This book analyses the use of the crucial concept of 'taste' in the works of five major seventeenth-century French authors, Méré, Saint Evremond, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère and Boileau. It combines close readings of important texts with a thoroughgoing political analysis of seventeenth-century French society in terms of class and gender. Dr Moriarty shows that far from being timeless and universal, the term 'taste' is culture-specific, shifting according to the needs of a writer and his social group. (...) The notion of 'taste' not only helped to shape a new dominant culture, but also registered the conflicts within that culture between a view of taste that presupposted the values of 'polite society' as an exclusive (though not necessarily aristocratic) group, and a view that stressed the value of the classical-humanist tradition as a source of standards ratified by a broader public. this study sheds light not only on the central concept, but also on the individual authors discussed and on the norms of French classical literature in general. (shrink)

From the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries, French writing is especially concerned with analysing human nature. The ancient ethical vision of man's nature and goal survives, even, to some extent, in Descartes. But it is put into question especially by the revival of St Augustine's thought, which focuses on the contradictions and disorders of human desires and aspirations. Analyses of behaviour display a powerful suspicion of appearances. Human beings are increasingly seen as motivated by self-love: they (...) are driven by the desire for their own advantage, and take a narcissistic delight in their own image. Moral and religious writers re-emphasize the traditional imperative of self-knowledge, but in such a way as to suggest the difficulties of knowing oneself. Operating with the Cartesian distinction between mind and body, they emphasize the imperceptible influence of bodily processes on our thought and attitudes. They analyse human beings' ignorance of their own motives and qualities, and the illusions under which they live their lives. Their critique of human behaviour is no less searching than that of writers who have broken with traditional religious morality, such as Hobbes and Spinoza. A wide range of authors is studied, some well-known, others much less so: the abstract and general analyses of philosophers and theologians are juxtaposed with the less systematic and more concrete investigations of writers like Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld, not to mention the theatre of Corneille, Molière, and Racine. (shrink)

This book deals with three major French thinkers of the seventeenth century, Descartes, Pascal, and Malebranche. It examines their influential critical accounts of the impact of the body and of social relationships on experience, and the need to correct this by reference to metaphysical or religious truth.

Disguised Vices analyses the underlying logic of these arguments, and investigates what is at stake in them.

French thinkers have revolutionized European thought about knowledge, religion, politics, and society. Delivering a comprehensive history of thought in France from the Middle Ages to the present, this book follows themes and developments of thought across the centuries. It provides readers with studies of both systematic thinkers and those who operate less systematically, through essays or fragments, and places them all in their many contexts. Informed by up-to-date research, these accessible chapters are written by prominent experts (...) in their fields who investigate key concepts in non-technical language. Chapters feature treatments of specific thinkers as individuals including Voltaire, Rousseau, Descartes and Derrida, but also more general movements and schools of thought from humanism to liberalism, via the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Marxism, and feminism. Furthermore, the influence of gender, race, empire and slavery are investigated to offer a broad and fulfilling account of French thought throughout the ages. (shrink)

Desmond Clarke adopts a broad understanding of the term ‘philosophy,’ informed by close attention to historical context. He discusses the limitations of early modern philosophy as an academic discipline, plausibly connecting its tendency to conservatism with the fact that philosophy teachers were generally recent graduates, employed for quite short periods, and thus ill-equipped to develop the subject. On the other hand, as he observes, “what is now described as philosophical reasoning or analysis was widely distributed in the publications of lawyers, (...) theologians, natural philosophers, and political commentators”. This obliges him to cast his net very wide, far beyond the range of authors one would... (shrink)

This book is a study of Blaise Pascal's defence of Christian belief in the Pensees. Michael Moriarty aims to expound--and in places to criticize--what he argues is a coherent and original apologetic strategy. Setting out the basic philosophical and theological presuppositions of Pascal's project, the present volume draws the distinction between convictions attained by reason and those inspired by God-given faith. It also presents Pascal's view of the contradictions within human nature, between the 'wretchedness' and the 'greatness'. His (...) mind-body dualism and his mechanistic conception of non-human animals are discussed. Pascal invokes the biblical story of the Fall and the doctrine of original sin as the only credible explanation of these contradictions. His analysis of human occupations as powered by the twin desire to escape from painful thoughts and to gratify one's vanity is subjected to critical examination, as is his conception of the self and self-love. Pascal argues that just as Christianity propounds the only explanation for the human condition, so it offers the only kind of happiness that would satisfy our deepest longings. He thus reasons that we have an interest in investigating its truth-claims as rooted in the Bible and in history. The closing chapters of this book discuss Pascal's view of Christian morality and the famous 'wager' argument for opting in favour of Christian belief. (shrink)

