InThe Matter of Capital, Christopher Nealon offers a distinctive revisionary account of American poetry written in the wake of the ideological retreats of Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden around the time of the Second World War. Nealon argues that American verse of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was profoundly influenced by an unfolding context of capitalist development and crisis, in ways that have not been fully accounted for in orthodox accounts of recent literary history. Ruth (...) Jennison’sThe Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Gardeseeks similarly to highlight the centrality of leftist critiques of capitalism in modern American poetry. Her focus is the Objectivist group of poets, in particular Louis Zukofsky, a Jewish-American Marxist often regarded as the major successor to Pound in the interwar years. Jennison applies the theory of ‘combined and uneven development’ to the 1930s work of Zukofsky and his circle. (shrink)

Explores the biographical, historical and philosophical connections between Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault Derrida and Foucault are unquestionably two of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. Both share a similar motivation to challenge our fundamental structures of meaning - in texts, political structures, and epistemic and discursive practices - in order to inspire new ways of thinking. Between Foucault and Derridaexplores the notorious Cogito debate and includes: the central articles, an important piece by Jean-Marie Beyssade, along with a (...) letter Foucault wrote to Beyssade in response - both these pieces available for the first time in English translation. In the second part of the book, 10 essays written by some of the most well-known scholars working in contemporary continental philosophy address the various philosophical intersections and divergences of these two profoundly important thinkers. The first collection of the central essays involved in the Cogitodebate between Foucault and Derrida Includes the first English translations of Jean-Marie Beyssade's important 1973 article on the debate and Foucault's letter in response to it Some of the best-known scholars working in continental philosophy today examine where Foucault and Derrida converge and diverge, and how they ultimately shaped each other's projects Contributors Amy Allen * Ellen Armour * Yubraj Aryal * Jean-Marie Beyssade * Vernon W. Cisney * Jacques Derrida * Fred Evans * Michele Foucault * Peter Gratton * Leonard Lawlor * Edward McGushin * Nicolae Morar * Jeff Nealon * Christopher Penfield * Arkady Plotnitsk * Paul Rekret * Alan Schrift. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:666 Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Lana Dee Povitz To See and Be Seen: In Conversation with JEB August 12, 2017; a hot, bright morning. Ariel and I disembark at the train station in Takoma, DC, and head toward the waiting car. In the driver’s seat is one of the most important photographers of lesbian lives in the United States, Joan E. Biren, (...) popularly known as JEB. Decades before social media made images of nearly anything accessible to nearly anyone with a web connection, JEB published Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians in 1979—in her words, “The first lesbian [photography] book that was going to say LESBIAN on the cover and have real people with real faces and first names on the inside.”1 A videographer later in her career, JEB made her mark traveling around the country in the late 1970s and early 1980s with her Dyke Show.2 Formally titled Lesbian Images in Photograph : 1850–the present, this constantly evolving visual and audio performance featured between three hundred and four hundred slides of lesbians or lesbian-like women from 1850 to the present.3 At the crest 1. Joan E. Biren, phone interview with Ariel Goldberg, October 10, 2017. Transcript in author’s possession. 2. JEB toured with the Dyke Show in the United States and Canada from 1979 to 1985. See Sophie Hackett, “Queer Looking,” Aperture 218 (Spring 2015): 40–45. 3. Ibid. On “lesbian-like” women and finding lesbians throughout history before the consolidation of the identity category, see Judith M. Bennett, “‘Lesbian-Like’ and the Social History of Lesbianisms,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9, nos. 1–2 (January–April 2000): 1–24; David M. Halperin, “The First Homosexuality?” in his How to Do the History of Homosexuality Lana Dee Povitz 667 of the women’s liberation movement, audiences crowded together wherever they could to see the show—in living rooms, garages, church basements, community centers, and feminist bookstores—sitting rapt on the ground or on folding chairs. For many in these all-women spaces, JEB’s slides were the first images of women like them they’d ever seen. It’s Ariel who has arranged today’s interview, doing research for the book they’re writing about the influence of the twentieth century’s LGBTQ photographers on contemporary mainstream image culture. Ariel Goldberg is a photographer and poet who crisscrosses New York City working as an adjunct on different college campuses. The more they tell me about JEB in the weeks leading up to this meeting, the more I sense something genealogical afoot. Each representing the white, Jewish, middle -class,antiracist-lesbian-grassroots activism of their respective eras, both JEB and Ariel are self-taught, collaborative, and accountable to their circles of activist/artist friends. They pursue projects with or without (usually without) institutional support and brim with interests that hover between marginal and hot. As for me, I’m a historian, tagging along for the ride. I know little about photography, its practitioners, or its technologies, but I’m dipping into a new research project about the impact of social-movement participation on activist lives. And, aware of JEB’s role as a documentarian of (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002): 48–80; Leila Rupp, Sapphistries : A Global History of Love Between Women (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Valerie Traub, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). See also Cait McKinney, “‘Finding the Lines to My People’: Media History of Queer Bibliographic Encounter,” GLQ: Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 24, no. 1 (January 2018): 55–83. For a discussion of queer desire for belonging based in literature, see Christopher Nealon, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewall (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).  Ariel Goldberg, by Lana Dee Povitz. 668 Lana Dee Povitz social justice movements, including women’s and gay liberation, as well as her theoretical contributions to the early lesbian-separatist collective known as the Furies Collective, I am curious what this veteran activist life looks like now. Ariel and I speculated about JEB on the ride down from New York. We know she... (shrink)

