We need to keep experimenting with writing to meet the challenges of Deleuze and Guattari’s flattened ontology in the humanities. The paper reports on a small, experimental research project at a university in the north-west of England. The findings are written in an experimental mode, inspired by the Deleuze and Guattarian concept, ‘assemblage’. The experiment is theorised and assessed in a non-reductive way that offers future creative possibilities to other researchers. First, the paper presents a context for the subsequent experimental (...) writing. Some current innovative writerly practice and some theoretical and methodological standpoints are reviewed. Next, this paper presents its theorisation of ‘assemblage’ with particular reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the idea, ‘double articulation’. This approach supports and justifies the author’s schematisation of the textual assemblage into four areas: identity, work, territory and dissolving territory. The author explains how these ideas func... (shrink)

Preface Introduction Christopher J. Berry: Adam Smith: Outline of Life, Times, and Legacy Part One: Adam Smith: Heritage and Contemporaries 1: Nicholas Phillipson: Adam Smith: A Biographer's Reflections 2: Leonidas Montes: Newtonianism and Adam Smith 3: Dennis C. Rasmussen: Adam Smith and Rousseau: Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment 4: Christopher J. Berry: Adam Smith and Early Modern Thought Part Two: Adam Smith on Language, Art and Culture 5: Catherine Labio: Adam Smith's Aesthetics 6: James Chandler: Adam Smith as Critic 7: (...) Michael C. Amrozowicz: Adam Smith: History and Poetics 8: C. Jan Swearingen: Adam Smith on Language and Rhetoric: The Ethics of Style, Character, and Propriety Part Three: Adam Smith and Moral Philosophy 9: Christel Fricke: Adam Smith: The Sympathetic Process and the Origin and Function of Conscience 10: Duncan Kelly: Adam Smith and the Limits of Sympathy 11: Ryan Patrick Hanley: Adam Smith and Virtue 12: Eugene Heath: Adam Smith and Self-Interest Part Four: Adam Smith and Economics 13: Tony Aspromourgos: Adam Smith on Labour and Capital 14: Nerio Naldi: Adam Smith on Value and Prices 15: Hugh Rockoff: Adam Smith on Money, Banking, and the Price Level 16: Maria Pia Paganelli: Commercial Relations: from Adam Smith to Field Experiments Part Five: Adam Smith on History and Politics 17: Spiros Tegos: Adam Smith: Theorist of Corruption 18: David M. Levy & Sandra J. Peart: Adam Smith and the State: Language and Reform 19: Fabrizio Simon: Adam Smith and the Law 20: Edwin van de Haar: Adam Smith on Empire and International Relations Part Six: Adam Smith on Social Relations 21: Richard Boyd: Adam Smith, Civility, and Civil Society 22: Gavin Kennedy: Adam Smith on Religion 23: Samuel Fleischacker: Adam Smith and Equality 24: Maureen Harkin: Adam Smith and Women Part Seven; Adam Smith: Legacy and Influence 25: Spencer J. Pack: Adam Smith and Marx 26: Craig Smith: Adam Smith and the New Right 27: Tom Campbell: Adam Smith: Methods, Morals and Markets 28: Amartya Sen: The Contemporary Relevance of Adam Smith. (shrink)

Truth, Christopher Norris reminds us, is very much out of fashion at the moment whether at the hands of politicians, media pundits, or purveyors of postmodern wisdom in cultural and literary studies. Across a range of disciplines the idea has taken hold that truth-talk is either redundant or the product of epistemic might. Questions of truth and falsehood are always internal to some specific language-game; history is just another kind of fiction; philosophy is only a kind of writing; law (...) is a wholly rhetorical practice. In _Reclaiming Truth_, Norris critiques these fashionable trends of thought and mounts a specific challenge to cultural relativist doctrines in epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics, and political theory. Norris presents his case in a series of closely argued chapters that take issue with the relativist position. He attempts to rehabilitate the value of truth in philosophy of science by restoring a lost distinction between concept and metaphor and argues that theoretical discourse, so far from being an inconsequential activity, has very real consequences, particularly in ethics and politics. This debate has become skewed, he suggests, through the widespread and typically postmodern idea that truth-claims must always go along with a presumptive or authoritarian bid to silence opposing views. On the contrary, there is nothing as dogmatic—or as silencing—as a relativism that acknowledges no shared truth conditions for valid or responsible discourse. Norris also offers a timely reassessment of several thinkers—Althusser and Derrida among them—whose reception history has been distorted by the vagaries of short-term intellectual fashion. _Reclaiming Truth _will be welcomed by readers concerned with the uses and abuses of theory at a time when such questions are in urgent need of sustained and serious debate. (shrink)

