v. 1. Classical contributions to cosmopolitanism -- v. 2. Key contemporary analyses of cosmopolitanism -- v. 3. Cosmopolitans and cosmopolitanisms -- v. 4. Contested cosmopolitanisms.

The article discusses the philosophy of sportive existence, as put forward by Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. Ortega is widely recognized as the major figure in Hispanic philosophy in the 20th century. Sports are an integral aspect of Ortega's philosophical output, both as aids toward understanding more general issues in ontology and philosophical anthropology and as explicit topics for reflection and analysis in and of themselves. Issues to do with sports and the sportive aspects of life were central to (...) Ortega's reflections on the nature of the human condition. Ortega argued that in many ways, the figure of the sportsperson represented more than any other symbol the human being's quintessence. (shrink)

Michael Ing's The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early Confucianism is the first monograph in English about the Liji--a text that purports to be the writings of Confucius' immediate disciples, and part of the earliest canon of Confucian texts called ''The Five Classics,'' included in the canon several centuries before the Analects. Ing uses his analysis of the Liji to show how early Confucians coped with situations where their rituals failed to achieve their intended aims. In contrast to most contemporary interpreters (...) of Confucianism, Ing demonstrates that early Confucian texts can be read as arguments for ambiguity in ritual failure. (shrink)

The ancient Greek historian and political scientist Polybius is not as well known in the present day as figures such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle. This is in part due to his having lived in the Hellenistic period, an epoch often thought to be characteristic of Greek cultural and political decline, rather than in the earlier ‘golden age’ of Greek intellectual life in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Yet Polybius’s ideas have been of profound importance in modern western (...) thought, in areas as diverse as historiography, philosophy of history and the theorization of political institutions. This article illustrates the main contours of how subsequent thinkers have received and made use of Polybian ideas and themes, and argues for regarding Polybius as an important precursor of contemporary social scientific analyses of ‘globalization’. The article first excavates and identifies some of the main forms of appropriation of Polybius’s ideas that have occurred in the West over the last 500 years. Secondly, it delineates the most important appropriation of Polybius in the human sciences that has been effected in recent times, namely the use made of Polybian themes by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire, their influential diagnosis of the contemporary state of world affairs. Thirdly, the article proffers a critique of these authors’ use of Polybius, and in its stead offers an alternative mode of appropriation of his work for the purposes of analytically reorienting the human sciences in light of present-day concerns with globalization and conditions of globality. It is argued that, far from being a figure of only antiquarian interest, Polybius continues to be of much relevance for human scientists today, for he may be seen as a foundational figure in efforts to think about the ‘global’ level in human affairs. (shrink)

In January 1902, Joseph Mokuʻōhai Poepoe began publishing a monthly journal titled Ke Kanawai (the law). As an attorney, author, and editor, Poepoe endeavored to provide resources in ka ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (the Hawaiian language) for Kanaka (Hawaiians) living in a world now governed by American law. The three extant issues (January through March) contain a column titled “Kakaolelo—Logika,” a transliteration of “logic” paired with the term “kākāʻōlelo,” commonly glossed as “oration,” “counsel,” or “debate,” but traditionally referring to cultural specialists that (...) advised leaders and were known for being adept in speaking. This column is likely the earliest prolonged engagement with western philosophy by a Kanaka writing in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi. The purpose of this article is to lay the groundwork for further discussing questions of comparative philosophy in a Hawaiian context. Thus, the article proceeds in two parts. First, I contextualize the column within its historical setting; then, I translate the column. This will set the stage for future work of interpretation and comparison. (shrink)

This book is about the necessity, and even value, of vulnerability in human experience. In it, Michael Ing brings early Chinese texts into dialogue with questions about the ways in which meaningful things are vulnerable to powers beyond our control; and more specifically, how relationships with meaningful others might compel tragic actions.

