Structuralism was the major intellectual concern of French philosophy during the 1960s and 1970s. Elsewhere it was not, except in circles influenced by French thought. Lévi‐Strauss seemed to embody this theoretical trend; actually, he was simply its most outstanding figure. That situation was a strange one, in several respects: Lévi‐Strauss was not the initiator of structuralism as such, nor did he aim to cause any upheaval in the field of philosophy. But it is undeniable that most of the thinkers who (...) were (often wrongly and against their will) deemed to be structuralists, or post‐structuralists, or neo‐structuralists, such as derrida (see Article 50), althusser (Article 48), foucault (Article 49), deleuze (Article 51), Serres, lyotard (Article 52), Barthes, lacan (Article 47), Marin, entertained a special relationship with structural linguistics and with Lévi‐Strauss's anthropology. This is what needs to be understood. Thus the following sets of questions will be addressed: (1) Why, and because of what methodological requirements, did Lévi‐Strauss seek explanatory models for some anthropological problems in structural linguistics? (2) How and why did this choice made by Lévi‐Strauss have a decisive influence upon some of the major philosophers in France at that time? What were the fruits, and what were the limits and misunderstandings of the structuralist inspiration, particularly in its anthropological version, in philosophy. In other words, what assessment can be made today of the relationships between philosophy and Lévi‐Strauss's anthropology? (shrink)

"Provides an extremely valuable introduction to the work of Michel Serres for an English-speaking audience, as well as offering useful critical approaches for those already familiar with its outlines." ---Robert Harrison, Stanford University [blurb from review pending permission] The work of Michel Serres---including the books Hermes, The Parasite, The Natural Contract, Genesis, The Troubadour of Knowledge, and Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time---has stimulated readers for years, as it challenges the boundaries of science, literature, culture, language, and epistemology. The essays (...) in Mapping Michel Serres, written by the leading interpreters of his work, offer perspectives from a range of disciplinary positions, including literature, language studies, and cultural theory. Contributors include Maria Assad, Hanjo Berressem, Stephen Clucas, Steven Connor, Andrew Gibson, René Girard, Paul Harris, Marcel Hé naff, William Johnsen, William Paulson, Marjorie Perloff, Philipp Schweighauser, Isabella Winkler, and Julian Yates. (shrink)

It is widely asserted that we are now living in a post-truth society. What that means, this book argues, is that the contemporary global world is thoroughly infested not only with trickster figures but an entire and operational trickster logic; or, that we now live in a Trickster Land - an argument advanced by the claim that in modernity liminality has become permanent; or that modern life is patently absurd. The first part of the book presents a series of 'guides' (...) to this condition, in the form of key thinkers and writers who can help us understand and navigate our Trickster Land. Such guides include Hermann Broch, Lewis Hyde, Roberto Calasso, Michel Serres, Sándor Márai, Colin Thubron, and Albert Camus. The second part goes on to discuss five main regions of Trickster Land: art, thought, the economy, politics, and society. This last, central chapter of the book contrasts trickster logic with the basic, foundational logic of social life, presented as gift-giving by Marcel Mauss and as sociability by Georg Simmel, and which is expressed here, combining Heraclitus and Plato with the Gospel of John, by three basic terms of ancient Greek culture, as arkhé charis logos: meaningful social life originally and in its essence is animated by the power of kind benevolence. This volume will appeal to scholars of social theory, anthropology and sociology with interests in political thought and contemporary culture. (shrink)

