Henry W. Johnstone (1996) attempts to use a notion of postponement to give a general account of viciousness of infinite regresses. Though some of his examples suggest that his notion applies to only beginningless regresses (...eRdRcRbRa), I will show that it also applies to endless ones (aRbRcRdRe...). Unfortunately, despite this expanded application, it does not apply to all vicious regresses, even to some of his own examples; it is cumbersome and unnecessary, and it fails to explain how some infinite regresses (...) entail a contradiction. (shrink)

Critically engaging with thinkers including Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Catherine Malabou, Jean-Claude Milner, Martin Hagglund, William Connolly and Jane Bennett, Johnston formulates a materialist and naturalist account of subjectivity that does full justice to human beings as irreducible to natural matter alone.

First systematic presentation and assessment of the groundbreaking journal Cahiers pour l’Analyse. Concept and Form is a two-volume monument to the work of the philosophy journal the Cahiers pour l’Analyse (1966–69), the most ambitious and radical collective project to emerge from French structuralism. Inspired by their teachers Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, the editors of the Cahiers sought to sever philosophy from the interpretation of given meanings or experiences, focusing instead on the mechanisms that structure specific configurations of discourse, from (...) the psychological and ideological to the literary, scientific, and political. Adequate analysis of the operations at work in these configurations, they argue, helps prepare the way for their revolutionary transformation. The first volume comprises English translations of some of the most important theoretical texts published in the journal, written by thinkers who would soon be counted among the most inventive and influential of their generation. The second volume collects newly commissioned essays on the journal, together with recent interviews with people who were either members of its editorial board or associated with its broader theoretical project. Contributors include Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Edward Baring, Jacques Bouveresse, Yves Duroux, Alain Grosrichard, Peter Hallward, Adrian Johnston, Serge Leclaire, Patrice Maniglier, Tracy McNulty, Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-Claude Milner, Knox Peden, Jacques Rancière, François Regnault, and Slavoj Žižek. (shrink)

Nous présentons ici la traduction d’une conférence donnée par Ernst Cassirer au Cercle linguistique de New York en 1945, intitulée « Le structuralisme dans la linguistique moderne ». Dans ce texte, Cassirer propose une généalogie de l’approche structurale dans la linguistique moderne, en faisant remonter la problématique aux débats épistémologiques des xviiie et xixe siècles sur la constitution des sciences du vivant. La conférence de Cassirer revêt ainsi à nos yeux un double intérêt : d’une part, elle rend compte de (...) l’unité de l’œuvre cassirerienne, puisque l’auteur y mobilise des concepts dont il a posé les premiers jalons dès 1910 dans Substance et fonction ; d’autre part, elle permet de rendre compte de la spécificité méthodologique des sciences de la culture, à partir d’une généalogie conceptuelle de la méthode en train de naître dans les cercles linguistiques de l’époque. Nous tâcherons de présenter les différentes étapes de l’argumentation de Cassirer, allant d’une redéfinition de la nécessité dans le domaine linguistique, en passant par l’analogie entre science du vivant et science du langage, pour finir par interroger la place accordée à la notion de structure dans la philosophie de Cassirer. (shrink)

Johnston presents an argument for a form of immortality that divests the notion of any supernatural elements. The book is packed with illuminating philosophical reflection on the question of what we are, and what it is for us to persist over time.

This book presents a posthumous collection of previously uncollected works of political theory written by Whittle Johnston. Johnston believed that both the liberal tradition of political thought and the realist tradition of international thought had contributed much to humanity's store of political wisdom, but that each had limitations that could most easily be recognized by its encounter with the other. His method of accomplishing this task was to examine the liberal conception of political life in general and international (...) political life in particular and then to explore the realist critique of the liberal view, particularly as it was expressed by three great twentieth-century realist thinkers, all of whom were, in their various ways, skeptical of liberal assumptions: Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau, and E. H. Carr. In doing so, Johnston reveals the power of the realist outlook, but also the areas in which it remains insufficient, and insufficient particularly where it underestimates the complexity and prudence that liberalism is capable of displaying. There have been studies of both liberalism and realism, but no other work has put them into conversation with each other in the way that this book does. (shrink)

