at issue here. What is more interesting, or at least what interests me, is the fact that the dramatic frame seems designed to bring such questions into play. Bald historical questions (Did Socrates really say that? How does Plato know? Is Phaedo's memory accurate?) may seem unsophisticated, but they are natural questions for the reader to pose—as generations of readers and commentators attest. The questions are natural only in the sense that the text is constructed so as to prompt [End Page 578] them. Questions of historicity arise almost inevitably from the tension in the dramatic frame between, on the one hand, the repeated emphasis on the desire for accuracy, and, on the other hand, the strained relationship—elaborately indirect and distant both spatially and temporally—between the words of the text and the words of Socrates.A further, telling detail appears directly before Phaedo's narrative begins. In response to a question by Echecrates, Phaedo lists the friends of Socrates who were present. In the course of this list, Phaedo famously remarks, "I believe that Plato was ill" or perhaps better (Jowett) "but Plato, if I am not mistaken, was... (shrink)

In visual information processing, two kinds of vision are distinguished: vision-for-perception related to the conscious identifi cation of objects, and vision-for-action that deals with visual control of movements. Neuroscience suggests that these two functions are performed by two separate brain neural systems - the ventral and dorsal pathways. Two experiments using behavioural measures were conducted with the objective of exploring any potential interaction between these two functions of vision. The aim was to combine in one (...) class='Hi'>task methods allowing for the simultaneous capture of both perceptual global processing and affordance extraction and to check whether they infi uence each other. This aim was achieved by employing the paradigms of Navon and Tucker and Ellis. A compound fi gure was created made up of objects with handles that might or might not have orientation congruent between levels. The results revealed that while the affordance effect occurred every time, the Navon effect appeared only when subjects focused their attention on object elements responsible for inconsistence within compound fi gure. Most importantly, even when these two effects occurred at once, they had no effect on each other. Results from the study failed to confi rm the hypothesis about interaction and gives support to the view that vision-for-perception and vision-for-action tend to act as separate systems. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Genealogies of OppressionA Response to Ladelle McWhorter’s Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A GenealogyChloë TaylorLadelle McWhorter introducesRacism and Sexual Oppression inAnglo-America with an account of her experiences during the days between the attack on and the death of Matthew Shepard. On sabbatical near Pennsylvania State University in October 1998, McWhorter describes following these events as they were covered by the media and discussed on a Penn State University (...) LGBT listserv. A day and a half after Shepard’s death, McWhorter attended a candlelight vigil organized by Penn State students. It was raining, only thirty people were present, their voices could scarcely be heard over the sounds of traffic, and the event risked being more disheartening than consoling. An attempt was made to salvage the vigil through song, and someone suggested singing “We Shall Overcome,” but none of the students knew the words. McWhorter realized that she was the only person present who could lead the group in a song that might bring a sense of hope and closure to the otherwise depressing gathering. However, as she describes, she was wary of calling “upon the memory and power of African American movements for justice and freedom in order to further the rights and interests, or at least comfort the fearful souls of nonheterosexual people” (10). She writes,It was important for Matthew Shepard to remain Matthew Shepard and Emmett Till to remain Emmett Till, two separate individuals whose living and dying are different events in human history. I believed it was important [End Page 207] to remember the differences between black and queer struggles, subcultures, and experiences of oppression.(9)McWhorter thus did not sing, and thegathering disintegrated without closure. Each one of us wandered away, carrying with us, not a sense that despite the violence and injustice all around us life can go on and love and respect do still exist—which is, I suppose, what the candlelight shining in the darkness at such vigils is intended to instil in us—but rather with that sense of futility and hopelessness that drizzle and senseless death inspire.(5)Despite her decision to not sing, McWhorter goes on to discuss not only the danger of Sameness that prompted her decision—the danger of homogenizing or identifying oppressions—but also the “twin danger” of Difference. As McWhorter argues, “If we maintain radical distinctions between political events, we may fail to see important overarching patterns and as a result miss opportunities to form and consolidate alliances that might counter the networks of power that oppress so many of us” (10–11).Although there are risks involved in emphasizing either Sameness or Difference, McWhorter notes that she had always been more worried by the dangers of Sameness. She attributes this intuition to her attraction to Foucault. The genealogical method is concerned with revealing discontinuities between experiences in diverse historical periods, undermining histories that impose homogeneity on the past. Pointing out historical disparities kindles hope for a different future and is thus an emancipatory task. McWhorter notes that Foucault is a “splitter” and not a “lumper” like Hegel or Plato. Despite her Foucauldian aversion to lumping, McWhorter writes that in the wake of that candlelight vigil and the more general political climate of the late 1990s in which allegiances between civil rights movements were being disavowed, she came to worry about that other danger, the danger of too much splitting. She wonders “whether, despite all the differences in experience and effect, it might not be the case that somehow these things are joined together, part of the same matrix of power, employing the same means, serving the same ends, shaping the same lives” (11). She notes, “It is that other danger and that other set of possibilities that have moved me to write this book, despite the risks such an enquiry inevitably runs” (11).The dangers of Difference are practical but also factual since, McWhorter argues, there are real similarities between the deaths of Shepard and Till that risk being overlooked. Most significant of these is that both young men were murdered for their sexual deviance: one for his homosexuality, the other for his insistence that... (shrink)