Since at least the late nineteenth century, a world-level moral culture has developed, providing a space for certain persons to be presented as global moral icons. This global moral space was already pointed to by Kant as an emergent form, and was later theorized by Durkheim. This article shows that an important institutionalization of global moral culture involved the founding of the Nobel Prizes, the subsequent mutations of which were also important in the constitution of that culture. These, and other (...) awards which imitated them, are performative in a profound sense: they simultaneously reflect and help bring into being a planet-spanning culture which demands moral icons which both exemplify and partly constitute it. How the Nobel Prizes and their imitators work to create moral iconicity that is globally relevant is explored. The case of Gandhi is taken as an example of how, despite not being awarded a Nobel Prize, some moral icons are also brought into being through symbolic contact with other such icons, including Nobel Prize winners. The article considers the lingering, powerful, but generally invisible, influence today on world moral culture of the innovations pursued by the early Nobel Prize committees. (shrink)

Philosophical issues of hospitality are bound up with broader issues of cosmopolitanism in thought and in practice. This paper considers the interplay of human faces, masks, forms of hospitality, and cosmopolitanizing and anti-cosmopolitanizing socio-political dynamics in the time of Covid-19. Despite confident assertions by some interested parties that it is now finished and past history, Covid-19 remains a major challenge across the globe, and so reflections on the interplay of masking, cosmopolitanism, and hospitality remain pertinent today and are not merely (...) a quaint feature of life during the early years of the pandemic. Voluntary acts of self-masking are argued to be more than just mundane forms of micro-level action and interaction among persons. Instead, freighted sometimes with political meaning, and certainly loaded with ethical force, the donning of a face mask can operate as a small but compelling quotidian act of cosmopolitan concern and hospitableness towards other people, including those perceived to be very unlike oneself. (shrink)

The automobile has figured as an important issue of concern and a profound source of fascination for a wide range of intellectuals in France since the 1950s. The car has been understood variously as a covert vehicle of creeping Americanization and consumerization, a threatening object that obliterates nature, a harbinger of hyper-modern futures, and as a constitutive element of everyday practices. This article traces out the diverse ways in which the car has been ‘good to think with’ for a range (...) of French intellectuals in the period spanning roughly from 1950 through to the 1970s. It seeks to demonstrate the richness of those currents of thought in post-war France which were concerned to comprehend the nature of car cultures. It is argued that these ways of thinking can be drawn upon in the present day by those wishing to analyse contemporary features of automobility. (shrink)

As one approach to examining the way ethical decisions are made, we asked experts and novices to review a set of scenarios that depict some important ethical tensions in research. The method employed was “protocol analysis,” a talk-aloud technique pioneered by cognitive scientists for the analysis of expert performance. The participants were asked to verbalize their normally unexpressed thought processes as they responded to the scenarios, and to make recommendations for courses of action. We found that experts spent more time (...) working through the decision-making process than novices and also raised substantially more concerns than novices. Differences also exist among the three groups of experts. (shrink)

pThis article thinks through the work of Kanaka (Native Hawaiian) philosopher Davida Malo (1795–1853) and puts it in dialogue with the work of Richard Armstrong (1805–1860). It argues that Malo offers an account of being human that entails the proper management of impulses (makemake) and intentions (manaʻo) in ways that lead to flourishing (hoʻokūʻonoʻono) in complex communities (kauhale) overseen by leaders (aliʻi) that are informed by the examples of leaders from the past. Standards for proper living, in this setting, are (...) constructed by the community, the members of which are informed by their own experiences and the experiences of their ancestors (kūpuna) as the latter sought to ease the burdens (kaumaha) they confronted in daily life. Armstrong offers a similar picture of human beings as creatures that must learn to observe their intentions and to cultivate intentions that foster proper communal living—a community that Armstrong conceptualizes as a single family (hoʻokahiʻohana). Unlike Malo’s description, however, the standards of this family construct are based on universal laws of right and wrong that only pertain to humans and their standing before a divine figure understood as the Biblical God. The significance of this piece is not only to show how Malo and Armstrong may have conversed over the question of how to live well, but also to begin a conversation in the field of world philosophies about the viability of Kanaka ways of life./p. (shrink)