In a recent paper in Business Ethics Quarterly Professor Jeffrey Moriarty (2005) asserted the relevance of political philosophy to business ethics. Moriarty asked whether "businesses ought to be run (more) like states" and argued why that might be beneficial. This paper on the contrary asserts that there are distinct disadvantages to businesses attempting to be run more like states. Specifically, it asserts that any such an attempt increases the likelihood of the re-emergence of a totalitarian society as (...) businesses currently often act as an intermediary between the individual and the state. The paper contemplates Moeller's ambitions in the Weimar period for the business to be run like a state and the historical outcome of those ambitions. The paper also distinguishes between two different kinds of rights and argues that different kinds of rights pertain to different sectors which preclude business being run like a state. (shrink)

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau famously laments that "there are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live." From Thoreau's point of view, what professors of philosophy do has something parasitic or derivative about it. They subsist on the praiseworthy achievements of others who have gone before them: real philosophers, presumably, who understood that "to be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found (...) a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically."1... Read More. (shrink)

This special issue of the _South Atlantic Quarterly_ focuses on theory’s role in contemporary politics, reading, and critiques of literature. Although there will always be questions raised about what theory is, what it can do, and its overall efficacy, “Theory Now” argues that those questions obscure the fact that theory is, and always has been, the precondition for thought. This issue demonstrates what it means to engage with theory in this particular historical moment. One contributor takes a critical (...) look at Michel Foucault’s final lectures, which have only recently been published in French, and evaluates their potential to instruct contemporary theory and politics. Another contributor contemplates Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s legacy and insists that the only way to read her work is to anticipate the effects it may have in the future rather than assume that interpretations of her scholarship are now settled. With this issue, recently appointed editor Michael Hardt inaugurates “Against the Day,” a new section composed of short essays that focus on a topic of contemporary political importance. (shrink)

Justice requires giving people what they deserve. Or so many philosophers – and according to many of those philosophers, everyone else – thought for centuries. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, however, perhaps under the influence of Rawls’s (1971) desert-less theory, desert was largely cast out of discussions of distributive justice. Now it is making a comeback. In this chapter I consider recent research on the concept of desert, arguments for its requital, and connections between desert and other distributive ideals. (...) I suggest that desert-sensitive theories of distributive justice, though they face obstacles, have a promising future. (shrink)

Literature is open to psychoanalysis as is any other form of expression—this much is obvious. Less so is the relevancy of analysis to the specificity of literary texts, to what differentiates them from other linguistic utterances; in short, the literariness of literature.The analyst cannot avoid this problem of focus. If he did, he would treat verbal art as a document for purposes other than an understanding of its defining difference. He would simply be seeking one more set of (...) clues to the workings of the human mind, as the sociologist or historian exploits literature to explore periods or societies through their reflection in its mirror.The only approach to the proper focus must be consistent both with the analyst’s method and with the natural reader’s practice. The analyst requires free association on the part of the analysand, and he matches this free flow of information with an attention equally open to all that is said. It is only after a passive stage of “evenly-hovering attention,” or, as the French nicely call it, écoute flottante, that he seizes upon clues to build a model of interpretation. These clues are revealed to him by anomalies such as parapraxes and repetitions or deviant representations, as well as formal coincidences between what he hears and the corpus of observations on linguistic behavior accumulated since Freud. The reader, on the other hand, is faced with a text that is strongly organized, overdetermined by aesthetic, generic, and teleological constraints, and in which whatever survives of free association is marshaled toward certain effects. The reader himself is far from passive, since he starts reacting to the text as soon as his own way of thinking, and of conceiving representation, is either confirmed or challenged. The text tends therefore not to be interpreted for what it is, but for what is selected from it by the reader’s individual reactions. A segmentation of the text into units of significance thus occurs, and it is the task of the critic to verify the validity of this process. In pursuing this goal he must restrict himself to a segmentation that can be proven as being dictated by textual features rather than by the reader’s idiosyncrasies, by those elements the perceptions of which does not depend on the latter and that resist erasure when they are in conflict with such individual quirks. The analyst’s advantage in identifying such features is that he is trained to recognize the above-mentioned anomalies and to explain them by repression and displacement, that is, by the traces left in the surface of the text by the conflict between its descriptive and narrative structures and the lexicon and grammar that we call the unconscious. Michael Riffaterre, University Professor at Columbia University and a senior fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory, is the editor of Romantic Review. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Syllepsis” and “Intertextual Representation: On Mimesis as Interpretive Discourse”. (shrink)