'Correlations without correlata' is an influential way of thinking of quantum entanglement as a form primitive correlation which nonetheless maintains locality of quantum theory. A number of arguments have sought to suggest that such a view leads either to internal inconsistency or to conflict with the empirical predictions of quantum mechanics. Here wew explicate and provide a partial defence of the notion, arguing that these objections import unwarranted conceptions of correlation properties as hidden variables. A more plausible account sees the (...) properties in terms of Everettian relative states. The ontological robustness of entanglement is also defended from recent objections. (shrink)

Contemporary architecture is increasingly grounded in science and mathematics. Architectural discourse has shifted radically from the sometimes disorienting Derridean deconstruction, to engaging scientific terms such as fractals, chaos, complexity, nonlinearity, and evolving systems. That's where the architectural action is -- at least for cutting-edge architects and thinkers -- and every practicing architect and student needs to become conversant with these terms and know what they mean. Unfortunately, the vast majority of architecture faculty are unprepared to explain them to students, not (...) having had a scientific education themselves. Here is an architecture book by an architect/scientist, just in time to help architects in the new millennium. Alexander discusses many of the scientific terms arising in cutting-edge architecture, and explains them to those who don't have scientific training or advanced mathematical knowledge. We find discussions of the evolution of forms; the importance of process in design; iteration; genetic algorithms; sequences of transformations; different levels of scale (i.e. fractals); etc. They are explained here by an architect who is also a scientist, because he wants to change the way architects think and build. Alexander is not merely popularizing other scientists' results and making them accessible to architects: he is in fact presenting new and original scientific work that ties many of these concepts together in a way that will be useful to architects. (shrink)

This fully revised and updated edition of God, Humanity and the Cosmos is an essential companion to the field, with exercises for the student, a comprehensive bibliography, and suggestions for further reading.

The ever-present possibility of death forces upon us the question of life's meaning and for this reason death has been a central concern of philosophers throughout history. From Socrates to Heidegger, philosophers have grappled with the nature and significance of death. In "Annihilation", Christopher Belshaw explores two central questions at the heart of philosophy's engagement with death: what is death; and is it bad that we die? Belshaw begins by distinguishing between literal and metaphorical uses of the term and (...) offers a unified and biological account of death, denying that death brings about non-existence. How our death relates to the death of the brain is explored in detail. Belshaw considers the common-sense view that death is often bad for us by examining the circumstances that might make it bad as well as the grounds for thinking that one death can be worse than another. In addition, Belshaw explores whether we can be harmed after we die and before we were born. The final chapters explore whether we should prevent more deaths and whether, via cryonics, brain transplants, data storage, we might cheat death. Throughout Belshaw shows how questions of personhood and life's value are bound up with our views on the sense and significance of death. "Annihilation's" in-depth analysis and insightful exposition will be welcomed not only by philosophers working on the metaphysics of death but also by students and scholars alike looking for a foundation for discussions of the ethics of abortion, euthanasia, life-support and suicide. (shrink)

Heidegger's connection with Nazism is well known and has been exhaustively debated. But we need to understand better why Heidegger believed National Socialism to be the best cure for the ills of modern society. In this book Christopher Rickey examines the internal logic of Heidegger's ideas to explain how they led him to become a powerful critic of liberalism and a Nazi supporter. Key to Rickey's interpretation is the radically antinomian conception of religiosity he finds at the core of (...) Heidegger's challenge to modernity. Heidegger responds to the crisis of modernity with a philosophy attuned to the fundamental need for humans to live with the proper stance toward the divine. Inspired by Lutheran and mystical theology, Heidegger outlines an essentially religious conception of authentic human being. Like his radical Lutheran forerunners, Heidegger politicizes the radical strains of Luther's theology to create a potent revolutionary brew: the revolution of the saints. Rickey traces out the ways in which these currents fundamentally shape Heidegger's thought: the Lutheran background to his critique of modern science and the technological rationality it spawns; his transformation of Aristotle's prudential conception of practical wisdom into the total revelation of being that lays the basis for revolutionary political action; and his mystical and sectarian understanding of authentic community. Rickey shows how this political-theological vision forms the basis of Heidegger's concrete political action, and concludes with an analysis of the fundamental problems this vision poses to our political thinking today. (shrink)

