This extraordinary book offers a clear and compelling biography of Jacques Derrida along with one of Derrida's strangest and most unexpected texts. Geoffrey Bennington's account of Derrida leads the reader through the philosopher's familiar yet widely misunderstood work on language and writing to the less familiar themes of signature, sexual difference, law, and affirmation. In an unusual and unprecedented "dialogue," Derrida responds to Bennington's text by interweaving Bennington's text with surprising and disruptive "periphrases." Truly original, this dual and dueling (...) text opens new dimensions in Derrida's thought and work. "Bennington is a shrewd and well-informed commentator whose book should do something to convince the skeptics... that Jacques Derrida's work merits serious attention."—Christopher Norris, _New Statesman & Society_ "Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida have presented a fascinating example of what might be called post-structuralist autobiography."—Laurie Volpe, _French Review_ "Bennington's account of what Derrida is up to is better in almost all respects—more intelligent, more plausible, more readable, and less pretentious—than any other I have read."—Richard Rorty, _Contemporary Literature_. (shrink)

The ‘Happy Few’ of Stendhal's dedications are certainly readers, but they do not cohere into a community, and are vigilant and suspicious around the use of the first-person plural pronoun. This already sets them apart from the proponents of ‘surface reading’, who, moreover, have a historically questionable and conceptually feeble understanding of the intimate relationship between deconstruction and reading-and indeed of what thinking in terms of ‘surface’ entails.

Dunn, Geoffrey D Lent is a time of preparation for Easter. It developed during the fourth century as a time when sinners, who could no longer participate as full members of the church due to the serious and public nature of their offences, prepared for reconciliation with the church through penance, and adult catechumens, who were seeking to join the church as new members, prepared for initiation into the church. The season is a time of renewal of relationships for (...) the community, of renewal of our relationship with God and of renewal of our relationships with others. The central theme is conversion: a conversion as radical as reorienting one's whole life according to the gospel of Jesus, and as total as requiring the surrender of life. We surrender our old way of life and allow the Spirit to conform us to the new way of life as a disciple of Jesus. The Year A readings have a particular focus on the initiation of catechumens, who, at the start of Lent, celebrate the rite of election and enter the final period of purification and enlightenment before initiation at Easter. On the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Sundays the elect celebrate the scrutinies, when the community examines their readiness for initiation. The symbols of the Easter liturgy feature in the readings of these three Sundays: water, light, and life. (shrink)

Dunn, Geoffrey D Older Catholics would have grown up hearing about the sacrifice of the Mass, while in the last fifty years we have increasingly spoken of the celebration of the eucharist. Of course, the eucharist is sacrifice, but it is other things besides, like meal and celebration, and the word 'sacrifice' is easy to misinterpret. For many of us the word 'sacrifice' conjures up thoughts of the killing and slaughter of animals or even people. It is true that (...) the word can mean this, but it has a much broader meaning. To sacrifice something is to remove it from the realm of the everyday and hand it over or dedicate it to some other purpose. Thus, a bloodless sacrifice, like the libation or pouring out of wine, is the offering up of something for someone else's use rather than one's own. Naturally, the killing of a living victim ensures that one cannot change one's mind later on and take it back, especially when the burnt sacrificial animal has often then been eaten by those who had participated in or witnessed the ritual slaughter. (shrink)

Dunn, Geoffrey D One of my philosophy professors told me there were two sets of alternatives at the heart of philosophy, which is another way of saying that there are two fundamental choices between two different ways at the heart of understanding life. The years have proven, at least as far as I am concerned, just how insightful this observation was. The two sets of alternatives are one and many, and being and flux. The solemn feast of Pentecost, the (...) last day of our Easter season, gives us the opportunity to reflect on the first set: one and many. When we look out at the world, are we the kind of persons who see what we have in common with others and see what unites us, or are we the kind of persons who first notice the differences between us and other people: either our gender, or our skin colour, or our language, or our religion, or our social status, or our nationality, or our education, or our occupation? There are so many things that make us different from one another that it is a rare person who is able to focus on what makes us one. (shrink)