Philosophy, by and large, tends to dwell on what might be called the woeful nature of reality—finitude, suffering, loss, death, and the like. While these topics are no doubt worthy of philosophical concern, undue focus on them tends to obscure other facets of our experience and of reality, giving philosophy a temperament that could justifiably be called melancholic. Without besmirching the value of such inquiry, this paper suggests that philosophers have largely ignored the experience of joy and, consequently, missed its (...) distinctive contributions to our understanding of the meaningfulness of life and the goodness of being. Traditional accounts of the problem of evil are rooted in what John D. Caputo calls “strong theology,” which tends to construe evil as a problem to which God should supply the answer or solution. However, if we call into question traditional accounts of omnipotence, evil ceases to be a problem, and we become free to engage it as part of what Gabriel Marcel calls “the mystery of being.” Thus liberated, we are free to assess more clearly phenomena missed by melancholic accounts of being, among them the experience of joy, attested to in diverse forms of philosophy, literature, memoir, and elsewhere. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Sacred Game: The Role of the Sacred in the Genesis of Modern Literary FictionAndrew J. McKennaThe Sacred Game: The Role of the Sacred in the Genesis of Modern Literary Fiction, by Cesareo Bandera; 318 pp. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994, $16.50.When we consider the early relations of philosophy and literature, we most often think of Republic X and about degrees of separation between reality and (...) its image. That is a mistake, according to Cesareo Bandera, who shows in his deft reading of Laws that Plato expelled the poets chiefly because of their threat to the difference between sacred and profane: their mournful harmoniae polluted sacred rites. In this Plato is closer to the religious world examined by Durkheim, where the absolute difference between sacred and profane alone guarantees all other differences. Aristotle is shown to be starkly misleading here, since his Poetics discuss tragedy as if it had nothing to do with the ritual practices in which it originates. His vaunted realism can only save poetry—and ontological appearances—by ignoring, by virtually expelling the sacred from its purview.This expulsion of the sacred from the horizon of our rationality is the thematic core of Bandera’s argument about modern literary fiction as it [End Page 189] emerges in the Renaissance. He does not bring the religious back to our attention to enthrall us with it anew, but to explain via formidable literary and historical scholarship how we stand with respect to it, and how we misunderstand our enlightened disrespect for it. Our modern scientific spirit, our really amazing freedom of inquiry, has a different genealogy than we commonly suppose.It is not primarily philosophy which grounds our humanist irreverence, but our Western religious tradition, which Bandera reads, along with René Girard, Roberto Calasso, and Marcel Gauchet, as a uniquely desacralizing agency in culture. His book’s central endeavor is to expand the implications of Girard’s sacrificial theory of social formation across close readings of ancient and Renaissance literature and criticism in order to show the constraints on rationality within a culture where the sacred veiled human violence. According to this view, that veil is rent irreparably with the revelation of the innocent victim as the vantage point from which to interpret the murderous fury of the crowd, however ritualized as awe for the god(s), or as art. A stunning analysis of Virgil (with an assist from Michel Serres’s reading of Lucretius) reveals a writer holding back from his appalled understanding of violent foundations. With the Renaissance, art is cannily deritualized; not pious Aeneas, born of a goddess, but Don Quixote, born in prison, sets the course for modern fiction.Bandera’s astute readings of Renaissance literature and criticism shed decisively new light on the significance of this axial period, poised at the fulcrum of his argument. His vast and probing research reminds us how modern literary fiction nourished its self-consciousness and freedom amidst lavish and vehement debate over mixing the human and divine. Stripped of the taboos limiting classical thought, the sacred’s monopoly on violence had eroded to reveal individual culpability—but also vast, new possibilities for thought and action. A clear ethical impulse accompanies these readings, in which Calderon and Cervantes are shown to deprive us of a sacred alibi for human violence, which is now a matter for me to resolve with my neighbor. Organically cultural imperatives lose ground to a sense of individual responsibility, which Bandera traces back to the historically documented ascendancy of devotio moderna in late medieval Europe.Despite and because of debates over its cultural role, Renaissance literature’s very marginality freed it to explore every dimension of human error. And we learn how those who unwittingly conspire to resacralize it, from Tasso and Shelley through Arnold and Frye, only continue to play the sacred game that caused shudders in Plato and inspires just plain silliness among our own critical anarchs and demystifyers.Bandera’s net is cast wide and deep, including a bracing debate with Milbank and Blumenberg, whose sweep he emulates successfully, and whose powerful analyses he corrects. Witty and adroit scrutiny of our “sacred allergy” extends... (shrink)