The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the (...) first, functioned as a secular religion. Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in thought and that the English naturalist Charles Darwin was at the heart of it. However, contrary also to what many think, this revolution was not primarily scientific as such, but more religious or metaphysical, as people were taken from the secure world of the Christian faith into a darker, more hostile world of evolutionism. In a fashion unusual for the history of ideas, Ruse turns to the novelists and poets of the period for inspiration and information. His book covers a wide range of creative writers - from novelists like Voltaire and poets like Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century with novelists including Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and H. G. Wells and poets including Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and on to the twentieth century with novelists including Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson, and poets including Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Philip Appleman. Covering such topics as God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sexuality, and sin and redemption, and written in an engaging manner and spiced with wry humor, Darwinism as Religion gives us an entirely fresh, engaging and provocative view of one of the cultural highpoints of Western thought. (shrink)

For forty years, American priest and friar Reginald Foster, O.C.D., worked in the Latin Letters office of the Roman Curia’s Secretary of State in Vatican City. As Latinist of four popes, he soon emerged as an internationally recognized authority on the Latin language—some have said, the internationally recognized authority, consulted by scholars, priests, and laymen worldwide. In 1986, he began teaching an annual summer Latin course that attracted advanced students and professors from around the globe. This volume gathers contributions from (...) some of his many students in honor of his enduring influence and achievements. Its chapters explore a wide range of linguistic and literary evidence from antiquity to the present day in a variety of theoretical perspectives. If the motivation for putting together this collection has been to reflect (and reflect upon) Foster’s influences on Latin scholarship and pedagogy, its title alludes—via the medieval folk etymology of the word labyrinthus (“quasi labor intus”)—to its theme: ambiguity in Latin literature. (shrink)

All of Mikhail Bakhtin’s work stands under the sign of plurality, the mystery of the one and the many. Unlike the third eye of Tibetan Buddhism, which gives those who possess it a vision of the secret unity holding creation together, Bakhtin seems to have had a third ear that permitted him to hear differences where others perceived only sameness, especially in the apparent wholeness of the human voice. The obsessive question at the heart of Bakhtin’s thought is always (...) “Who is talking?” It was his sense of the world’s overwhelming multiplicity that impelled Bakhtin to rethink strategies by which heterogeneity had traditionally been disguised as a unity. In his several attempts to find a single name for the teeming forces which jostled each other within the combat zone of the word—whether the term was “polyphony,” “heteroglossia,” or “speech communion”—Bakhtin was at great pains never to sacrifice the tension between identity and difference that fueled his enterprise. He always sought the minimum degree of homogenization necessary to any conceptual scheme, feeling it was better to preserve the heterogeneity which less patient thinkers found intolerable—and to which they therefore hurried to assign a unitizing label.Bakhtin’s metaphysical contrariness has the effect of making at times appear to be indiscriminate, as when he refused to recognize borders between biography and autobiography or, more notoriously, between speaking and writing. But, as I hope to show, these apparently cardinal distinctions are for Bakhtin only local instances of unity that participate in and are controlled by a fare more encompassing set of oppositions and differences. All this places an extra burden on those who seek an overarching design in Bakhtin’s legacy: the apparently unitizing term “Bakhtin” proves to be as illusory—or more illusory—in its ability to subsume real distinctions as any other, if we submit it to a Bakhtinian analysis. Michael Holquist is professor and chairman of the department of Slavic languages and literatures a Indiana University. With his wife, Katerina Clark, he has just completed Mikhail Bakhtin, a study of Bakhtin’s life and works, forthcoming in the autumn of 1984. He is currently working in Moscow. (shrink)

Instead of seeing satisfaction as the necessary and appropriate goal of desire, Dreiser seems to see it only as an inevitable but potentially fatal by-product. Desire, for him, is most powerful when it outstrips its object; indeed, it is the very fact of this excessiveness that fuels Sister Carrie's economy—which is one reason why Carrie is right to think of money as "power itself." The economy runs on desire, which is to say, money, or the impossibility of ever having enough (...) money. Nothing is more characteristic of Carrie than her ability to "indulge" in what Dreiser calls "the most high-flown speculations,"1 rocking in her chair and spending in "her fancy" money she hasn't yet earned. Fancy or imagination is the very agent of excessive desire for Carrie, enabling her to get "beyond, in her desires, twice the purchasing power of her bills" . When Drouet suggests to her that she has dramatic ability, "imagination," as usual, "exaggerated the possibilities for her. It was as if he had put fifty cents in her hand and she had exercised the thoughts of a thousand dollars" .· 1. Thomas Dreiser, Sister Carrie, ed. Donald Pizer , p. 22. All subsequent references to this work will be cited parenthetically in the text.Walter Benn Michaels is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of articles on American literature and literary theory and a book entitled American Epistemologies: Literary Theory and Pragmatism. (shrink)

