This essay, in the form of a letter written to director László Nemes in the immediate aftermath of viewing Son of Saul, is at once a critical reading of the film within a larger theoretical framework and a subjective emotional response to seeing on the screen something of the author’s own “most harrowing nightmares.” While bringing Nemes’s film into conversation with Maurice Blanchot, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, the Hassidic tale and ancient myths, Georges Didi-Huberman returns to his reflections in Images (...) in Spite of All (2008) on the four photographs taken clandestinely of the gas chambers in Auschwitz by one of the Sonderkommando. Son of Saul presents the allegory of Saul whose job as a Sonderkommando is to drag countless corpses to the crematorium where they will be reduced to ashes but who sets out on a mad, single-minded quest to give a proper burial, complete with the recitation of kaddish, to the body of one boy. According to the author, the film marks the invention of the “documentary tale” genre, combining Benjamin’s notions of montage based on the document, as manifested in the work of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Alfred Döblin, and that of the dying art of storytelling, intimately bound up as it is with the authority of the dying. Thus, the dead child drowning at the end of the film stands as an inversion of the story of Moses, a living child saved from drowning, just as the real historic death of the Jewish people reverses the mythical Biblical birth of the Jewish people. (shrink)

This volume is a direct result of a conference held at Princeton University to honor George A. Miller, an extraordinary psychologist. A distinguished panel of speakers from various disciplines -- psychology, philosophy, neuroscience and artificial intelligence -- were challenged to respond to Dr. Miller's query: "What has happened to cognition? In other words, what has the past 30 years contributed to our understanding of the mind? Do we really know anything that wasn't already clear to William James?" Each participant (...) tried to stand back a little from his or her most recent work, but to address the general question from his or her particular standpoint. The chapters in the present volume derive from that occasion. (shrink)

This book tackles the most difficult and profound open questions about life and its origins from an information-based perspective.

Moral leadership matters. As world politics enters a new and dangerous era, judgment, constancy, moral purpose, and a willingness to overcome partisan politicking are essential for America's leaders. Tempered Strength finds the alternative standard of leadership that Americans are seeking in the classical philosophy of prudence. Ethan Fishman's new work brings together leading American political scientists—including Ronald Beiner, Kenneth L. Deutsch, and George Anastaplo—to discuss the evolution of a standard of prudential leadership both reasonable in nature and practical in (...) scope. Section One studies the meaning of prudence and its evolution in the history of political science from Aristotelian phronesis to Xenophon, Thomas Aquinas, Edmund Burke, and Michael Oakeshott. Section Two demonstrates how the theory of prudential leadership can be applied to practical political issues. (shrink)

In the current literature, the impacts of the transformation undergone by the Quebec health and social services network (RSSS) in 2015 deal mainly with issues of accessibility, efficiency and performance. The impacts of this reform on the place of ethics in the RSSS are to date little documented. In this article, we are interested in the place occupied by clinical and organizational ethics in the institutions created by this reform, namely the integrated health and social services centres (CISSS) and the (...) integrated university health and social services centres (CIUSSS). How is ethics regulated? In a self-regulatory manner, that is to say based on rational reflection based on values? Or is it rather in a hetero-regulatory manner, based on obedience to norms dictated by an external authority? The aim of our study was to gain a better understanding of how clinical and organizational ethics are regulated in the CISSS and CIUSSS of the RSSS. To this end, an analysis of ethics-related documents developed by these establishment and made available to the public on their websites was carried out, using the conceptual framework that guided this study. In doing so, we were able to observe the predominance of hetero-regulatory regulation of ethics. Thus, although ethics seems to have a greater place than in the past within RSSS establishments, the regulation of clinical and organizational ethics remains largely and predominantly hetero-regulatory. (shrink)

It is not only overtly probabilistic illatives like ‘makes it certain that’ but also apparently non-probabilistic ones like ‘therefore’ that have probabilistic import. Illatives like ‘therefore’ convey the meaning that the premise confers on the conclusion a probability not only greater than 0 but also greater than 1/2. But because they do not say whether that probability is equal to or less than 1, these illatives are appropriately called ‘neutral’.

