It is one of Sartre's greatest strengths that his declared aim was 'to write for his own time'. From the 1940s onward, he became ever less interested in 'timeless' questions, and ever more concerned to explore the concrete realities of his own age. This engagement with the contemporary makes it particularly tempting to consider what Sartre's responses to the events of our own age would be. Ever since his death in 1980, those of us who have drawn insight and inspiration (...) from Sartre's works have tended to ask how Sartre might have judged particular political developments. And because of the central place given to violence in his thought, as well as his detailed reflections on the Second World War and the wars in Algeria and Vietnam, it is only natural to ask how Sartre would have responded to the appalling events of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent 'war on terror'. (shrink)

Michel Onfray’s L’Ordre libertaire is a passionate defence of Camus as a philosopher, and an attempt to co-opt him as a representative of Onfray’s own Nietzschean, hedonistic, libertarian, atheist beliefs. But the account is far from successful. Onfray’s presentation is highly repetitive, and though he promises us a ‘careful reading’, in fact his work contains many errors and misrepresentations. His vituperative attacks on Marxism in general, and on Sartre in particular, are often based on serious inaccuracies. His attempt to defend (...) Camus en bloc makes him frequently insensitive to the complexities and contradictions of Camus’s thought, and in particular of his political stance. The treatment of Camus’s views on the Algerian War in particular, and the role of violence in history in general, is equally unsatisfactory. (shrink)

Paul Levi was leader of the German Communist Party in the vital years 1919 and 1920; he was subsequently expelled for his opposition to the adventurist March Action in 1921. Three recent books cast new light on this complex figure: David Fernbach’s selection of his writings, Frédéric Cyr’s biography and Paul Frölich’s memoirs. Levi was a man of great talent and courage, but his leadership style was defective; he was neither Leninist nor Luxemburgist, and his greatest weakness was his inability (...) to relate to ultra-leftism. His limitations are revealed by a comparison with his comrade Clara Zetkin. (shrink)

The French journal Clarté had its origins in a movement launched just after the end of World War I by Henri Barbusse. It was soon taken over by a group of more radical intellectuals, who were close to the French Communist Party but not under its direct control. The journal combined politics and culture. It attempted to analyse the changing world-conjuncture, and in particular the significance of the defeated revolutions in Germany and China. But it also developed a theory of (...) culture under the influence of the Russian proletcult, Victor Serge, Georges Sorel and surrealism. In 1927, under the influence of Pierre Naville, Clarté broke with the Moscow-dominated Communist Party and became the organ of the French Left Opposition. Cuenot has given a well-researched and balanced account of its development. (shrink)

Romain Ducoulombier, author ofCamarades!, a study of the origins of the French Communist Party, belongs to a different ideological context to earlier authors on the subject, such as Kriegel, Wohl or Robrieux. But though Ducoulombier claims originality for his work, there is little genuinely new here. He fails to grasp the impact of the Russian Revolution on the French working class and has little understanding of the dynamics of the Communist International. He stresses the ‘asceticism’ and ‘messianism’ of the early (...) Communist Party without giving a precise meaning to these terms. Worst of all, Ducoulombier concentrates on archival material while saying remarkably little about the French Communist Party’s actual activities, notably work in the trade unions, anti-militarism and anti-colonialism. (shrink)

We have two aims in this paper. The first is to provide the reader with a critical guide to recent work on relativity and persistence by Balashov, Gilmore and others. Much of this work investigates whether endurantism can be sustained in the context of relativity. Several arguments have been advanced that aim to show that it cannot. We find these unpersuasive, and will add our own criticisms to those we review. Our second aim, which complements the first, is to demarcate (...) the most defensible form of relativistic endurantism. A recurring theme of this paper is that even those philosophers who do worry about relativity have not taken it seriously enough. (shrink)

Scientism has none of the virtues of science or philosophy, so let's do away with it.

Both papers – to different degrees – underplay the interactive dimensions of music, and both would have benefited from integrating the concept of attachment into their treatments of social bonding. I further suggest that their treatment of music as a discrete domain of human experience and behaviour weakens their arguments concerning its functions in human evolution.

Abstract Havi Carel has recently argued that one can be ill and happy. An ill person can ?positively respond? to illness by cultivating ?adaptability? and ?creativity?. I propose that Carel's claim can be augmented by connecting it with virtue ethics. The positive responses which Carel describes are best understood as the cultivation of virtues, and this adds a significant moral aspect to coping with illness. I then defend this claim against two sets of objections and conclude that interpreting Carel's phenomenology (...) of illness within a virtue-ethical framework enriches our understanding of how illness can be edifying. (shrink)

All three authors range themselves against John Norton's deductive analysis of thought experiments. Brown's insight, Nersessian's mental modelling, and Gooding's embodiment, arise, in each case, from a major all-purpose philosophical theory. None reaches down to the specific level of thought experiments, which are small, rare, and precious. I urge attention to Wittgenstein's remark that "the experimental character disappears when one looks at the process as a memorable picture." Thought experiments are not experiments. They are static. They become fixed, more like (...) jokes or optical illusions. Unlike real experiments, they have no life of their own. (shrink)

This paper reassesses the role of sceptical thinking in the emergence of the new science of the seventeenth century, in the context of the seminal but contestable History of Scepticism by Richard Popkin. It investigates the anti-sceptical essay by Galen De optimo modo docendi, which was retranslated in the sixteenth century by Erasmus and later published as an adjunct to the works of Sextus Empiricus, in order to highlight the currency of ideas about hyperbolic doubt, and links this to the (...) long tradition of free enquiry in which doubting authority is seen as a profitable exercise closely associated with the independence of philosophy from theological domination; and it argues that this long tradition played an important role in the emergence of the new science. (shrink)

Experience is inescapably temporal. But how do we experience time? Temporal experience is a fundamental subject in philosophy – according to Husserl, the most important and difficult of all. Its puzzles and paradoxes were of critical interest from the Early Moderns through to the Post-Kantians. After a period of relative neglect, temporal experience is again at the forefront of debates across a wealth of areas, from philosophy of mind and psychology, to metaphysics and aesthetics. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of (...) Temporal Experience is an outstanding reference source to the key debates in this exciting subject area and represents the first collection of its kind. Comprising nearly thirty chapters by a team of international contributors, the _Handbook_ is organised into seven clear parts: Ancient and early modern perspectives Nineteenth and early twentieth-century perspectives The structure of temporal experience Temporal experience and the philosophy of mind Temporal experience and metaphysics Empirical perspectives Aesthetics Within each part key topics concerning temporal experience are examined, including canonical figures such as Locke, Kant and Husserl; extensionalism, retentionalism and the specious present; interrelations between temporal experience and time, agency, dreaming, and the self; empirical theories of perceiving and attending to time; and temporal awareness in the arts including dance, music and film. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience is essential reading for students and researchers of philosophy of mind and psychology. It is also extremely useful for those in related fields such as metaphysics, phenomenology and aesthetics, as well as to psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists. (shrink)