Abstract:The Kumulipo has become one of the best-known compositions in Kanaka (Hawaiian) culture. This article focuses on sections 8–11 of the chant, which describe the coming forth of humanity in the context of the shift from Pō (darkness) to Ao (light). This shift is a pivotal moment in the chant, and it signals something distinctive about being human, namely the ability to organize complex societies on the basis of moʻokūʻauhau (genealogies). This ability is rooted in an awareness of oneself as (...) a being uniquely situated in time and place among a myriad of other beings all originating in the fecundity of Pō. Such self-awareness enables the construction of relational differences that support robust communities by means of kinship and other networks, but it also provides humanity with the ability to contend over our place in the genealogical cartography of the world and to ruin the otherwise flourishing world. The Kumulipo, as such, highlights an ambivalence associated with the rise of humanity. (shrink)

Social theory is a crucial resource for the social sciences. It provides rich insights into how human beings think and act and how contemporary social life is constructed. But often the key ideas of social theorists are expressed in highly technical and difficult language that can hide more than it reveals. The new edition of this popular book continues to cut to the core of what social theory is about. Covering key themes from the classical thinkers onwards, including Marxism, post-structuralism, (...) phenomenology, feminism and more, the second edition features a new chapter on Actor-Network Theory and enhanced discussion of postcolonial theory. Wide ranging in scope and coverage, the book is concise in presentation and free from jargon. Showing why social theory matters, and why it is of far-reaching social and political importance, the book is ideal for readers seeking a clear, crisp mapping of a complex but very rewarding area. (shrink)

The "Tangong Shang" chapter of the Liji provides a brief account of Confucius performing certain burial rites for his deceased parents. After finishing one portion of the rites, something awful occurs—heavy rains fall, causing the grave to collapse. Confucius' demonstration of reverence through the performance of these burial rites is thwarted; but whose fault is it that the grave collapsed? Could Confucius have prevented this failure? In this essay it is argued that contrary to most contemporary interpretations, unpreventable failures in (...) ritual were causes of concern for the authors of early Confucian texts because they believed that meaningful aspects of life were vulnerable to these failures, and because they found themselves occasionally unable to recognize a clear distinction between preventable and unpreventable failures in ritual. This essay provides a persuasive reading of an early Confucian text that preserves rather than resolves the ambiguity between preventable and unpreventable failures in ritual. It argues for an openness to a tragic reading of early Confucian ritual theory. Contemporary interpreters, for the most part, have neglected such a reading; yet in the worldview of the Liji unpreventable failures in ritual were a real, yet uncertain, possibility. (shrink)

In his lifetime, Bruno Latour (1947-2022) made many provocative and controversial arguments, such as about the nature of the practices of the natural sciences, and against standard social scientific forms of critique. Running through many of Latour’s interventions, aimed at what he took to be stultifying forms of academic and intellectual orthodoxy, was a concern with the nature of truth. Whether emphasising how science fabricates its ‘facts’, or in having to deal with uncomfortable similarities between that sort of analysis and (...) the attacks on the allegedly fraudulent nature of climate science by climate sceptics, or in presenting the societal bases of standard forms of social critique as fictitious, Latour was constantly engaged in battles about and polemics concerning what counts as truths and truthfulness. In this paper, we consider the nature of some of the main contours of Latour’s battles about and with truths. We present an account of his practice in a critical light. Sometimes that involves stepping outside of the ‘anti-critical’ frame of reference he sought to construct and impose on how philosophy, sociology and other ways of thinking are done, but it also sometimes involves using that apparatus, while turning it against the intentions of the author. The purpose of this paper is not to try out-do Latour in the dismissal of intellectual positions other than one’s own. Instead, we focus on other types and levels of failure in the career-long endeavours and engagements with matters of truth of this curious but undoubtedly unavoidable figure, ‘Bruno Latour’. We end by speculating if more ‘Bruno Latours’ will be fabricated in the service of new modes of truth-creation in the future. (shrink)