These few pages will attempt to analyze the relationships created in the chronically delirious person between himself and his own biography, such as he knows and has experienced it, to which he attaches himself and which dominates him without his knowing it. A few remarks to clarify our vocabulary before getting into the development of this question. We prefer the expression “chronic deliria“, in the plural, to the word “psychosis”, used in the singular. The former term is clinical, and therefore (...) empirical, whereas the second derives from theories; and, especially, the former does not immediately imply a unity of process as opposed to the effective diversity of semiotic appearances. Moreover, the nominal adjective “psychotic“ runs the risk of both clandestinely bringing in hidden presuppositions and of re-establishing the old presumed unity with mental alienation, which had, indeed, been exorcised by J. P. Falret by the middle of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

Flesh of My Flesh is a collection of articles by today's most respected scientists, philosophers, bioethicists, theologians, and law professors about whether we should allow human cloning. It includes historical pieces to provide background for the current debate. Religious, philosophical, and legal points of view are all represented.

This book is about the legitimation of Hegel's philosophy. Its central thesis is that Hegel's philosophy is one of human experience. The point of Hegel's philosophy of history, the author argues, is an apologetic one: to disclose how human experience connects the activity of philosophical thought to the intellectual attitude which assent to the Christian Incarnation requires. It is this connection alone which legitimates Hegel's conception of philosophy as absolute knowledge. The rationale for that connection is made manifest to us (...) by Hegel's philosophy of history, of which the focus is his philosophical engagement with the experience of his own time. (shrink)

This book offers original accounts of a number of central social phenomena, many of which have received little if any prior philosophical attention. These phenomena include social groups, group languages, acting together, collective belief, mutual recognition, and social convention. In the course of developing her analyses Gilbert discusses the work of Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, David Lewis, among others.

For deliberations on the ethical and meta-ethical implications of Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy, here are abstracts and papers from the Ethics Section of the 6th International Whitehead Conference held at the University of Salzburg in Salzburg, Austria in July 2006. In accordance with the conference schedule, there are three subsections. The subsection on "Metaphysics of Morals and Moral Theory" includes contributions from Franklin I. Gamwell (Does Morality Presuppose God?), John W. Lango (abstract only), Duane Voskuil ("Ethics' Dipolar Necessities and (...) Theistic Implications), and Theodore Walker Jr. ("Neoclassical Cosmology and Matthew 22:36-40). The subsection on "Evaluating Moral Practices" includes contributions from Frederick Ferrè (abstract only), Seung Gap Lee (Hope for the Earth: A Process Eschatological Eco-ethics for South Korea), Mary Elizabeth Mullino Moore (Compassion, Creativity, and Form: The Ethics of Institutions), and George W. Shields (Ruse, Altruism, and Process Philosophy). The subsection on "Ethics and Aesthetic Values" includes contributions from Stephen T. Franklin (abstract only), Brian G. Henning (Is There an Ethics of Creativity?), Mihàly Tòth (Art of Life and the Ethics of Life Forming), and Guorong Yang (Problems and Perspectives in the Emerging of Global Society). (shrink)

The ‘musca depicta’ trope is well known to art historians, with a history going back to Pliny. It flourished in the Renaissance, but in eighteenth-century England the meaning of the trope was altered greatly when employed in popular culture, both in live theatrical presentations (by George Alexander Stevens) and in published poetry (by James Robertson, comedian of York). Originally, the trope signalled the virtuosity of the painter, who was able to fool the eye by depicting flies so real that (...) the viewer attempted to shoo them off the picture. However, in the hands of Stevens and Robertson, that bit of theatre was turned on its head, as the supposed connoisseur engaged in a harsh criticism of a painting is startled when a fly that he thinks poorly depicted suddenly flies off the canvas, thereby rendering the connoisseur a satiric target. (shrink)

