This article is a revised and considerably expanded version of a short paper first delivered to the Past and Present Annual Conference 1979 on ‘The Transmission of Ideas in Early Modern Europe c. 1350–1700’. A slightly different version in German was presented to the Tübingen Symposium on ‘Flugschriften als Massenmedium der Reformationszeit’ in 1980, which has been published in the conference proceedings . I have repeated a few paragraphs of this German version here.

Excerpt from The Appeal to Immediate Experience: Philosophic Method in Bradley Whitehead and Dewey The insight and guidance of Professor John Herman Randall, Jr. have made this book possible. Rather than merely acknowledge my debt to him I would like to express my gratitude here for his unfailing kindness, his penetrating criticism of my efforts, and the help he has given me in clarifying the complex problems of this subject-matter. I wish also to acknowledge the kindness of the following publishers (...) in permitting me to quote from their publications: F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, by Allen and Unwin Ltd.; J. H. Randall, Jr. and J. Buchler, Philosophy: An Introduction, by Barnes Noble, Inc.; F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality and Essays on Truth and Reality, by Clarendon Press, Oxford; F. J. E. Woodbridge, Nature and Mind, by Columbia University Press; R. W. Church, Bradley's Dialectic, by Cornell University Press; John Dewey, The Man and His Philosophy, by Harvard University Press; J. Dewey, Logic and Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, by Henry Holt Company; R. Kagey, F. H. Bradley's Logic, by R. Kagey; J. Dewey, Nature in Experience and Whitehead's Philosophy, by Longmans, Green & Co.; A. N. Whitehead, Symbolism, Modes of Thought, Adventures of Ideas, Process and Reality, T. M. Forsyth, English Philosophy, and J. H. Muirhead, Bradley's Place in Philosophy, by the Macmillan Company; A. N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature-and An Equiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, by the Macmillan Company and the Cambridge University Press; H. B. Haldane, Human Experience, by John Murray Ltd.; J. Goheen, Whitehead's Theory of Value, by Northwestern University Press; J. Dewey, Experience and Nature, by Open Court Publishing Co.; G. Santayana, Realm of Essence and Scepticism and Animal Faith, by Charles Scribner's Sons; and J. Dewey, "How is Mind to be Known?" The Objectivism-Subjectivism of Modern Philosophy," M. Gross, The Philosophy of A. N. Whitehead," and M. C. Otto, The Journal of Philosophy. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

In Spare the Rod, historian Campbell F. Scribner and philosopher Bryan R. Warnick think deeply about punishment and discipline practices in American schooling. To delve into this controversial subject, the authors carefully consider two major issues. The first involves questions of meaning. How have concepts of discipline and punishment in schools changed overtime? What purposes are they supposed to serve? And what can they tell us about our assumptions about education? The second issue involves the justification of punishment and (...) discipline in schools. Are public school educators ever justified in punishing or disciplining students? Are these things important for moral education? Or, are they fundamentally opposed to education? If some form of punishment is justified in schools, what ethical guidelines should direct its administration? The authors argue that as schools have grown increasingly bureaucratic over the past century, formalizing disciplinary systems and shifting from physical punishments to forms of spatial or structural punishment (such as suspension), school discipline has not only come to resemble the operation of prisons or policing but has grown increasingly integrated with those institutions. These changes, they argue, disregard the unique status of schools as spaces of moral growth and community oversight, and are incompatible with the developmental ethos of education. What we need is a view of discipline and punishment that fits with the sort of moral community that schools should be. (shrink)

Masterminded by women, the Red Army Faction terrorized West Germany from the 1970s to the 1990s. Afterimages of its leaders persist in the works of pivotal artists and writers, including Gerhard Richter, Elfriede Jelinek, and Slavoj Žižek. Why were women so prominent in the RAF? What does the continuing cultural response to the German armed struggle tell us about the representation of violence, power, and gender today? Engaging critical theory, Charity Scribner addresses these questions and analyzes signal works that (...) point beyond militancy and terrorism. This literature and art discloses the failures of the Far Left and registers the radical potential that RAF women actually forfeited. _After the Red Army Faction_ maps out a cultural history of militancy and introduces "postmilitancy" as a new critical term. As Scribner demonstrates, the most compelling examples of postmilitant culture don't just repudiate militancy: these works investigate its horizons of possibility, particularly on the front of sexual politics. Objects of analysis include as-yet untranslated essays by Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas, as well as novels by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Judith Kuckart, Johann Kresnik's _Tanztheaterstück Ulrike Meinhof_, and the blockbuster exhibition _Regarding Terror_ at the Berlin Kunst-Werke. Scribner focuses on German cinema, offering incisive interpretations of films by Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, and Fatih Akin, as well as the international box-office success _The Baader-Meinhof Complex_. These readings disclose dynamic junctures among several fields of inquiry: national and sexual identity, the disciplining of the militant body, and the relationship between mass media and the arts. (shrink)

This essay explores the relationship between boredom, leisure, selfhood, and education in Kevin Hood Gary’s book, Why Boredom Matters, paying particular attention to connections between Aristotelian and existentialist approaches to the subject. Following Gary, the essay argues that schools force students to endure boredom or try to stimulate them with distractions, rather than helping them focus on enduring sources of meaning or cultivate stronger senses of self.