Like dreaming, hallucination has been a formative trope for modern philosophy. The vivid, often tragic, breakdown in the mind’s apparent capacity to disclose reality has long served to support a paradoxical philosophical picture of sensory experience. This picture, which of late has shaped the paradigmatic empirical understanding the senses, displays sensory acts as already complete without the external world; complete in that the direct objects even of veridical sensory acts do not transcend what we could anyway hallucinate. Hallucination is thus (...) the mother of Representationalism, which insists that it is mental intermediaries that make other.. (shrink)

Qu'est-ce qu'un enseignement? Une pensée? Qu'autorisent-ils? À la suite de Claire Brunet, Sandra Laugier et Frédérique Ildefonse qui dirigent ce volume, d'anciens étudiants, aujourd'hui chercheurs renommés ou plus discrets, creusent à travers le sillon de leur discipline ce que leur a permis l'enseignement de leur maître commune à l'École normale supérieure. Les amitiés intellectuelles s'y joignent. Ce que l'on appelle communément communication dans le monde académique devient texte. Tous, en creux, décrivent l'influence d'un enseignement, la liberté qu'il permet à des (...) esprits pour s'épanouir et nous laissent découvrir un portrait intellectuel d'une grande originalité. La pensée de Claude Imbert, philosophe, logicienne, longtemps directrice du département de philosophie de la rue d'Ulm, n'a pas les honneurs médiatiques français en sus des "académiques" d'usage. S'y prêterait-elle? Pourtant, la philosophe française est depuis plus de vingt ans lue, reçue et écoutée dans les universités du monde entier, des Etats-Unis à la Chine en passant par l'Amérique du Sud. Tous les textes rassemblés ici, comme autant de variations, sans jamais le dire, souhaitent contribuer à la reconnaissance de l'oeuvre. Un inédit "Ne rien oublier et tout apprendre" de la philosophe et un texte de Pascalle Monnier, écrivain, accompagnent le volume."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The description for this book, The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation, will be forthcoming.

In this book, Mark Johnston argues that God needs to be saved not only from the distortions of the "undergraduate atheists" but, more importantly, from the idolatrous tendencies of religion itself. Each monotheistic religion has its characteristic ways of domesticating True Divinity, of taming God's demands so that they do not radically threaten our self-love and false righteousness. Turning the monotheistic critique of idolatry on the monotheisms themselves, Johnston shows that much in these traditions must be condemned as (...) false and spiritually debilitating. A central claim of the book is that supernaturalism is idolatry. If this is right, everything changes; we cannot place our salvation in jeopardy by tying it essentially to the supernatural cosmologies of the ancient Near East. Remarkably, Johnston rehabilitates the ideas of the Fall and of salvation within a naturalistic framework; he then presents a conception of God that both resists idolatry and is wholly consistent with the deliverances of the natural sciences. Princeton University Press is publishing Saving God in conjunction with Johnston's forthcoming book Surviving Death, which takes up the crux of supernaturalist belief, namely, the belief in life after death. (shrink)

The _Mozi_ is a key philosophical work written by a major social and political thinker of the fifth century B.C.E. It is one of the few texts to survive the Warring States period and is crucial to understanding the origins of Chinese philosophy and two other foundational works, the _Mengzi_ and the _Xunzi_. Ian Johnston provides an English translation of the entire _Mozi_, as well as the first bilingual edition in any European language to be published in the West. (...) His careful translation reasserts the significance of the text's central doctrines, and his annotations and contextual explanations add vivid historical and interpretive dimensions. Part 1 of the _Mozi_ is called the "Epitomes" and contains seven short essays on the elements of Mohist doctrine. Part 2, the "Core Doctrines," establishes the ten central tenets of Mo Zi's ethical, social, and political philosophy, while articulating his opposition to Confucianism. Part 3, the "Canons and Explanations," comprises observations on logic, language, disputation, ethics, science, and other matters, written particularly in defense of Mohism. Part 4, the "Dialogues," presents lively conversations between Master Mo and various disciples, philosophical opponents, and potential patrons. Part 5, the "Defense Chapters," details the principles and practices of defensive warfare, a subject on which Master Mo was an acknowledged authority. Now available to English-speaking readers of all backgrounds, the Mozi is a rich and varied text, and this bilingual edition provides an excellent tool for learning classical Chinese. (shrink)