One of Frege’s basic philosophical convictions has been that “a large part of the philosopher’s work consists—or at least should consist—in a fight against language.”. Besides, it is partly to his having yielded too easily to the deceptive suggestions of natural language that he himself attibuted, at the very end of his life, the failure of his attempt at defining numbers in logicist terms Nevertheless, he remained to the end convinced that the hopes raised by logic, one of (...) whose tasks is “to free us of the chains of language”, can only rest, in the last analysis, upon the possibility to trust the bulk of language and to make use of “such an imperfect instrument” to fight from the inside the uncertain fight that the philosopher must embark upon in order to free himself from its dominion and neutralize or eliminate its most damaging imperfections. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French ThoughtVirginia A. La CharitéDowncast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, by Martin Jay; xi & 632 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, $35.00.The book jacket flyleaf for Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes proclaims in exuberant and laudatory terms that this study has a double agenda: one is to show that vision is by (...) no means the dominant sense in ordering Western culture and the other is to posit instead a “plurality of ‘scopic regimes, particularly in the climate of postmodernism. Indeed, antiocularcentrism provides the unifying thread of Jay’s work, which reviews the theory of vision from Plato to Bergson in the first three chapters and concentrates on “the culture of modernity” in chapters four through eight; the ninth chapter interestingly and curiously places Derrida and feminist criticism side by side under the aegis of “phallogocularcentrism” and presents Derrida and Irigaray if not as the high points of modernism, then at least as the center of the poststructuralist discourse, which argues for the elevation of the word over the eye and so offers downcast eyes as the new logo for what is now identified as postmodernism. Jay’s last chapter addresses postmodernism as a foreclosure on visual practice or the ocularcentric. The short seven-page conclusion attempts to place a positive note on the author’s admitted denigration of the notion of visuality in modern French intellectual thought and culture by calling for a plural or multiple—“polyscopic”—visual experience. Hence, Jay concludes that his notion of downcast eyes or disillusionment is “no solution” (p. 592) to the problem. Certainly, Broodthaer’s “L’Oeil” on the jacket cover does not present [End Page 162] downcast eyes but rather the very feminine alluring eye of a seductress. In this sense, the real message of Jay’s work is reader, beware! His provocative title and even more provocative subtitle initiate from the outset a critique of one of the long-held and cherished myths about the dominance and prominence of the visual sense in Western culture, especially in modern French thought. It is the unsettling of the comfortableness of this notion which Jay’s work successfully undertakes.The study is well-organized and lucidly written. It forcefully argues the author’s case. Unfortunately, there is no bibliography. The omission of a bibliography undercuts the project and casts scholarly suspicion on the entire venture. In all truth, the inclusion of a bibliography would dramatically call attention to serious lacunae in the scholarship. The French thinkers presented and analyzed, such as Bataille, Barthes, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Irigaray, and Lyotard, have been studied in depth—at times brilliantly—but Jay ignores this rich corpus of critical material. In particular, his treatment of important French poets such as Rimbaud, the surrealists, Ponge, and others is so skewed in order to reinforce his denigration of the dominant role of vision in twentieth-century French writing that the reader in the field of French studies questions the quality of the basic research undertaken for the project and the author’s skill at reading with understanding and sensitivity hermetic material in the original French. Once these questions are raised, the very nature of Jay’s study itself becomes suspect.As the reader progresses through the volume, it seems that most of Jay’s analyses of the primary texts are based on English translations and are in fact limited to those works available in translation. While this may not be the actual case, the lack of a bibliography reinforces such a suspicion and contributes to the steady erosion of the credibility of the study. Even worse, it poses a troubling if not invidious question: who is the audience for Downcast Eyes? Surely, the audience is not humanists who specialize in twentieth-century French studies. If the intended audience is one of scholars and their students in cultural history and the social sciences with little grounding in contemporary French intellectual thought as manifested in its literature and literary criticism, this audience needs to begin its reading with Jay’s conclusion which is a masterfully subtle denigration of his own work on... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Future Directions for Oversight of Stem Cell Research in the United States: An UpdateMary A. Majumder (bio) and Cynthia B. Cohen (bio)On 9 March 2009, President Barack Obama (2009a) signed an executive order revoking the statement issued by President George W. Bush during a televised speech in August 2001, in which the latter had sharply restricted the scope of federally funded human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research to cell (...) lines derived (without federal funding) prior to 9:00 P.M. EDT on 9 August 2001. Action by President Obama to remove the cut-off date had been expected. It came as a surprise, however, that he gave authority to determine the scope of eligible research to the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), referencing only general concerns of responsibility, scientific worth, and legality.1 This contrasted not only with the approach of former President Bush, but also with that of former President Clinton, who had expressed personal opposition to the creation of embryos for research and had a distinction between hESCs derived from embryos created for research and those derived from spare embryos enshrined in NIH policy.President Obama’s remarks upon signing the executive order give some insight into the thinking behind his approach. Implicit in them are the views that earlystage human embryos outside the womb do not have full moral status and that the destruction of human embryos in the effort to care for and ease the suffering of human beings who do have full moral status does not devalue human life. The President also stressed that the decision to pursue hESC research reflected not only his opinion, but also a broad social consensus. He concluded with strong ethical commitments on two fronts:We will develop strict guidelines, which we will rigorously enforce, because we cannot ever tolerate misuse or abuse. And we will ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society, or any society.