Michael Kelly is the author of 68 entries altogether. The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French is far more than a simple revision of the original Oxford Companion to French Literature, published in 1959, and described by The Listener as the `standard work of reference for English-speaking enquirers into French literature'. As the change in title implies, this completely new work presents an authoritative guide not only to ten centuries of literature (...) produced in the territory now called France, but also to the rich literary output of other French-speaking countries around the world. The scope of the Companion is deliberately open and inclusive, challenging and extending the traditional canon. Literature is understood in a broad sense, ranging from strip cartoon and pamphlet to tragedy and epic, and particular attention is devoted to francophone writing from outside France. Written by an international team of specialists, entries cover individual authors and works - over 3,000 of them - from the troubadours to Césaire, and from La Princesse de Clèves to La Vie mode d'emploi. Each is discussed in detail within their historical, cultural, and intellectual context. Among the new features of the Companion are the substantial essay-entries, reflecting up-to-date scholarship and theoretical debates on topics such as: - literary movements and genres - historical subjects such as chivalry, or Occupation and Resistance in wartime France - movements of thought from Scholasticism to feminism - linguistic topics - the sciences - the arts and media, including opera, cinema, and press. (shrink)

This article explores the vocabulary of knowing in Descartes’ Meditations. It offers a detailed and in part sequential examination of his use of cognitio and scien...

Health institutions recommend that young infants be exclusively breastfed on demand, and it is widely held that parents who can breastfeed have an obligation to do so. This has been challenged in recent philosophical work, especially by Fiona Woollard. Woollard’s work critically engages with two distinct views of parental obligation that might ground such an obligation—based on maximal benefit and avoidance of significant harm—to reject an obligation to breastfeed. While agreeing with Woollard’s substantive conclusion, this paper (drawing on philosophical discussion (...) of the ‘right to rear’) argues that there are several more moderate views of parental obligation which might also be thought to ground parental obligation. We first show that an obligation to breastfeed might result not from a general obligation to maximally benefit one’s child, but from what we call ‘choice-specific’ obligations to maximise benefit within particular activities. We then develop this idea through two views of parental obligation—the Dual Interest view, and the Best Custodian view—to ground an obligation to exclusively breastfeed on demand, before showing how both these more moderate views fail. Finally, we argue that not only is there no general obligation to breastfeed children, but that it is often morally right not to do so. Since much advice from health institutions on this issue implies that exclusive breastfeeding on demand is the best option for all families, our argument drives the feeding debate forward by showing that this advice often misrepresents parents’ moral obligations in potentially harmful ways. (shrink)

We are grateful to Stanley Fish for demonstrating what “Against Theory” had merely assumed, that the only kind of theory worth attacking is the kind which claims to be more than just another form of practice. Some readers have thought that our arguments were directed against all general reflection about literature or criticism. Others have thought that we were resisting the encroachment on literary study of themes derived from politics, or psychoanalysis, or philosophy. These are plausible misreading (...) of our intention, since the term “theory” is indeed sometimes applied to any critical argument marked by historical or aesthetic generalization or by the reading of literature in terms of themes derived from other disciplines. But, as Fish shows, neither empirical generality nor thematic novelty is enough to make an argument theoretical in more than a trivial sense, that is, in a sense that marks it as importantly different in kind from other critical arguments. Theory in a nontrivial sense always consists in the attempt “to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without,” and this strong kind of theory is the kind whose coherence we deny . It is also the kind of theory engaged in by the vast majority of those who consider themselves theorists—including many who might prefer to think of themselves as practicing theory in some weaker sense.At the conclusion of “Philosophy without Principles,” Richard Rorty appears to join those who think we are attacking theory in its weaker senses as well as in the strong sense just described. He suggests that eliminating the writing and teaching of theory would deprive literary scholars of “an opportunity to discuss philosophy books—as well as novels, poems, critical essays, and so forth—with literature students” . If this were the only issue between Rorty’s version of pragmatism and ours, our disagreement would come to an immediate end, since nothing could be further from the aims of “Against Theory” than rendering a judgment about what books should be discussed in literary classrooms. But our disagreement runs deeper than debates about the curriculum. It involves, first, a fundamental disagreement about language and, second, an equally fundamental disagreement about the nature and consequences of pragmatism. Steven Knapp is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley; his book Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge is forthcoming. Walter Benn Michaels, an associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is working on the relation between literary and economic forms of representation in nineteenth-century America. A previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Sister Carrie’s Popular Economy,” appeared in the Winter 1980 issue. The authors’ joint contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Against Theory,” and “A Reply to Our Critics,” appeared respectively in the Summer 1982 and June 1983 issues. (shrink)