The general process view of learning, which guided research into learning for the first half of this century, has come under attack in recent years from several quarters. One form of criticism has come from proponents of the so-called biological boundaries approach to learning. These theorists have presented a variety of data showing that supposedly general laws of learning may in fact be limited in their applicability to different species and learning tasks, and they argue that the limitations are drawn (...) by the nature of each species' adaptation to the particular requirements of its natural environment. The biological boundaries approach has served an important critical function in the move away from general process learning theory, but it is limited in its ability to provide an alternative to the general process approach. In particular, the biological boundaries approach lacks generality, it is in some respects subservient to the general process tradition, and its ecological content is in too many cases limited toex post factoadaptive explanations of learning skills. A contrasting, ecological approach to learning, which can provide a true alternative to general process theory, is presented. The ecological approach begins by providing an ecological task description for naturally occurring instances of learning; this step answers the question:Whatdoes this animal learn to do? The next step is an analysis of the means by which learning occurs in the course of development, answering the question:Howdoes the animal learn to do this? On the basis of such analyses, local principles of adaptation are formulated to account for the learning abilities of individual species. More global principles are sought by generalization among these local principles and may form the basis for a general ecological theory of learning. (shrink)

A while ago I pulled the short straw, and became chair of my department. One nice part of the job is to praise people I work with, which I can do sincerely because they are very praiseworthy. I also have to read a lot of praise by others; the familiar things—project evaluations, letters of recommendation, promotion dossiers, and so on and so forth. As a result, I have learnt to attend to praise a little more closely.

Adrian Johnston offers a first-of-its-kind sustained critical response to Slavoj Zizek's Less Than Nothing and Absolute Recoil, in which Zizek returns to Hegel. Johnston develops what he calls transcendental materialism, an antireductive materialism capable of preserving and advancing the legacies of the Hegelian, Marxian, and Freudian traditions.

Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou defy theoretical humanities' deeply-entrenched resistance to engagements with the life sciences. Rather than treat biology and its branches as hopelessly reductive and politically suspect, they view recent advances in neurobiology and its adjacent scientific fields as providing crucial catalysts to a radical rethinking of subjectivity. Merging three distinct disciplines--European philosophy from Descartes to the present, Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, and affective neuroscience-- Johnston and Malabou triangulate the emotional life of affective subjects as conceptualized in philosophy (...) and psychoanalysis with neuroscience. Their experiments yield different outcomes. Johnston finds psychoanalysis and neurobiology have the potential to enrich each other, though affective neuroscience demands a reconsideration of whether affects can be unconscious. Investigating this vexed issue has profound implications for theoretical and practical analysis, as well as philosophical understandings of the emotions. Malabou believes scientific explorations of the brain seriously problematize established notions of affective subjectivity in Continental philosophy and Freudian-Lacanian analysis. She confronts philosophy and psychoanalysis with something neither field has seriously considered: the concept of wonder and the cold, disturbing visage of those who have been affected by disease or injury, such that they are no longer affected emotionally. At stake in this exchange are some of philosophy's most important claims concerning the relationship between the subjective mind and the objective body, the structures and dynamics of the unconscious dimensions of mental life, the role emotion plays in making us human, and the functional differences between philosophy and science. (shrink)

La réception française d’Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936), au début du xxe siècle, s’inscrit tout d’abord au cœur des débats épistémologiques autour de la constitution des sciences historiques et des sciences sociales, ainsi que l’atteste la controverse entre Paul Lacombe et Alexandru Dimitri Xenopol. Le second volet de la réception de Rickert en France concerne la philosophie des valeurs et le lien qu’elle entretient avec les positions épistémologiques défendues par le néokantien de Bade. L’étude de cet aspect de la réception se fera (...) à partir de la lecture qu’en proposent Georges Gurvitch d’une part, et Raymond Aron d’autre part, tous deux formulant, à leur manière, une accusation visant le formalisme de la théorie rickertienne des valeurs. Si les discussions philosophiques des positions du philosophe allemand sont assez rares, elles constituent néanmoins un révélateur pertinent des débats qui animaient la philosophie et les sciences historiques et sociales de l’époque. (shrink)

