Like it or not, a big picture of the history of science is something which we cannot avoid. Big pictures are, of course, thoroughly out of fashion at the moment; those committed to specialist research find them simplistic and insufficiently complex and nuanced, while postmodernists regard them as simply impossible. But however specialist we may be in our research, however scornful of the immaturity of grand narratives, it is not so easy to escape from dependence – acknowledged or not – (...) on a big picture. When we define our research as part of the history of science, we implicitly invoke a big picture of that history to give identity and meaning to our specialism. When we teach the history of science, even if we do not present a big picture explicitly, our students already have a big picture of that history which they bring to our classes and into which they fit whatever we say, no matter how many complications and refinements and contradictions we put before them – unless we offer them an alternative big picture. (shrink)

The concept of “tacit knowledge” as the means by which individuals interpret the “rules” of social interaction occupies a central role in all the major contemporary theories of action and social structure. The major reference point for social theorists is Wittgenstein's celebrated discussion of rule-following in the Philosophical Investigations. Focusing on Giddens' incorporation of tacit knowledge and rules into his “theory of structuration”, I argue that Wittgenstein's later work is steadfastly set against the “latent cognitivism” inherent in the idea of (...) tacit knowledge and tacit rules. I also argue that the idea of tacit knowledge and tacit rules is either incoherent or explanatorily vacuous. (shrink)

Differences between, and struggles over, plural forms of time and temporal categories is a crucial yet underexplored aspect of debates about global justice. This article aims to reorient the global...

There's Crito, my contemporary and fellow demesman, the father of Critobulus. … [T]hen there's Lysanias of Sphettus, father of Aeschines. … [N]ext, there's Epigenes' father, Antiphon of Cephisus here … and there is Adeimantus, the son of Ariston, whose brother is Plato. …In his recent book, Against Individualism, Henry Rosemont takes up the modern notion of the free, autonomous individual and urges his readers to reconsider the central role it has played in moral and political thought.1 Arguing with a clear (...) eye on the problem of social injustice, Rosemont lays out reasons why we should view foundational individualism as a barrier to relieving huge disparities of wealth and unjust global practices. He offers a... (shrink)

Femininity and whiteness dominate Western nursing, silencing ontologies and epistemologies that do not align with these dominant norms while perpetuating systemic racism and discrimination in nursing practice, education, research, nursing activism, and sociopolitical structures. We propose Black feminist thought as a praxis to decenter, deconstruct, and unseat these ideologies and systems of power. Drawing from the work of past and present Black feminist scholars, we examine the ontological and epistemological perspectives of Black feminist thought. These include (i) the uniqueness and (...) particular experiences of people, (ii) the acceptance of ontological and epistemological pluralism of truths and ways of knowing, and (iii) the mandate for equity in the health, social, political, and environmental structures of society. By focusing our attention on lived experiences and voices of those systematically excluded in nursing practice, education, research, and society, Black feminist thought offers an anticolonial, antiracist, and antidiscriminatory foundation for more effectively upholding nursing's disciplinary mandate for social justice and equity. (shrink)

In this article, I present an alternative method for teaching the Intro to Buddhism class. The standard way of teaching this class allows little room for non-normative aspects of Buddhism such as violence, and insofar as it does, it implicitly frames them as “aberrations” from “real Buddhism.” In my syllabus, I began by having students read The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh, which teaches them about Buddhist doctrine with a seductively modernist approach. At the mid-point of (...) the semester, I then reveal to them that Thich Nhat Hanh’s book leaves out a great deal of what is found in actual traditional Buddhist practice, including reincarnation, gods, spirits, miracles, the supernatural, patriarchy, and violence. In the second half of the semester, we then study regional forms of Buddhism, with a special eye towards practice, including the practice of violence. (shrink)

Background Research in children is essential for them to benefit from the outcomes of research but involvement must be weighed against potential harms. In many countries and circumstances, medical research legally requires parental consent until the age of 18 years, with poorly defined recommendations for assent prior to this. However, there is little research exploring how these decisions are made by families and the ethical implications of this. Aim To explore key ethical debates in decision-making for participation of children and (...) adolescents in a human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine trial. Methods Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with Tanzanian girls (aged 9–16 years) who had participated in an HPV vaccine trial (n = 13), their parents or guardians (n = 12), and girls together with their parents (in paired parent-child interviews) (n = 6). The interviews were analysed using thematic analysis. Interview data came from a qualitative acceptability study undertaken as part of the Dose Reduction Immunobridging and Safety Study of Two Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Vaccines in Tanzanian Girls (DoRIS) trial. Results Girls and parents desired collaborative decision-making, with parents ultimately making the decision to consent. However, girls wanted a larger part in decision-making. Decisions to consent involved many people, including extended social networks, the trial team, media outlets and healthcare professionals and this resulted in conflicts to be negotiated. Deciding where to place trust was central in participants and parents considering decisions to consent and overcoming rumours about trial involvement. Conclusions Existing models of decision-making help to understand dynamics between parents, adolescents and researchers but neglect the important wider social impacts and the fundamental nature of trust. Children’s roles in discussions can be evaluated using the principles of consent: autonomy, freedom and information. Concepts such as relational autonomy help to explain mechanisms families use to negotiate complex consent decisions. Whilst interviewees supported the maintenance of legal parental consent, researchers must design consent processes centring the child to ensure that whole family decision-making processes are supported. (shrink)