This paper is more explorative than programmatic. It attempts to place empirical flesh on some of Alfred North Whitehead's speculative thoughts on concrete apprehensions. The challenge lies in the fact that Whitehead was vague on the subject. While Whitehead offers numerous thoughts on why we mistake the abstract for the concrete he wrote considerably less on how we can get ourselves to think more concretely. I therefore examine an empirical case and work 'backwards', showing its affinities with process thought. (...) A largely invisible phenomenon within the social/political theory literature is the empirical subject of this paper: the agricultural field day (though the events examined are not of the conventional variety). The paper begins with an overview of Whitehead's critique of abstraction and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Attention then turns directly to the case study to empirically ground Whitehead's thoughts on doing more concrete abstractions. (shrink)

Berkeley is best known for his immaterialism and the texts that extol it—the Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. He made his case by treatise, then by dialogue, and this tendency towards stylistic experimentation did not end there; this paper explores an early speculative fiction project that pursued his theological and philosophical agendas. Berkeley used satire to challenge his “freethinking” philosophical opponents in “The Pineal Gland” story published in The Guardian in 1713. Echoing the grand (...) tours Berkeley undertook in subsequent years, Part 1 offers a “gland tour” of some literary motivations, influences and legacies of these essays. Berkeley pursues heroic themes from Homer and Alexander Pope, while lampooning the philosophies of both Descartes and the freethinkers. Armed with the device of a magic snuff that transports him to the pineal glands of his adversaries, Berkeley's protagonist uses it “to distinguish the real from the professed sentiments of all persons of eminence in court, city, town, and country”. (Guardian, p. 187) Part 1 examines ‘The Pineal Gland’ in the context of Berkeley's broader philosophical legacy and the text's significant engagement with the literature of Homer and Pope, concluding that “The Pineal Gland” is an important but overlooked source in the history of early speculative fiction. Part 2 continues this analysis by exploring Berkeley's relationship with an expansive London literary circle, interrogating a line of influence beginning with the writing of Margaret Cavendish. In doing so, Part 2 also examines Berkeley's complex attitudes towards women. (shrink)

Although the great French novelists of the last two centuries are widely read in America, there is a widespread notion that little of importance has happened in French literature since the heyday of Sartre, Camus, and the nouveau roman. Curious American readers seeking new, up-to-date information and analyses will find in Paths to Contemporary French Literature a stimulating and much-needed guide to the major currents of one of the worldas great literatures. This critical panorama of (...) contemporary French literature introduces English-language readers to over fifty important writers and poets. Emphasizing authors who are admired by their peers, John Taylor offers a compelling insideras view. (shrink)

In this book, first published in 1984, Joel Weinsheimer advocates revitalizing the practice of imitating literature as a mode appropriate for literary critics as well as artists. The book is not only about imitation; it is itself an imitation, specifically of Samuel Johnson. As both the focus and mode of presentation, imitation is presented not merely as a kind of poetry that once flourished in the eighteenth century but also as a kind of criticism particularly relevant today. Applying arguments (...) from philosophy of science, deconstruction, psycho-analysis, literary theory, semiotics and hermeneutics, Weinsheimer shows that the three main currents of thought responsible for forcing imitation underground were empiricism, originalism and historicism. The three central chapters of the book concentrate on their representatives: John Locke, Edward Young and Thomas Warton. The author then applies Johnsonian arguments – supported by those of Gadamer Peirce – to challenge those objections and re-establish imitation as an intellectually defensible mode of writing. (shrink)

We might think that thought experiments are at their most powerful or most interesting when they produce new knowledge. This would be a mistake; thought experiments that seek understanding are just as powerful and interesting, and perhaps even more so. A growing number of epistemologists are emphasizing the importance of understanding for epistemology, arguing that it should supplant knowledge as the central notion. In this chapter, I bring the literature on understanding in epistemology to bear on explicating (...) the different ways that thought experiments increase three important kinds of understanding: explanatory, objectual and practical. (shrink)

The university as the pluralistic forum is not a picture of what a Catholic university is but a picture of what it is gradually, painfully becoming.