(Obama 2009b)The specific guarantee that President Obama gave against government support for the development of cloning techniques for human reproductive purposes made his silence on the use of cloning for research seem significant. Comments he had made in the course of the campaign (Obama 2008) suggested that he would affirm [End Page 195] the Clinton-era policy of limiting federal funding to hESCs derived from spare embryos. Did this silence mean that President Obama was opening the door to federal funding of research cloning when and if scientists might manage that feat?2009 NIH GuidelinesThe answer to this question and several others came on 17 April, when Raynard Kington, the acting director of NIH, released Draft NIH Guidelines for Human Stem Cell Research (NIH 2009), developed by an NIH Stem Cell Task Force, along with a request for public comment within 30 days of their publication in the Federal Register.2 The 2009 Draft Guidelines exclude from federal funding the derivation of hESCs, a restriction mandated by the reenactment of the Dickey-Wicker Amendment as part of the 2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act (Public Law 111-8, Division F, Title V, § 509). The 2009 Draft Guidelines also exclude the use of hESCs derived from embryos created for research purposes, and so represent a refusal to open the funding door as broadly as the NIH interpretation of the Dickey-Wicker Amendment might allow, at least for the time being.It appears that the drafters used as their starting point the 2000 NIH Guidelines for Research Using Human Pluripotent Stem Cells (NIH 2000) dating from the Clinton Administration, rather than more recent guidelines from the National Academy of Sciences (National Research Council 2005; 2007; 2008) and other private bodies. Both the format and content of the 2000 and 2009 NIH efforts are similar, making the departures in the latter stand out in high relief. We highlight departures related to informed consent to embryo donation, creation of human-nonhuman chimeras, and the role of an NIH task force, updating our original comment (Cohen and Majumder 2009).Informed Consent to Embryo DonationThe 2009 NIH Draft Guidelines require that certain statements... (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 201-207. “Poetry is experience, linked to a vital approach, to a movement which is accomplished in the serious, purposeful course of life. In order to write a single line, one must have exhausted life.” —Maurice Blanchot (1982, 89) Nikos Karouzos had a communist teacher for a father and an orthodox priest for a grandfather. From his four years up to his high school graduation he was incessantly educated, reading the entire private library of his granddad, comprising mainly (...) the Orthodox Church Fathers and the ancient classics. Later on in his life he sold the library for money, only to buy a little more time before he went broke again: “I carry sorrow like a cage/ I got no birds/ as I come back from her hair/ I see the profit emptied/ cool from terror.” (1993, Ι, 101) Nowadays—and ridiculously recently—we are more than apt to speak of a certain insouciance pertaining to the Greek form of expenditure: expenditure without any type of investment, sometimes not (even) symbolic. In the vaults of the European unconscious, this imprudent stance still conjures a “capital punishment” in the form of de-capitation, reflecting back the fear of excess and the terror of its consequences.1 Thus the Greek way of living is very close to what a stranger could have termed as “the Greek way of dying.” Yet, what is not often understood is that the Greek esprit , the same one that invented the maxim μηδ?ν ?γαν (“nothing in excess”), does not experience death solely as an imminent fear of bankruptcy. For it miraculously combines its unconditional acceptance with the promise of a resurrection that is always there in the scents of Spring, from Dionysus to the orthodox Christ: “Everyone resurrects himself through dying [….] Resurrection is the switching of mortalities.” (2002, 94) Hence, if an entire library was imprudently traded for a plate with seven olives, a sliced tomato and some fresh goat cheese, let us not be fooled: this is not the meal of the pauper, but that of “an aristocrat from God” (1993, II, 491) feeding his eloquent loudmouth, ridiculously cut open in an otherwise rock-solid caput . *** To speak of the Greek experience is to speak about a half-dead language that still utters in life what is seemingly excluded from it and thus forbidden to be talked about: death. Death as anything that is out of this world, as something that will never return . Still, along with an experience of death that recently waned as a worn-out academic fashion, the Greek experience is dead too. Nearly 2300 years of written words separating Homer from the fall of Byzantium equal 500 books on a library traded for money: “I am with the killed. Hence my deepest solitude. I do not feel this tremendous macho society, beyond from the fact that it is a ruthlessly consuming one. It is me who pays all the time .” (2002, 57) Let us do the math and see how much this dealing with the Greek experience is costing the poet and how much dealing with the Greek experience might cost us today. *** “I do not guarantee a single word.” (Karouzos, 1993, II, 454) Through its various dialects and forms, the Greek language speaks through an incessant historical dissemination. Anyone who is aware of this terrifying polymorphy and still calls himself a poet, must stand against a white sheet of paper, pen-in-hand, with a very particular duty: to be as fully inconsistent as possible. In the formally ironic uniqueness of the poem, the poet functions as “a band-aid for lesser and greater antinomies.” (1993, I, 251) Of course these antinomies are not exhausted in language—they are historical, political and, alas, existential. Yet, beyond appearances , it is language that ruthlessly encodes them through history, submitting the poet to the temptation of placing them one next to the other on a single white sheet. The closer their neighboring, the greater the scattering of the writer in the ironic uniqueness of the paper. In a work where poetic license is described as a “freedom-impasse” (2002, 51), this task is undertaken in full conscience of its personal consequences: “what I am interested in is to escape my individuality (envisioning the non-ego) […] Nevertheless, my dissociations never achieve duration.” (2002, 74-75) Hence, though poetry is the “deserted direction of will,” (1998, 62) the stance of the poet is not that of a Nietzschean “great man.”2 Whereas drunkenness provides a thread between the poem and the excess it both presupposes and infuses (“Poetry always enlarges. ‘Drunkenness’ is nothing more than that,” (2002, 85)), whereas language flashes in loudmouth spurts of déraison (“When I am alone I do something else. I utter words. For example, while having my ouzo and listening to music I am most likely capable of randomly shouting ‘Electricity!’” (2002, 138)), the poet never gives in to the double affirmation that would eventually risk the “element of pleasure in discourse.” (2002, 80)” It