Dunn, Geoffrey D As a seminary student I was taught that a homily ought to end with a eucharistic link. Mature reflection leads me to conclude that the entire homily is itself the eucharistic link. It joins together the interplay of the life of the assembly and the Scriptures, on the one hand, and the great prayer of thanksgiving on the other. My reflections are missing the element of the life of the assembly, which can be supplied only by (...) individual preachers in touch with their communities, but hopefully they provide something of the reason why, on this particular occasion, the assembly can move on to offer God thanks. (shrink)

In chapter 14 of Luke's Gospel we have several stories about table fellowship put together and several sayings of Jesus that are added as maxims to conclude the stories, even though originally they were probably used in a different context. We find the first maxim about those who exalt themselves being humbled and those who humble themselves being exalted attached to different material in Matthew 23. We have just heard the first of those two table fellowship stories, which are found (...) in Luke only, but the third is going to be left out of our liturgy readings entirely. (shrink)

Dunn, Geoffrey D In the past two weeks we have heard of covenants God made with people: the covenant with Noah symbolised by the rainbow and the covenant with Abraham symbolised by the stars in the night sky. God made fantastic promises and it would seem that God asked for little in return. Perhaps that is unfair. Noah had to suffer seeing the rest of humanity destroyed and Abraham endured the torment of preparing his son for sacrifice. They both (...) offered a significant display of faith and their descendants enjoyed the benefits. (shrink)

Dunn, Geoffrey D We see in Mark's Gospel an interest in Jesus reaching out beyond the Jewish people to bring the good news to other peoples as well. One of the issues associated with that is the extent to which these other people need to adopt Jewish ways in order to become followers of Jesus. That is why, even though we are in a section of Mark's Gospel that deals with Jesus and the disciples, we have today's passage about (...) Jesus and the Jewish religious leaders, the Pharisees. (shrink)

We continue where we left off from last Sunday with Jesus establishing the ethical foundations of the new Israel. Hypocrisy is really one of the most distasteful of human characteristics and in today's gospel passage Jesus confronts it head on. Hypocrisy is the real 'fake news', for it is nothing other than a sham and a pretence that we are something that we really are not, a contrivance that we are better than others when we are not, a sanctimonious false (...) virtue that we have the right to point out the faults of others while leaving our own failings untouched. When we are the victim of someone else's hypocrisy we feel the injustice and unfairness, we feel the betrayal and deception, we feel the put-down and rejection. (shrink)

It is not specified in Mark's Gospel where the ascension of Jesus takes place, although the last location specified is Jerusalem. Nor are we given a time frame for how long after the resurrection it occurred. In Matthew we also have no time frame, but the ascension is located in the north, in Galilee. In the second half of Luke we are told that the ascension took place forty days after the resurrection, and in the first half we are told (...) that it took place at Bethany, a small village just outside of Jerusalem. In the last words Jesus speaks to his followers he connects his ascension back to his death and resurrection. He also connects the mission of the church, in bringing the message of forgiveness to the world and the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost, to his death and resurrection. (shrink)

Dissent is a word we come across frequently these days. We read it in the newspapers, use it in discussions with friends and colleagues—perhaps even engage in the activity ourselves. And yet for all of its popularity, few of us, if pressed, would be able to pin down exactly what dissent is. It is this question I wish to explore in this paper. In particular my aim will be to provide a conceptual analysis of the idea of dissent such that (...) we may more cleanly distinguish it from other related forms of disagreement. I use a recent book written on the topic by Ronald Collins and David Skover as an argumentative foil. (shrink)