Philosophers of music often appeal to intuition to defend ontological theories of musical works. This practice is worrisome as it is rather unclear just how widely shared are the intuitions that philosophers appeal to. In this paper, I will first offer a brief overview of the debate over the ontology of musical works. I will argue that this debate is driven by a conflict between two seemingly plausible intuitions—the repeatability intuition and the creatability intuition—both of which may be defended on (...) the grounds that they are reflective of our actual musical practices. The problem facing philosophers within this debate is that there is no clear way to determine which of the two conflicting intuitions is more reflective of our musical practices. Finally, I offer discussion of an experimental study that was designed to test participants' intuitions regarding the repeatability of musical works. The evidence presented there suggests that the participants broadly accept the repeatability of musical works, but in a much narrower way than philosophers would likely accept. (shrink)

Seth Shabo has presented a new argument that attempts to codify familiar worries about indeterminism, luck, and control. His ‘Assimilation Argument’ contends that libertarians cannot distinguish overtly randomized outcomes from exercises of free will. Shabo claims that the argument possesses advantages over the Mind Argument and Rollback Argument, which also purport to establish that indeterminism is incompatible with free will. I argue first that the Assimilation Argument presents no new challenges over and above those presented by the Rollback Argument, and (...) second that the Rollback Argument itself neither presents a deep challenge to, nor raises the cost of, accepting libertarianism. (shrink)

One of the major developments in cancer research in recent years has been the construction of models that treat cancer as a cellular population subject to natural selection. We expand on this idea, drawing upon multilevel selection theory. Cancer is best understood in our view from a multilevel perspective, as both a by-product of selection at other levels of organization, and as subject to selection at several levels of organization. Cancer is a by-product in two senses. First, cancer cells co-opt (...) signaling pathways that are otherwise adaptive at the organismic level. Second, cancer is also a by-product of features distinctive to the metazoan lineage: cellular plasticity and modularity. Applying the multilevel perspective in this way permits one to explain transitions in complexity and individuality in cancer progression. Our argument is a reply to Germain’s scepticism towards the explanatory relevance of natural selection for cancer. The extent to which cancer fulfills the conditions for being a paradigmatic Darwinian population depends on the scale of analysis, and the details of the purported selective scenario. Taking a multilevel perspective clarifies some of the complexities surrounding how to best understand the relevance of evolutionary thinking in cancer progression. (shrink)

We often know what we are judging, what we are deciding, what problem we are trying to solve. We know not only the contents of our judgements, decidings and tryings; we also know that it is judgement, decision and attempted problem-solving in which we are engaged. How do we know these things?

Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War, 1945?1990. By R. J. B. Bosworth (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) xv + 260 pps. £40.00 cloth.

Ethics & Behavior, Volume 21, Issue 5, Page 428-430, September-October 2011.

The craftworker is considered to be an exemplar of attention to quality, service to the public, personal satisfaction and the embodiment of tradition. The teacher as craftworker can safely be seen as one of the three archetypes of the teacher described briefly in Chapter 4. Furthermore, it is perhaps the default conception of the teacher in recent philosophical treatments of the nature of teacher's work. This conception is examined and criticised.

Synthetic biology is a cutting-edge area of research that holds the promise of unprecedented health benefits. However, in tandem with these large prospective benefits, synthetic biology projects entail a risk of catastrophic consequences whose severity may exceed that of most ordinary human undertakings. This is due to the peculiar nature of synthetic biology as a ‘threshold technology’ which opens doors to opportunities and applications that are essentially unpredictable. Fears about these potentially unstoppable consequences have led to declarations from civil society (...) groups calling for the use of a precautionary principle to regulate the field. Moreover, the principle is prevalent in law and international agreements. Despite widespread political recognition of a need for caution, the precautionary principle has been extensively criticized as a guide for regulatory policy. We examine a central objection to the principle: that its application entails crippling inaction and incoherence, since whatever action one takes there is always a chance that some highly improbable cataclysm will occur. In response to this difficulty, which we call the ‘precautionary paradox,’ we outline a deliberative means for arriving at threshold of probability below which potential dangers can be disregarded. In addition, we describe a Bayesian mechanism with which to assign probabilities to harmful outcomes. We argue that these steps resolve the paradox. The rehabilitated PP can thus provide a viable policy option to confront the uncharted waters of synthetic biology research. (shrink)