We first got to know TEDMED, a partner of TED (known for its entertaining talks on important ideas), in November 2011, when Jay Walker, its ebullient curator and chairman, visited The Hastings Center to discuss our common interests. What took place was an energizing conversation with Hastings Center staff and several members of the center's board of directors about some of the most intractable health care problems. Jay sketched his vision of marshaling creative and motivated leaders from business, public (...) policy, and medicine to address them. He imagined these people drawing on their areas of expertise to make unforeseen connections—perhaps some insight from business would spark a new idea for combatting childhood obesity or eliminating medical errors. They would use their influence to put the best ideas into practice. Soon after, Walker's colleagues were back in touch with a plan for launching his movement: The Great Challenges of Health and Medicine program. (shrink)

Part I: The Life of Cognitive Science:. William Bechtel, Adele Abrahamsen, and George Graham. Part II: Areas of Study in Cognitive Science:. 1. Analogy: Dedre Gentner. 2. Animal Cognition: Herbert L. Roitblat. 3. Attention: A.H.C. Van Der Heijden. 4. Brain Mapping: Jennifer Mundale. 5. Cognitive Anthropology: Charles W. Nuckolls. 6. Cognitive and Linguistic Development: Adele Abrahamsen. 7. Conceptual Change: Nancy J. Nersessian. 8. Conceptual Organization: Douglas Medin and Sandra R. Waxman. 9. Consciousness: Owen Flanagan. 10. Decision Making: J. Frank (...) Yates and Paul A. Estin. 11. Emotions: Paul E. Griffiths. 12. Imagery and Spatial Representation: Rita E. Anderson. 13. Language Evolution and Neuromechanisms: Terrence W. Deacon. 14. Language Processing: Kathryn Bock and Susan M. Garnsey. 15. Linguistics Theory: D. Terence Langendoen. 16. Machine Learning: Paul Thagard. 17. Memory: Henry L. Roediger III and Lyn M. Goff. 18. Perception: Cees Van Leeuwen. 19. Perception: Color: Austen Clark. 20. Problem Solving: Kevin Dunbar. 21. Reasoning: Lance J. Rips. 22. Social Cognition: Alan J. Lambert and Alison L. Chasteen. 23. Unconscious Intelligence: Rhianon Allen and Arthur S. Reber. 24. Understanding Texts: Art Graesser and Pam Tipping. 25. Word Meaning: Barbara C. Malt. Part III: Methodologies of Cognitive Science:. 26. Artificial Intelligence: Ron Sun. 27. Behavioral Experimentation: Alexander Pollatsek and Keith Rayner. 28. Cognitive Ethology: Marc Bekoff. 29. Deficits and Pathologies: Christopher D. Frith. 30. Ethnomethodology: Barry Saferstein. 31. Functional Analysis: Brian Macwhinney. 32. Neuroimaging: Randy L. Buckner and Steven E. Petersen. 33. Protocal Analysis: K. Anders Ericsson. 34. Single Neuron Electrophysiology: B. E. Stein, M.T. Wallace, and T.R. Stanford. 35. Structural Analysis: Robert Frank. Part IV: Stances in Cognitive Science:. 36. Case-based Reasoning: David B. Leake. 37. Cognitive Linguistics: Michael Tomasello. 38. Connectionism, Artificial Life, and Dynamical Systems: Jeffrey L. Elman. 39. Embodied, Situated, and Distributed Cognition: Andy Clark. 40. Mediated Action: James V. Wertsch. 41. Neurobiological Modeling: P. Read Montague and Peter Dayan. 42. Production Systems: Christian D. Schunn and David Klahr. Part V: Controversies in Cognitive Science:. 43. The Binding Problem: Valerie Gray Hardcastle. 44. Heuristics and Satisficing: Robert C. Richardson. 45. Innate Knowledge: Barbara Landau. 46. Innateness and Emergentism: Elizabeth Bates, Jeffrey L. Elman, Mark H. Johnson, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett. 47. Intentionality: Gilbert Harman. 48. Levels of Explanation and Cognition Architectures: Robert N. McCauley. 49. Modularity: Irene Appelbaum. 50. Representation and Computation: Robert S. Stufflebeam. 51. Representations: Dorrit Billman. 52. Rules: Terence Horgan and John Tienson. 53. Stage Theories Refuted: Donald G. Mackay. Part VI: Cognitive Science in the Real World:. 54. Education: John T. Bruer. 55. Ethics: Mark L. Johnson. 56. Everyday Life Environments: Alex Kirlik. 57. Institutions and Economics: Douglass C. North. 58. Legal Reasoning: Edwina L. Rissland. 59. Mental Retardation: Norman W. Bray, Kevin D. Reilly, Lisa F. Huffman, Lisa A. Grupe, Mark F. Villa, Kathryn L. Fletcher, and Vivek Anumolu. 60. Science: William F. Brewer and Punyashloke Mishra. Selective Biographies of Major Contributors to Cognitive Science: William Bechtel and Tadeusz Zawidzki. (shrink)