Summary The 1993 Education Act introduced changes that encouraged the supply?side of the quasi?market of schools. As a result of that Act, since April 1994 it has been possible for groups of parents or independent sponsors to apply to the Secretary of State for Education and Employment in England or the Secretary of State for Wales to establish their own grant?maintained schools. This article traces the attempts of various potential sponsors to establish new schools within the state system. It is (...) argued that the Funding Agency for Schools and the Department for Education and Employment have developed the detail of the new scheme in such a way as to make it almost impossible for potential sponsors to meet their requirements. The implications of the policy and its implementation are discussed. (shrink)

Dunn, Geoffrey D As with last year's reflections, it is my intention to give a distinctly patristic flavour to what I write, drawing upon the rich tradition of the church in the youthful flush of its earliest centuries, a time also of great challenge, to see the enduring relevance and beauty of the insights of the earliest Christian preachers, commentators and authors.

As with the last two years' reflections, it is my intention to give a distinctly patristic flavour to what I write, drawing upon the rich tradition of the church in the youthful flush of its earliest centuries, a time also of great challenge, to see the enduring relevance and beauty of the insights of the earliest Christian preachers, commentators, and authors.

: Descartes provides an original and puzzling argument for the traditional theological doctrine that the world is continuously created by God. His key premise is that the parts of the duration of anything are "completely independent" of one another. I argue that Descartes derives this temporal independence thesis simply from the principle that causes are necessarily simultaneous with their effects. I argue further that it follows from Descartes's version of the continuous creation doctrine that God is the instantaneous and total (...) cause of everything that happens, and that this is just what his physics demands. But although God is the total cause of everything, he is not the only cause, since Descartes considers it obvious that finite minds have the power to move bodies. In the face of this apparent paradox, several recent commentators have suggested that Descartes accepted the late scholastic view that God and finite causes somehow collaborate or concur in the production of numerically identical effects. But close examination reveals that the case for Cartesian concurrentism is weak. Fortunately, there is a simpler and more fruitful solution to the problem of reconciling divine and human action. I argue that that in Descartes's world certain motions, such as voluntary movements of our bodies, are causally overdetermined This account allows Descartes to avoid occasionalism without embracing an elaborate metaphysics of secondary causality. Finally, I argue that the overdeterminist interpretation sheds new light on two longstanding problems of Cartesian metaphysics. First, it resolves a serious difficulty with a standard reading of Descartes's conception of human freedom. Second, it offers a novel approach to the old problem of reconciling genuine human action with the principle of the conservation of total quantity of motion. (shrink)

One of the most significant contemporary thinkers in continental philosophy, Jacques Derrida’s work continues to attract heated commentary among philosophers, literary critics, social and cultural theorists, architects and artists. This major new work by world renowned Derrida scholar and translator, Geoffrey Bennington, presents incisive new readings of both Derrida and interpretations of his work. Part one sets out Derrida’s work as a whole and examines its relevance to, and ‘interruption’ of, the traditional domains of ethics, politics and literature. The (...) second part of the book presents compelling insights into some important motifs in Derrida’s work, such as death, friendship, psychoanalysis, time and endings. The final section introduces trenchant appraisals of other influential accounts of Derrida’s work. This influential and original contribution to the literature on Derrida is marked by a commitment to clarity and accuracy, but also by a refusal to simplify Derrida’s often difficult thought. (shrink)

Technological dystopias incarnate transhumanist dreams of a this-worldly blissful immortality. Underlying these and others is a globalized technocratic paradigm, the loss of an overarching cosmic world view, rise in consumerism, a gnostic repudiation of the body, and a neo-pelagian aspiration to individualistic self-sufficiency. One response to these transhumanist dreams is to remind ourselves of how nature actually works, its origins, constrains, and future. Our relationship with nature spills over to how we feel standing face-to-face with pain and suffering. In this (...) article I reframe cancer as a journey of maintaining harmony with nature instead of a war against death that we are destined to lose. I argue that understanding the limits and constraints of the natural world help us come to peace with the reality of cancer, and perhaps find meaning in suffering. Instead of avoiding the inevitable at all costs, vulnerability and suffering have their own lessons. In contrast to trans humanist dreams, being human presents an opportunity to welcome the reality of imperfection, to be liberated from our addiction to control and excessive technological manipulation of nature, to draw together as a community, and to live the lessons of each stage of our finite life to its fullest. I hope this reflection, grounded in scientific literature and engaging with richly embodied medical humanities readings, can help us all change how we relate to cancer, from books to bench to biotech to bedside. (shrink)