Despite several decades of criticism, dichotomous thinking about behavioral development remains widespread and influential. This is particularly true in study of birdsong development, where it has become increasingly common to diagnose songs, elements of songs, or precursors of songs as either innate or learned on the basis of isolation-rearing experiments. The theory of sensory templates has encouraged both the dichotomous approach and an emphasis on structural rather than functional aspects of song development. As a result, potentially important lines of investigation (...) have been overlooked and the interpretation of existing data is often flawed. Evidence for a genetic origin of behavioraldifferencesis frequently interpreted as evidence for the genetic determination of behavioralcharacters. The technique of isolation rearing remains the methodology of choice for many investigators, despite the fact that it offers only a rather crude analysis of the contribution of experience to song development and provides no information at all about genetic contributions to development. The latter could in principle be elucidated by the application of developmental-genetic techniques, but it is unlikely that these can easily be applied to the study of birdsong. Because developmental questions are so often posed in terms of the learned–innate dichotomy, “experience” is taken to be synonymous with “learning” and the possible role of nonobvious contributions to song development has largely been ignored. An alternative approach, based on Daniel Lehrman's interactionist theory of development, permits a more thorough appreciation of the problems that have yet to be addressed, and provides a more secure conceptual foundation for theories of song development. (shrink)

Nous publions dans ce volume les dits d'une journee d'etude en hommage de Claude Troisfontaines intitulee La Raison par quatre chemins. Apres une introduction, le lecteur trouvera une premiere figuration de ce que sont les quatre chemins de la Raison. En effet, dans son parcours academique comme dans sa vie intellectuelle, il nous semble que le travail philosophique de Claude Troisfontaines s'est deploye en quatre directions significatives: la reflexion epistemologique, les recherches en theologie naturelle ou philosophique, les etudes (...) sur les rapports entre la philosophie et les differents arts, et les etudes blondeliennes. Dans les contributions, toutes remarquables par leur vivacite, bien que provenant d'horizons differents, les auteurs ont choisi d'emprunter un de ces quatre chemins de la Raison, en signe de compagnonnage envers Claude Troisfontaines, afin d'evoquer chacun a sa maniere une meme Histoire, vecue ou partagee. Enfin le livre contient une bibliographie complete des travaux d'edition et des publications de Claude Troisfontaines. (shrink)

Dans la préface aux Confessions, Rousseau déclare se donner en comparaison pour l’étude des hommes qui reste encore à faire. Plus que le récit d’une vie singulière et plus qu’une plaidoirie, l’entreprise autobiographique rousseauiste aurait donc aussi une vocation anthropologique. Mais comment concevoir un tel procédé comparatif et comment définir la connaissance qu’il vise dans la mesure où Rousseau lui-même ne cesse par ailleurs d’associer comparaison et amour-propre? Dès lors, nous verrons que si l’écriture de soi s’inscrit dans une perspective (...) anthropologique, celle-ci ne saurait être coupée de l’ambition éthique et morale portée par l’auteur. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s philosophical achievement lies in the development of a new philosophical method rather than in the elaboration of a particular philosophical system. Dr Paul Johnston applies this innovative method to the central problems of moral philosophy: whether there can be ‘truth’ in ethics, or what the meaning of objectivity might mean in the context of moral deliberation. Wittgenstein and Moral Philosophy, first published in 1989, represents the first serious and rigorous attempt to apply Wittgenstein’s method to ethics. The conclusions (...) arrived at differ radically from those dominating contemporary ethical discussion, revealing an immense discrepancy between the ethical concepts employed in everyday moral decision-making and the way in which these are discussed by philosophers. Dr Johnston examines ways of eliminating this discrepancy in order to gain a clearer picture of the proper nature of moral claims, and at the same time provides new insights into Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy. (shrink)