A definition of [George] Eliot as renunciatory culture-mother may seem an odd preface to a discussion of Silas Marner since, of all her novels, this richly constructed work is the one in which the empty pack of daughterhood appears fullest, the honey of femininity most unpunished. I want to argue, however, that this “legendary tale,” whose status as a schoolroom classic makes it almost as much a textbook as a novel, examines the relationship between woman’s fate and the structure (...) of society in order to explicate the meaning of the empty pack of daughterhood. More specifically, this story of an adoptive father, an orphan daughter, and a dead mother broods on events that are actually or symbolically situated on the margins or boundaries of society, where culture must enter into a dialectical struggle with nature, in order to show how the young female human animal is converted into the human daughter, wife, and mother. Finally, then, this fictionalized “daughteronomy” becomes a female myth of origin narrated by a severe literary mother uses the vehicle of a half-allegorical family romance to urge acquiescence in the law of the Father.If Silas Marner is not obviously a story about the empty pack of daughterhood, it is plainly, of course, a “legendary tale” about a wanderer with a heavy yet empty pack. In fact, it is through the image of the packman that the story, in Eliot’s own words, “came across my other plans by a sudden inspiration”—and, clearly, her vision of this burdened outsider is a re-vision of the Romantic wanderer who haunts the borders of society, seeking a local habitation and a name.11 I would argue further, though, that Eliot’s depiction of Silas Marner’s alienation begins to explain Ruby Redinger’s sense that the author of this “fluid and metaphoric” story “is” both Eppie, the redemptive daughter, and Silas, the redeemed father. For in examining the outcast weaver’s marginality, this novelist of the “hidden life” examines also her own female disinheritance and marginality.12 11. Eliot to Blackwood, 12 Jan. 1861, quoted in Ruby V. Redinger, George Eliot: The Emergent Self , p. 436. As Susan Garber has suggested to me, the resonant image of the “packman” may be associated with the figure of Bob Jakin in The Mill on the Floss , the itinerant pack-bearing peddler who brings Maggie Tulliver a number of books, the most crucial of which is Tomas à Kempis’ treatise on Christian renunciation .12. Rediner, George Eliot, p. 439; Eliot, “Finale,” Middlemarch, p. 896. Sandra M. Gilbert, now professor of English at the University of California, Davis, will join the Department of English at Princeton University in fall 1985. Her most recent works include a collection of poems, Emily’s Bread , and, coedited with Susan Gubar, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English . In addition, she is at work on Mother Rites: Studies in Literature and Maternity, a project from which “Life’s Empty Pack” is drawn, and, with Susan Gubar, on No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, a sequel to their collaborative Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination . “Costumes of the Mind: Transvestitism as Metaphor in Modern Literature” appeared in the Winter 1980 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