Widely regarded as the most influential proponent of the truth of original sin in the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr worked hard to excise any "literalistic" element from his interpretation of the doctrine. In his attempt to "correct" the Augustinian tradition on original sin by purging it of all "literalistic errors," however, Niebuhr assumed as his starting point the most characteristically modern objection to the doctrine: that birth is a thoroughly natural, animal, and morally meaningless event. As a result, Niebuhr unnecessarily (...) constrained his vision of the dimensions of human freedom, and hence his description of the dynamic of anxiety and freedom that energizes sin. Through a careful reading of Reinhold Niebuhr's writings on original sin, in light of the truth that the end of human life is inseparable from its origins, a reappraisal and recovery of the meaningfulness of the assertion of original sin as a literal inheritance is possible. The result of such a reappraisal and recovery is an amplified insight into the existential anxiety that Niebuhr otherwise described so convincingly. (shrink)

How original was the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham? In John Stuart Mill's opinion, not very original at all. Bentham maintained that pleasure and pain should provide our chief criteria of the moral quality of actions, because they are important above all other things in making our lives go well or ill. But two thousand years before Bentham defended the doctrine of utility that ‘all things are good or evil, by virtue solely of the pain or pleasure which they produce”, a (...) gentle and cultivated man had taught in a garden at Athens that the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain were the most fitting objectives in the life of the wise man. The name of this sage, who endeavoured to provide in his own career an exemplar of his doctrine, was Epicurus of Samos. On Mill's reading of history, utilitarianism and Epicureanism were in essential respects the same. (shrink)

Notice that this paper has not claimed that all natural languages are CFL's. What it has shown is that every published argument purporting to demonstrate the non-context-freeness of some natural language is invalid, either formally or empirically or both.18 Whether non-context-free characteristics can be found in the stringset of some natural language remains an open question, just as it was a quarter century ago.Whether the question is ultimately answered in the negative or the affirmative, there will be interesting further questions (...) to ask. If it turns out that natural languages are indeed always CFL's, it will be reasonable to ask whether this helps to explain why speakers apparently recognize so quickly whether a presented utterance corresponds to a grammatical sentence or not, and to associate structural and semantic details with it. It might also be reasonable to speculate about the explanation for the universally context-free character of the languages used by humans, and to wonder whether evolutionary biological factors are implicated in some way (Sampson (1979) could be read in this light). And naturally, it will be reasonable to pursue the program put forward by Gazdar (1981, in press) to see to what extent CFL-inducing grammatical devices can be exploited to yield insightful descriptions of natural languages that capture generalizations in revealing ways.If a human language that is not a CFL is proved to exist, on the other hand, a different question will be raised: give the non-context-free character of human languages in general, why has this property been so hard to demonstrate that it has taken over twenty-five years to bring it to light since the issue was first explicitly posed? If human languages do not have to be CFL's, why do so many (most?) of them come so close to having the property of context-freeness? And, since the CFL's certainly constitute a very broad class of mathematically natural and computationally tractable languages, what property of human beings or their communicative or cognitive needs is it that has caused some linguistic communities to reach beyond the boundaries of this class in the course of evolving a linguistic system?Either way, we shall be interested to see our initial question resolved, and further questions raised. One cautionary word should be said, however, about the implications (or lack of them) that the answer will have for grammatical studies. Chomsky has repeatedly stated that he does not see weak generative capacity as a theme of central importance in the theory of grammar, and we agree. It is very far from being the case that the recent resurgence of interest in exploring the potential of CF-PSG or equivalent systems will, or should, be halted dead in its tracks by the discovery (if it is ever forthcoming) that some natural language is not a CFL. In the area of parsing, for instance, it seems possible that natural languages are not only parsed on the basis of constituent structure such as a CF-PSG would assign, but are parsed as if they were finite state languages (see Langendoen (1975) and Church (1980) for discussion along these lines). That is, precisely those construction-types that figure in the various proofs that English is not an FSL appear to cause massive difficulty in the human processing system; the sentences crucial to the proofs are for the most part unprocessable unless they are extremely short (yet the arguments for English not being and FSL only go through if length is not an issue). This means that in practice properties of finite state grammars are still of great potential importance to linguistic theory despite the fact that they do not provide the framework for defining the total class of grammatical sentences. The same would almost certannly be true of CF-PSG's if they were shown to be inadequate in a similar sense. It is highly unlikely that the advances made so far in far in phrase structure description could be nullified by a discovery about weak generative capacity. Moreover, there are known to be numerous ways in which the power of CF-PSG's can be marginally enhanced to permit, for example, xx languages to be generated without allowing anything like the full class of recursively enumerable or even context-sensitive languages (see Hopcroft and Ullmann (1979), Chapter 14) for an introduction to this topic, noting especially Figure 14.7 on p. 393. The obvious thing to do if natural languages were ever shown not to be CFL's in the general case would be to start exploring such minimal enhancements of expressive power to determine exactly what natural languages call for in this regard and how it could be effectively but parsimoniously provided in a way that closely modelled human linguistic capacities.In the meantime, it seems reasonable to assume that the natural languages are a proper subset of the infinite-cardinality CFL's until such time as they are validly shown not to be. (shrink)