is exactly because the gap of the antinomies is so vast that poetry is not meant to be written with a hammer. Neither does writing consist in a reevaluation of those elements. In short, poetry is not an affirmation of difference, but the surprising beauty of chiming antinomies. We might never transcend them, but it is up to us to put them together. Yet again, this voisinage is not to be identified with the necessity of chance as an eternal return.4 On the contrary it is a return from that very return : Let us treat Yes as a No to No and No as a Yes […] And let us not forget that this pissed affirmation crumbled down Nietzsche’s intellect in the dark paths of this world. (2002, 88) This return from the “vicious circle” should in no way be taken as a form of artistic prudence. Rather it can be seen as a dribble of demonic inconsistency as Dionysus transforms himself into a Christ that is in turn de-theologized: “Who can forbid that? Every man is capable of his own theology, nothing can stop him.” (2002, 73-74) This is a turn towards an existential vision of the world, historically coinciding with a particular political defeat of the Left, to which the poet devoted all his life: after the defeat of the popular front I raised the question “why do we exist?” while others were asking “why we failed.” (2002, 57)5 But most of all it is a return to poetry that exceeds the existential question itself, going beyond the issue of faith. Poetry comes in as a question of return after a defeat that is confessed in full profanity. Though it accepts the necessity of the defeat, it does not affirm it. Though it negates it, the negation is not in the name of a promise to be delivered in the kingdom of heavens. Following a historical and existential defeat, poetry is born post mortem . It signals a return to Christ as “groundless religiousness in the surprise of the real as such” (2002, 72) which is at once a return to the refuge of childhood. It is not a question of endurance towards an eternal return. Rather it is a question on the possibility of an existential return. Returning in a world as someone who cannot enjoy any returns exactly because he is averse to guarantees. A return without returns. *** PHOTOCOPY OF HAPPINESS When I was young I used to pin down cicadas and step on ant nests. I used to stand there silent for hours. With threads I decapitated bees. Now I am a dead man breathing. (Karouzos, 1993, II, 336.) The return to the “paradise of childhood” (2002, 68) constitutes the devouring refuge of its own memory when defeat becomes the synonym of adulthood. The political struggles of a young communist in a country torn up by a civil war right after World War II fraught with incarcerations and exiles. Historically they resulted in the defeat of the communist movement in Greece and opened up a long turbulent road that would peak in the dictatorship of 1967. Existentially they led to a series of disillusionments: mental breakdown, divorce, abandonment of studies in law school. To the question “why do we exist” the answer was poetry. Still this exposé should not be read as a sweeping chronography of a man. For it actually happens to coincide with the historical fate of a nation that after its modern constitution never stopped dreaming of the glories of its past youth, in a present that was (and is) sweepingly disappointing. But isn’t this return to youth finally a way of compensating for a loss of youth that necessarily results in a losing adulthood? Will Greeks, the eternal children of Plato and Nietzsche, ever learn? How to return without dying, how to remember without wasting time? WE ARE IN THE OPEN MEANING Living the coldest mauve night right across Parthenon I went to take a piss on some foliage and I was enjoying the foliage as it was steaming. (Karouzos, 1993, II, 340) Beyond the historical tragedies of modern Greece and away from any personal disappointments, the relation that this land holds with language and history is mediated through the Greek light—whose omnipresence is the very condition of its transcendence. All historical contradictions from Dionysus to Christ took place under this light; all those disseminated dialects were spoken beneath its warmth. To paraphrase Lévinas,6 light is both the condition of the world and of our withdrawal from it—a withdrawal towards the invisibility of God, of the dead, of meta-physics, resulting from the temptation that all is still here, behind this light the visibility of which they once evaded: “birds, the allurement of God.” (1993, I, 17) Under that luminous sky, if Greeks can do anything at all, it is to envision a return that will never come. All they can do is write poetry—which is doing nothing; other than lending an ear to a disseminated language whispering a unity that cannot be promised, as an adulthood in defeat is ready to recognize. Trying “to trap the invisible in visibility” (1993, II, 483) they forget that they have grown up and one day they die—with the promise of return. Hence an additional meaning must be given to this return to childhood. It does not signal salvation but rather its promise. To the ears of an aged continent it means that the return to/of poetry is a losing game, a return without returns. “Europe, Europe… you are nothing more than the continuation of Barabbas.” (1993, I, 295) *** “Life is not there to verify theories.”7 The records show that Karouzos was finally given a second-class pension from the Greek government, at the time when he was being recognized by the literary press as one of Greece’s major contemporary poets. Being neither a bourgeois nor a nobelist, he proclaimed himself to be an anarcho-communist, unconditionally faithful to the utopia of a classless society. He also drank, heavily. “Capitalism made an animal out of man/ Marxism made an animal out of truth/ Shut up.” (1993, II, 369) Perhaps one of the most scandalous divides of our times has been the one between the living and the dead, the latent prohibition that the living should not be concerned with the dead based on the mere impossibility of the dead to be concerned with the living in the first place. What adds to this scandal is that this divide abuses anything that cannot return to us by subsuming it under the same futility. Hence death is no longer “loss” in the usual sense. It no more refers to the things we lost but to our “loss” (of time, money and well-being) as we insist to dwell on them. Death is a waste —of time. It is this waste that we find in the insouciance of Greek expenditure; the waste in dealing with a language that most of its historical part is no longer spoken (a dead language); the waste in translating a poet who is ex definitio untranslatable; the waste of his vision, his money, his life. The waste of dealing with anything that cannot return and that cannot bring in any returns . But it is also the waste of life that poetry itself presupposes, the waste of dealing with invisibility, with anything that is out of this world and thus invokes the fear of death that is in turn—and surprisingly— nowhere to be found. Instead of death, what is there, beyond the light, is