The most arresting aspect of the Scottish Enlightenment is its conception of commercial society as a distinct and distinctive social formation. Christopher Berry explains why Enlightenment thinkers considered commercial society to be wealthier and freer than earlier forms, and charts the contemporary debates and tensions between Enlightenment thinkers that this idea raised. The book analyses the full range of literature on the subject, from key works like Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations', David Hume's 'Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects' (...) and Adam Ferguson's 'Essay on the History of Civil Society' to lesser-known works such as Robert Wallace's 'Dissertation on Numbers of Mankind'. (shrink)

Anna Vaninskaya's Fantasies of Time and Death: Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien brings together three major writers of fantasy and studies their treatment of temporality and mortality. This book is about our ongoing conversation regarding time and death and the unique ability for fantasy to tackle these biggest of subjects. If writers have long envisioned time as a river and death as the sea, for instance, what Vaninskaya's new book discusses is how fantasy allows us, through the use of impossible creations and (...) new metaphors, to imagine new ways of understanding our ontological trap. The genre attempts to try to see the world as one of the gods creating it, or to understand time as the eternal burden of the elves; we may... (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Feeble Versions Robust Versions The Body View Who's Who? The Soul View The Reincarnation View Is There an Afterlife? Might I Live On?

Appealing to reason rather than religious belief, this book is the most comprehensive case against the choice of abortion yet published. This updated edition of The Ethics of Abortion critically evaluates all the major grounds for denying fetal personhood, including the views of those who defend not only abortion but also post-birth abortion. It also provides several (non-theological) justifications for the conclusion that all human beings, including those in utero, should be respected as persons. This book also critiques the view (...) that abortion is not wrong even if the human fetus is a person. The Ethics of Abortion examines hard cases for those who are prolife, such as abortion in cases of rape or in order to save the mother's life, as well as hard cases for defenders of abortion, such as sex selection abortion and the rationale for being "personally opposed" but publically supportive of abortion. It concludes with a discussion of whether artificial wombs might end the abortion debate. Answering the arguments of defenders of abortion, this book provides reasoned justification for the view that all intentional abortions are ethically wrong and that doctors and nurses who object to abortion should not be forced to act against their consciences. Updates and Revisions to the Second Edition include: --A response to Alberto Giubilini's and Francesca Minerva's now famous 2012 article, "After-Birth Abortion" in the Journal of Medical Ethics--Responses to new defenses of Judith Jarvis Thomson's violinist argument--The addition of a new chapter on gradualist views of fetal moral worth, including Jeff McMahan's Time-Relative Interest Account--The addition of a new chapter on the conscience protection for health care workers who are opposed to abortion--Responses to many critiques of the first edition, including those made by Donald Marquis, David DeGrazia, and William E. May. (shrink)

Throughout history, war seems to have had an iron grip on humanity. In this short book, internationally renowned philosopher of war, Christopher Coker, challenges the view that war is an idea that we can cash in for an even better one - peace. War, he argues, is central to the human condition; it is part of the evolutionary inheritance which has allowed us to survive and thrive. New technologies and new geopolitical battles may transform the face and purpose of (...) war in the 21st century, but our capacity for war remains undiminished. The inconvenient truth is that we will not see the end of war until it exhausts its own evolutionary possibilities. (shrink)

Quentin Skinner has enduringly insisted that a past text cannot be ‘understood’ without the reader knowing something about its historical and linguistic context. But since the 1970s he has been attacked on this central point of all his work by authors maintaining that the text itself is the fundamental guide to the author’s intention, and that a separate study of the context cannot tell the historian anything that the text itself could not. Mark Bevir has spent much of the last (...) 20 years repeating a similar counter-argument. Although ‘study the linguistic context’ might be a useful heuristic maxim, Bevir says, it does not express a necessary or sufficient condition for understanding. But Skinner is right, and one of the figures he has consistently identified as a formative inspiration, R. G. Collingwood, has already (in his work of the 1930s) shown why. What Collingwood calls his ‘logic of question and answer’ explains why the historian cannot answer his characteristic ‘intention’ question about past texts without knowing the context of problems to which authors think they are offering solutions. The study of context is neither ‘prior’ (as Bevir incorrectly supposes) nor ‘separate’ (as Skinner inaccurately says), but it is, as Skinner maintains, nevertheless impossible to grasp an author’s intention without it. This ‘logic of question and answer’ also explains why, in history, dismissing the study of context is in fact a pre-judgement of evidence yet unseen. (shrink)