Romans 13:1-7, which commands subjection to governing authorities, can be given too much weight in the moral analysis of undocumented immigrants. This article considers Romans 13 in the broader context of Romans and of the biblical canon to show biblical reasons for permitting civil disobedience toward immigration law. Rather than viewing undocumented immigrants as universally immoral lawbreakers, these biblical factors combined with analysis of civil disobedience for the preservation of life, legal ambiguities arising from competing jurisdictions, and other socio-political factors (...) show that it may be a prudent action for undocumented immigrants to disobey immigration law. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America by Michael John WitgenGeronimo Barrera de la TorreSeeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America BY MICHAEL JOHN WITGEN Williamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill, N.C.: Omohundro Institute for the Study of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2022The colonial projects (...) of nation-states in the Americas have defined the relationship between states and Indigenous peoples by means of [End Page 138] dispossession, as Anishinaabeg thinker Leanne Betasamosake Simpson asserts.1 Seeing Red delves into the processes through which dispossession of Indigenous land became the ideology and systematic practice behind US expansion as Indigenous communities struggled to reshape their place in the new context. The book carefully details the settler- colonial ideology and logic of elimination that permeated US territorial expansion over the Northwest Territories at the end of the eighteen and the first decades of the nineteenth centuries. Seeing Red thoroughly examines the complex context of dispossession by the US colonial power, centering on Anishinaabeg communities, the “mix- race” population, and the different Indigenous people inhabiting this region. However, the book focuses on what the author names “unthinkable history,” following Michel- Rolph Trouillot’s argument that this region, and the whole continent, was conceived as an unsettled territory instead of belonging to many Indigenous peoples. Thus, the text explores Indigenous and mixed- raced communities’ political imaginaries and imagined futures to retain autonomy and territory.Author Michael John Witgen is a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe and a professor in the Department of History and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. His research centers on the complex relations between Indigenous people and settler colonizers in the Great Lakes and the Northwest Territories. Seeing Red expands his previous analysis of race, ethnicity, and citizenship intersections, bringing to the fore Indigenous people’s history to rethink the statemaking process in the United States.This book’s pages show that theft lies at the foundation of wealth transfer from Indigenous territories to the United States government and white citizens. The white settler ideology, based on a “doctrine of discovery,” established a stark division between the civilized and uncivilized to rationalize, among other things, the theft of Indigenous people. This is a central argument of the book that signals how the civili zation project underpinning the territorial expansion of the United States was based on the transformation of commons into private property. Indigenous land became critical in the “political economy of plunder” advanced by the state and the meaning of “native” as a racial categorization of exclusion. Chapter 1 explores this economy of plunder by detailing the advancement of the settler frontier through different [End Page 139] mechanisms, such as the treaty policy— subsequently violated by the state— and territory surveying to make land legible for the state and cheap for settlers. It is worth mentioning that the book contains historical and thematic maps that visually represent the ideology of wilderness behind the colonization project and evidence of the territorial extent of dispossession suffered by Indigenous communities. However, this crusade to dispossess Indigenous peoples from their territory also rested on the national mythology that strengthened the trope of Indigenous vanishing. The author shows how during the years of the study, the Indigenous population was not vanishing but immersed in an intricate social world and transregional trade networks. Chapter 2 explores such context, following the story of an Ojibwe man to evidence the context in which settlers and federal officials relied on Indigenous customs to profit from the fur trade while using ties with communities to further land cessions.Mix- race families played a crucial role in expanding the settler frontier through treaty negotiations but remained marginalized as they identified themselves as both Natives and US citizens. Chapter 3 examines the significance of mixed- raced families, particularly women, in establishing and expanding missions’ schools that relied on their domestic and linguistic labor. Moreover, it shows the intricate landscape of the civilization mission that depended on the complex networks that had created... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Anthony Close CENTERING THE DE-CENTERERS: FOUCAULT AND LAS MENINAS Over the last two decades, French avant-garde critical theory has shaken the pillars of the traditionalist temple with this thought: the interpreter of a literary text should not primarily be concerned with its author's intentional design, but rather with the surreptitious forces which shape it, warp it, and ultimately turn it into a problematic will-ofthe -wisp. The "decoding" of those (...) forces takes many forms (Freudian, anthropological, and so on), of which deconstruction is the most celebrated ; "de-centering"—the banishment of the intentional subject from the focus of interpretation — is common to all. In the first part of this article I wish to set out my philosophical objections to that exclusion, and in the second part, to examine an interesting failure to make it effective in practice: Foucault's analysis of Velazquez's painting Las Meninas, which constitutes the first chapter of Les mots et ks choses. One of my reasons for choosing Foucault's text as an example is that its premises are in some ways comparable to the philosophy of the archdeconstructor, Derrida. My skepticism about them and the analytic method based on them is not meant to suggest that I regard Foucault's historical studies as valueless. On the contrary, I recognize that he, together with some other decoders (particularly Barthes), has important things to say. My attack is a form of defense. I wish to uphold the value of traditional forms of interpretation by showing that though Foucault, like other decoders, casts radical doubts upon them in theory, he tends to negate those doubts by the implications of his practice. 21 22Philosophy and Literature M. H. Abrams has defined the traditionalist historian of culture as one who assumes that (a) authors of the past exploited the norms and possibilities of their language to say something determinate, (b) the properly equipped historian can approximate to their meaning, (c) his interpretation can aspire to a reasonable degree of objectivity. ' Let that serve as a working definition of my traditionalist standpoint. This has a philosophical rationale, basically Wittgensteinian and Austinian, which needs to be explained and set over against some of decoding's typical presuppositions. I choose Derrida's as an example. From my perspective, two objections can be leveled against his thought: its tendency to hypostatize the intentional subject as a metaphysical essence which must be reached through and beyond language, and to see language itself as an unrealistically slippery medium. Both objections were raised against him by Searle in their famous polemic with each other.2 Derrida's thought is inscribed within, even while it reacts against, a traditional conception of language as a name-like substitute for essence. According to this conception, influentially represented in this century by Husserl's phenomenology, bits of language somewhat resemble sterling currency bills which bear on their face the legend: "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of? pound(s)" That is, they are potentially capable ofbeing cashed for lumps of being, which can thus be possessed by mind. Derrida counters that the currency is fraudulent: it continually defers presence and possession, rendering problematic its relation to being and self, and their very existence. In order to foster the illusion that he is master of his words, hence of what they designate, Western Man has historically given status of originality to voice rather than to writing, to a form of expression which is seemingly intimate to consciousness rather than external. The paradoxical thesis ofDe lagrammatologie is that writing came first. One of the routes by which Derrida arrives at this conclusion is Saussure's conception of the discontinuous, articulated nature of language and the negative and differential character of linguistic signifiers, not stably linked to universal referents.3 On this basis he builds his idea of différance (a pun on difference and deferral ), the elusive negative margin which makes language possible, and at the same time, makes impossible consciousness's full presence to itself and to being.4 Hence Derrida's notion of language's anarchic and willful power to detach itself from die intentions or usage of its users and to float... (shrink)