the being without us (to recall the Lévinasian il y a ), the mumble of our own nothingness which constitutes the price to be paid for writing poetry under an evergreek light. To understand this to-and-fro, is to realize that poetry is something out of this world that nevertheless takes place in this world, by virtue of this world. But to ridiculously equate this to-and-fro with death as non-existence, is to exile poetry along with its own possibility from this same old world: I do not believe that poetry will ever disappear from this world. […] But I am also sure that it does not have many chances of playing, as you say, a redemptive role in our vertiginous technological future. Without being endangered as a creative need, it will be placed on the side of history. (2002, 32) It is mainly there that we would like to locate the meaning of Nikos Karouzos’s poetry today. If we are willing to include the Greek original it is because we consider that it will be both a waste of time for us to do so (since most of you cannot read Greek) and because it might induce you to the even larger waste of learning it. We would additionally be glad if this small introduction served as an equally wasteful, academically useless piece of reading, gesturing towards a taboo of investing in anything Greek—that is in anything dead among the living, in anything that will never come back and maybe was never here in the first place. This is the only way to reserve for ourselves the possibility of poetry and preserve the light of its promise. “To return: that is the miracle.” (1993, I, 17) Athens, Greece July 10, 2011 NOTES 1 “ Capitale (a Late Latin word based on caput “head”) emerged in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries in the sense of funds, stock of merchandise, sum of money or money carrying interest.[…] The word and the reality it stood for appear in the sermons of St. Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444) ‘… quamdam seminalem rationem lucrosi quam communiter capitale vocamus ’, ‘that prolific cause of wealth that we commonly call capital’” (Braudel, 1992, 232-233). 2 “A great man – a man whom nature has constructed and invented in the grand style – what is he? First : there is a long logic in all of his activity, hard to survey because of its length, and consequently misleading; he has the ability to extend his will across great stretches of his life and to despise and reject everything petty about him, including even the fairest, ‘divinest’ things in the world.” (Nietzsche, 1968, 505, §962) 3 Cf. Deleuze, 1986, 186-9. 4 “Return is the being of becoming, the unity of multiplicity, the necessity of chance: the being of difference as such or the eternal return.” (Deleuze, 189)5 In this 1982 interview Karouzos refers to the defeat of the communist movement in Greece after the civil war of 1946-1949 between the Governmental Army and the Democratic Army of Greece, the military division of the Greek communist party. Karouzos’s father was a member of the communist National Liberation front (EAM) members of which formed the mainl resistance movement (ELAS) in Greece during WWII. The poet was a member of the United Panhellenic Organization of Youth (EPON), which was a youth division of EAM. After the end of the war, ELAS was called to disarmament in view of the formation of a National Army. The members of EAM resigned from the government of national unity and a series of protests led to a 3 year civil war between ELAS and the Government Army. After the defeat of ELAS the Communist party was outlawed and many communists were exiled in deserted Greek islands. Karouzos, who took action in the Greek resistance and was active during the Greek civil war, was exiled in Icaria on 1947 and in Makronisos on 1953 where he was called two years earlier to do his military service. 6 “Existence in the world qua light, which makes desire possible, is then, in the midst of being, the possibility of detaching oneself from being. To enter into being is to link up with objects; it is in effect a bond that is already tainted with nullity. It is already to escape anonymity. In this world where everything seems to affirm our solidarity with the totality of existence, where we are caught up in the gears of a universal mechanism, our first feeling, our ineradicable illusion, is a feeling or illusion of freedom. To be in the world is this hesitation, this interval in existing, which we have seen in the analyses of fatigue and the present.” (Lévinas, 1988,43-4) 7from a TV interview. THE POETRY OF NIKOS KAROUZOS From Redwriter [ Ερυθρογρ?φος ], in Collected Works, Vol . II, Athens: Ikaros. 1993, 463-4. [Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 9-10.] JESUS ANTI-OEDIPUS* Why were we once saving till the fifth day the Paschal lamb? The scriptures say: with this victim’s meat we ought to cleanse all of our senses. To give life to the whitest wave miraculous odors in the extension of the chest. Ideals to death. For us to witness the illustrious dawns of Absinthe and for the soul to be a deeply carved ornament on the fore we named will. Then many deer running amidst the evergreen growth with watery hymns, then, the unintended angels descending with heights spiraling in their momentum offer themselves to the luminous Adventure. Whence the need for speech and our sufferings covered with flags like the glorified dead. An incorporeal finger pointing at the flamboyant and fragrant holocausts within the tired horizons and the exhausted breadths with joys of the mistletoe on fire and shivering all of the green-leaved love. Something would have chirped again had we not driven it away— maybe the ewe’s grass. Something would have called us to the eternal resurrection— maybe the grace of spring. But now our heart is fiercely blinded, withdrawn to the appearances of Hades. Silence and ice incessantly cover the Infant Spirit in thatched times. While the cherry trees are dreaming faintly glowing in absolute darkness there’s nothing the Babylonians can contemplate in labs with automatic colored lights. How to rejoice now in the fifth day of the lamb? We have forked the stars. We’ve gradually become supposedly sublime with plucked chimeras in our hands. Avenged relentlessly by science. *Though the poem appears in a 1990 collection, it was actually written in 1968. Hence the reader must be aware in not associating Karouzos’ Anti-Oedipus with the famous 1972 work of Deleuze and Guattari, given that the former precedes the latter. ΙΗΣΟΥΣ ΑΝΤΙ-ΟΙΔΙΠΟΥΣ Γιατ? κρατο?σαμε κ?ποτε ?ς την π?μπτη μ?ρα το πασχαλιν? πρ?βατο; Τα κε?μενα λ?νε: μ’ αυτο? του θ?ματος το κρ?ας ?πρεπε να καθαρ?σουμε ?λες τις αισθ?σεις. Για να δ?σουμε κ?μα στη ζω? λευκ?τατο θαυμ?σιες ευωδι?ς στην ?κταση του στ?θους. Ιδανικ? στο χ?ρο. Για να βλ?πουμε τα λαμπρ? χαρ?ματα του ?ψινθου και να ’ναι η ψυχ? στ?λισμα βαθυχ?ρακτο της πλ?ρης που την ε?παμε θ?ληση. Τ?τε πολλ?ς δορκ?δες τρ?χοντας αν?μεσα στην καταπρ?σινη φ?ση με τους υδ?τινους ?μνους, τ?τε, κατεβα?νοντας οι αθ?λητοι ?γγελοι με κυλινδο?μενο το ?ψος στην ορμ? τους χαρ?ζονται της αστραφτερ?ς Περιπ?τειας. ?θεν η μιλι? γι’ αυτ? χρει?