In this article, I will discuss Aron Gurwitsch's criticism of Edmund Husserl's theory of hyletic data. First, Husserl’s doctrine will be summarized in its earliest complete formulation. It will then be seen that Gurwitsch's problem with this doctrine is primarily due to his acceptance of gestalt theoretic organization. He conceives of hyletic data as being a kind of formless stuff that undergoes organiza-tion by morphetic components of the noesis, which represents a dualism in percep-tion. Instead, Gurwitsch wants to show us (...) that the organization of these contents is autochthonous. I will consider Gurwitsch's criticism against Husserl's own writings, and especially those that were not available to Gurwitsch. It will be seen that Husserl continues to develop this doctrine and that it very interestingly undergoes a kind of noematization and exhibits certain displays of autochthonous organization that in the end are not far from Gurwitsch's own conception of these affairs.Este artículo versará sobre la crítica de Aron Gurwitsch de los data hylé-ticos de Edmund Husserl. En primer lugar, se resumirá la doctrina de Husserl en su primera formulación completa. A continuación, se verá que el problema de Gur-witsch con esta doctrina se debe principalmente a su aceptación de la organización teórica de la Gestalt. Él concibe los data hyléticos como una especie de material amorfo que se somete a organización por los componentes de morphé de la noesis, lo que representa un dualismo en la percepción. En cambio, Gurwitsch quiere mos-trarnos que la organización de estos contenidos es autóctona. Se examinará la críti-ca de Gurwitsch acerca de los escritos del propio Husserl y especialmente de aque-llos que no estuvieron al alcance de Gurwitsch. Se verá que Husserl sigue desarro-llando esta doctrina y que curiosamente sufre una especie de noematización y muestra ciertas manifestaciones de organización autóctona que, a la postre, no están lejos de la concepción gurwitscheana de estos asuntos. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The fact of pluralism has set a number of practical and theoretical problems for political theorists. One of the most serious difficulties is the question of the criteria for judgment. What critical standards are available when encountering a society's practices that are different from one's own? One strategy for dealing with this is to separate out questions of ethics from questions of morality. We argue that this is a particularly unfruitful conceptual strategy. Rather our position is that the concept (...) of real interests is already operant within the practices of judgment that constitute a community, or a form of life. Our strategy is to first explore the possibility of immanent normative critique of interests expressed in forms of life using Wittgenstein and Dewey in light of Rahel Jaeggi's Critique of Forms of Life. Properly understanding how these standards of immanent critique work dissolves the problem of how to apply these to external contexts. While Jaeggi's is an excellent contribution to the discourse on critique and justification, we find that there are commitments in her idea of “immanent critique” that require reformulation with respect to the question of real interests. (shrink)

This chapter from Michel Serres’s comprehensive study on Leibniz—"The System of Leibniz and its Mathematical Models [Le système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques]"—examines Leibniz’s epistemological framework. This framework, which Leibniz developed for a large part in his “Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas [Meditationes de cognitione, veritate et ideis],” is pitched against Descartes’s "Meditations on First Philosophy [Meditationes de Prima Philosophia]" and the method of systematic doubt developed therein. While Descartes rejects any knowledge with the slightest possibility of falsehood, (...) Leibniz accepts knowledge with even a minimal degree of truth. Leibniz’s approach involves a progressive genesis of truth through a series of filters, each further refining knowledge. This process is intrinsically linked to infinitism and combinatorics, allowing for a gradual differentiation of the distinct from the indistinct. The filters are applied sequentially, with each filter proceeding through its own oppositions, resulting in a spectrum of knowledge ranging from obscure to clear, confused to distinct, inadequate to adequate, and symbolic to intuitive. This framework facilitates pluralism within rationalism that proceeds through evolving or regional truths. The filters overlap, and only the final stage of knowledge is devoid of mixture. Leibniz’s epistemology is non-Cartesian, as it relativizes truth and falsehood at each stage of the filtering process. It also accounts for the limitations of sensory perception, attributing them to the imperfection of the human mind in its current state. (Translated by Martijn Boven). (shrink)

Children's understanding of the human mind has been found to be related to many social and experiential factors such as interactions with peers (Astington & Jenkins, 1995), parental socioeconomic a...

The mechanisms by which bacteria adapt to changes in their environment involve transcriptional regulation in which a transcriptional regulator responds to signal(s) from the environment and regulates (positively or negatively) the expression of several genes or operons. Some of these regulators exert a positive feedback on their own expression. This is a necessary (although not sufficient) condition for the occurrence of multistationarity. One biological consequence of multistationarity may be epigenetic modifications, a hypothesis unusual to microbiologists, in spite of some well-known (...) epigenetic modifications in bacteria. We propose here that the occurrence of mucoidy in the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which is currently attributed to mutations only, may also be an epigenetic modification. A theoretical approach using a generalised logical analysis lends credit to this hypothesis and suggests experiments to ascertain it. (shrink)

This is a review article (15,000 words) of Putnam's Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity, (Harvard, 2016).

The AAR-SBL Women’s Caucus session on ‘Beyond Down and Dirty: From Good to Great Sex’ revisited the Good Sex: Feminist Perspectives from the World’s Religions project and book with the participation of two of its co-editors, Mary E. Hunt and Patricia Beattie Jung, and co-author and collaborator, Wanda Defeilt. Scholar colleagues, Brandy Daniels, Fitri Junoes, and Alicia Besa Panganiban, presented intriguing papers on feminist religious and ethical reflections on what constitutes great sex as they examined the issues discussed by feminist (...) scholars and activist authors of Good Sex. Moreover, the session was an exhilarating dialogue of international, interreligious, and intergenerational perspectives on what women think is great sex. It was an exciting starting ground for intergenerational discussion with senior scholars, associated with the Good Sex book, providing generous, constructive, and well-considered responses to the presentations of their colleagues. The diverse international audience of masters, doctoral and senior scholars – male and female – was included in the complex, fun, and challenging discussion of sex. Amidst various issues raised, there was a consensus that discussions on great sex must address issues of safety, justice, and pleasure. Overall the session was a success as the platform for the presentations modelled a feminist method that was intentionally designed to give more time for discussion, not only among panelists but also with the audience. (shrink)

Veils -- Boxes -- Tables -- Visit -- Joy.

