This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

As John Henry Newman reflected on 'The Idea of a University' more than a century and a half ago, Bradley C. S. Watson brings together some of the nation's most eminent thinkers on higher education to reflect on the nature and purposes of the American university today. Their mordant reflections paint a picture of the American university in crisis. This book is essential reading for thoughtful citizens, scholars, and educational policymakers.

Light effects on the activity of several genes have recently been exploited in studies of plant gene expression. We discuss here some examples involving nuclear genes of higher plants, with emphasis on responses mediated by the phytochrome system. Recent work has revealed considerable diversity in the responses of different genes, indicating that several different regulatory programs are probably involved. A start has been made in studies of nuclear events associated with the changes in expression. Transcriptional regulation almost certainly occurs, although (...) many details remain to be studied and effects on mRNA processing and turnover have not been ruled out. Recent in vitro mutagenesis and gene transfer experiments with the gene for the small subunit of RuBP carboxylase indicate that sequences involved in regulating the level of expression in the light are located 5′ to the gene within about 1 kb of the start of transcription. (shrink)

This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

Probably no part of the Iliad has given rise to more discussion than the apparent contradiction between Books 9 and 16. In the former, Agamemnon's embassy offers Achilles the restoration of Briseis and ‘handsome gifts’ in recompense for taking her: in the latter Achilles tells Patroklos to obey his battle-orders exactly, ‘so that you may win me great renown and glory from all the Danaans, and they shall restore the lovely damsel and also give splendid gifts’ —just as though he (...) had not refused precisely these things only the night before. (shrink)

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)

The most prevalent approach to understanding recreation experiences in resource management has been a motivational research program that views satisfaction as an appropriate indicator of experience quality. This research explores a different approach to studying the quality of recreation experiences. Rather than viewing recreation experiences as a linear sequence of events beginning with expectations and ending with outcomes that are then cognitively compared to determine experience quality, this alternative approach views recreation as an emergent experience motivated by the not very (...) well-defined goal of acquiring stories that ultimately enrich one's life. Further, it assumes that the nature of human experience is best characterized by situated freedom in which the environment sets boundaries that constrain the nature of the experience, but that within those boundaries recreationists are free to experience the world in unique and variable ways. Therefore this alternative approach seeks a more context specific description of the setting/experience relationship that is intended to complement more general management frameworks (e.g., the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum) developed in conjunction with the motivational research program. (shrink)