Both Jaspers and his friend and intellectual mentor, Max Weber, took phenomenology to be a part of a tradition of "empathy" (Einfühlung) and "understanding" (Verstehen). Both concepts were important within the Methodenstreit, or methodological controversy, which was raging over the nature and the scientific status of the human sciences at the turn of the century. Empathy was an important concept for Jaspers and for Weber but not for other figures within the Methodenstreit, such as Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel, both (...) of whom were also highly influential on Jaspers and Weber. Understanding was a crucial concept for all these men. To them, it was the defining feature of the human sciences. All of these authors and the Methodenstreit in general were dominated by themes that were fundamentally Kantian. -/- Also present within the Methodenstreit were socalled neo-Kantian figures such as Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, who were successively Jaspers's professors after he left the practice of psychiatry in 1913 to take up a lectureship in psychology within the Heidelberg department of philosophy. An interest in the differing logic of the natural, and the human or cultural, sciences was the neo-Kantian influence on the Methodenstreit. Empathy played no part whatsoever, and understanding played a late, different, and minor part in Rickert's thinking. Jaspers's phenomenology begins from the same neo-Kantian themes as Rickert's theory of science, but Jaspers does not follow Rickert into his detailed distinctions between the two kinds of science. -/- For Jaspers, phenomenology was an "understanding, empathic representation" (verstehende, einfühlende Vergegenwärtigung) of the other person's psychic life. For Weber, it was an "empathic understanding" (einfühlende Verstandnis). Both Jaspers and Weber believed that this definition of phenomenology was exactly in line with Husserl's own thinking. This paper shows that their belief was a serious misunderstanding of Husserl's view. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Theory in the “Post” Era: A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons ed. by Alexandru Matei, Christian Moraru and Andrei TerianLaura Elena Savu WalkerMatei, Alexandru, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian, editors. Theory in the “Post” Era: A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons. Bloomsbury, 2021. 376pp.Far from “mourning” the demise of theory, this timely and thoughtfully curated essay collection testifies to its “renewed vitality,” its compelling presence “across (...) fields, domains of life, and geocultural boundaries,” and its power to build an ever-expanding world community of practioners who are forming what has come to be known as a “theory commons” (ix). As the collection’s editors point out, theory’s new lease on life hinges on ensuring both the democratic workings of this “world discourse formation” (1) and on the responsible theorizing of the very notion of community in “a world threatened by all kinds of anti-communal actions and reactions, from runaway globalization to exacerbated tribalism and tunnel-vision politics” (x). Working on the margins, specifically, out of a Romanian “lab” called The Critical Theory Institute (CTI), which opened its doors in early 2000, the contributors seek to revise the “standard history of theory,” one whose “Western origins, authority, and cultural compass ” strike them as “exceedingly reductive” (3). This project of geotheoretical repositioning and recalibration aims to recast theory as a “quintessentially cross-linguistic, cross-cultural, trans- and intercontinental undertaking” (4). As such, it carries on the project, launched in a previous volume, Romanian Literature as World Literature (2018), of fashioning an alternative to the nation-state paradigm that has long shaped literary and intellectual histories. In both of these works, Romanian critics and theorists have tuned into a wide range of voices, and tapped into a shared conceptual and methodological apparatus—itself the product of “an ethno-linguistic medley of traditions” (8). This approach informs what editors see as the “epoch-making” (17) discursive paradigm that has taken shape in globally networked post-Cold War societies (17), a viral model of cultural influence that fosters an ontology of “contact, contagion, of infection, dissemination, and horizontal accumulation” (15).To give us a sense of theory’s complex genealogy and evolution, the editors reference the Bulgarian critic Galin Tihanov, who has attributed [End Page 122] important developments in contemporary theory to the achievements of theorists (Nikolai Trubetskoi, Roman Jakobson, Vladimir Propp, and Georg Lukács) and schools of thought (Russian Formalism and the Prague Linguistic Circle). In “Traveling Theory” (1983) and “Traveling Theory Reconsidered” (2000), Edward Said called attention to the migratory nature of contributions made, for instance, by Georg Lukács, whose theories moved across different European locales in this period. Since then, contemporary theory has branched out to integrate the travels and travails of scholars affiliated with theory labs located in Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, and last, but not least, Romania (10).Theory in the “Post” Era highlights five characteristics that distinguish theory in the “post” era from earlier forms: 1) It has a “reluctantly epoch-alist” thrust (19; original italics), which assumes that the “post” lexicon entails “rupture, discontinuity, and opposition” (19), radical departures, tentative claims, provisional conclusions, and ex-centric perspectives; 2) it adopts a “self-reflexive and experimental” (20; original italics) stance in which theorists invoke inherited approaches or invent new ones; 3) it introduces a “transdisciplinary” (21; original italics) scope that allows authors to interrogate the foundations, aims, and methods of theoretical discourse and practice across several knowledge domains, from which they “borrow whole vocabularies and toolkits” (21); 4) it is “nationally, transnationally, and ecologically affiliative” (20) in ways that allow theorists to “think with others at a distance” (21) about global issues; and 5) it is programmatic, placing critical and theoretical concerns in the service of “the ethical, the political, and the communal” (22). Organized around three main themes (“Aesthetics,” “Temporalities,” and “Critical Modes”), the essays juxtapose discussions of pivotal historical events and cultural phenomena with literary analyses of Romantic era “classics,” modernist experiments, and postmodern works of the post-Communist era, a corpus that includes, but is not limited to, landmark works of national culture that are now part of a fast-expanding planetary... (shrink)