At last scholars are recognizing that the great generative architectonics of idealism’s account of self-consciousness would demand or imply, from a genealogical perspective, an unconscious. Yet, between Foucaultian inspired analyses of madness in Hegel, and Slavoj Zizek’s Lacanian readings of the unconscious in the work of F. W. J. Schelling, there has been essentially no mention of J. G. Fichte. As an attempt to redress this failure, I will begin to sketch Fichte’s own unique articulation of an unconscious (Unbewusst) by (...) highlighting three unique aspects or perspectives: (a) the idea of a pre-conscious, self-affective self; (b) the notion of the self-seeing eye; and (c) his own first hand involvement with dynamic psychiatry’s phenomena of magnetic rapport. This exposition of the unconscious in Fichte has two distinct ends. First, it stands as one of the first sustained expositions of the unconscious in the work of Fichte. This analysis which places Fichte’s work in the broader genealogy of dynamic psychiatry, however, also stands as a critique of the Freudian psychoanalytic model of the unconscious. (shrink)

In his Ethics, Spinoza maintains that God’s essence is expressed as both thought and extension. Despite this claim, however, Spinoza’s very definition of truth, understood as adequation, would seem to reduce the aspect of extension to an exclusively intellectual paradigm. I question the extent to which a body remains a body throughout the Ethics in the transition from the first knowledge of the imagination to the highest know ledge of adequate ideas. As a way to think beyond the totality of (...) adequation, I tum to Emmanuel Levinas’s distinction between totality and infinity. I reference Levinas in order to highlight certain impasses within Spinoza’s system and to serve as a possible alternative articulation of an extensional love of God. (shrink)

Interpretation always takes place in the present tense. It is worth reminding ourselves of this, because few philosophical texts or treatises have suffered the rise and fall of the vagaries of their own contemporary Weltanschauung as Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation. Few texts in history have been simultaneously so overestimated and underestimated in their impact and importance as Fichte's Addresses; and therefore few texts can be said to be so misunderstood—and so need in of reassessment. This collection, Fichte's Addresses (...) to the German Nation Reconsidered, edited by Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore, precisely seeks to fill this lacuna. The interpretative fate of the Addresses has always hinged on the... (shrink)

This paper uses Maurice Blanchot’s image of the corpse as a trope by which to offer a unique quasi-material reading of the German Idealist notion of speculative suicide. And its method of interpretative retrieval, like these idealists, works to think the relevance of idealism today by affirming the spirit against the letter. The paradox of suicide—that we aspire to be witness to our own death—presents itself as a double, as interpreted in works of Fichte and Schelling. This double, the very (...) core of speculative aspiration, is essentially a temporal other whose prosthetic character suggests that the speculative power of spirit is simultaneously technological, and that the limit-condition of suicide be found not in an ethereal speculative unity but rather in the intractable materiality of our own corporeal remains. (shrink)

This book offers a radically new interpretation of the entire philosophy of J. G. Fichte by showing the impact of nineteenth-century psychological techniques and technologies on the formation of his theory of the imagination—the very centerpiece of his philosophical system. By situating Fichte’s philosophy within the context of nineteenth-century German science and culture, the book establishes a new genealogy, one that shows the extent to which German idealism’s transcendental account of the social remains dependent upon the scientific origins of psychoanalysis (...) in the material techniques of Mesmerism. The book makes it clear that the rational, transcendental account of spirit, imagination, and the social has its source in the psychological phenomena of affective rapport. Specifically, the imagination undergoes a double displacement in which it is ultimately subject to external influence, the influence of a material technique, or, in short, a technology. (shrink)

Fichte’s project has much to offer contemporary continental philosophy and Laruelle’s project is an inspiring example of the continuing creative power and possibility latent in Fichte’s work. In a well-known ad hominem flourish, Fichte famously asserts that the choice between founding foundational philosophical first principles, between freedom and dogmatism (idealism and realism), cannot itself, in turn, be justified by philosophy alone. Yet what if the philosophical decision itself, the decision of and for philosophy is itself an ad hominem choice that, (...) as Laruelle contends, is little more than a narcissistic game? Indeed, Laruelle radicalizes such stakes by suggesting it is not merely the dogmatism of realism that is the problem, but that all philosophy is a narcissistic dogmatism. And it is this very decision for philosophy that remains our oldest dogmatic prejudice. (shrink)

By offering an original reading of J. G. Fichte's central philosophic work, The Science of Knowledge , through the prism of his much over looked "Journal of Animal Magnetism" this dissertation situates Fichte's later metaphysics of the image within the concerns of contemporary media theory. It does so by taking seriously the political consequences of the historical transformation of the faculty of imagination in age of materialism. Such a reading is made possible by approaching German Idealism through the critical apparatus (...) of 20th century Continental Philosophy . ;In the 19th century, Post-Kantian idealism's designation of the imagination as a faculty was called into question. For instance, with the appearance of Mesmerism and the rise of magnetic psychology, the very validity of the transcendental subject was rendered suspect. The subject's imagination was shown to be transparent to external influence. In his own search for a physical instantiation of idealism Fichte realized that the imagination and its power of imaging was no longer limited to the transcendental subject, but was shown to be a function of material technique. Such a transformation would have far reaching political consequences. Specifically, if Fichte articulated spirit---which defined social wholeness---in terms of the imagination, then the appropriation of the imagination by technological materialism demanded a fundamental rethinking of the communicative ground of the social. (shrink)

Alfred North Whitehead called Isabel Scribner Stearns the most talented female philosopher in America. Drawing on Whitehead and her other teachers, Paul Weiss, C.I. Lewis, H.H. Price, and Grace de Laguna, as well as the traditions of ancient Greek philosophy, Continental Rationalism, German Idealism, and American Pragmatism, Stearns has created an epistemologically and logically sound systematic account of the ontology of individuation and the relational genesis and endurance of individual beings.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 55, Issue 1, Page 83-98, February 2021.

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