ζεται και τα δειν? σκεπ?ζονται ωσ?ν τους τιμημ?νους νεκρο?ς με σημα?ες. Ασ?ματο δ?χτυλο δε?χνει τα φλογ?δη και μοσχοβ?λα ολοκαυτ?ματα στους κουρασμ?νους ορ?ζοντες στα εξουθενωμ?να πλ?τη καθ?ς αν?βουν οι χαρ?ς του νερα?δ?ξυλου και τρ?μει ολ?κληρη η πρασιν?φυλλη αγ?πη. Κ?τι θα κελαηδο?σε π?λι αν δεν το δι?χναμε— μπορε? της προβατ?νας το χορτ?ρι. Κ?τι θα μας καλο?σε στην απ?ραντη αν?σταση— μπορε? του ?αρος η χ?ρη. Μα η καρδι? μας ?γρια τυφλ?θηκε π?ρασε στα φαιν?μενα του ?δη. Σιγ? και π?γος αδι?κοπα σκεπ?ζει στους αχυρ?νιους καιρο?ς το Ν?πιο Πνε?μα. Την ?ρα που ονειρε?ονται οι βυσσινι?ς και λ?μπουν αμυδρ? μεσ’ στο απλ?τατο σκοτ?δι τ?ποτα δε στοχ?ζονται οι βαβυλ?νιοι στα εργαστ?ρια με τ’ αυτ?ματα χρωματιστ? φ?τα. Π?ς να χαρο?με πια την π?μπτη μ?ρα του προβ?του; Φουρκ?σαμε τ’ αστ?ρια. Γ?ναμε σιγ?-σιγ? δ?θεν υπ?ροχοι με μαδημ?νες χ?μαιρες στα χ?ρια. Μας ν?μεται σκληρ? η επιστ?μη. From: Redwriter [Ερυθρογρ?φος], in Collected Works, Vol. II, Athens: Ikaros. 1993, 472. [Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 18.] DIALECTΙCS OF SPRING Christ the straight angle; Christ the Pythagorean theorem. Christ the infinitesimal calculus from above the blessed Sets Christ. Christ the tessellation of massive particles Christ the zero mass. Hence we spray numbers and fields of lust. We are carabineers of diseased logic plus something— Observed means observer and Hekate The darkness luminous and light in the dark Astarte banqueters demons from today. ΔΙΑΛΕΚΤΙΚΗ ΤΟΥ ΕΑΡΟΣ Χριστ?ς η ορθ? γων?α· Χριστ?ς το πυθαγ?ριο θε?ρημα. Χριστ?ς ο απειροστικ?ς λογισμ?ς ?νωθεν ?λβια Χριστ?ς τα Σ?νολα. Χριστ?ς η ψηφιδογραφ?α στα μαζικ? σωμ?τια Χριστ?ς η μ?ζα μηδ?ν. ?ρα ψεκ?ζουμε αριθμο?ς και πεδ?α λαγνε?ας. Ε?μαστε τυφεκιοφ?ροι νοσο?σης λογικ?ς και κ?τι-- παρατηρο?μενο σημα?νει παρατηρητ?ς και Εκ?τη σκ?τος το π?μφωτο και φως εν τ? σκοτ?? η Αστ?ρτη συνδαιτημ?νες δα?μονες απ’ ?ρτι. From: Redwriter [Ερυθρογρ?φος], Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 18. [1993, II, 472]. CREDO (as we are used to say in Latin) Α I believe in one Poet expelled from heavens / fugitive from the god and vagabond, Empedocles / and here on earth / exile on the earth etc. of Baudelaire /. Β I believe in one Computer inside thunder and through matter. Γ Suffering undefiled / substantive / the Poet uplifts himself slow-burning suicidal implying lengthy sleeps. Δ Cutting down on prospective mistakes. Ε Of all things visible and invisible officiating the onion-peelings. Ζ The Poet has nothing / see the departed /. Η I believe in one Poet that says: madness I enjoy; he ridicules existence; let me light up from my mana. Θ Syntax he doesn’t care about when musicality commands him. Along with still more licenses, and Ts are played according to the concept sound anywhere. E.g. the winters here, he winters there; it will not come—I will not rest, etc. etc. Ι The Poet exercises thought until it’s stripped down. Κ And if he’s Greek he must always study the fineness of Attica, in light, mountains, fields and sea. For this fineness teaches language. Λ And if he’s deeply destined the Poet expresses the unexplainable of the explained; he happens to be a rightful heir to the scientist and his predecessor. Μ On the froth he does not last; the Poet blusters at the bottom of the pot. Ν Flamebred and never redeemed. Ξ The Poet must sometimes say: what a consumption of presence — be a bit lonely for a change! Ο The Poet is twilit. Π He is susceptible of deaths and resurrections. Ρ He looks from the corner of his eye and exists in a glance. Σ He follows behind the mother. Τ Eveningless when it comes to age. Υ I believe in one Poet who says: let the purities coincide. Until the Corinth of the Universe or even further. Φ In a higher despair. Χ In a brighter quintessence. Ψ In one sensation that lifts off. Ω Forgiving everyone. CREDO (ως ε?θισται να λ?με λατινιστ?) Α Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν εκτ?ς ουρανο? / φυγ?ς θε?θεν και αλ?της, Εμπεδοκλ?ς / και επ? της γης / εξ?ριστος π?νω στη γη κ.λπ. του Βωδελα?ρου /. Β Πιστε?ω εις ?να Υπολογιστ?ν εντ?ς κεραυνο? και δια της ?λης. Γ Υποφ?ροντας ?χραντα / ουσιαστικ?ν / ο Ποιητ?ς ανατε?νεται βραδυφλεγ?ς αυτ?χειρας εξυπακο?οντας πολ?ωρους ?πνους. Δ Τα υποψ?φια λ?θη λιγοστε?οντας. Ε Ορατ?ν τε π?ντων και αορ?των ιερουργ?ντας την αποκρομμ?ωση. Ζ Ο Ποιτ?ς ?χει τ?ποτα / βλ?πε τους αναχωρ?σαντες /. Η Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν που λ?ει: η τρ?λα μ’ αρ?σει· γελοιοποιε? την ?παρξη· ας αν?ψω απ’ τη μ?να μου. Θ Συνταχτικ? δεν το γνοι?ζεται στην προσταγ? της μουσικ?τητας. Μαζ? και μ’ ?λλες ακ?μη λευτερι?ς, και τα νυ πα?ζονται κατ? την ?ννοια ?χος οπουδ?ποτε. Π.χ. τον χειμ?να εδ?, το χειμ?να εκε?· δε θ? ’ρθει – δεν θα καταλαγι?σουμε, κ. λπ. κ.λπ. Ι Ο Ποιητ?ς γυμν?ζει τη σκ?ψη σε απογ?μνωση. Κ Κι αν ε?ναι ?λληνας οφε?λει να σπουδ?ζει π?ντοτε της Αττικ?ς τη λεπτ?τητα, σε φως, βουν?, χωρ?φια και θ?λασσα. Διδ?σκει γλ?σσα η λεπτ?τητα το?τη. Λ Κι αν ε?ναι βαθι? πεπρωμ?νος ο Ποιητ?ς εκφρ?ζει το ανεξ?γητο του εξηγητο?· τυγχ?νει ν?μιμος δι?δοχος του επιστ?μονα και προκ?τοχ?ς του. Μ Στον αφρ? δεν ?χει δι?ρκεια· στο πατοκ?ζανο μα?νεται ο Ποιητ?ς. Ν Φλογοδ?αιτος και ποτ? ξελυτρωμ?νος. Ξ Ο Ποιητ?ς κ?ποτε πρ?πει να λ?ει: μεγ?λη καταν?λωση παρουσ?ας – γενε?τε και λ?γο μοναξι?ρηδες! Ο Ο Ποιητ?ς ε?ναι αμφ?φλοξ. Π Επιδ?χεται θαν?τους και αναστ?σεις. Ρ Ακροθωρ?ζει και υπ?ρχει σε ξαφνοκο?ταγμα. Σ Ε?ναι ουραγ?ς της μητ?ρας. Τ Αν?σπερος απ? ηλικ?α. Υ Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν που λ?ει: να συμπ?σουν οι αγν?τητες. Μ?χρι την Κ?ρινθο του Σ?μπαντος ? μακρ?τερα. Φ Σε αν?τερη απελπισ?α. Χ Σε φαειν?τερη πεμπτουσ?α. Ψ Σε μια α?σθηση που πτηνο?ται. Ω Συγχωρ?ντας τους π?ντες. From Large Sized Logic [ Λογικ? μεγ?λου σχ?ματος ], Athens: Erato, 1989, n.p. [1993, II, 521-3]. (shrink)

RESUMEN Este artículo pretende comprender la filosofía de Platón como un ejercicio esencialmente político. Esto implica, sin embargo, distinguir cómo se ejerce esta filosofía política, su sentido y alcance. Muchos estudiosos han atribuido a Platón el proyecto político que Sócrates desarrolla en la República. Sin embargo, el símil de la caverna da cuenta de la imposibilidad o, al menos, de la interna problematicidad de tal proyecto, por lo cual se sugiere que no es en el diálogo República donde se encontraría (...) la auténtica filosofía política de Platón, sino en los denominados diálogos aporéticos. En estos diálogos no se habla sobre una posible ciudad, sino que se ejercita de manera viva una política desarrollada por la dialéctica terapéutica de Sócrates, cuya tarea es desvelar la virtud mediante el desenmascaramiento de los rostros de la ciudad. ABSTRACT The following paper contends that Plato's philosophy is essentially a political activity. This imply, however, to distinguish how this political philosophy carries out, its meaning and scope. Many scholars have attributed to Plato the political project, which Socrates develops in the dialogue Republic. Nevertheless, the simile of the cave reveals the impossibility of such a project or, at least, the serious problems that lie behind it. So, I suggest, that is not in the dialogue Republic where it finds Plato's authentic political philosophy, but in the so-called aporetic dialogues. In these dialogues it does not discuss about a possible city, but it exercises in a lively way a politics builted by Socrates' dialectic therapy, whose task is unveiling the virtue through the unmasking the faces of the city. (shrink)