Although there is a large literature on referentiality, going back to at least the nineteenth and early twentieth century, much of this early work is based on constructed data and most of it is on English. The chapters in this volume contribute to a growing body of work that examines referentiality through naturalistic data in context. Taking an interactional approach to (non)referentiality, contributors to this volume ask how participants talk in real time about persons and things as individuals or (...) as categories, and what distinguishes 'referential' from 'nonreferential', 'specific' from 'nonspecific', and 'generic' from 'nongeneric'. Crucially, we ask whether these distinctions even matter to participants in conversation, and if they do, what the evidence for that would be. Contributors investigate these issues using data from conversational interaction in a variety of social contexts - from close friends and family to more casual acquaintances, in service encounters, and between adults and children - and in a range of languages: English, Finnish, French, Indonesian, Japanese, and Mandarin. Collectively, the chapters develop insights showing that reference is often fluid, dynamic, and indeterminate, that referential indeterminacy is typically unproblematic for participants, that shifts in referentiality tend to be tied to specific social goals, and that reference and referentiality emerge dialogically and interactionally. (shrink)

This article examines how the work associated with Henry de Bracton functioned in early modern political and legal thought as an ideograph, a one-word summation of arguments deployed by communities in support of ideological goals. The first part explains the medieval and early modern milieu of 'Bracton' and discusses key folios in context. In the second section the authors discuss in detail the ways in which Civil War Royalists and Parliamentarians made De Legibus pertinent to their antithetical causes. The (...) third part explores 'Bracton's' role in the disputes of the late Stuart period, when attempts to alter the succession in Charles II's reign and at the Glorious Revolution brought a reprise of civil war theorizing. Finally, whereas many early modernists see in seventeenth-century England a break with the medieval past, we follow the lead of those medieval scholars who treat the history of political ideas from the twelfth to the seventeenth century as a single epoch. In so doing we hope to contribute to the ongoing discussion of how seventeenth-century political literature can best be read and understood. (shrink)

Was Joseph de Maistre a conservative thinker?; an actor who might at any time switch roles with his alleged British counterpart Edmund Burke in a show called “Reactions to the French Revolution”? Or was de Maistre (as Sir Isaiah Berlin saw him) a milestone on mankind’s rush to the “Age of Unreason” in general, and to the Nazi folly in particular? To answer this controversy, Professor Michael Shafir called on the witness’ stand an unexpected expert in conservatism (...) and the folly of revolutions: Romanian playwright Ion Luca Caragiale. Using as evidence before the court Caragiale’s famous farce “Master Leonida Facing Reaction”, this exercise in literary counterfactualism demonstrates, according to Shafir, the fig of reason and faith is too small to cover the wastelands of unreason and Social-Darwinist-like psychopathology. (shrink)

Economics for Alfred Marshall, the last of the classical economists, is concerned with activities in the ordinary business of life. In that milieu, we find conflicts and chaotic behavior among people, firms, and countries, which make them conduct their affairs in different, and sometimes, ironic ways. Economic Ironies Throughout History explores, explains, predicts, and harnesses these ironies for economists and scholars alike. Szenberg and Ramrattan distill their core economic ironies from a vast history of philosophy and literature that applies (...) to economic thought. They include philosophical, psychological, literary and linguistic discussions and the personalities behind those ideas such as Socrates, Kierkegaard, Hume, Freud, Jung, Saussure, and Barthes. This book is ideal for economists as well as scholars across the business, social science, and humanities fields. (shrink)

Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach was a philosopher, translator, and prominent social figure of the French Enlightenment. In his philosophical writings Holbach developed a deterministic and materialistic metaphysics which grounded his polemics against organized religion and his utilitarian ethical and political theory. As a translator, Holbach made significant contributions to the European Enlightenment in science and religion. He translated German works on chemistry and geology into French, summarizing many of the German advances in these areas in his entries (...) in Diderot's Encyclopedia. Holbach also translated important English works on religion and political philosophy into French. Holbach remains best known, however, for his role in Parisian society. The close circle of intellectuals that Holbach hosted and, in various ways, sponsored produced the Encyclopedia and a number of revisionary religious, ethical, and political works that contributed to the ideological basis for the French Revolution. Despite the radical views of many members of his coterie, however, Holbach's broader visiting guest list included many of the most prominent intellectual and political figures in Europe. His salon, then, was at once a shelter for radical thought and a hub of mainstream culture. (shrink)

Aimee Barbeau advances a thoughtful critique of my article, “The Connection Between Stakeholder Theory and Stakeholder Democracy: An Excavation and Defense.” Although Barbeau does much to push forward the debate about corporate governance, she does it without undermining my thesis. For what Barbeau has shown is not that stakeholder theorists should not endorse stakeholder boards of directors, but that they should also endorse other ways for stakeholders to participate in decision-making processes within firms.