This is an Open Access book. In 2015, Industry 4.0 was announced with the rise of industrialization by the European Parliament, supporting policy, research, and infrastructure funding. In 2020, Industry 5.0 was launched as an evolution of Industry 4.0, towards societal and ecological values in a sustainable, human-centric, and resilient transition. In 2023, the IN4ACT research project team completed 4 years of research on the impact on these initiatives. Presentations reviewing the progress of management practices and economics led to conversations (...) about what’s next. The unanticipated rise in late 2022 of Generative AI technologies (e.g. ChatGPT, DALL-E) sparked dialogues with an extended circle of researchers on impacts not considered in 2015 or in 2020. This collection of chapters reflects multiple perspectives on research findings to 2023, prospects for 2024, and considerations on ways the techno-economic industrial revolutions may be reshaped into desirable futures respecting social and ecological concerns. (shrink)

Many influential stances within the social sciences regard nature in one of two ways: either as none of their concern (which is with the social and cultural aspects of human existence), or as wholly a social and cultural fabrication. But there is also another strand of social scientific thinking that seeks to understand the interplay between social and cultural factors on one side and natural factors on the other. These volumes contain the main contributions that have been made within each (...) of these streams of thought. The selections illustrate to the reader the complexity of the various positions within these streams, and the strengths and limitations of each perspective. A new introduction places these articles in their historical and intellectual context and the volumes are completed with an extensive index and chronological table of contents. (shrink)

Of all sociology's `strange others', cultural studies is perhaps the least unfamiliar to many sociologists. Yet cultural studies exists in one of the most ambiguous relationships with sociology of any academic discipline. In this article, it is argued that the complicated nature of the relationship is compelled by the very closeness of the two participants in it. What often seems to be an ongoing state of ritualized antagonism between them flows not from their ostensible differences but in fact from their (...) striking underlying similarities. Their symbiotic bond both compels, and is hidden by, the rhetorical displays of selfhood in which they both often engage. The article reviews and assesses this state of affairs, and argues that the similarities between the two disciplines are actually based on a number of shared epistemological assumptions, a priori ways of thinking that in fact are very much open to question. A critique of these assumptions is outlined, and it is suggested that by recognizing their shared nature, both sociology and cultural studies, and the relationship between them, would enter into a greater state of intellectual maturity. (shrink)

This article provides a critique of the postmodernist notion that there has been of recent years a dissolution of the divide between aesthetics and practical activities, between Art and Life. It does so by considering the game of soccer from a phenomenological viewpoint, which shows that the game possesses intrinsically ‘aesthetic’ qualities. The conditions of possibility of such qualities are understood by introducing the idea of the ‘proto‐aesthetics’ of soccer and other mundane phenomena. By considering the proto‐aesthetics of the quotidian (...) we argue that recent changes in the nature of practical life should not be regarded as due to ‘aestheticisation’ but rather as springing from processes of commodification. (shrink)

Civilizational analysis of the kind propounded by Eisenstadt and globalization theory are apparently wholly incommensurate paradigms, with radically differing visions of the contemporary world order, the former championing the notion of ‘multiple modernities’ and the latter envisioning a world of trans-national processes and institutions. This articles challenges such a dichotomizing view, and seeks to illustrate how in various ways they overlap and can come to inform each other. Particular attention is given to how a focus on inter-civilizational interactions can lead (...) to productive rapprochements between civilizational analysis and globalization theory, as it allows some of the themes of the latter to be analysed through civilization-analytic lenses. The pioneering work in this regard of Benjamin Nelson is shown to provide a basis for future civilizational analyses of globalization, especially in the pre-modern world. (shrink)