_Purpose_ of the article is to find out the main content and ways of embodying freedom as a value of the volunteer movement in the context of analyzing the social motivation of human behavior in general. _Theoretical basis._ The theoretical basis of the research is the philosophical and anthropological understanding of freedom as a person’s creative overcoming of obstacles to establish his or her eccentric essence. Such a vision is embedded, in particular, in Karl Jaspers’ philosophy of existence, Helmuth (...) Plessner’s philosophy of positioning in the world, and Paul Ricœur’s philosophy of rational choice of life path. _Originality__._ The importance of freedom as a value, as well as other social values, is revealed and specified through the analysis of the values of the volunteer movement. In the desire of people engaged in volunteer work to achieve freedom through other values, the content of freedom as a basis for self-reproduction of the individual, community and society is revealed. _Conclusions._ Representatives of various humanities and social sciences have distinct research interests in analyzing the values inherent in volunteers. As members of a certain society and certain communities in this society, volunteers do not act outside the economy, politics and other spheres of public life, but reveal their freedom through creative and non-standard solutions to economic, political, and other problems. At the same time, research psychologists focus attention on the personal self-realization of a person, theorists and practitioners of social work study volunteers’ desire to gain recognition from peers and other small social groups, and representatives of sociology, political science and other social sciences focus their attention on such socially significant values of volunteering as patriotism, solidarity, etc. The task of social philosophy is to justify the desire to contribute to the public good, which is common to all volunteers. Representatives of philosophical anthropology look for the best social intentions inherent in a person as a member of society in volunteering. Analysis of the values of volunteering as a motivator of human behavior provides knowledge of socially significant values inherent in every member of society to a greater or lesser extent. (shrink)

This work is a "prolegomena to the study of evil," the beginning of a more ambitious project designated by the author an "ideational critique of society." Such an endeavor would include a "rhetoric that grasps the structures of consciousness, the phenomenology of history, and the dramaturgy of contemporary scenes." The bulk of the present study constitutes an essay in phenomenological sociology. Each of the seven deadly sins is insightfully described in terms of its dominant features as well as in relation (...) to and distinction from allied or similar phenomena. Significantly, the presiding intellectual presences are as often Homer, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and Aquinas as more contemporary ones such as Simmel, Marx, Weber, and Freud. The scope and sensitivity of the author is further manifested in his illuminating use of literary figures including Dante, Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Artaud. Lyman maintains that "sin has been neglected by sociology" and views this work as a first step in remedying such neglect. At the outset he states that he is not offering a way out of or elimination of evil nor the promise of good. Fortunately, much of the book and in particular its concluding chapter serves as at least a strong qualification of this posture. Though holding out no hope for redemption or a final release from sin and evil, Lyman’s effort would seem to have a commendable melioristic aim. He is concerned, however, to avoid what is for him the besetting sin of contemporary sociology—the attempt to present a sociological blueprint for earthly happiness. Lyman would like to see sociology respect "the social visions that the reason of ordinary people produces," while neither applauding nor opposing them. "The sociological task would then be to describe the processes of social architectonics, and not to build the new society in advance of them." It is evident that Lyman wishes to avoid explaining away sin or reducing it to psychological or societal deviance but it would have been helpful to have had some suggestion of his ontology or metaphysics of sin. The "reality" of sin and evil remains unclarified throughout these analyses. The citations from Homer, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Dante, and other such figures are presented without irony or condescension. Now it may be possible to distill psychological and sociological insights from these thinkers while rejecting or ignoring their theological dimensions. To do so, however, involves a process of abstraction and a contextualism which hardly leaves the phenomena as presented by these thinkers untouched and unchanged. Hence, it would seem that some justification for the "sin" character of these actions in their contemporary milieu is called for. Lyman hints that he is unhappy with the neutralization of sin resulting from contemporary social science. What is not clear is whether he rejects the naturalistic assumptions which undergird and indeed make inevitable such neutralizing interpretations. The background assumption of Lyman’s study is a Nietzschean-like "sociology of the absurd" which presupposes "a world that is ultimately and essentially without meaning" but is made meaningful "by the actions and beliefs of the people who participate in it." This is, of course, a radically different world than the one within which the sin-evil language emerged and gave this language its depth and significance. One aspect of Lyman’s continuing task, therefore, would be to show how it is possible to speak meaningfully of sin and evil when the belief in a transcendent which constituted these phenomena in their classical modes is absent. Nietzsche’s challenge must be faced: after the "death of God" we can still speak of "good and bad" but can we any longer speak of "good and evil"?—E.F. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhism and the Idea of Human Rights:Resonances and Dissonances1Perry Schmidt-LeukelIn 1991 L.P.N. Perera, Professor of Pāli and Buddhist Studies in Sri Lanka, published a Buddhist commentary on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In this commentary Perera tries to show that, in the Pāli canon, i.e. the canonical scripture of Theravāda Buddhism, for every single article of the Human Rights Declaration a substantial parallel or at least a (...) statement with a similar tendency can be found. Indeed, says Perera, Article 1, which affirms the dignity and rights of all humans, "is in complete accord with Buddhist thought, and may be said to be nothing new to Buddhism in conception" (Perera 1991:21). In contrast, the Buddhist Peter Junger, Professor of Law at the University of Cleveland, Ohio, judged in 1995 that... though followers of Buddhist traditions do value most, if not all, of the interests underlying the rhetoric of human rights, they may not have much use for the label itself, which is, after all, a product of the traditions of Western Europe and the parochial histories of that region.