Christopher Norris is Emeritus professor at Cardiff University. Recently, he began to address philosophical questions through poetry. In his paper, he explains why. Rather than expressing definite ideas in an elegant way, poetry can be intended as a process from which new ideas (also philosophical ones) can emerge. The result are a number of poems which cover a variety of issues, ranging from philosophy to politics, arts, history of ideas and science. Itinera has already begun to publish a few (...) of these poems in previous issues and is now presenting three of them on painters (Turner, Matisse, Magritte). (shrink)

Michel Galley, Pi-Chuan Chang, Daniel Cer, Jenny R. Finkel, and Christopher D. Manning Computer Science and Linguistics Departments Stanford University..

This article attempts to draw out and to clarify a tension at the core of Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift. This tension can be put as follows. On the one hand, Schelling insists quite strongly throughout this text upon the inherent goodness of creaturely selfhood—not simply in the negative sense that selfhood is not intrinsically evil, but in the positive sense that each created self is loved by God and destined to play a singular part in God’s self-revelation. On the other hand, Schelling (...) depicts selfhood in terms that seem to link it inextricably—perhaps constitutively—to sin and evil. It is my contention in this article that this tension arises as a result of Schelling’s attempt, in the Freiheitsschrift, to embed an essentially Kantian account of radical evil within the broadly Neoplatonic framework he had sketched five years earlier in his Philosophy and Religion. (shrink)

Liberal environmentalism, or green politics, intends to Dind a compromise between the prevailing global economic order and the need to protect the environment. The idea of sustainability, introduced in the Rio Summit, is the central component of international climate agreements. But on closer analysis, it can be argued that the problem of climate change is rooted in a neo-liberal system in which corporate interests collude with state policies. The free market is one of the fundamental causes of the systematic destruction (...) of the environment. Big corporations, so motivated by proDit, cannot be trusted to absorb the huge social costs of environmental degradation. For this reason, the use of indigenous wisdom is proposed to balance our way of life and environmental preservation. The study argues that climate justice would require dismantling an exploitative economic order to avert the existential threat from changing climactic patterns. (shrink)

This essay argues that Montaigne draws on elements of both the Academic and Pyrrhonian skeptical traditions, but that the fundamental desire for self-knowledge that initially led him to appreciate the insights of the ancient skeptics ultimately leads him beyond them. What lies at the heart of Montaigne’s skepticism is neither an epistemological position nor the experience of doubt, but rather the determination to philosophize self-consciously.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Christopher Norris HOME THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD: DERRIDA, AUSTIN, AND THE OXFORD CONNECTION THERE IS NO philosophical school or tradition that does not carry along with it a background narrative linking up present and past concerns. Most often this selective prehistory entails not only an approving account of ideas that fit in with the current picture but also an effort to repress or marginalize anytíiing that fails so to (...) fit. Bertrand Russell's History Of Western Philosophy is one fairly blatant example of mis strategy at work.1 The story it tells is a Whiggish account of how drinkers managed — against all the odds of metaphysical delusion — to come out at last (with Russell and his peers) on the high plateau oflogical consistency and truth. On the way to this dénouement Russell avails himself ofvarious techniques for pointing up die narrative drift. His coverage takes in all the accredited "major" thinkers, some of whose opinions Russell is hard put to summarize without remarking how nonsensical they appear from a modern (logical) point of view. Elsewhere — as with Leibniz or Kant — he takes the more accommodating line of winnowing out the structures of valid argument and consigning what remains to the history of dead metaphysical abstractions. It is this latter technique that has characterized the approach of analytical philosophers to the history of their discipline. The question is not so much, what did these drinkers mean or knowingly hope to achieve by posing the issues as they did? Rather it is to ask what techniques exist for translating their concerns into an up-to-date idiom based upon certain (mainly linguistic) terms of analytical enquiry. P. F. Strawson's revisionist reading of Kant is probably the best-known example of how such techniques can be used to achieve a distinctively modern understanding of otherwise recalcitrant texts.2 What remains of Kant after this cleaning-up 2 Philosophy and Literature operation is still "metaphysics" of a kind, but relieved of its excess conceptual baggage and couched (as Strawson would claim) in a "descriptive" rather than a "prescriptive" idiom. Thus philosophy comes to terms with its own errant precursors by explaining what they would presumably have said if equipped with die latest analytical tools. The result of such meuiods is to rewrite intellectual history from a standpoint of self-assured logical grasp where present concerns decide what shall count as the relevant or useful aspects ofpast tradition. And the same selective process goes to construct that typecast narrative which treats the "British" and die "Continental" styles of philosophizing as two completely separate, indeed antagonistic lines of descent. Thus it is taken for granted that the two sides are so far apart, with so little in the way of shared methods and assumptions, mat any kind of dialogue is certain to produce mere bafflement or cross-purpose talk. British philosophers with an interest in "Continental" theory feel themselves forced into a marginal role by the highly professionalized ethos that prevails within their discipline. This feeling is only strengthened by their more or less accepting the background mythology that explains how the two "traditions" grew up in a state of hostility often amounting to downright mutual contempt. There are several different versions of this story at present, but they all serve equally to reinforce the sense of incommensurable aims and languages. One (the "ordinary language" version) takes its lead from the later Wittgenstein in arguing that most of the problems that have long vexed philosophers — and continue to vex those "Continental" thinkers — result from dieir use ofa poindess metaphysicaljargon which puts them at odds with the commonsense wisdom of everyday usage. On this account, such thinkers have failed to learn the lesson bequeaüied by a long tradition of misguided speculative thought. They have persisted in errors and delusions of their own creating, hooked on a kind of malign verbal magic — "bewitchment by language," as Wittgenstein described it — which prevents them from seeing the plain sense ofthings. The other exemplary narrative is Uiat which takes not "ordinary language" but logic (or the modern refinements oflogic introduced by philosophers like Frege) as its reference point for deciding which episodes ofprevious or subsequent diought are to... (shrink)