Derrida’s “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?”, first delivered at the fifteenth annual Assises de la Traduction Littéraire à Arles in 1998, is an address that appears at first to speak from the outside and with a certain deference to professional translators. Yet, it quickly becomes apparent that Derrida not only counts himself among them but uses the occasion to reflect on his own surprising success as a translator of Hegel. This success has to do first and foremost with the proven (...) “relevance” of his translation of the notoriously untranslatable term Aufhebung as relève [in English: sublation]. Not a little perplexed by this apparent triumph, Derrida takes up the French term again, this time redeploying it in the translation of a crucial line from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. In doing so, he relaunches his engagement with Hegel, asking what energies bound up in the concept of relève might yet be released, what internal resistances silently at work in it might still be mobilized to take it in an entirely new direction. Such an engagement enables him to explore in turn what resistances may be at work in the notion of translation itself. Inhabited by an internal otherness, by a constitutive resistance to itself, translation must be understood from the very first as transference. While translation studies have long been attentive to the transferential dynamics in which individual translators find themselves enmeshed, Derrida’s text views transference in more impersonal terms as the tenacious grip in which certain structures of thought hold us, structures which also inform our understanding of translation. How to work with and against this structural unconscious? To address this question, it is necessary to examine Derrida’s own translational practice and the privilege he accords to the term trouvaille. (shrink)

Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach can be considered as the most influential protagonists-in-exile of the scientific philosophy that arose in the twenties and early thirties under the headings Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung and Wissenschaftliche Philosophie. Both were born in 1891 — as was a generally forgotten member of the Vienna Circle: Edgar Zilsel.

The French social philosopher Pierre Bourdieu is now recognised as one of the major thinkers of the twentieth century. In a career of over fifty years, Bourdieu studied a wide range of topics: education, culture, art, politics, economics, literature, law, and philosophy. Throughout these studies, Bourdieu developed a highly specialised series of concepts that he referred to as his "thinking tools", which were used to uncover the workings of contemporary society. Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts highlights his most important (...) concepts and examines them in detail. Each chapter deals with an individual concept and is written to be of immediate use to the student with little or no previous knowledge of Bourdieu. This new edition of the leading text is entirely revised and updated and includes new essays on Methodology, Politics and Social Space. (shrink)

Gerhard Gentzen has been described as logic’s lost genius, whom Gödel called a better logician than himself. This work comprises articles by leading proof theorists, attesting to Gentzen’s enduring legacy to mathematical logic and beyond. The contributions range from philosophical reflections and re-evaluations of Gentzen’s original consistency proofs to the most recent developments in proof theory. Gentzen founded modern proof theory. His sequent calculus and natural deduction system beautifully explain the deep symmetries of logic. They underlie modern developments in computer (...) science such as automated theorem proving and type theory. (shrink)

pt. 1. Collection of Sastri's writings and a kavya on him -- pt. 2. Select research papers presented at the birth centenary seminars.

Although the great French novelists of the last two centuries are widely read in America, there is a widespread notion that little of importance has happened in the French literature since the heyday of Sartre, Camus, and the nouveau roman. Some might argue that even well-read Americans are ignorant about what is happening in European literature generally. Certainly, there has never been so few translations of foreign books in the United States, or so little coverage of (...) foreign writers. Curious American readers need new, up-to-date information and analyses about what is happening elsewhere. Paths to Contemporary French Literature is a stimulating and much-needed guide to the major currents of one of the world's great literatures. This critical panorama of contemporary French literature introduces English-language readers to over fifty important writers and poets, many of whom are still little known outside of France. Emphasizing authors who are admired by their peers, John Taylor offers a compelling insider's view. Their pioneering essays included in this book offer incisive analyses of the ideas motivating current writing and delve into a writer's or poet's entire output. Although some names may be familiar, the reader obtains fresh reappraisals of their seminal work. Especially noteworthy, however, are Taylor's lively introductions to many other key writers who either have not yet crossed the English Channel, let alone the Atlantic. Combating the notion that French literature is overtly intellectual, inaccessible, or interested only in formal experimentation, Taylor shows that many French writers are instead acutely inquisitive about the outside world, shrewd observers of reality, even very funny. Although not conceived as a "reference book," the volume possess some qualities of a reference work: a good bibliography, reliable dates and biographical facts. (shrink)