‘Globalization’ has become in recent years one of the central themes of social scientific debates. Social theories of globalization may be regarded as specific academic and analytic manifestations of wider forms of ‘global consciousness’ to be found in the social world today. These are ways of thinking and perceiving which emphasize that the whole world should be seen as ‘one place’, its various geographically disparate parts all being interconnected in various complex ways. In this article we set out how both (...) a general ‘ecumenical sensibility’ involving such ways of thinking, and its specifically academic variant, an ‘ecumenical analytic’, are simultaneously responses to ‘globalizing conditions’ and also products of the latter. We demonstrate how social theories of globalization, locatable in the overall set we call the ‘ecumenical analytic’, are reflexive thought-products, in that they both seek to investigate, and are made possible by, ‘globalizing conditions’. Rejecting the view that both an ecumenical sensibility and an ecumenical analytic are solely products of modernity, we show how such modes of consciousness and analysis were present in the period of Greek history between the death of Alexander the Great and the rise of the Roman Empire. We show how at that period a socio-political situation akin in certain ways to modern ‘globalizing conditions’ generated both an ecumenical sensibility and an ecumenical analytic, the latter most forcefully represented by a revolutionary new genre in historiography called Universal History. By examining the ideas of its most famous practitioner, the historian Polybius, we demonstrate that Universal History both provided a framework for understanding what we today would call ‘globalization’, and exhibited a remarkable degree of reflexive awareness about its own conditions of possibility. We seek to show that an attentiveness to ‘global’ processes and a reflexive understanding of what makes that form of thinking possible in the first place, are not solely confined to modernity but were identifiable features of intellectual production in the Hellenistic period of ancient Greece. In this way we argue that scholars today should not imagine that the contemporary ‘global turn’ in social thought is either unique or wholly historically unprecedented. (shrink)

In recent times developments in the natural sciences and in the sphere of environmental politics have compelled social scientists, and also some natural scientists, to rethink the relations that hitherto have been held, in Western thought generally and within particular disciplines, to characterize ‘nature’ on the one side and ‘culture’ on the other. This article considers the history of this conceptual boundary and looks at new conceptualizations of nature/culture, stimulated by developments both in biotechnology and in the ongoing controversies about (...) environmental degradation. It argues that while some of the contributions to reconfiguring, or abolishing, the nature/ culture division have been productive and stimulating of new ways of conceiving the world, there has nonetheless been an unfortunate tendency for social scientists to bring to bear inherited analytic dispositions on biotechnological and environmental matters. Instead of using these issues as means of challenging social scientific disciplinary dogmas and of engaging in constructive rapprochement with natural scientists, social scientists have in their analyses of such matters often merely asserted the hegemony of ‘culture’ over ‘nature’, and thus in effect the superiority of social scientific over natural scientific conceptualizations of the world. Far from overcoming the nature/culture boundary, social scientists have too often merely asserted the primacy of the sorts of subject matters and analytic techniques they feel comfortable with, rather than subjecting their practices to fully reflexive self-scrutiny. (shrink)

As one approach to examining the way ethical decisions are made, we asked experts and novices to review a set of scenarios that depict some important ethical tensions in research. The method employed was “protocol analysis,” a talk-aloud technique pioneered by cognitive scientists for the analysis of expert performance. The participants were asked to verbalize their normally unexpressed thought processes as they responded to the scenarios, and to make recommendations for courses of action. We found that experts spent more time (...) working through the decision-making process than novices and also raised substantially more concerns than novices. Differences also exist among the three groups of experts. (shrink)

Real Life in China at the Height of the Empire: Revealed by the Ghosts of Ji Xiaolan. Translated by DavId E. Pollard. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2014. Pp. xl + 334. $45.

In this paper, we contend that there are two ways of arguing, namely sincere and insincere arguing. We draw such a distinction, based on the felicity conditions of the complex speech act of arguing as modelled in van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s pragma-dialectical approach. We introduce a conversa-tional setting, which contains a speech act of arguing that does not count as in-sincere arguing, while being a sui gene-ris form of sincere arguing. We desig-nate it as “cooperative inquiry”. Finally, we show that (...) argument evaluation plays a key role in determining whether an in-stance of arguing counts as either argu-ing sincerely or insincerely. Résumé: Dans cet article, nous affir-mons qu’il existe deux manières d’argu-menter, à savoir l’argumentation sincère et l’argumentation non sincère. Nous établissons une telle distinction, basée sur les conditions de félicité de l’acte de parole complexe consistant à argu-menter, tel que modélisé dans l’ap-proche pragma-dialectique de van Eemeren et Grootendorst. Nous intro-duisons un cadre conversationnel, qui contient un acte de parole d'argumenta-tion qui n'est pas considéré comme une argumentation non sincère, tout en étant une forme sui generis d'argumentation sincère. Nous la désignons comme « enquête coopérative ». Enfin, nous montrons que l’évaluation des argu-ments joue un rôle clé pour déterminer si un cas d’argumentation compte comme une argumentation sincère ou non. (shrink)

In this essay, we will argue that acts of resistance within "attention economies" take the form of a wager isomorphic to the one delineated by Blaise Pascal in his Pensées. First, we examine the role of relevance in communication, interpretation, and understanding. Second, we turn to Cécile Malaspina's conception of noise, which allows us to grasp the intricate relation between judgment and uncertainty. Next, we exemplify our claim by analyzing David Foster Wallace's The Pale King and J.J. Voskuil's seven-volume (...) series Het Bureau. In both texts, noise as an epistemic and aesthetic technique operates on a diegetic and metatextual level. Rather than warranting efficiency and optimization through the filter model of attention, we will develop an ethics of noise that opens up the possibility to re-individuate the subject of "attention economies.". (shrink)

This outline for a paper, which develops a compatibilist analysis of abilities, was completed by David Lewis during his sabbatical in the Fall semester of 2000 and is dated 20 January 2001. Starting from the claim that it’s a “Moorean fact” that we are often able to do otherwise, Lewis provides a “simple proof of compatibilism.” He then presents his own account of abilities: S is able to A if and only if there are no obstacles to their A-ing, (...) where an obstacle is a “robust preventer”: something that would cause S not to A, and which “wouldn’t go away if things were just a little different.”. (shrink)

Walker, David 'When our first parents were driven out of Paradise, Adam is believed to have remarked to Eve; My dear, we live in an age of transition'. When we look back at the past decades, and look ahead, we could consider we too are living in an age of transition. Looking back we often take the Second Vatican Council as the point where change began. However, the seeds of what flowered at the council and have continued to bear (...) fruit after it were planted well before it. The future is not clear, yet we can expect that significant change will be part of it. As we reflect on our changing situation, it would be helpful to keep in mind another comment of Dean Inge: 'There are two kinds of fools: one says, "This is old, therefore it is good"; the other says, "This is new, therefore it is better" '. (shrink)

This essay critically examines Alfred R. Mele’s attempt to solve a problem for libertarianism that he calls the problem of present luck. Many have thought that the traditional libertarian belief in basically free acts (where the latter are any free A-ings that occur at times at which the past up to that time and the laws of nature are consistent with the agent’s not A-ing at that time) entail that the acts are due to luck at the time of the (...) act (present luck) rather than to the kind of agent control required for genuinely free, morally responsible action. While libertarians frequently have tried to rebut the claim that basically free acts are due to present luck, Mele argues for the daring thesis that they should embrace present luck rather than try to explain it away. His strategy is to argue that the assumption of present luck in the decisions of very young children (or “little agents”) does not preclude us from attributing to them a small amount of moral responsibility and that this makes it possible to conceive of moral development as a gradual process in which as the frequency of the indeterministically caused free actions increases, the agents take on greater and greater moral responsibility. In this paper I give several possible reconstructions of Mele’s argument and analyze in detail why none of them succeeds. (shrink)