(Junger 1998: 56)Junger goes on to say that "the concept of human rights is not likely to be useful in...following the Buddha Dharma" (Junger 1998: 55).Thus Perera and Junger agree that the content of the various human rights is acceptable for Buddhists. However, they disagree strongly in their evaluation of the idea of human rights in itself. In this respect Damien Keown has rightly argued that the crucial question on 'Buddhism and Human Rights' is not so much whether Buddhism can accept any particular human right but rather whether the idea of human rights as such can find a philosophical justification within the "overall Buddhist vision of individual and social good" (Keown 1998: 24).It is this problem that I would like to pursue in this paper. In the first part I will sketch some basic characteristics of the idea of human rights. In the second part I will point out what resonances this idea finds in Buddhism or by which Buddhist concepts the human rights idea can be justified. And finally, in the third part, I will deal [End Page 33] with the question of potential dissonances between the idea of human rights and Buddhist concepts.On the Nature of Human RightsWith the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the various subsequent human rights conventions the rights of individuals were for the first time inscribed into international law, which had previously recognised only collectives as legal subjects. By formulating universal rights as valid for every individual human being regardless of race, colour, sex, religion, birth, etc. the Universal Declaration points to the most important feature of the idea of human rights: the protection of the individual or, to be more precise, the protection of the individual against powerful institutions of the state, society, religion or others. It is individual self-determination and free agency that are protected through human rights. Human rights define the minimum of what is necessary in order to guarantee the freedom of individual agency and the freedom of self-determination. By the definition of inalienable rights,2 the idea of human rights sets limits to those collectives and institutions in which we usually live, limits which for the sake of the basic liberty of the individual are not to be transgressed. Michael Ignatieff summarises this understanding of human rights with the words: "rights exist to protect individuals" (Ignatieff 2001: 67), and "they are worth having only if they can be enforced against institutions like the family, the state, and the church" (Ignatieff 2001: 66f.). Therefore "moral individualism" is "the core of the Universal Declaration" (Ignatieff 2001: 66).It is true that the further development of the human rights debate, particularly within the context of the United Nations, has led to an extension of the idea of human rights to collective rights and collective legal entities by including among human rights, for example, a nations' right to self-determination and the right to peace and the right to development. However, in my opinion it would be highly... (shrink)

In the beginning, Savransky's book offers a copious list of many worlds that we may or may not inhabit or even know about: a world where the dead are persons with whom the living confer, a world where part of the year the sun never sets, a world where sorcery-lions stalk their victims, a world where fictional characters give advice to novel readers, a world where immortal fungi live in disturbed forests, and and and (without end). This is a “world (...) of many worlds,” say Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser; a “pluralistic universe,” says William James. But neither phrase tells us what the world is like. They only stand for a practical and burning question at a time when the erasure of differences goes on at a breathtaking pace and the worlds face globalizing forces that fracture the multiple practices through which beings exist.These attempts at world erasures were and are by no means inevitable, and Savransky offers us, more precious than any explanation, a story about the past that helps us feel important aspects of what continues to occur. The story concerns the fraction of Magellan's circumnavigating crew arriving back in Spain in 1522, and by retelling it Savransky gives us a striking sense of the crew not so much having crossed the globe as having invented it. As in Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), the journey legitimized the conception of a unified reality, a globe, everywhere of the same quality, whose local particularities are but obstacles to overcome, resources to exploit, or exotic mysteries to visit. The main effort of Savransky's book, then, is to gather means that might empower ways of thinking, feeling, and living in a brazen reversal of Verne's title—around the day in eighty (or a thousand) worlds.Savransky is by no means alone in this task, and many anthropological and philosophical proposals have contributed. He comments on some of these with a view to learning from their inventiveness rather than to pointing out their shortcomings. Still, we have learned from the fate of such proposals and experiments the startling ease with which the vision of a unified reality can creep back into the best attempts at thinking about a world of many worlds. Take, for instance, the language of ontology that has enabled us to hear from other worlds things of which we could not imagine reality was capable. But then, as Savransky shows, those gains are nearly lost when ontology turns into a turn—the “ontological turn”—and the anthropologists sail off around the world, posing the question “What is your ontology?” to people who could not care less about ontology.From James especially, Savransky borrows many proposals, two of which I will mention here. First is the need to reclaim philosophical Realism from those who made it a weapon of disqualification. James himself was the keen proponent of a Realism that we might call generic: “reality feels like itself,” any experience is real, and no experience should be required to justify its existence. Second, if “reality feels like itself,” then we may expect to experience “worldquakes” whenever we happen to brush up against other worlds. Perhaps the most compelling meaning that we may assign, following James, to pluriverse, is the notion and experience of “the” world being not only more than one, but also more than many—a sense of the real as inseverable from a more. Thus Savransky writes, along these lines, that “the pluriverse is not a world we dream might come about—it is what makes us dream.”. (shrink)