By the start of the 1860s, architecture and the materials, processes, and cultures of emerging modernity were combining in Paris, above all other cities, with unprecedented consequences. Georges-Éugene Haussmann, Emperor Napoléon III’s Prefect of the Seine, had in 1853 been tasked with modernizing the city. His principle strategy was to demolish entire quarters of ramshackle medieval fabric for the creation of pristine, arrow-straight boulevards and sparkling squares, all of which were lined by luxurious standardized buildings, serviced by underground sewers, and (...) brilliantly lit by gas lamps.1 As the city heaved in every quarter, a group of Parisian authors stepped forward to respond to the literal. (shrink)

The list of saints dragonslayers is long in Western tradition: from archangel Michael, Saint George, Saint Marcel up to captain Nemo from the famous Jules Verne’s novel. It is quite different in East Asia and especially in China, where the dragon benefits from an extremely positive valuation. What are the causes of such a symbolic reversal? This is what we are trying to elucidate in this paper. The dragon, so laden with malignity in the West and requiring a hero (...) to fight it and to restore, against multiple perversity, the solidity of the concept of being, is an auspicious image in the Chinese world that benefits from the riches of multiplicity: assimilated to the “Son of Heaven”, emperor of all under heaven, located in the center of the changing world, he ensures the correct order of political, geographic, calendar, or anthropological pluralities. Two world views stand face to face: one that saves being by slaying the dragon, the other which recognizes the value of changes and transformations. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to investigate the intersections between masculinity, shame, art, anality, the abject and embodiment by focusing on a particular period of the British art duo Gilbert & George's work in the 1990s. In their series The Naked Shit Pictures, The Fundamental Pictures and The Rudimentary Pictures, the duo's artistic self-performance opens a scatological narrative territory where the male body encounters its own abject fluids strategically magnified. Situating itself within the boundary between queer theory (...) and Lacanian psychoanalysis with a particular focus on the phallus and the abject, this essay argues that Gilbert & George's art-works mentioned above could be regarded as visual commentaries on and queer interventions into bodily anxieties of normative masculinities. It thus reads the artists’ visual discourse of performative hypervisibility as a queer/ing one where the conventional male masculinity confronts simultaneously its ejaculatory bliss and its fear of anal penetration. (shrink)

Georg. I. 36 sq.:quidquid eris,—nam te nec sperant Tartara regem, nec tibi regnandi ueniat tam dira cupido;—Mr. Page's note puts well what seems the customary view of this famous parenthesis: ‘The force of nam deserves attention. Having used the phrase quidquid eris, which sums up the whole passage from line 24, as though there were no other form of deity left which Augustus could assume, Vergil adds this explanatory sentence to show why he had not mentioned the fourth division into (...) which deities were divided, viz. those of the underworld. The fourfold division of deities being well known, Vergil cannot omit the fourth without stating the reason for which he does so.’. (shrink)