Slavoj Žižek is one of the most interesting and important philosophers working today, known chiefly for his theoretical explorations of popular culture and contemporary politics. This book focuses on the generally neglected and often overshadowed philosophical core of Žižek’s work—an essential component in any true appreciation of this unique thinker’s accomplishment. His central concern, Žižek has proclaimed, is to use psychoanalysis to redeploy the insights of late-modern German philosophy, in particular, the thought of Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. By taking this (...) avowal seriously, Adrian Johnston finally clarifies the philosophical project underlying Žižek’s efforts. His book charts the interlinked ontology and theory of subjectivity constructed by Žižek at the intersection of German idealism and Lacanian theory. Johnston also uses Žižek’s combination of philosophy and psychoanalysis to address two perennial philosophical problems: the relationship of mind and body, and the nature of human freedom. By bringing together the past two centuries of European philosophy, psychoanalytic metapsychology, and cutting-edge work in the natural sciences, Johnston develops a transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity—in short, an account of how more-than-material forms of subjectivity can emerge from a corporeal being. His work shows how an engagement with Žižek’s philosophy can produce compelling answers to today’s most vexing and urgent questions as inherited from the history of ideas. (shrink)

Saint Augustin écrit : " Qu'est-ce donc que le temps ? Si personne ne me le demande, je le sais ; mais, si on me le demande et que je veuille l'expliquer, je ne le sais plus.

Résumé Selon la perspective de l’œuvre ouverte développée par Eco, « un texte est un tissu d’espaces blancs, d’interstices à remplir … un mécanisme paresseux qui vit sur la plus-value de sens qui y est introduite par le destinataire » (Eco 1985, Lector in fabula ou la coopération interprétative dans les textes narratifs, Myriem Bouzaher (trad.). Paris: Grasset, 66–67). C’est à cette plus-value de sens, concomitante à l’activité interprétative, que la présente étude s’attardera, et ce, afin d’identifier d’abord des éléments (...) de l’album d’enfance nécessitant l’interprétation d’un lecteur modèle et d’en convoquer par la suite les significations qui peuvent être appliquées au texte. Plus précisément, il s’agira de décrire et d’analyser les mécanismes intertextuels qui enrichissent l’organisation syntaxique et sémantique de quatre albums d’enfance parus au Québec entre 1992 et 2002 et qui nécessitent l’intervention d’un lecteur modèle pour identifier les systèmes de signification et les savoirs qui y sont rattachés. Les albums soumis à l’investigation reprennent le schéma narratif de contes de fée connus et celui d’une nouvelle contemporaine. L’hypothèse est la suivante: si les composantes génériques de l’album dévoilent à un jeune lecteur des univers de références connus et familiers, le processus de l’intertextualité sollicite des contenus qui, soumis à l’interprétation d’un lecteur modèle, font parfois surgir des structures de signification inattendues. (shrink)

Recent books by Paul Johnston, D. Z. Phillips, Philip Shields, and B. R. Tilghman all depict Wittgenstein as centrally concerned with ethics, but they range from representing his main works as expressing and advocating a particular religious-ethical outlook to arguing that his work has no ethical content but aims primarily to clarify such logical distinctions as that between ethical and empirical judgments. All four books raise the question about the moral philosopher's proper role, and each suggests a rather different (...) answer. Via the discussion of these books, I argue that Wittgenstein's stress on diversity in the ways of human life, his notion of conceptual grammar, the idea of a perspicuous representation, his lifelong involvement with art and his suggestions about its connection with morality, and his preoccupation with aspect-seeing-all suggest new possibilities of rehabilitating the historically recurrent idea that the philosopher may be a moral sage. (shrink)

_The Contradictions of Modern Moral Philosophy_ is a highly original and radical critique of contemporary moral theory. Paul Johnston demonstrates that much recent moral philosophy is confused about the fundamental issue of whether there are correct moral judgements. He shows that the standard modern approaches to ethics cannot justify - or even make much sense of - traditional moral beliefs. Applied rigorously, these approaches suggest that we should reject ethics as a set of outdated and misguided claims. Rather than (...) facing up to this conclusion, most recent moral philosophy consists of attempts to find some ways of preserving moral beliefs. This places a contradiction at the heart of moral philosophy. As a resilt it is often impossible to tell whether a contemporary philosopher ultimately rejects or endorses the idea of objective right and wrong. On the basis of a Wittgenstein approach Paul Johnston puts forward an alternative account of ethics that avoids this contradiction and recognises that the central issues of ethics cannot be resolved by conceptual analysis. He then uses this account to highlight the contradictions of important contemporary moral theorists such as Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre, Thomas Nagel and Charles Taylor. (shrink)