The volume documents, and makes an original contribution to, an astonishing period in twentieth-century philosophy—the progress of Arne Naess's ecophilosophy from its inception to the present. It includes Naess's most crucial polemics with leading thinkers, drawn from sources as diverse as scholarly articles, correspondence, TV interviews and unpublished exchanges. The book testifies to the skeptical and self-correcting aspects of Naess's vision, which has deepened and broadened to include third world and feminist perspectives. Philosophical Dialogues is an essential addition to the (...) literature on environmental philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousai and the Challenges of Comic Translation:The Case of William Arrowsmith's Euripides AgonistesElizabeth ScharffenbergerThesmophoriazousai is conspicuously absent from the well-known and widely used series of Aristophanes translations that, under the editorial supervision of William Arrowsmith, was published originally by the University of Michigan Press and then taken up by New American Library. This is not to say, however, that a translation of the comedy was never composed for (...) this series. Arrowsmith took the task upon himself and began his translation of Thesmophoriazousai some time before 1960 when the Aristophanes series was at the height of its production; in later years, he revised his text at least once, and the evidence points to 1968-1973 as the principal period during which the translation was reworked. The cover page on the manuscript that he sent me in 1991 indicates that an introduction and notes (standard in this series) were to accompany the translation, but the package I received contained only the translated text, and I have no idea whether the notes and commentary were ever composed or finished. The text of the translation has a handful of typographical errors and minor inconsistencies in the directions on costuming and staging, which seem to mark the project as an arrested work in progress.The unpublished creation of a renowned classicist who was also a prolific and respected translator, Arrowsmith's Thesmophoriazousai — titled on the manuscript's cover page, Euripides Agonistes (Thesmophoriazousae)— provides an exciting venue for exploring the challenges involved in translating Aristophanes for contemporary English-speaking audiences. My purposes in this paper are thus twofold. I want to examine selected aspects of Arrowsmith's version of this comedy and also advance some general ideas about the challenges involved in translating the plays of Aristophanes and, for that matter, any comic work. My endeavor on both scores will be both preliminary and cursory; there is no way to do justice to every feature of this translation in a few pages or to [End Page 429] produce a complete theory of comic translation. But I hope that I can suggest a reasonably systematized foundation for analyzing the choices Arrowsmith made in his rendering of Thesmophoriazousai and, at the same time, present a set of criteria that might have broader use to people who rely on all kinds of comic translations.The "Frames" of Comic TranslationThere are very few works that treat, from either practical or theoretical perspectives, the translation of comic works and comic devices such as parodies and puns. These works include an essay on translating Ari-stophanes published in 1960 by Arrowsmith, titled "The Lively Conventions of Translation," as well as Douglass Parker's 1992-93 Arion essay in Arrowsmith's memory and André Lefevere's Translating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context. Their consensus is that translating comedy, especially Aristophanic comedy, poses formidable and unique challenges.1The most obvious challenge is the topicality of jokes and comic scenarios. According to Arrowsmith, "It is initially the hard facts of culture that most torment the translator of Greek comedy.... Tragedy... keeps a decent distance from common life, but comedy dumps into the translator's lap an intolerable profusion of things—odd bits of clothing, alien cuisine... unfamiliar currency, etc." (1960, 123). Thesmophoriazousai bears out this observation; it overflows with difficult "things" and "hard facts" to translate, beginning with the many props and elements of costume that come into play in the prologue with the appearance of Agathon and the dressing of the Kinsman, and including such crucial items as Mica's wineskin "baby." The problem of "translating" these objects is compounded by the challenges involved in making intelligible the comedy's preoccupation with Euripides and its many-layered engagement with Euripidean tragedy, which give rise to the parodies of Telephus, Palamedes, Helen, and Andromeda. These parodies go hand in hand with countless theatrical in-jokes and self-conscious references to local Athenian theatrical practices. Then there are the play's festal performance context (the Dionysia) and festal setting (the Thesmophoria), its allusions to local forensic and judicial procedures, and its caricatures of figures such as Agathon and Cleisthenes who, like Euripides, would have... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 353-356 [Access article in PDF] Book Review The Metaphysical Club The Metaphysical Club, by Louis Menand; xii & 546 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001, $27.00. "They didn't just want to keep the conversation going; they wanted to get to a better place" (p. 440). So much for the most prominent contemporary pragmatist, Richard Rorty, who remains unmentioned except in the acknowledgments. (...) That better place is participatory democracy (a phrase that does not appear in the book), which "means that everyone is equally in the game, but it also means that no one can opt out" (p. 441). The true name of the game is skeptical tolerance. There are no unquestionable duties or inalienable rights, no immutable natural laws, no absolute moral rules, no highest principles, no inherent virtues, no absolute standards, no stasis, no absolutely certain truth. There are no individual destinies, because the social comes before the individual, and the individual is embedded within and cannot exist without society. Scientific knowledge is always probabilistic, not necessarily because nature is indeterministic, but because we can never know enough to calculate its regularities if they exist. To wit, there are no Platonic Ideas or unchanging universals. All is change, nothing that happens is ever repeated, our general ideas and laws of nature are merely tools for getting along in the world. Above all, ideas do not refer to things, only to other ideas. What expedites our thinking is true. What expedites our acting is right. Whenever we act according to principle, rule, or law, we are making a bet that events will turn out the way [End Page 353] we think they will. If we keep this always in mind, we will never succumb to violence or war in the name of belief or principle. Whatever we believe, it could be otherwise. Such is a general summary of pragmatism as it has filtered down to the textbooks. It is (again befittingly) more or less accurate. The can-do American seeks out cash value in practical life.Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Saunders Pierce, and John Dewey crafted the only indigenous philosophy that has so far been produced in America. Its roots are in Laplacean probability theory, Darwinian evolutionism, and Chauncey Wright's indeterminism. While James hoped to save a place for religion (if it works, go with it) and Pierce a place for God (he thought there had to be a designing intelligence to account for order), the pragmatic result is profoundly skeptical and secular. Neither Holmes nor Dewey thought that individuals imbedded in societies had any need of absolutes. Holmes said that people first decide on the basis of experience, then they deduce. Dewey said that people first behave commonsensically, then they rationalize.There is nothing as condensed as the above in Louis Menand's beautiful book on the ideas, personalities, and influence of Holmes, James, Pierce, and Dewey. I know of no clearer exposition of their ideas, and few biographers have made them come so alive. In particular, Menand's coverage of peripheral (but by no means insignificant) figures is very rich. He describes the development of graduate universities in America in detail from their autocratic beginnings to the institution of academic freedom as we know it today. University presidents, trustees, and administrators are presented luxuriously as the villains, and the professors gloriously as the heroes. Menand remarks with slight amazement that society bought the concept that professors were beholden to the public at large and not to the state or private university owners. He could have commented further on the fact that the concept of academic freedom has become virtually irrelevant in today's corporate research universities."It is a remarkable fact about the United States," Menand begins his book, "that it fought a civil war without undergoing a change in its form of government" (p. ix). This is a breathtaking fact, and I don't suppose Menand had any intent to explain it. "The Civil War swept away the slave civilization of the South, but it swept away almost the whole intellectual... (shrink)