Influential philosopher Michel Serres’s foundational work uses fable to explore how human relations are identical to that of the parasite to the host body. Among Serres’s arguments is that by being pests, minor groups can become major players in public dialogue—creating diversity and complexity vital to human life and thought. Michel Serres is professor in history of science at the Sorbonne, professor of Romance languages at Stanford University, and author of several books, including _Genesis._ Lawrence R. Schehr is professor of (...) French at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University. His books include _Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal _. (shrink)

This transcribed panel discussion, which took place in January 2024 at the conference »New Right Literature and Literary Politics« in Stuttgart, considers what an appropriate academic and journalistic approach to the New Right should look like. One example of this is the reporting on the married couple Helmut Lethen and Caroline Sommerfeld.

Michel Serres is one of the most influential living theorists in European philosophy. This volume makes available a work which has a foundational place in the development of chaos theory, representing a tour de force application of the principles underlying Serres' distinctive philosophy of science.

Essays in this volume honor Marcel Senn on the occasion of his retirement from the law department of Universität Zürich. The contributors of the essays are colleagues and friends.

Biogea is a mixture of poetry, philosophy, science, and biography exemplary of the style that has made Michel Serres one of the most extraordinary thinkers of his age. His philosophical and poetic inquiry sings in praise of earth and life, what he names singularly as Biogea. In these times when species are disappearing, when catastrophic events such as earthquakes and tsunamis impale the earth, Serres wonders if anyone “worries about the death pangs of the rivers.” And for Serres, one can (...) ask the same question of philosophy as the humanities increasingly find themselves in need of defenders. Today, all living organisms discover themselves part of this Biogea. “Today we have other neighbors, constituents of the Biogea: the sea, my lover; our mother, the Earth, becomes our daughter; this beautiful breeze which inspires the spirit, a spiritual mistress; our light friends, the fresh and flowing waters.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ego CredoMichel Serres (bio)Saint Paul combines in one singular person the three ancient formats, Jewish, Greek, and Latin, from which the Western World sprang. A devout Pharisee, he was born in Tarsus into a family of the Diaspora, and educated in Jerusalem under Gamaliel; he observed Mosaic Law and constantly cited the Torah, both Psalms and Prophets, with erudition. It also seems likely that he knew Greek philosophy, at (...) least by way of Philo the Jew, since he wrote and spoke the Greek language and cited some of its authors, saying that he admired its wisdom, practiced its elegance, and dreaded its reason. As a Roman citizen, like his father, he took pride in this status; he must have known Roman Law, since after being sentenced by the imperial courts, he addressed an appeal to them.Saint Paul not only symbolizes the cultural melting pot among Mediterranean sailors, port-merchants, and occasional scholars during the Pax romana; he above all embodies the integral man built by the Law, the Logos, and the Administration, three formats forged in the fires of Hebraic monotheism, Hellenistic rational Wisdom, and Roman Law, themselves respectively shaped by ritual in the Temple, harmony in the Cosmos, and the City-State in the Empire. This triple belonging to an organized society, a systematic world, and an all-powerful god promotes excellent modes of conduct.Triply formatted in this way, Saint Paul, newly named, rose up out of the trinity of his belonging; he traveled the world over, and he invented the coming era. In so doing, he braved three disasters: the persecution of his fellows, the mockery of Greek philosophers on the Areopagus, and his trial and probable execution by Rome. In and through Paul, all the superior and lasting achievements of the Indo-European and Semitic traditions stem from this original bifurcation; the good news he proclaims is incarnated and grafted on him and through him; from him, the branch of a new creature springs forth.Although his ancient formats imply a belonging to three different communities, the new man identifies with none of them in order to create something entirely new. But what? [End Page 1]Belonging and IdentityIn a previous book, I wrote that my identity cannot be reduced to my belonging to certain groups. So do not call me "old man," a male, or a writer, but put me, if you must, in whichever subcategory designates the corresponding age, sex, or profession. Apart from these characteristics, who am I? Me. All the rest, including what the government bureaucracy obliges me to write on my so-called "identity" card, merely indicates some of the subcategories to which I belong.If you confuse belonging and identity, you make a logical error that is certainly serious, but, in the end, relatively benign. Moreover, you set yourself up to make a deadly mistake, that of racism, which consists precisely in reducing a person to one of his groups. We owe this distinction (which is so important that I like to repeat it) to Saint Paul. We owe it to him both in theory, because he elaborates it, and in terms of his life, because the Good News that he brings breaks with the three ancient formats, all three of which were associated with groups."There is neither Jew nor Greek," says Paul, "there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female" (Gal. 3:28). All he mentions here are classes, sexes, languages, or nations—in short, all categories or groups. What he means is that there is no longer any belonging in the earlier sense, leaving only the identity I = I: "But by the grace of God I am what I am" (1 Cor. 15:10).For Paul, the only thing left is this "new creature": I, the adoptive Son of God, through faith in Jesus Christ; I, full of faith and without works, without pride; I, empty, poor, and nothing: universal.Who am I? I am I, and that is all. If we put aside the subcategorical definition of belonging (x å A), the principle of identity becomes evident, not in a formal way, as in the Aristotelian sense of a... (shrink)