Literary criticism is neither more nor less important today than it has been since the becoming an accepted activity in the Renaissance. The humanists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created the institution of criticism as we know it: the recovery and analysis of works of art. They printed, edited, and interpreted texts that dated from antiquity and which had been lost or disheveled. Evangelical in their fervor, avid in their search for lost or buried riches, they also put into (...) circulation certain influential ideas. Perhaps the most important of these was that the authoritative version of a book is the original version, freed from interpolation and accretion. A correlative idea was that, similarly, one could rely on an original or natural light in the interpreter, an intuitive good sense that helped him to a true understanding of a text if it was a genuine text. . . . There are signs that we are now nearing the end of this Renaissance humanism. Not because of a determinist or providential march of history, but ideas eventually exhaust what influence they may have. Today, after all, there is no dearth of ancient texts, or of new ones. Editing, moreover, has become only too conscious of the difficulty of recovering an "original" version or edition: in Wordsworth scholarship, for example, the authority of the 1850 Prelude, the text approved by the poet shortly before his death, was challenged by the 1805-6 Prelude printed by de Sélincourt in the 1920s; and the authority of this is in turn being eroded by antecedent manuscripts, the so-called "Five-Books Prelude" and "Two-Part Prelude." It is equally precarious to establish the text of Emily Dickinson's poems—which of the variants are to be chosen as definitive? Or, from another angle, Melville's Billy Budd has become a mine for genetic speculation. Even when no editorial problem exists, a philosophical issue arises as to the concept of originality itself.1 · 1. For the time being, it is enough to quote Hegel's provocative attack on all "Ur-Metaphysics": "What comes later is more concrete and richer; the first is abstract, and least differentiated." Geoffrey Hartman, professor of English and comparative literature at Yale University, is the author of The Unmediated Vision, Andre Malraux, Wordsworth's Poetry, Beyond Formalism, and most recently The Fate of Reading. He is currently working on a book to be published in late 1977, Criticism in the Wilderness. (shrink)