There has recently been a wave of attempts to make sense of the role of de se thoughts in linguistic communication. A majority of the attempts assume a Perryan or a Lewisian view of de se thought. Views with these assumptions, I suggest, come in four varieties: uncentering (Egan 2007, Kölbel 2013, Moss 2012), recentering (Heim 2004, Weber 2012), multicentering (Kindermann 2014, Ninan 2010, Torre 2009), and no centering (Kaplan 1989, Perry 1979). I argue first that all four varieties of (...) centering are committed to what I call a shifting operation on the hearer's part. I argue second that, against common assumption, there is no real choice to make between the views. By showing that attempts to establish an advantage for some view over the others fail across the board, I make the case for neutralism regarding the varieties of centering – the claim that coverage of the empirical data is exactly the same for each view, and that the views are broadly equal in simplicity and elegance. (shrink)

Genetic relatedness figures heavily in contemporary ethical debates on egg freezing, although the arguments lack empirical‐based evidence. Rather than adding another theoretical view on the moral relevance of genetic connections, this paper instead proposes an empirically grounded perspective based on two independent qualitative interview‐based studies conducted in Belgium and France. Three themes emerge from our empirical data: (1) prioritizing family building; (2) centering the gestational experience of motherhood; and (3) identifying the complexities and limitations of adoption. These themes suggest that (...) the relationship between egg freezing, genetics, biological motherhood, and adoption is highly complex and less straightforward than what is often assumed in the egg freezing debate. Our study provides more detailed insights into women's ambivalent experiences regarding those reproductive options. We discuss the ethical implications of our empirical findings and hold that pursuing genetic desire is not necessarily the main moral reason why women freeze their eggs. (shrink)

Sequential action makes up the bulk of human daily activity, and yet much remains unknown about how people learn such actions. In one motor learning paradigm, the serial reaction time (SRT) task, people are taught a consistent sequence of button presses by cueing them with the next target response. However, the SRT task only records keypress response times to a cued target, and thus it cannot reveal the full time‐course of motion, including predictive movements. This paper describes a mouse movement (...) trajectory SRT task in which the cursor must be moved to a cued location. We replicated keypress SRT results, but also found that predictive movement—before the next cue appears—increased during the experiment. Moreover, trajectory analyses revealed that people developed a centering strategy under uncertainty. In a second experiment, we made prediction explicit, no longer cueing targets. Thus, participants had to explore the response alternatives and learn via reinforcement, receiving rewards and penalties for correct and incorrect actions, respectively. Participants were not told whether the sequence of stimuli was deterministic, nor if it would repeat, nor how long it was. Given the difficulty of the task, it is unsurprising that some learners performed poorly. However, many learners performed remarkably well, and some acquired the full 10‐item sequence within 10 repetitions. Comparing the high‐ and low‐performers’ detailed results in this reinforcement learning (RL) task with the first experiment's cued trajectory SRT task, we found similarities between the two tasks, suggesting that the effects in Experiment 1 are due to predictive, rather than reactive processes. Finally, we found that two standard model‐free reinforcement learning models fit the high‐performing participants, while the four low‐performing participants provide better fit with a simple negative recency bias model. (shrink)

The present revival of metaphysics seems to be characterized primarily by the fact that it is now once again respectable to turn one's attention to perennial problems and to speak of them openly as metaphysical problems. Amid the resulting discussions, a certain amount of uncertainty and caution pervades the air, and there is still a great deal of doubt about how far one may or should go with respect to metaphysical speculation. Discussion seems to be centering primarily on the meaning (...) and function of metaphysics itself and on the approaches one may legitimately take in dealing with questions concerning the existence of God and of a soul or self. Less emphasis is placed on solving specific problems, and Aristotle's notion of "being as such" or Heidegger's concern with the ground of being seem to provoke little interest this side of the Channel. In general, there is little concern with trying to tie the philosophical loose ends which characterize the present state of philosophy by producing either a bold synthesis or a new Weltanschauung. (shrink)

There is wide support in logic, philosophy, and psychology for the hypothesis that the probability of the indicative conditional of natural language, P(if A then B), is the conditional probability of B given A, P(B|A). We identify a conditional which is such that P(if A then B)=P(B|A) with de Finetti’s conditional event, B | A. An objection to making this identification in the past was that it appeared unclear how to form compounds and iterations of conditional events. In this paper, (...) we illustrate how to overcome this objection with a probabilistic analysis, based on coherence, of these compounds and iterations. We interpret the compounds and iterations as conditional random quantities, which sometimes reduce to conditional events, given logical dependencies. We also show, for the first time, how to extend the inference of centering for conditional events, inferring B|A from the conjunction A ^ B, to compounds and iterations of both conditional events and biconditional events, B || A, and generalize it to n-conditional events. (shrink)

The central claim of this article is that post-truth requires a political and socio-economical perspective, rather than a moral or epistemological one. The article consists of two parts. The first part offers a critical examination of the dominant analyses of post-truth in terms of shifting standards of the origin and the evaluation of facts. Moreover, the claim that postmodernism is the cause of post-truth is examined and refuted. In the second part an alternative perspective is developed, centring around the notion (...) of gatekeepers. Rather than linking post-truth to bullshit and postmodernism, it should be understood as a symptom of a contemporary shift in the gatekeepers of truth and knowledge. Knowledge and truth are always mediated in society through the hands of gatekeeping institutions such as journalism or science. Post-truth is a symptom of a broader transformation of the gatekeeping institutions of our current society. It therefore requires a political philosophy of these institutional shifts and the new risks they involve. (shrink)

I show that centered propositions—also called de se propositions, and usually modeled as sets of centered worlds—pose a serious problem for various versions of Lewis's Principal Principle. The problem, put roughly, is that in scenarios like Elga's `Sleeping Beauty' case, those principles imply that rational agents ought to have obviously irrational credences. To solve the problem, I propose a centered version of the Principal Principle. My version allows centered propositions to be objectively chancy.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction to Creative Writing ContributionsAlexis Pauline Gumbs, Akasha Gloria Hull, Cheryl Clarke, doris diosa davenport, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Asha French, Sharon Bridgforth, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Alexis De Veaux, and Sokari Ekinewhen i first began to dream of creative writing contributions for this special issue of Feminist Studies celebrating the fortieth anniversaries of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color and All the Women Are (...) White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies, I imagined a wealth of examples of the world and the work made possible by these two groundbreaking anthologies. I wondered what their editors and contributors were writing now. I wondered about the work of their students and people like me: those of us who understand everything we write as indebted to the path-making, silence-clearing, generative, and bodacious work of the participants in the miracles that are This Bridge Called My Back and But Some of Us Are Brave.But today as I reread the contributions that actually emerged from this process, I realize that my dream was too small. I imagined writing that would provide evidence of the ongoing impact made by these two anthologies. Instead, the creative writing in this special issue offers something more crucial and beautiful than I had imagined. These works are not mere evidence of a transformed world; these works are continuing to transform the world in urgent and visionary ways. As repeated again and again by participants in the 2022 celebration for the fortieth anniversary celebration of This Bridge Called My Back, the work that inspired these anthologies is not over. The writings featured in this issue not only show [End Page 198] how this work continues, but they feed, nurture, and provoke us as we honor our responsibility to transform this world.For example, when Akasha Gloria Hull, coeditor of But Some of Us Are Brave, shares her daily early morning meditative writing in "Writing and Rebirth: A Set of Journal Poems," we remember not only her fundamental work excavating the daily lives of Black women writers from the nineteenth century—most notably in Give Us Each Day, her edited book based on the diaries of poet Alice Dunbar Nelson—but also our own imperative. Hull's reflections on health challenges, interpersonal conflict, resurrection, collaboration, and writing itself remind us that our feminist praxis is impactful because of its dailyness. Those of us who wake up tomorrow will need to ask the same critical questions the editors of But Some of Us Are Brave asked of the fields of Black studies and women's studies. We will find surprises and repetitions in the days we meet, and then we will have to do it again.When we read two new prose poems by Cheryl Clarke, an original contributor to This Bridge Called My Back, we have an opportunity to time travel. In "Living as a Lesbian in the Archive of Style," we venture into a critical engagement with the term "hardcore lesbian," displacing the desires of the person who needs to classify others using that term with those of someone who has been hailed by it. Clarke's poem is a reminder that as we work in literary traditions and fields of study made possible by the revolutionary identity politics of an earlier era, we are still responsible for centering the experiences of those most impacted by our fluent and fluid naming practices. In "History," Clarke offers us a timely Black lesbian feminist lens on many iterations of responding to police violence, centering the perspective of a lesbian, her lover, and her lover's husband.The poem "On Being an hbcu Graduate, Teacher, Professor-Scholar at Stillman College, Tuscaloosa, AL, in May 2015" by doris diosa davenport—an original contributor to But Some of Us Are Brave—highlights the intimacy, hilarity, and poignancy of the daily work of intergenerational critical and creative praxis. In particular, she considers the context of institutions and regions that are sometimes excluded from the imaginary of how and where feminist work happens. davenport transmits the lessons and energy gained through her practice of thinking and gathering otherwise... (shrink)

Bruno Latour reconnaît l’influence de Gilbert Simondon sur son oeuvre, en particulier quant à sa compréhension de la technique. Latour semble ainsi réaliser en grande partie le programme de « non-anthropologie » de Simondon. Mais une apparente contradiction existe dans le traitement de l’énonciation par Latour : sa compréhension de la matérialité et des modes d’existence semble prendre le détour de la sémiotique. Cela a mené certains critiques à mettre en doute son approche de la matérialité. Toutefois, vue à travers (...) la lentille de l’influence que Simondon a eue sur Latour, il est possible de relire la théorie latourienne de l’énonciation en comprenant la communication comme passage de l’action d’un être à l’autre, et la signification de cette action comme résultat de sa participation à un processus de constitution des êtres. Latour est donc résolument un penseur du décentrement de l’humain.Bruno Latour recognizes the influence of Gilbert Simondon on his work, especially with respect to his understanding of technique. Latour appears, in that sense, to actualize a large proportion of Simondon’s “non-anthropology”. Yet, what appears to be a contradiction remains in his treatment of enunciation: indeed, his understanding of materiality seems to take the detour of semiotics. This has led some critics to question his approach to materiality. However, seen through the lens of Simondon’s influence on him, it is possible to revisit Latour’s theory of enunciation and to understand communication as the passage of action from one being to the next, and signification as the outcome of action’s participation to the constitution process of a being. This way, Latour is a thinker resolutely committed to de-centering the focus of research away from human beings. (shrink)

A biographical sketch of the Spanish philosopher Leonardo Polo which includes an outline of the central interests of philosophical work, centring on his contribution to the history of philosophy.

The discussion about the double inscription of the political is a familiar trope among progressive thinkers, whose discussions have focused primarily on the ontological presuppositions of the political at the expense of a theoretical reflection on politics. This article shifts the emphasis to the latter. It develops an image of thought of our political actuality that moves beyond the commonplace observation that politics exceeds electoral representation. Its underlying assumption is that modernity is characterized by a continual process of political territorialization (...) and re-territorialization whereby the political frontier has experienced a series of displacements along a migratory arc that goes from the sovereign state to liberal party democracies. However, it does not stop there, for as politics colonizes new domains and carves up novel places of enunciation, the cartography we inherited from democratic liberalism experiences a Copernican de-centring that throws us into a scenario best described as an archipelago of political domains. This announces the becoming-other of politics, the post-liberal setting of our political actuality. (shrink)

It was pointed out, first by Robert Stalnaker, then also by Andy Egan, that David Lewis’s model of centered-worlds contents has undesired consequences for communication of de se contents. The recent years have seen a number of attempts to save the model by amending it to handle de se communication. Proposals include the appeal to sequences of individuals in the centers, to ersatz classical propositions, and to operations of “re-centering”. The authors are Dilip Ninan and Stephan Torre, Sarah Moss and (...) Max Kölbel, and Alan Gibbard and Clas Weber. The present paper discusses these attempts. The conclusion is that they fail. (shrink)

It has been argued that Kant's all-consuming efforts to place autonomy at the center of philosophy have had, in the long-run, the unintended effect of leading to the widespread discrediting of philosophy and of undermining the notion of autonomy itself. The result of this 'Copernican revolution' has seemed to many commentators the de-centring, if not the self-destruction, of the autonomous self. In this major reinterpretation of Kant and the post-Kantian response to his critical philosophy, Karl Ameriks argues that such a (...) view of Kant rests on a series of misconceptions. By providing the first systematic study of the underlying structure of the reaction to Kant's critical philosophy in the writings of Reinhold, Fichte and Hegel, Karl Ameriks challenges the presumptions that dominate popular approaches to the concept of freedom, and to the interpretation of the relation between the Enlightenment, Kant and post-Kantian thought. (shrink)

In 1969 Jasia Reichardt curated an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London called Play Orbit. Although it has not achieved the landmark status of Reichardt's Cybernetic Serendipity, which was presented in London a year earlier, it caught the intellectual and artistic mood of a newly emergent constituency of (largely British) artists who had benefited from a post-war revision of art education and a de-centring of intellectual energy away from the economic capitals. It may be that Play Orbit (...) will eventually be regarded in much the same way as Cybernetic Serendipity that is, as a significant footnote in the history of contemporary art. By turning artists' attention to toys through this project, the categories of painting and sculpture dissolved and the Modernist imperative of the enduring observation that had informed the arts and letters in a centred intellectual regime was seen for what it was: a colonial anachronism. The unapologetic relativism of play and the provisional truths of games coalesced in Play Orbit as confrontations to the essentialist materialism of the prevailing orthodoxy. In this sense Play Orbit, and its extensive catalogue of images and essays, foreshadowed not only the critical style that followed the influence of Continental Theory in the mid 1970s but also anticipated the agenda of virtually all that has been written about games in the last decade. For all its apparent whimsy and reification of idiosyncrasy, Play Orbit can now be seen as, above all, a constructively political intervention levered through the arts. For example, one of the more enduring and least contested impacts of the intellectual revisions of the last thirty years that Play Orbit foreshadowed is evident in the practice of history not least the practice of history as a game to be played. This paper elaborates on these assertions and asks how games and games theory might be connected with their own political and intellectual history, and how contemporary artists who choose to benefit from the licence that play endows might situate their work within what might be called Art Ludistory: a political play on the history of play. (shrink)

Esse texto propõe a hipótese da “máquina s’imaginante” como sendo o constructo fundamental da teoria da imaginação de Spinoza e pretende justificar certa leitura que permita tal denominação. Para tanto, parte-se da noção de _contemplari externè_ para, em seguida, explanar a noção interpretativa de _simul desconcertante_, a qual desempenha importante papel a fim de forjar a noção de _centramento em si_, noção que permite captar os efeitos de interioridade e exterioridade relativas ao indivíduo humano e cujo engendramento faz a natureza (...) das coisas ser apreendida teleologicamente. A partir do _centramento em si _são examinadas e interpretadas categorias relevantes da imaginação, sendo a mais importante delas a _concatenatio_. Por fim, são indicados alguns desdobramentos da hipótese de leitura proposta. (shrink)

A vernacular fifteenth-century sermon tells us, in order to warn of the threats to spiritual welfare posed by dance, that cyclic motion and centering of sensory impressions – amongst them intimate conversation – are essential elements of dance. When blending out the parenesis, implicit poetics of medieval dance can be distilled from that sermon. The way how these essential elements of dance are used for generating disruptions within literary plots will be demonstrated in three literary texts dating from the thirteenth (...) to the fifteenth century: Disruptions in connection with dance occur when contrary concepts of motion clash with each other, for example the linearity of the chivalrous way through the Other World with the cyclicity of round dances. ‚Der Württemberger‘, however, collides two contrary concepts of time which can be paraphrased as spatial metaphors, namely the linearity of earthly life which collides with the cyclicity of eternal damnation, a collision symbolized by the expulsion of life out of the dance of the death. Finally in ‚Ritter Sociabilis‘, dance generates a virtual space which subverts the courtly society. The protagonists of all these texts differently manage to resolve disruptions, namely by redemption, by repentance, or by continuing disruptions which they have caused themselves. (shrink)

Amie Thomasson's Norms and Necessity offers a non-factualist theory of the language of metaphysical necessity, centering on the idea that statements of necessity express semantic norms. This article identifies a potential problem for the view by distinguishing two kinds of conditional necessity, investigates a solution derived from a well-known parallel pair of conditional necessities in deontic logic, but finds it is not up to the job. The last part of the paper suggests a different route, largely in keeping with the (...) underlying ideas behind Thomasson's approach. (shrink)

O presente artigo pretende dar sentido à afirmação feita, mais do que uma vez, por Paul Ricoeur, de que a sua filosofia poderia ser vista como um kantismo pós-hege-liano. Nesse contexto, o artigo procura abordar o pensar ricoeuriano mostrando de que modo ele se instaura e se desenvolve no horizonte kantiano de uma filosofia dos limites do saber. Essa abordagem é desenvolvida em dois momentos. O primeiro dirige-se à leitura que Paul Ricoeur faz da Crítica da Razão Pura de Kant. (...) O segundo centrar-se-à em três momentos fulcrais da Filosofia de Paul Ricoeur - a definição do seu projecto Filosofia da Vontade, a figura própria da sua Hermenêutica e o filosofema inovação semântica - evidenciando em cada um deles a ressonância da herança kantiana. /// Aim of this article is to to explore the meaning of Paul Ricoeur's persistent characterization of his own work as a post-Hegelian Kantism. In view of this end, the article demonstrates that Ricoeur's thinking is at once rooted and developed within the horizon of Kant's critical philosophy of limits in regard to knowledge. This can be shown by first considering Ricoeur's reading of the first Critique, and then centering on three decisive moments of Ricoeur's philosophy, to wit, the formulation of the project developed in the Philosophy of Will, the shape of his theory of hermeneutics, and his notion of semantic innovation that can be conceived as a philosophema. The Kantian influence can be seen to resonate in all three instances. (shrink)

Resumo A cultura ocidental, erigida sob a égide da ontologia grega, historicamente relegou o outro em sua alteridade ao esquecimento, numa supremacia do ser que justificou as cruzadas, a colonização, a escravidão, os regimes totalitários como o fascismo e o nazismo, entre outros. Este artigo tem como objetivo apresentar as perspectivas do professor Joel Birman e do filósofo Emmanuel Lévinas sobre a importância da construção de um novo paradigma na cultura ocidental. Paradigma que reconheça a alteridade, numa abertura inédita do (...) eu , que supere a lógica egocêntrica do ser . A abordagem de Birman consiste na leitura feita, a partir da psicanálise, das causas e consequências da cultura do narcisismo, que norteia a sociedade do espetáculo na pós-modernidade. Essa cultura, ao centrar-se no eu , faz do outro objeto para suas satisfações egoístas. Já a abordagem de Lévinas é uma crítica filosófica ao primado da ontologia, que desde sua origem na Grécia antiga desconsiderou o outro, numa negação violenta da alteridade. A proposta levinasiana é a de que a ética precede a ontologia, ou seja, a ética como filosofia primeira deve nortear a relação entre os homens, num reconhecimento do outro em sua alteridade. Não se pretende neste breve trabalho analisar de forma minuciosa as concepções de Birman e de Lévinas, mas apontar que, apesar das diferenças de abordagem, ambos se aproximam no que tange à questão da alteridade na cultura ocidental. Palavras-chave: Alteridade; Paradigma; Eu; Narcisismo; Ontologia.The Western Culture based on the aegis of the Greek ontology, has historically relegated the other in his alterity to the forgetfulness, in supremacy of the Being who justified the crusades, the colonization, the slavery, the totalitarian regimes like the Fascism and the Nazism, among others. It is in this perspective that this article has as objective to present the perspectives of the teacher Joel Birman and of the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas on the importance of constructing a new paradigm in the western culture that recognizes the alterity. This paradigm which recognizes the alterity of other is an unpublished opening of myself , who surpasses the egocentric logic of the Being. The approach of Birman consists of reading, from the psychoanalysis, of the causes and consequences of the narcissism culture, that leads society of spectacles in the post-modernity, which while be centering in myself, it does from another object for his selfish satisfactions. The approach of Lévinas is already a philosophical criticism on the primacy of the ontology, which from his origin in ancient Greece, disregarded other in a negation of the alterity in a violent form. The proposal Levinasiana is the one that the ethics precedes the ontology, in other words, the ethics as first philosophy must lead the relation between the men, in recognition of other in his alterity. It is important to find out that it's not intention of this short work to analyze in details the conceptions of Birman neither of Lévinas, but to highlight the similarities between their thought in spite of the differences between their approaches regarding to the question of the alterity in the western culture. Key words: Alterity; Paradigm; Narcissism; Ontology. (shrink)

In this paper the influence of John Duns Scotus’s thought in Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition is outlined, centering the analysis in the concepts of “univocal being” and “intrinsic mode”. The novelty of this work lies on its effort to accurately locate the thesis of the univocity of being and the theory of intrinsic mode that goes along with it in the work of Duns Scotus. Subsequently, an attempt is made to determine the horizon of appropriation and the conceptual displacement (...) operated by Gilles Deleuze in his own work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 122-123 [Access article in PDF] Andreas Kamp. Philosophiehistorie als Rezeptionsgeschichte. Die Reaktion auf Aristoteles' De Anima-Noetik. Der frühe Hellenismus. Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 2001. Pp. viii + 315. Cloth, $82.00. This book is the first installment of an extraordinarily ambitious project. The plan is to investigate the reception of Aristotle's conception of the intellect, set out in De Anima 3.4-5, in (...) the subsequent history of philosophy, from Theophrastus to the present.The current volume deals with the natural starting-point for this project, philosophy in the early Hellenistic period, centering on Theophrastus and his tenure as head of the Peripatos, the school that Aristotle founded.Kamp begins with an engaging, somewhat lengthy introduction, which remains curiously remote from what one might expect it to concentrate on, namely Aristotle's conception of the intellect. Apart from presenting an outline of the reception of Aristotle's philosophical work in general from Theophrastus to Sigmund Freud, the introduction includes only one short paragraph specifically on the topic of the intellect (12). This paragraph, which comes closest to revealing Kamp's reason for focusing, of all things, on Aristotle's discussion of the intellect in De Anima3.4-5, simply makes two unsubstantiated claims. First, Kamp claims that the conception of the intellect, as presented in those chapters, is at the center of the Aristotelian system; and secondly, that this is, of all Aristotelian and perhaps all philosophical theories, the one that received the highest level of attention in the subsequent history of philosophy. The reader might be content to wait and let the second claim be borne out, in the present volume and beyond; but the first claim—concerning the centrality of the intellect, and of De Anima3.4-5, to Aristotle's thought—should at least have received some specification and illustration.The central part of the book, and philosophically by far the most interesting, concerns Theophrastus. Kamp begins with an extensive discussion of the political, social, and economic circumstances of Theophrastus's biography and of the history of the Peripatos. He then offers a reconstruction of Theophrastus's remarks on the nature of the intellect in the fifth book of his Physics. This reconstructive effort is based on a number of fragments [End Page 122] preserved in Themistius's De Anima paraphrase (written at about 350ad) and in Priscianus Lydus's Metaphrasis in Theophrastum (about 530ad). Kamp's discussion of these fragments is well informed, judicious, and illuminating throughout.It may be in order, though, to indicate one misgiving. One of the problems that Theophrastus addresses is that it might appear as if thinking were a matter of the intellect being changed by intelligibles, much as perceiving is, or may appear to be, a matter of sense being changed by sensibles. (If so, the question arises as to what the principle of thought is, the intellect itself or the intelligibles.) Kamp reconstructs the train of thought as follows (124-5).(1) The intellect stands to intelligibles the way sense stands to sensibles (intellect-sense analogy).(2) Sense is changed by sensibles.Therefore, the intellect is changed by intelligibles.Kamp proceeds to suggest (126) that Theophrastus attempted to avoid the conclusion by denying the first premise. According to Kamp, Theophrastus rejected the intellect-sense analogy by drawing attention to significant differences between (the activity of) the intellect and sense perception, one of these being that the intellect (in thinking) is changed only in a special sense, namely inasmuch as it undergoes a transition to activity, energeia. Kamp is right that the notion of a special kind of change that consists in a transition to activity is Aristotelian; it is presented in considerable detail in De Anima2.5 (417b2-16). But it would surely be puzzling if Theophrastus thought that one significant difference between (the activity of) the intellect and sense perception was that the intellect (in thinking) was changed in a special sense (whereas sense perception, to complete the... (shrink)

The proliferation of diasporas has influenced the nature of internationalization in many higher education (HE) systems and institutions, especially in terms of academic and student mobility/migration. Through a systematic review of the academic literature, I critically analyze the widespread uses of and approaches to ‘diaspora’ in HE research and its relationship to internationalization. I identify two major areas of studies and corresponding approaches to diaspora: one which frames diaspora as human capital and focusses on the role of the state; and (...) the other which frames diaspora as marginalized other and social construct. I argue that ‘diaspora’ in HE studies tends to be ambiguous, under-defined, under-theorized, and fragmented. I further argue that it is loosely connected to internationalization discourses, despite its clear connections. I posit that this is because ‘internationalization’ is associated with humanitarianism, cosmopolitanism, global citizenship and the de-centering of states, nations, ethnicities, religions, and particularistic identities. Diaspora is often associated with these latter categories and thus, is shunned. I conclude by suggesting that the blending of (often conflictual) ideas, intentions, values and identities is precisely what diaspora engages in and that the conditions of our increasingly mobile and (inter)connected world necessitate a (re)thinking of diaspora in HE scholarship. (shrink)

This paper introduces a framework for direct surface composition by online update. The surface string is interpreted as is, with each morpheme in turn updating the input state of information and attention. A formal representation language, Logic of Centering, is defined and some crosslinguistic constraints on lexical meanings and compositional operations are formulated.