The article focuses on one of the central themes of Gabriel Marcel’s thought: the afterlife and the presence of the dead. Marcel approaches such a “mystery” through his plays, one of the most important aspects of his thought.

French existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel is one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. The central themes of his philosophy, which are developed with a blend of realism, concreteness, and common sense, continue to be relevant for the plight of humanity in the twentieth-first century. Marcel's thought emphasizes: the attempt to safeguard the dignity and integrity of the human person by emphasizing the inadequacy of the materialistic life and the unavoidable human need for transcendence; the inability of philosophy (...) to capture the profundity and depth of key human experiences, and so the need to find a deeper kind of reflection; the importance of the experience of inter-subjectivity, which Marcel believes is at the root of human fulfillment, and which also finds expression in the transcendent dimension of human experience, a dimension that cannot be denied without loss, and that often gives meaning to our most profound experiences. Marcel is also one of the few contemporary thinkers who manages to do justice to the subjectivity and individuality of the human person, while avoiding the relativism and skepticism that has tended to accompany these notions, and that has plagued contemporary philosophy after Heidegger. He makes an unwavering effort to challenge the moral relativism and spiritual nihilism of his French rival, Jean-Paul Sartre, and of other representative existentialist philosophers. All of Marcel's important ideas are introduced here, ranging from his unique conception of philosophy; to his original approach to epistemology and the nature of knowledge; to his view on the nature of the human person, including the idea of being-in-a-situation and the importance of the "context" that the subject lives in for the subject's ideas and experiences; to his approach to religious themes, including the issues of the rationality of religious belief, the question of God's existence, and our longing for the transcendent; and his "concrete approaches" of fidelity, hope, love and faith. There are also selections in which he discusses some of his misgivings about the direction of contemporary culture, especially the effects of technology. Brendan Sweetman is Professor of Philosophy at Rockhurst University, Kansas City, MO. He has published over seventy articles and reviews. He is president of the Gabriel Marcel Society. (shrink)

With this profound final work, completed in the days leading up to his death, Michel Serres presents a vivid picture of his thinking about religion—a constant preoccupation since childhood—thereby completing Le Grand Récit, the comprehensive explanation of the world and of humanity to which he devoted the last twenty years of his life. Themes from Serres's earlier writings—energy and information, the role of the media in modern society, the anthropological function of sacrifice, the role of scientific knowledge, the problem of (...) evil—are reinterpreted here in the light of the Old Testament accounts of Isaac and Jonah and a variety of Gospel episodes, including the Three Wise Men of the Epiphany, the Transfiguration, Peter's denying Christ, the Crucifixion, Emmaus, and the Pentecost. Monotheistic religion, Serres argues, resembles mathematical abstraction in its dazzling power to bring together the real and the virtual, the natural and the transcendent; but only in its Christian embodiment is it capable of binding together human beings in such a way that partisan attachments are dissolved and a new era of history, free for once of the lethal repetition of collective violence, can be entered into. (shrink)

In this reflection on the relation between nature and culture, Michel Serres relates the present environmental catastrophe to pollution generated by humanity's efforts to appropriate.

The significance of consciousness in modern science is discussed by leading authorities from a variety of disciplines. Presenting a wide-ranging survey of current thinking on this important topic, the contributors address such issues as the status of different aspects of consciousness; the criteria for using the concept of consciousness and identifying instances of it; the basis of consciousness in functional brain organization; the relationship between different levels of theoretical discourse; and the functions of consciousness.