Social theorists in recent years have concerned themselves with the matter of the kind and intensity of people’s everyday reflective capacities. In this respect, Bourdieu has mostly been found wanting. This article seeks to counter this sentiment with recourse to an ‘anti-mechanistic’ reading of Bourdieu’s theory of practice. It begins by arguing that in imposing a strict delineation between consciousness and habitus, Bourdieu and his critics alike at times unwittingly conflate habitus and mechanistic habit, at once vaunting conscious deliberation and (...) neglecting the non-habitual acts that habitus makes possible. Next it turns to the treatment, within the mechanistic reading, of the notion of the ‘social world’. The argument is that in this reading the social world is reified and rendered the mere background or setting for social practices rather than the product of those practices. Without recognition of this latter quality, the social world becomes hypostatized and exists outside of time. The secondary aim, then, is to argue for a thoroughgoing temporal relation to social reality in Bourdieu’s theory. (shrink)

This paper examines how communities of naturalists in mid-nineteenth-century Britain were formed and solidified around the shared practices of public meetings, the publication and reading of periodicals, and the making and printing of images. By focusing on communities of naturalists and the sites of their communication, this article undermines the distinction between amateur and professional scientific practice. Building on the notion of imagined communities, this paper also shows that in some cases the editors and illustrators utilized imagery to construct a (...) specifically British naturalist community. Following three ‘amateur’ natural-history periodicals (Science Gossip,Midland Naturalistand theJournal of the Quekett Microscopical Club) the article demonstrates how the production and reproduction of natural history in the nineteenth century was contingent on community debate – and that this debate both was highly visual and moved across printed and geographical boundaries. This paper investigates images both for their purported success and for their ascribed value to natural history. Additionally, it considers the debates over their limitations and alleged failures of printing. Altogether, the article argues that investigating the communal practices of observation, writing, drawing and engraving allows for a better understanding of the shared practices of nineteenth-century natural history. (shrink)

This book deconstructs the whole lineage of political philosophy, showing the ways democracy abuts and regularly undermines the sovereignist tradition across a range of texts from the Iliad to contemporary philosophy. Politics is an object of perennial difficulty for philosophy—as recalcitrant to philosophical mastery as is philosophy’s traditional adversary, poetry. That difficulty makes it an attractive topic for any deconstructive approach to the tradition from which we inherit our language and our concepts. Scatter 2 pursues that deconstruction, often starting with, (...) and sometimes departing from, the work of Jacques Derrida by attending to the concepts of sovereignty on the one hand and democracy on the other. The book begins by following the fate of a line from Homer’s Iliad, where Odysseus asserts that “the rule of many is no good thing, let there be one ruler, one king.” The line, Bennington shows, is quoted, misquoted, and progressively Christianized by Aristotle, Philo Judaeus, Suetonius, the early Church Fathers, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Jean Bodin, Etienne de la Boétie, up to Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson, and even one of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials, before being discussed by Derrida himself. In the book’s second half, Bennington begins again with Plato and Aristotle and tracks the concept of democracy as it regularly abuts and undermines that sovereignist tradition. In detailed readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, Bennington develops a notion of “proto-democracy” as a possible name for the scatter that underlies and drives the political as such and that will always prevent politics from achieving its aim of bringing itself to an end. (shrink)

The incident at Antioch described in Galatians 2:11–14 features in a number of Augustine’s works: Expositio epistulae ad Galatas, his correspondence with Jerome, De mendacio, Sermo 162C, and in De baptismo contra Donatistas. While a few scholars have seen Augustine’s anti-Donatism as a driving force behind all his comments about this encounter between Peter and Paul, this article argues that, while the idea of Peter’s humility is to be found in his commentary, the sermon, one of the letters, and the (...) treatises, Augustine interpreted the scriptural passage in a variety of different ways, depending upon his situation. In the commentary, Augustine wanted to defend the reality of the argument between Peter and Paul because of his belief that scriptural authors would not lie. The same idea occurs in his letters, e.g., Epistula 82, where he adds that his interpretation was supported by Cyprian. Contrary to the aforementioned scholars, it is only in De baptismo that Augustine applies the Galatians passage, which he takes as referring to Peter’s humility, to Cyprian himself as an imitator of Peter. Thus, it is only in this treatise that Augustine seeks to redeem Cyprian from the clutches of the Donatists. A close reading of this variety of interpretation by Augustine contributes to an appreciation of the complexity of his reception of Cyprian, a topic of ever-increasing importance in Augustinian studies. (shrink)