Matthew Watson’s The Market provides a fascinating and rigorous history of how economists have conceived of markets, gradually eliminating historical, social, political and ethical context from their analysis over more than two centuries. This review notes that the book provides a nuanced genealogy, which stresses many of the contingencies and mutations through which the vocabulary of economics has been formed. But it also notes some unanswered questions raised by the book, concerning the contribution that economic reductionism has made to (...) the rise of the market as an ideological trope of contemporary politics. (shrink)

The British have often denied the very existence of a tradition of English literary theory. George Watson redeems that denial in his latest book, the first study of 20th Century English theory. The book begins with Yeats, Pound and Eliot, who made England their home. In subsequent chapters, based on personal recollection as well as published sources, it assesses the contribution of I.A. Richards, William Empson, F.R. Leavis, C.S. Lewis, Isaiah Berlin and Wittgenstein, as well as Marxists like E.P. (...) Thompson and Raymond Williams. English literary theory is a tradition that has suffered in reputation, paradoxically, by the sheer fertility of its invention. In this seminal work the author celebrates that fertility from the First World War downto the death of Iris Murdoch in 1999, showing that England pioneered the academic study of theories of literature years in advance of France or the USA. (shrink)

Although it is now fifteen years since G. Williams' thorough-going criticism of B. Axelson's Unpoetische Wörter, his discussion has failed to elicit the adverse response which might have been expected in view of the widespread influence exerted by the earlier work. The reason for this may be that Axelson's theory is so widely accepted that any refutation thereof may be disregarded. Yet surely Williams was right to point to the dangers of total reliance on statistics and to the (...) necessity of considering the contexts in which words occur in Latin poetry. In this respect, he was not so much rejecting Axelson's work as pointing to its inadequacies: whereas Axelson would be content to label a word that occurs only rarely in poetry as ‘unpoetisch’, it is necessary, as Williams demonstrates, to take the further step of determining the effect that such a word has in a given context. This approach will be particularly helpful, for example, in the case of parvulus at Virg. Aen. 4.328, where the heightened pathos achieved by Virgil's use of a diminutive is better appreciated by the reader who is aware of the scarcity of diminutive adjectives in poetry and in epic above all. To recognise parvulus as an ‘unpoetic word’, with Axelson, is the essential first step, but we should proceed a stage further to inquire what effect was intended by the employment of a form not normally found in elevated poetry. Of greater importance is Williams' rejection of the ‘hierarchy of genres’ theory, taken for granted by Axelson, that is, that Latin poetry may be divided into a number of higher- or lower-ranking genres and that the more elevated a genre the less unpoetic vocabulary it is liable to employ. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Adolf Meyer: Psychiatric AnarchistS. Nassir Ghaemi (bio)KeywordsMeyer, biopsychosocial model, Jaspers, pluralism, philosophy, psychiatryThey had weekly lunches in 1920s New York City: In one door stepped a stooped philosopher, with a mustache and a twinkle, perhaps ruminating on some recent Marxist theory; in the other door came the elegant Swiss physician, goateed and erudite. Every week, for a time, John Dewey (leader of American pragmatism) and Adolf Meyer (dean of (...) mid-twentieth century American psychiatry and long-time chair of the Johns Hopkins psychiatry department) lunched together and, somewhere in those conversations—one might imagine—the field of philosophy and psychiatry was born (Meyer 1948, 152).Yet pragmatism—as a proper school of philosophy—does not capture Meyer’s psychiatry. Rather, the core of his thinking, in my view, is to be found in a vague term that deserves analysis: eclecticism.EclecticismIt has been said that eclecticism is a vice in theory but a virtue in practice (Stone 1981), which highlights why so many are attracted to it. Deep down, practitioners just want to be free: They believe that their freedom of choice will tailor treatments best to patients and thus result in best outcomes. As a conceptual theory for psychiatry, eclecticism is a model that views any theory or method as potentially correct, but no theory or method as definitively incorrect. There is no way to avoid an “anything goes” practice with eclecticism: It is—to use a political analogy—an anarchism of mind.William James once remarked that the basis for all philosophies lies in the personalities of philosophers. So it was with Meyer’s eclecticism: congenial personally, he seemed congenitally incapable of disagreeing with any person. Any idea, even the most unusual, would receive a respectful hearing from Meyer. (Double brings out new, excellent documentary evidence of this extreme indecision in the drafts of Meyer’s unsent letters to the behaviorist John Watson.) Although quaint and commendable pedagogically, this excessive open mindedness left American psychiatry—so dependent on Meyer—prey to hard-headed biological radicals and psychoanalytic dogmatists. This is where his eclecticism failed us.Enabling Biological ExtremismMeyer played a key role in legitimizing extreme biological approaches. In addition to his interest in insulin coma (which Double mentions), Meyer enabled the popularization of colectomy and frontal [End Page 341] lobotomy. Psychiatric colectomy, developed by Henry Cotton, was based on the focal toxin theory of mental illness—the idea that mental illness was caused by toxins released by bacteria in the body, the specific locations of which where were the colon and rotted teeth. In one hundred case reports, with mostly short-term follow-up, published in his prominent text, The Defective Delinquent and Insane (Cotton 1921), Cotton laid out his case, which Meyer legitimized by writing a generous foreword. Meyer’s authority was powerful enough to render Cotton’s limited evidence base much more credible than it might otherwise have been. In the 1920s and 1930s, tens of thousands colectomies and full mouth teeth extractions were conducted in patients with mental illness. (Meyer himself sometimes recommended it).1The other biological extremist story is more famous. In a 1936 conference, with Meyer in attendance, the neurologist Walter Freeman presented, for the first time, cases of refractory schizophrenia treated with a new method: frontal lobotomy. Psychoanalyst attendees protested that Freeman was proposing nothing more than mutilation of the brain; yet Meyer intervened in favor of Free-man (“I am not antagonistic to this work, but find it very interesting” [El-Hai 2005]). Unfortunately, Freeman, like Cotton, was a dogmatist: Over time, he performed frontal lobotomy more and more extensively, not just as a treatment of last resort in the most ill schizophrenics (as in the first cases presented to Meyer), but later as a treatment of first resort for the mildest mood disorders. (By 1950 Freeman had personally conducted 2400 transorbital lobotomies, an “office procedure” that allowed him to lobotomize a patient in 15 minutes [El-Hai 2005]).2Lest my critique of Meyer in that era be seen as a Whiggish interpretation of history (the claim that we are so much smarter than those shrinks of the past; in fact I think... (shrink)

William S. Robinson has for many years written insightfully about the mind-body problem. In Understanding Phenomenal Consciousness he focuses on sensory experience and perception qualities such as colours, sounds and odours to present a dualistic view of the mind, called Qualitative Event Realism, that goes against the dominant materialist views. This theory is relevant to the development of a science of consciousness which is now being pursued not only by philosophers but by researchers in psychology and the brain sciences. This (...) provocative book will interest students and professionals who work in the philosophy of mind and will also have cross-disciplinary appeal in cognitive psychology and the brain sciences. (shrink)

First-order logic. The origin of modern foundational studies. Frege's system and the paradoxes. The teory of types. Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. Hilbert's program and Godel's incompleteness theorems. The foundational systems of W.V. Quine. Categorical algebra.

Shoemaker argues that a satisfactory resolution of Moore's paradox requires a _self-intimation thesis that posits a "constitutive relation between belief and believing that one believes." He claims that such a thesis is needed to explain the crucial fact that the assent conditions for '_P' entail those for '_I believe that P'. This paper argues for an alternative resolution of Moore's paradox that provides for an adequate explanation of the crucial fact without relying on the kind of necessary connection between first (...) and second-order beliefs that is posited by Shoemaker's self-intimation thesis. (shrink)

Frank Jackson has abandoned his famous knowledge argument, and has explained why in a brief "Postscript on Qualia" . This explanation consists of a direct argument, and an attempt to explain away the intuition that lies at the heart of the knowledge argument. The direct argument is clarified and found to be subtly question-begging. The attempt to explain away the key intuition is reviewed and found to be inadequate. False memory traces, which Jackson mentions at the beginning of the direct (...) argument, are discussed and found not to materially affect the force of the knowledge argument. (shrink)

In a careful exposition of French Marxism, William Lewis places Althusser and his thought alongside the pre- and post-war French communist intellectual climate: the result is an excellent and unique work. Part theoretical treatise on some of Althusser's more complicated and less explored ideas, part intellectual history, Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism is, in total, an important text for philosophy, French and francophone studies, political thought, cultural studies, marxist thought, and several other disciplines interested in the intellectual (...) life and times of the twientieth century. (shrink)

William S. Allen sets the works of Theodor Adorno, Immanuel Kant and Peter Weiss in dialogue, revealing how an interrogation of the aesthetics of 'the whole' and the conception of history in Western thought reveals new ways of thinking about history and historically. This book traces how Adorno's reconsideration of history through his readings of Kant's Critique of Judgement are distinct from formulations offered by other thinkers. More than any of them though, Adorno's aesthetics has introduced an alternative thought, which, (...) Allen shows, has been modified and extended in the work of Peter Weiss and other contemporary thinkers. (shrink)

Because of Paul’s egalitarianism evidenced in his concern for an inclusive salvation that did not discriminate against gentiles, it is widely assumed that Paul opposed all ethnic distinctions as contrary to the message of Christ. A close look at his letters, especially the letter to the Romans, shows that whilst Paul, because of his belief in the impartiality of God, argues against discrimination, he does differentiate clearly between Jew and Greek and does not oppose ethnic distinctions as such. What Paul (...) opposes is the hostility that emerges from a failure to recognize and accept the other in their distinctive identity. He is thus an advocate of social and cultural diversity rather than of uniformity. (shrink)

This article defends epiphenomenalism against criticisms raised in Dwayne Moore’s “On Robinson’s Response to the Self-Stultifying Objection”.

Unlike his other fictional works Blanchot’s 1953 narrative Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas has received comparatively little attention. The reasons for this would seem to lie in the intense abstraction of his writing in this work, which is forbidding even by his own standards, but as I will show, this intensity can be understood as comprising a singular topography of the experience of writing. Blanchot’s narrative thereby becomes a very precise and concrete form of aesthetics, which can be usefully compared (...) to the understandings of melancholy developed by Benjamin and Adorno, but transposed into a more stringent modernist context. (shrink)

Contemporaries often reject epiphenomenalism out of hand, while Russellian Monism is regarded as worthy of further development. It is argued here that this difference of attitudes is indefensible, because the easy rejection of EPI is due to its violating a certain Causal Intuition, and RM implicitly violates that same intuition. An enriched version of RM mitigates the violation, but the same mitigation results if we make a parallel enrichment of EPI. If RM and EPI are approached on a level playing (...) field, it is not obvious which will prove to be the better view. (shrink)

The Sustained Attention to Response Task is a Go–No-Go signal detection task developed to measure lapses of sustained conscious attention. In this study, we examined the impact global interference and spatial uncertainty has on SART performance. Ten participants performed either a SART or a traditionally formatted version of a global–local stimuli detection task with spatially certain and uncertain signals. Reaction time in the SART was insensitive to global interference and spatial uncertainty, whereas reaction time in the low-Go task was sensitive. (...) Spatial uncertainty increased errors of omission in the SART, which was not expected if the SART measures mindlessness. There was a high correlation between participants’ errors of commission rate and their reaction time in the SART. The results, overall, support the view that the SART is a better measure of response strategy than lapses in sustained attention or mindlessness. (shrink)

The practice of modern craniomaxillofacial surgery has been defined by emergent technologies allowing for the acquisition, storage, utilization, and transfer of massive amounts of sensitive and identifiable patient data. This alone has thrust providers into an unlikely and unprecedented role as the stewards of vast databases of digital information. This data powers the potent surgical tool of virtual surgical planning, a method by which craniomaxillofacial surgeons plan and simulate procedural outcomes in a digital environment. Further complicating this new terrain is (...) the involvement of third‐party contractors—a necessary presence in bringing raw data to bear in the office, virtual space, and operating room. The individual privileges and responsibilities of patients, providers, and vendors towards data are situated within the most recent U.S. court rulings and regulations. This paper offers guidance for overseeing the safe and responsible transfer to third‐party contractors, and provides suggestions for negotiating the trinary relationship between physicians, their patients, and the vendors offering this transformative technology. (shrink)

In this essay I will examine the development of the notion of transcendence in Blanchot's early critical writings. Doing so indicates the radical way that Blanchot reconfigures this central ontological and theological term by way of his readings of the literary use of language. In turn this exposes the essential relation between finitude and literature, something which the second part of the essay will examine by way of Heidegger's study of the myth of Er.

The paper brings existential temporality, as developed in the work of phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Husserl, into dialogue with historical materialism. What results is the development of a theoretical background for what the author terms futural materialism, which is taken to be a complimentary logical extension of historical materialist projects. To this end, it is suggested that the past and the future are best understood as materially existing in the present in an immanent way, mediated by conscious beings in the (...) form of memory, projection, residual effect, and affect. Put differently, the present's presence in the past and future play a determining roll in those temporal dimensions, which subsequently fold back into the configuration of the present. Following Nietzsche and drawing influence from Guattari and Deleuze, it is argued that past and future are relatively fluid tools to be purposively deployed in the present for particular purposes rather than being transcendent facts which subjectivity must merely contend with. It is further asserted that as part of a broader non-reductive material monist project of social transformation, both futural and historical materialism are necessary considerations. (shrink)

The following pages attempt to develop the main outlines of an existential phenomenology of law within the context of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phe nomenology of the social world. In so doing, the essay addresses the rather narrow scholarly question, If Merleau-Ponty had written a phenomenology of law, what would it have looked like? But this scholarly enterprise, although impeccable in itself, is also transcended by a more complicated concern for a very different sort of question. Namely, if Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological descriptions of (...) the social world are correct-as I believe they largely are-then what are the philosophical consequences for an adequate understanding of law? Such a project may well occasion a certain surprise amongst observers of the contemporary philosophical landscape, at least in what concerns the terrain of continental thought, and for two different reasons. The first is that, although interest in Merleau-Ponty's work remains strong in the· United States and Can ada, his philosophical standing in his own country has been largely eclipsed! by that of, first, his friend/estranged acquaintance, Jean-Paul Sartre; by various Marxist philosophies and critical social theories; and finally by those doing her meneutics of language. In my view, current neglect of Merleau-Ponty's thought in France is most regrettable. (shrink)