We present a new modeling framework for recognition memory and repetition priming based on signal detection theory. We use this framework to specify and test the predictions of 4 models: (a) a single-system (SS) model, in which one continuous memory signal drives recognition and priming; (b) a multiple-systems-1 (MS1) model, in which completely independent memory signals (such as explicit and implicit memory) drive recognition and priming; (c) a multiple-systems-2 (MS2) model, in which there are also 2 memory signals, but some (...) degree of dependence is allowed between these 2 signals (and this model subsumes the SS and MS1 models as special cases); and (d) a dual-process signal detection (DPSD1) model, 1 possible extension of a dual-process theory of recognition (Yonelinas, 1994) to priming, in which a signal detection model is augmented by an independent recollection process. The predictions of the models are tested in a continuous-identification-with-recognition paradigm in both normal adults (Experiments 1–3) and amnesic individuals (using data from Conroy, Hopkins, & Squire,2005). The SS model predicted numerous results in advance. These were not predicted by the MS1 model, though could be accommodated by the more flexible MS2 model. Importantly, measures of overall model fit favored the SS model over the others. These results illustrate a new, formal approach to testing theories of explicit and implicit memory. (shrink)

Students reading Aristotle for the first time often face significant challenges. To complicate matters, if students who already have the habit of reading at a superficial level are asked to read large portions of Aristotle’s work, instructors may be reinforcing bad reading habits. This paper suggest that it is possible to insure many students learn how to read Aristotle for themselves provided students are assigned small, relatively accessible portions of text and initial discussion of these texts is geared toward empowering (...) students to make sense of Aristotle for themselves. To this end, this paper has developed an exercise using modeling clay that helps students to learn some of the main points in Book I and II of Aristotle’s “Physics.”. (shrink)

In Lyon in 1497 Badius printed the Sentences questions and other material attributed to the Dominican Robert Holcot, active at Oxford in the early 1330s. It turns out that the so-called De imputabi...

Christopher Norris is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University. He worked on literary criticism, on the question of realism and antirealism in philosophy, on Derrida and deconstructionism and on the philosophy of science. In the past few years he has also authored several philosophical poems. In this issue we present two poems he wrote that are dedicated to color.

Prologue -- The Greek stones speak : toward an archaeology of consciousness -- Singing the muses' song : myth, wisdom, and speech -- Physis, kosmos, logos : presocratic thought and the emergence of nature-consciousness -- Sophistical wisdom, Socratic wisdom, and the political life -- Civic wisdom, divine wisdom : Socrates, Plato, and two visions for the Athenian citizen -- Speculative wisdom, practical wisdom : Aristotle and the culmination of Hellenic thought -- Epilogue.