'Nobody reads Mill today,' wrote a reviewer in Time magazine a few years ago.! One could scarcely praise Mr Melvin Maddocks, who penned that remark, for his awareness of the present state of Mill studies, for of all nineteenth century philosophers who wrote in English, it is 1. S. Mill who remains the most read today. Yet it would not be so far from the truth to say that very few people pay much serious attention nowadays to Mill's writings about (...) logic and metaphysics (as distinct from those on ethical and social issues), despite the fact that Mill put enormous effort into their composition and through them exerted a considerable influen ce on the course of European philosophy for the rest of his century. But the only sections of A System of Logic (1843) and An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865) to which much reference is now made comprise only a small proportion of those very large books, and the prevailing assumption is that Mill's theories about logical and meta physical questions are, with few exceptions, of merely antiquarian in terest. Bertrand Russell once said that Mill's misfortune was to be born at the wrong time (Russell (1951), p. 2). It can certainly appear that Mill chose an inauspicious time to attempt a major work on logic. (shrink)

AtLeg.666b7, Burnet's emendation of the transmitted λήθην to λήθῃ has been widely accepted. Newly discovered support for this emendation comes from an Arabic version or adaptation of Plato'sLaws, most likely Galen'sSynopsis, quoted by the polymath Abū-Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī (a.d.973–1048) asKitāb al-Nawāmīs li-Aflāṭunin his ethnographic work on India. I transliterate and translate the passage below, proposing two incidental emendations to the Arabic:wa-qāla l-aṯīniyyu fī l-maqālati l-tāniyati mina l-kitābi: lammā raḥima [sic proraḥimati] l-ālihatu ǧinsa l-bašari min aǧli annahū maṭbūʿun ʿalā l-taʿabi hayyaʾū lahum (...) aʿyādan li-l-ālihati wa-li-l-sakīnāti wa-li-ʾf-w-l-l-n mudabbiri l-sakīnāti wa-li-d-y-w-n-w-s-y-s māniḥi l-bašari l-ḫamrata dawāʾan lahum min ʿufūṣati l-šayḫūḫati li-yaʿūdū fityānan bi-l-duhūli ʿani l-kābati wa-ntiqāli ḫulqi l-nafsi [wa-yantaqila ḫulqu l-nafsiperhaps to be read] mina l-šiddati ilā l-salāmati [al-salāsatiprobably to be read].The Athenian said in the second book of the work [sc. theLaws]: The gods, taking pity on the human race since it was born for toil, established for them feast-days (dedicated) to the gods and to the Muses and to Apollo, overseer of the Muses, and to Dionysus, who gave human beings wine as a remedy for them against the bitterness of old age, so that they might be rejuvenated by forgetting sorrow and (by) the character of the soul changing [and (so that) the character of the soul might changeperhaps to be read] from severity into soundness [into tractabilityprobably to be read].The source of the latter part of the passage, that is, the description of Dionysus’ gift and its effect (māniḥi l-bašari…l-salāmati), has until now remained unidentified. In the notes to his translation, Sachau, followed by Gabrieli, correctly identified part ofLeg. 653c–d (θεοὶ … ἔδοσαν) as the origin of much of the passage (see n. 4). No previous scholarship, however, has noted that the latter part translates a passage inLeg.666b–c (τοῖς ἀνθρώποις … τὸ τῆς ψυχῆς ἦθος), here joined to the earlier passage (presumably by Bīrūnī’s source, that is, most likely Galen) on the hinge of their shared mention of Dionysus. (shrink)