What explanation can be given for the relevance of literature to Bourdieu's theoretical work? In order to explain this choice of object, in the first part of this article I consider the national and international context within which Bourdieu's theory has been built. In the French intellectual space literature was a central theoretical object. In the international context, the attention paid to literature was justified by the importance given to the symbolic phenomena in the main contemporary (...) theoretical traditions. In order to appreciate the singularity and difficulty of Bourdieu's theoretical acquisition, I try to reconstruct the problems that he attempted to resolve, the theoretical possibilities with regard to which his hypotheses were defined, and the position that he held in his field of production at the time in which they were formulated. In Bourdieu's thought, this conjunctural dimension does not imply that a theory is particularized or relativized. So he presented his theoretical frameworks on literature as a model applying to any kind of cultural products. In the second part of my paper I intend to test these claims by examining under what conditions and to what extent his `Principles of a science of works' have been considerd transposable to other national contexts and/or to new objects. (shrink)

Henri Bergson was a French professor and philosopher. Born in Paris in 1859 to a Polish composer and Yorkshire woman of Irish descent, his revelatory ideas of life as ceaseless transformation and the importance of attention, learning, humor and joy brought him incredible fame and media celebrity.Here you will find insights from his greatest works.The Life Lessons series from The School of Life takes a great thinker and highlights those ideas most relevant to ordinary everyday dilemmas. These books (...) emphasize ways in which wise voices from the past have urgently important and inspiring things to tell us. (shrink)

** Named a Best Book of 2007 by Ready Steady Book, an independent book review website, working in association with The Book Depository, which is devoted to reviewing the best books in literary fiction, poetry, history and philosophy. "An invaluable guide to new literary territory, Taylor is equally good in discussing writers whom the reader already knows." -- Raphael Rubenstein, Rain Taxi "The paths that John Taylor invites us to walk in this book are inviting ones: fifty-five luminous essays devoted (...) to the broad avenues and the seductive byways of contemporary writing in France. John Taylor is opinionated but his opinions are rigorously argued ones. He strikes a canny and productive balance among a variety of competing concerns: the will to instruct his readers, the desire to share with them some very real pleasures, the imperative to interpret critically, and so forth. What emerges here is the image of a rare reader, one who is always willing to engage literature on its own terms, and that of a literature that is mobile, ambitious, provocative and deeply invested in the process of becoming. -- Warren Motte, Review of Contemporary Fiction "In this great introduction to some 50 French writers and poets little known outside of France, Taylor (The Presence of Things Past; The World As It Is), winner of the Three Oaks Prize for Fiction, invites his readers on an interesting journey."--Library Journal "Here it is under one cover: a deeply informed, delightful, and provocative stroll' through the literature of postwar France. From the chroniques of Cingria to the mythologies of Barthes, John Taylor introduces us to the prose and poetry of dozens of French authors, many of them regrettably never translated into English. Taylor is a skillful and witty guide, able to locate a writer between the traditions of Catullus and Pavese or to identify a style borrowing equally from Hlderlin and Hemingway. Working across every genre from autobiography to poetry to fiction to travelogue to the essay, these French authors, well known and obscure, have plumbed the quintessential French problem' of subjectivity. Tired of the culture wars? The language-lyric debate? The post-game analysis of post-structuralism? I suggest you dive into any one of John Taylor's Paths' for a reminder of the astonishing breadth and depth and complexity of which literature is capable."--Erica Funkhouser, author, Pursuit "Here we have vast erudition revealed in graceful, arresting sentences, writing that provides confidence and pleasure. John Taylor's writing strongly evokes Henry James' writing about French literature in his own day. Like James, Taylor is both generous and astute, never relinquishing admiration for the intricate process of analysis, analysis that he does so penetratingly and eloquently. However brilliant Taylor's observations, behind them rests a deep esteem for the writer, for his or her work, and for the tradition from which it comes. This is critical writing that is satisfying at every single level."--Richard Goodman, author, French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France "As they stroll through forgotten quartiers of Paris, wander in memory through the fields of a Norman childhood, reflect on a poem's resemblance to the salt marshes of the Breton coast, mourn the death of a beloved young wife, or look for answers in questions to which the only answers are more questions--France's most celebrated and, in some cases, still uncelebrated contemporary writers are exquisitely captured by John Taylor in a prose both limpid and lapidary and through a host of finely wrought essays, each a small jewel of critical insight, poetic sensitivity, and meticulous interpretation. Like a message in a bottle cast up on the shore, this work offers the English-speaking reader an original and poetic way to understand, appreciate, and love French. (shrink)