Mahāyāna ethics has a threefold emphasis: avoiding all evil, cultivating good, and saving all beings. Most Western studies of Buddhist ethics have used Pali and Sanskrit sources to examine the first two components, which are based on monastic codes for avoiding wrong doing and attain- ing virtue. Among the few studies of the third category, which includes Buddhist social ethics, East Asian Mahāyāna materials have been sadly lacking despite the Mahāyāna rhetoric about saving all beings. To correct this deficiency, this (...) paper analyzes an early lay Mahayana text, the Updsaka Precept Sūtra. The Upāsaka differs from earlier Buddhism and from many other Mahāyāna texts in two ways: it gives supremacy to com- passionate action in society rather than monastic spiritual attainment, and it asserts that helping others out of compassion is the highest practice and best way to attain enlightenment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Perloff’s Wittgenstein: W(h)ither Poetic Theory?David Kellogg (bio)Though Marjorie Perloff has been one of the most powerful forces in contemporary poetry studies for some time, her work has not received the critical attention it warrants. Her latest book, Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary, provides an opportunity for reflection on a body of writing remarkable both in its consistency and its constant reinvention. Indeed, reading (...) Perloff through Wittgenstein’s Ladder throws her other work over the last twenty years into a new light, as many concepts crucial to her vocabulary—not only theory but also modernism, artifice, avant-garde—are here turned around and forced into new roles. To ask whether and to what extent Wittgenstein’s Ladder constitutes a break in her career is simultaneously to raise the question of critical and poetic theory.Theory Inside and Out“It is in this sense that grammar may be said to replace theory,” writes Marjorie Perloff in the introduction to Wittgenstein’s Ladder [18]. The sense in question is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s, or rather the sense of the late (post-1929) Wittgenstein inflected through Perloff’s post-poststructuralist sensibility. As the sentence preceding this remarkable claim puts it: “For although the later Wittgenstein was to argue that grammar is precisely the key to understanding a given proposition, that there is no essence above and beyond a specific grammatical structure, one nevertheless must ‘distrust’ grammar in the sense of interrogating it as stringently as possible” [17–18].Of course, formulations of theory as a style of distrust have been a commonplace in theoretical discourse for some time. It would not be difficult to argue that Perloff’s explicit advocacy of grammar through Wittgenstein—whose philosophy, she argues, “is indeed intentionally ‘antiphilosophical,’ its purpose being precisely to determine in what circumstances philosophy should be ‘against’ philosophy and why” [12]—is of a piece with recent attempts to think the limits of theory in theory itself. But such a reduction would seriously misread Perloff’s project. We would do well to question, for example, the obvious similarities between Perloff’s description of a duplicity in the project of grammar/theory and the model it might be taken as at once pointedly evoking and evading, Paul de Man’s now-classic essay “The Resistance to Theory.” Despite their apparent similarities, the startling claims of Wittgenstein’s Ladder have little in common with de Man’s suggestion that “resistance may be a built-in constituent of [theoretical] discourse,” and that “the polemical opposition, the systematic non-understanding and misrepresentation, the unsubstantial but eternally recurrent objections, are the displaced symptoms of a resistance inherent in the theoretical enterprise itself” [12].For one thing, de Man explicitly distances his conception of a theoretical project deeply threatening to the claims of knowledge from one rooted in concepts of grammar: [End Page 67][A]s long as it remains grounded in grammar, any theory of language, includ-ing a literary one, does not threaten what we hold to be the underlying principle of all cognitive and aesthetic linguistic systems. Grammar stands in the service of logic which, in turn, allows for the passage to the knowledge of the world. The study of grammar, the first of the artes liberales, is the necessary pre-condition for scientific and humanistic knowledge. As long as it leaves this principle intact, there is nothing threatening about literary theory. The continuity between theory and phenomenalism is asserted and preserved by the system itself. Difficulties occur only when it is no longer possible to ignore the epistemological thrust of the rhetorical dimension of discourse, that is, when it is no longer possible to keep it in its place as a mere adjunct, a mere ornament within the semantic function.[14; emphasis added]In other words, de Man places grammar opposite the project of criticism, which he identifies with rhetoric and ultimately with reading. What de Man refers to as “the latent tension between rhetoric and grammar” is resolved decidedly in favor of the former: “the grammatical decoding of a text leaves a residue of indetermination that has to be, but cannot be, resolved by grammatical means, however... (shrink)