AMONG THEOLOGICAL WRITERS, MANY HAVE SUSPECTED THAT JOHN Rawls's writings on justice add up to a de facto manifesto of secularism. His writings especially provoke anxiety about the potential exclusion of theological affirmations from public political discourse. Much of this anxiety focuses on his concept of the "original position" from which principles of justice are negotiated. Consideration of the anxiety provoked by this concept, however, suggests that it is theologically richer than Rawls's critics allow. A turn to Søren Kierkegaard's The (...) Concept of Anxiety enables interpretation of the original position as a device of representation that identifies every individual with the fact of original sin. Crucial to this interpretation is Kierkegaard's description of original sin in terms of anxiety that arises from the innocence that is ignorance in the comparable original position of Adam. Where anxiety arises, sin follows. Where sin arises, the need for justice follows. Reading Rawls and Kierkegaard together consequently offers insight into the relevance of the history of the doctrine of original sin to contemporary theorization of justice. (shrink)

Distinguished critic and scholar Geoffrey Hartman explores the usefulness of Derrida's style of close reading for English and American scholarship and establishes its relevance to the division that has arisen between European and Anglo-American critical approaches. In addition, he discusses Derrida's exegesis in relation to theological commentary.

If read immediately after the U.S. presidential election of November 4, 2020, which resulted in the decisive victory of Joe Biden and the democratic party, followed by Donald Trump’s refusal to con...

Augustine’s Epistulae 23A*, 23*, and 22*, written in late 419 and early 420, present his involvement in the dispute concerning the translation of Honorius to Caesarea Mauretaniae (modern Cherchell), a city Augustine had visited in September 418 while fulfilling a commission from Zosimus of Rome. The translation of bishops from one church to another had been condemned by the 325 Council of Nicaea. The three letters are difficult to interpret because the information to his three correspondents (Possidius of Calama, Renatus, (...) a monk of Caesarea Mauretaniae, and Alypius of Thagaste, who was in Italy at the time) seems to differ. A careful reading reveals that not only did Augustine’s knowledge of the situation change over time, but that the stress he placed on differing elements of that situation also changed depending upon the correspondent. The letters also disclose the involvement of Boniface I of Rome, Zosimus’ successor, and the complex relationship of the African churches with the bishop of Rome, especially in the matter of judicial appeal. What is suggested here is that Augustine, without saying so, seemed to be aware of the criteria Boniface had employed in another translation controversy, which was the approved translation of Perigenes as bishop of Corinth, and that, if applied to Honorius, this would lead the Roman bishop to reach a very different conclusion. (shrink)

Rousseau’s founding critique of liberalism, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, takes the ambiguous form of a sweeping myth of civilization. Political theorists usually interpret the myth by reading it as a tale of passage from primordial nature to civil society, but what happens when we privilege another of the essay’s organizing devices, its symbolic depiction of the history of the species as the life of an individual? Interpreted through this metaphor, Rousseau’s myth becomes a charged tale of a (...) ‘life’ gone wrong, one that sheds interesting light on his critique of bourgeois society and selfhood. (shrink)

How might Derrida be said to greet Jean-Luc Nancy in Le Toucher? What kind of handshake does he offer? Derrida explicitly mentions the handshake at the very centre of his book, in the tangent devoted to Merleau-Ponty. A reading of this moment reveals an exemplary case of what happens when Derrida reads apparently ‘fraternal’ texts, and opens up further levels of difference. What then if we consider Nancy's response to Derrida, when the recipient of the handshake shakes back? By examining (...) Nancy's various (mis-)readings of Derrida's famous phrase ‘la différance finie est infinie’ it is possible to trace a subtle but irreducible non-reciprocity in this relationship, represented in the handshake of the ‘salut’ as greeting and valediction, beyond all safety or salvation. (shrink)