Explores the biographical, historical and philosophical connections between Jacques Derrida and Michel FoucaultBetween Foucault and Derrida explores the notorious Cogito debate and includes: the central articles, an important piece by Jean-Marie Beyssade, along with a letter Foucault wrote to Beyssade in response both these pieces available for the first time in English translation. In the second part of the book, 10 essays written by some of the most well-known scholars working in contemporary continental philosophy address the various philosophical intersections and (...) divergences of these two profoundly important thinkers.Key FeaturesThe first collection of the central essays involved in the Cogito debate between Foucault and DerridaIncludes the first English translations of Jean-Marie Beyssades important 1973 article on the debate and Foucault's letter in responseSome of the best-known scholars working in continental philosophy today examine where Foucault and Derrida converge and diverge, and how they ultimately shaped each others projectsContributorsAmy Allen, Penn State University, Pennsylvania, USA.Ellen Armour, Vanderbilt Divinity School, Tennessee, USA. Yubraj Aryal, University of Montreal, Canada and New York University, USA. Jean-Marie Beyssade, University of Paris IV, France.Vernon W. Cisney, Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania, USA.Fred Evans, Duquesne University, Pennsylvania, USA.Peter Gratton, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada.Leonard Lawlor, Penn State University, Pennsylvania, USA.Edward McGushin, Stonehill College, Massachusetts, USA.Nicolae Morar, University of Oregon, Oregon, USA. Jeff Nealon, Penn State University, Pennsylvania, USA.Christopher Penfield, Purdue University, Indiana, USA.Arkady Plotnitsky, Purdue University, Indiana, USA. Paul Rekret, Richmond, The American International University in London, UK. Alan Schrift, Grinnell College, Iowa, USA. (shrink)

How can thinking be effective in enabling us to meet our goals? If we answer this in terms of representation relations between thoughts and the world, then we are challenged to explain what representation is, which no one has been able to do. If we drop the appeal to representation, then it is hard to explain why certain inferences are good and others are not. This paper outlines a strategy for a nonrepresentationalist account of the way in which the structure (...) of reality may drive cognition. It begins by restricting our attention to certain paradigm cases of linguistically-mediated cooperative exchange. Second, it introduces a kind of nonconceptual thinking -- thinking in mental images. Third, in terms of imagistic cognition, the nonnormative conditions under which sentences are asserted and accepted is explained. Fourth, in terms of these conditions, the possibility of successful linguistic exchange in the paradigm cases is to be explained. Fifth, the strategy calls for an explanation how a language can be internalized and become a medium of intrapersonal thought. Finally, the norms of discourse can be conceived as norms that supervise the processes of linguistic exchange so explained. In this paper only the first three steps of the overall strategy will be carried out in any detail. But a strategy for completing the last three steps will be sketched. (shrink)

Direct Realism is the view that human perception takes physical entities and their mind-independent properties as immediate objects. Although this thesis is supported by common sense, many argue that it can be dismissed on philosophical or quasi-scientific grounds. This essay attempts to defend Direct Realism against one such argument, which I call the “Problem of Secondary Qualities,” using the ideas of Scottish Common Sense philosopher Thomas Reid. The first chapter of this work offers a detailed introduction to the Problem of (...) Secondary Qualities. The Problem of Secondary Qualities arises from the claim that science has shown that physical objects do not possess secondary qualities. This is a problem for Direct Realism because secondary qualities are certainly possessed by at least some perceivable objects. As I present it, the Problem rests on three commitments: that an analysis of secondary quality perceptions should extend to perception in general, that we perceive secondary qualities, and that physical objects do not possess secondary qualities without our perceptions of them. I conclude that Direct Realism requires an account of secondary qualities on which secondary qualities are perceiver-independent but identifiable with other causally relevant properties. In Chapter Two, I introduce Thomas Reid’s doctrine of primary and secondary qualities, in the context of his theory of perception, as a viable response to the Problem of Secondary Qualities. On Reid’s view, secondary qualities are both perceiver-independent and identical to scientific properties, and Reid offers many useful conceptual resources for responding to objections. Most important are Reid’s claims that sensation or sense experience is casually related to, but not essential for, perception and that our perceptions of secondary qualities give us very little knowledge concerning their natures. The final chapter shows how the Reidian theory holds up against four key objections to accounts of secondary qualities on which they may be identified with perceiver-independent, scientific properties. In most cases, the Reidian approach finds solutions without compromising our intuitions or received opinions. (shrink)

During the 1940s in America, as medicine became more research-focused, medical researcher heroes were described as devotedly pursuing miraculous medicine. At the same time, Hollywood thrived, and films were an effective means to help build the myth of the physician hero. Cinematic techniques, rather than only the narrative, of four films, Dr. Arrowsmith, The Story of Louis Pasteur, Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, are discussed to understand how they helped construct the image of the physician (...) hero, both in terms of what they were and what they were not. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie Jahrgang: 61 Heft: 2 Seiten: 184-206.