To those who know little about the Middle Ages, the copying of manuscripts of “the ancients” (whether classical, such as the Roman poet Horace, or Christian, such as Saints Jerome or Augustine) often seems either a laudable act of preserving the past or an unfortunate fixation on repeating the words of others rather than penning new and original compositions. Even scholars of the Middle Ages appear sometimes more interested in new types of works such as fabliaux or courtly romances written (...) in the vernacular; when they study the practice of copying, they often concentrate on identifying prototypes or legacies. Finding old wine in old bottles has been a fairly constant theme in medieval studies; sometimes, we must admit, medievalists have just thrown out the old bottles and moved on to something completely new. In this context, it may seem strange to find a work about medieval Latin manuscript commentaries titled “The Birth of the Author,” responding to Roland Barthes's well-known essay “The Death of the Author,” published in 1984 and cited repeatedly since. What can it mean to see new, self-conscious awareness of the act of personal creation in works that are copies by scribes of other works that themselves comment on yet earlier works, often of a certain age or canonicity? Yet in this intelligent, engaging, and beautifully produced book, art historian Jeffrey Hamburger not only shows how those who wrote commentaries came to suggest that anyone who composes a work (even the scribe who copies it) could be considered a creator of meaning but also that the images in commentaries themselves sometimes make statements—indeed, statements more radical than those in the text—about the author of the work being illustrated. Long known as one of the relatively rare historians of medieval art equipped with a wide knowledge of theology and hence of how images respond to and reflect text, Hamburger here shows himself possessed of a shrewd eye for the image itself. He studies illuminated prefaces to, among other texts, the prose and poetic works of Horace as used in the medieval classroom, copies of the major biblical commentary of the High Middle Ages, the Glossa ordinaria, and Rupert of Deutz's erotically charged commentary on the Song of Songs. Changing the lens through which scholars have usually viewed such texts, Hamburger argues that images of authors of commentaries sometimes go beyond anything in the text to assert the authority not only of the author of the text commented on and of the commentator but occasionally even of the scribe.The Birth of the Author is a work of complicated analysis, and its full power demands close attention. Understanding how images construct claims that go beyond the text involves a good deal of careful looking. Hamburger is a patient and clear guide, but the reader must be prepared to flip back and forth between the magnificent colored images the publisher provides and to follow what are often painstaking arguments from comparison of small visual differences or puzzling identifications of seemingly strange details. The result of doing so is, however, to gain not only the reward of Hamburger's ingenious conclusions but also a lesson in how to look. For example, in a discussion of Gilbert Universalis's commentary on the Lamentations of the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, Hamburger shows how Gilbert not only identifies Jeremiah as a “divine rhetorician” but also assimilates his own act of authorship to Jeremiah's prophetic speech. In the only extant copy of Gilbert's text that has a program of illustrations, the artist constructs both Jeremiah's speech and Gilbert's interpretation as similar acts of creation by framing both authors in parallel architectural images that evoke the Old Testament temple and a Christian church. Or to give a final example of Hamburger's interpretive reach: the book concludes not with yet another medieval preface but with an example of the far less usual manuscript epilogue. Here not only commentator, scribe, and illustrator but even the medieval reader construct themselves. Reception becomes interpretation, illustration becomes construction. In a commentary by the Carolingian figure Sedulius Scotus (fl. 840–60) on the Roman grammarian Donatus (mid-fourth century), the illustrator depicts Donatus as author and scribe (thus assimilating author into copier and vice versa). On the same folio, a later medieval reader constructs himself as reader/author in a charming marginal doodle that seems to entrap Donatus in a sort of hangman's noose. Thus, a bit wryly perhaps, Hamburger—himself teacher, commentator, and consummate scholar—seems to suggest that even frustrated students can construct themselves as interpreters and, yes, authors. Behind the seeming repetition and backward glance of the images in medieval commentaries lies radical and forward-looking self-awareness of the acts of authoring, interpreting, reading, and imagining. In Hamburger's analysis, the most seemingly conventional of medieval genres—the preface to commentaries on the texts of others—is a locus of the birth in illustration of the self-conscious and self-expressive author and reader. (shrink)

Ancient philosophy has from the outset inspired phenomenological philosophers in a special way. Phenomenological Interpretations of Ancient Philosophy offers fresh perspectives on the way ancient Greek thought has influenced phenomenology and traces the history of this reception. Unlike various related treatments, the present volume offers a broad account of this topic and includes chapters on Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacob Klein, Hannah Arendt, Eugen Fink, Jan Patočka, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida.