For those who believe in the values of liberalism and democracy the state is under a political obligation to seek the common welfare of its citizens. In furtherance of this domestic duty, it retains among its external rights and powers that right of self-defense which has been assigned to states under other ideologies.

Gordon Finlayson's response to Peter Gordon’s Adorno and Existence.

Understanding why individuals opt out of living donation is crucial to enhancing protections for all living donors and to identify modifiable barriers to donation. We developed an ethical approach to conducting research on individuals who opted out of living kidney donation and applied it in a small-scale qualitative study at one US transplant centre. The seven study participants had varied reasons for opting out, the most prominent of which was concern about the financial burden from lost wages during the postoperative (...) period. Several reported feeling alone during their decision-making process. Although no participants used an alibi, a centre-provided statement of non-eligibility to donate, all believed that centres should offer alibis to help preserve donor autonomy. Given the complexity of participants' decisions and the emotions they experienced before and after deciding not to donate, we suggest approaches for independent living donor advocates to support this population. This study demonstrates that research on individuals who opt out of donation is feasible and yields valuable insight into methods to improve the evaluation experience for potential living donors. (shrink)

This clear, riveting book will be of great interest not only to philosophers and to historians of philosophy but also to anyone interested in the great ...

From the beginning to the end of his career, the critical theorist and Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor W. Adorno sustained an uneasy but enduring bond with existentialism. His attitude overall was that of unsparing criticism, often verging on polemic. In Kierkegaard he saw an early paragon for the late flowering of bourgeois solipsism; in Heidegger an impresario for a "jargon of authenticity" that cloaked its idealism in an aura of pseudo-concreteness and neo-romantic kitsch; even in the more rationalist tradition of (...) Husserl's phenomenology he detected a vain attempt of the bourgeois spirit to break free from the prison-house of immanent consciousness. Yet his enduring fascination with the philosophical canons of existentialism and phenomenology suggests a connection far more complicated and productive than mere antipathy. From his first published book on Kierkegaard's aesthetic to the mature studies in negative dialectics, Adorno was forever returning to the philosophies of bourgeois interiority, seeking the paradoxical relation between their manifest failure and their hidden promise. Scholars of critical theory often regard these philosophical adventures as unfortunate lapses into reductive sociology or as marginal to Adorno's path of intellectual development. In Adorno and Existence, Peter E. Gordon challenges this assumption, showing how the confrontation with existentialism helps us toward a deeper understanding of Adorno's own intellectual commitments. In lucid prose and with a dialectical sensitivity for the links between philosophy and life, Adorno and Existence casts new and unfamiliar light on this neglected chapter in the history of Continental philosophy.--. (shrink)

This article situates current debates about transdisciplinarity within the deeper history of academic disciplinarity, in its difference from the notions of inter- and multi-disciplinarity. It offers a brief typology and history of established conceptions of transdisciplinarity within science and technology studies. It then goes on to raise the question of the conceptual structure of transdisciplinary generality in the humanities, with respect to the incorporation of the 19th- and 20th-century German and French philosophical traditions into the anglophone humanities, under the name (...) of ‘theory’. It identifies two distinct – dialectical and anti-dialectical, or dialectical and transversal – transdisciplinary trajectories. It locates the various contributions to the special issue of which it is the introduction within this conceptual field, drawing attention to the distinct contribution of the French debates about structuralism and its aftermath – those by Serres, Foucault, Derrida, Guattari and Latour, in particular. It concludes with an appendix on Foucault’s place within current debates about disciplinarity and academic disciplines. (shrink)

_A beautifully written exploration of religion’s role in a secular, modern politics, by an accomplished scholar of critical theory__ “Rich in historical background, illuminating in its comparative perspective, yet focused on the question of secularization and the normative resources of modernity—a joy to read.”—Maeve Cooke, University College Dublin__ “Gordon writes with a controlled power, elegance, simplicity, and clarity that is a rare pleasure.”—Max Pensky, Binghamton University_ _Migrants in the Profane _takes its title from an intriguing remark by Theodor W. (...) Adorno, in which he summarized the meaning of Walter Benjamin’s image of a celebrated mechanical chess-playing Turk and its hidden religious animus: “Nothing of theological content will persist without being transformed; every content will have to put itself to the test of migrating in the realm of the secular, the profane.” In this masterful book, Peter Gordon reflects on Adorno’s statement and asks an urgent question: Can religion offer any normative resources for modern political life, or does the appeal to religious concepts stand in conflict with the idea of modern politics as a domain free from religion’s influence? In answering this question, he explores the work of three of the Frankfurt School’s most esteemed thinkers: Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno. His illuminating analysis offers a highly original account of the intertwined histories of religion and secular modernity. (shrink)

Readers of Theodor Adorno often have understood him as a "totalizing negativist." If it truly is the case that Adorno saw modern society as a realm of complete falsehood, however, his own social theory is unintelligible. In A Precarious Happiness, Peter E. Gordon aims to redeem Adorno from this negativist interpretation by showing that it arises from a basic misunderstanding of his work. Pushing against entrenched interpretations, Gordon argues that Adorno's philosophy is animated by a deep attachment (...) to a concept of happiness or human flourishing, and it is only by virtue of that normative standard that Adorno judges the world a catastrophic failure. Through a comprehensive reading of Adorno's work, A Precarious Happiness shows that in an imperfect world, the available standards of our flourishing are also imperfect. Looking beyond Adorno, Gordon suggests that the practice of social criticism, even if it is directed toward exposing what is "false," cannot succeed without appealing to an unrealized notion of what would be right. (shrink)

A new reading of the philosophy of contemporary art by the author of The Politics of Time Contemporary art is the object of inflated and widely divergent claims. But what kind of discourse can open it up effectively to critical analysis? Anywhere or Not at All is a major philosophical intervention in art theory that challenges the terms of established positions through a new approach at once philosophical, historical, social and art-critical. Developing the position that “contemporary art is postconceptual art,” (...) the book progresses through a dual series of conceptual constructions and interpretations of particular works to assess the art from a number of perspectives: contemporaneity and its global context; art against aesthetic; the Romantic pre-history of conceptual art; the multiplicity of modernisms; transcategoriality; conceptual abstraction; photographic ontology; digitalization; and the institutional and existential complexities of art-space and art-time. Anywhere or Not at All maps out the conceptual space for an art that is both critical and contemporary in the era of global capitalism. Winner of the 2014 Annual Book Prize of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (USA). (shrink)

Peter Gordon’s response to Espen Hammer, Gordon Finlayson, and Iain Macdonald.

This piece reconstructs and reflects upon the terms of the theoretical projection underlying Max Tomba’s book,Marx’s Temporalities, with particular reference to his use of the concepts of multiple temporalities and temporal layers. Tomba’s use of these concepts, it is argued, productively relocates Marx’s writings within the framework of the twentieth-century philosophy of time. However, Tomba’s dependence upon received versions of these concepts, untransformed, reproduces theoretical problems implicit within them, which have been intensified by recent developments within global capital. The application (...) of these concepts to an understanding of the historical present, understood as a situation of globally disjunctive contemporaneity, is seen to be, in part, vitiated by their embeddedness within an increasingly exhausted past. (shrink)

_Philosophy in Cultural Theory_ boldly crosses disciplinary boundaries to offer a philosophical critique of cultural theory today. Drawing on the legacy of Walter Benjamin, Peter Osborne looks critically at central philosophical debates in cultural theory, such as: * the relationship between sign and image * the technological basis of cultural form * the conceptuality of art * the place of fantasy in human affairs. It will appeal to those in philosophy, cultural studies and art theory.

Franz Rosenzweig is widely regarded today as one of the most original and intellectually challenging figures within the so-called renaissance of German-Jewish thought in the Weimar period. The architect of a unique kind of existential theology, and an important influence upon such philosophers as Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, Leo Strauss, and Emmanuel Levinas, Rosenzweig is remembered chiefly as a "Jewish thinker," often to the neglect of his broader philosophical concerns. Cutting across the artificial divide that the traumatic memory of National (...) Socialism has drawn between German and Jewish philosophy, this book seeks to restore Rosenzweig's thought to the German philosophical horizon in which it first took shape. It is the first English-language study to explore Rosenzweig's enduring debt to Hegel's political theory, neo-Kantianism, and life-philosophy; the book also provides a new, systematic reading of Rosenzweig's major work, _The Star of Redemption._ Most of all, the book sets out to explore a surprising but deep affinity between Rosenzweig’s thought and that of his contemporary, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Resisting both apologetics and condemnation, Gordon suggests that Heidegger’s engagement with Nazism should not obscure the profound and intellectually compelling bond in the once-shared tradition of modern German and Jewish thought. A remarkably lucid discussion of two notably difficult thinkers, this book represents an eloquent attempt to bridge the forced distinction between modern Jewish thought and the history of modern German philosophy—and to show that such a distinction cannot be sustained without doing violence to both. (shrink)

Introduction: philosophies of race and ethnicity / Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford -- pt. 1. Ch. 1. Philosophy and racial identity / Linda Martin Alcoff -- ch. 2. Fanon, phenomenology, race / David Macey -- Ch. 3. Primordial being: enlightenment and the Indian subject of postcolonial theory / Chetan Bhatt -- Ch. 4. Race and language in the two Saussures / Robert J.C. Young -- pt. 2. Ch. 5. Unspeakable histories: diasporic lives in old England / Bill Schwarz -- (...) Ch. 6. Race, colonialism and history: China at the turn of the twentieth century / Rebecca E. Karl -- Ch. 7. Ethnicity and species: on the philosophy of the multi-ethnic state in Japanese imperialism / Naoki Sakai -- Ch. 8. On Chineseness as a theoretical problem / Rey Chow -- Ch. 9. Race and slavery: the politics of recovery and reparation / Fran¸ coise Vergés -- Ch. 10. Rewriting the black subject: the black Brazilian emancipatory text / Denise Ferreira da Silva. (shrink)

Peter Eli Gordon - Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays - Journal of the History of Philosophy 46:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 46.1 178-179 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Peter E. Gordon Harvard University Drew A. Hyland and John Panteleimon Manoussakis, editors. Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays. Bloomington-Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 2006. Pp. xiii + 194. Paper, $24.95. Heidegger's troubled and over-determined interest in Greek philosophy is well known. In (...) the 1933 rectoral address, he declared that genuine science would become possible only "if we again place ourselves under the power of the beginning of our spiritual-historical existence. This beginning is the departure, the setting out, of Greek philosophy." All of Western science, Heidegger concluded, "remains bound to that beginning of philosophy. From it science draws the strength of its essence, assuming that it still remains at all equal to this beginning." Such claims bear witness to his life-long interpretive confrontation with the dawning figures of Western philosophy: Aristotle, Plato, and the pre-Socratics. Heidegger's.. (shrink)

_A Critical Sense_ brings together in a single volume the leading figures of contemporary radical theory. Moving freely between philosophy, politics and cultural studies, it offers a fascinating overview of the lines of thought of today's intellectual left. Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis and critical theory, literary studies, deconstruction, pragmatism, postcolonial and queer theory are discussed in a series of interviews from the journal _Radical Philosophy_. Those interviewed are: Judith Butler Cornelius Castoriadis Drucilla Cornell Axel Honneth Istvan Meszaros Edward Said Renata Salecl (...) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Cornel West Slavoj Zizek For those unfamiliar with the often daunting work of some of today's most important thinkers, _ACritical Sense_ will offer an ideal introduction; for those already acquainted with the writings of the theorists interviewed here, the collection will throw new - and often surprising - light on familiar ground. (shrink)

This chapter is intended to provide the reader with a brief biographical overview of Adorno's life and thought, with an emphasis on the key turning points in his career. It discusses his childhood, his education in Frankfurt, his musical studies, his emigration first to Oxford and then to the United States, his return to Germany after the Second World War, his tenure as professor at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt and his prominence as a public intellectual, and his confrontation with students. (...) Together with biographical details the chapter also offers a simple overview of Adorno's major concerns as a philosopher. (shrink)

This essay reconstructs the place of Marx's thought within Adorno's writings from his 1931 inaugural lecture to his famous 1962 seminar on Marx. It focuses on three areas: the critique and transformation of philosophy; the sociology of the commodification of art; and the social ontology of the objectivity of illusions, derived from the critique of political economy. Adorno, it argues, ended his academic life significantly more of a Marxist than he had entered it, leaving a legacy that was distinctive both (...) for its dialectical appropriation of Marx's critique – and suspended supersession – of philosophy and for its philosophical interpretation of Marx's critique of political economy. (shrink)

I ask whether it is necessary that principles of number be mentally represented and point to the role of language in determining cultural variation. Some cultures possess extensive counting systems that are finite. I suggest that learning number principles is similar to learning conservation and, as such, might be derived from learning about the empirical properties of objects and other individuals in combinations.

Contemporary visual art stands on the ruins of beauty. What is the place of aesthetic in the experience of such art? And how has it changed in the two hundred years since the emergence of the modern conception of art as the object of a distinctive kind of pleasure? The essays in this volume, by philosophers and art theorists from Britain, France, Germany and the USA, investigate the changing role of the aesthetic in art. In writing that is both lucid (...) and challenging, the contributors make clear that the importance a society places on art and aesthetic is a barometer of its very health. (shrink)

In the English-language context, Benjamin's influence continues to grow, along with the already massive secondary literature on his writings. This collection brings together a selection of the most critically important items published in the literature on Benjamin, across the full range of his cultural-theoretical interests, from all periods of the reception of his writings, but focusing upon the most recent, to produce a near-definitive overview of the best critical literature. The main national contexts of reception represented are German, French and (...) Anglo-American, but also included are some important items from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Latin America and East-Asia. These are mainly in English translation, with many new translations appearing here for the first time. (shrink)

Across the Euro-Atlantic world, political leaders have been mobilizing their bases with nativism, racism, xenophobia, and paeans to “traditional values,” in brazen bids for electoral support. How are we to understand this move to the mainstream of political policies and platforms that lurked only on the far fringes through most of the postwar era? Does it herald a new wave of authoritarianism? Is liberal democracy itself in crisis? In this volume, three distinguished scholars draw on critical theory to address our (...) current predicament. Wendy Brown, Peter E. Gordon, and Max Pensky share a conviction that critical theory retains the power to illuminate the forces producing the current political constellation as well as possible paths away from it. Brown explains how “freedom” has become a rallying cry for manifestly un-emancipatory movements; Gordon dismantles the idea that fascism is rooted in the susceptible psychology of individual citizens and reflects instead on the broader cultural and historical circumstances that lend it force; and Pensky brings together the unlikely pair of Tocqueville and Adorno to explore how democracies can buckle under internal pressure. These incisive essays do not seek to smooth over the irrationality of the contemporary world, and they do not offer the false comforts of an easy return to liberal democratic values. Rather, the three authors draw on their deep engagements with nineteenth–and twentieth–century thought to investigate the historical and political contradictions that have brought about this moment, offering fiery and urgent responses to the demands of the day. (shrink)