Identity is a contemporary buzzword in education, referencing the individual and the social, the personal and the political, self and other. Following Maggie MacLure, we can think of identity in terms of teachers ‘arguing for themselves’, or giving an account of themselves. Yet in the wake of poststructuralism's radical de‐centering of the subject and its highlighting of a number of impediments to agency, we might well ask how teachers are to give an account of themselves? This paper offers reading (...) of identity that recognizes its paradoxical aspects, yet also contains scope for ethical agency. The latter is explored via a ‘diagram’ that utilizes Foucault's four axes of ethics to elaborate a framework for thinking about teacher identity as ethical self‐formation and for engaging in what I refer to here as ‘identity work’. This approach to thinking about teacher identity recognizes our discursive determination, yet also offers scope for recognizing and building ethical agency. (shrink)

"An eloquent work. Somer Brodribb not only gives us a feminist critique of postmodernism with its masculinist predeterminants in existentialism, its Freudian footholdings and its Sadean values, but in the very form and texture of the critique, she literally creates new discourse in feminist theory. Brodribb has transcended not only postmodernism but its requirement that we speak in its voice even when criticizing it. She creates a language that is at once poetic and powerfully analytical. Her insistent and compelling radical (...) critique refuses essentialism-from both masculinist thinkers and their women followers. She demystifies postmodernism to reveal that it and its antecedents represent yet another mundane version of patriarchal politics. Ultimately Brodribb returns us to feminist theory with the message that we must refuse to be derivative and continue to originate theory and politics from the condition of women under male domination." -Kathleen Barry, author of Female Sexual Slavery An iconoclastic work brilliantly undertaken . . . Nothing Mat(T)ers magnificently shows that postmodernism is the cultural capital of late patriarchy. It is the art of self- display, the conceit of masculine self and the science of reproductive and genetic engineering in an ecstatic Nietzschean cycle of statis." -Andre Michel Nothing Mat(T)ers encapsulates in its title the valuelessness of the current academic fad of postmodernism. Somer Brodribb has written a brave and witty book demolishing the gods and goddesses of postmodernism by deconstructing their method and de-centering their subjects and, in the process, has deconstructed deconstructionism and decentered decentering! This is a long-awaited and much-needed book from a tough- minded, embodied, and unflinching scholar." -Janice Raymond. (shrink)

Ever since Plato, a tragic conception of the human self has been the point de depart of moral and political philosophy: the I and the we belong to one another yet oppose each other. Ancients such as Aristotle contended that the we is ontologically prior and moderns such as Hobbes that the I is ontologically prior. I make the case that Jesus Christ realised an ontology which collapses this dichotomy: the human self is neither I nor we, but fundamentally I-we. (...) I demonstrate that this is an ontology of gift-dynamics, made explicit in the mythical complex of the cult centring on Jesus Christ, and engraved unto this cult's heart through ritual. (shrink)

This paper discusses the extent to which governmentality provides a critical visibility of the economy beyond its liberal imaginary. It argues that Foucault’s conceptual and historical understanding of liberal governmentality has two traits that encumber a de-centering of the economy from a Foucauldian perspective. The first obstacle results from a persistent asymmetry of the concept of governmentality as it remains solely geared towards replacing the monolithic account of the state. Governmentality is therefore in danger of rendering the economic invisible instead (...) of advancing an analytics of power appropriate to the specificity of this field. The second impediment relates to how Foucault reads the invisibility of the economy asserted in liberal discourse. While Foucault emphasizes how the “invisible hand” imparts a critical limitation towards the sovereign hubris of total sight, the paper unearths a more complex politics of truth tied to the invisible economy. Drawing on selected historical material, the papers shows that the liberal invisibility of the economy rather functions as a prohibitive barrier towards developing novel and critical visibilities of the economy. A Foucauldian perspective on economy, the paper concludes, benefits from piercing through this double invisibility of the economy. (shrink)

The culture of authenticity -- The enchanted garden -- The modern worldview -- Romanticism and the ideal of authenticity -- The heart of darkness -- De-centering the subject -- Story-shaped selves -- Authenticity in context.

Humanism is charged with fostering a harmful anthropocentrism that has led to the exploitation of non-human beings and the environment. Posthumanist and transhumanist ideas prominently aim at rethinking our self-understanding and human-nature relations. Yet these approaches turn out to be flawed when it comes to addressing the challenges of the “age of the humanity”, the Anthropocene. Whereas posthumanism fails in acknowledging the exceptional role of human beings with regard to political agency and responsibility, transhumanism overemphasizes human capabilities of controlling nature (...) and only deepens the human-nature dualism. Therefore, a critical and humble version of humanism is suggested as a viable alternative. Drawing on pragmatist thinkers William James and F.C.S. Schiller, a resource for de-centering the human being is provided that critically reflects our role in the larger ecosystem and underlines human potentials as well as human responsibilities. (shrink)

This paper contends that work in business ethics participates in two key aspects of the broad philosophical and aesthetic movement known as postmodernism. First, Iike postmodernists generally, business ethicists reject the “grand narratives” of historical and conceptual justification, especially the narratives embodied in Marxism and Mitton Friedman’s vision of unfettered capitalism. Second, both in the methods and content of their work, business ethicists share postmodernism’s “de-centering” of perspective and discovery of “otherness,” “difference” and marginality as valid modes of approach to (...) experience and moral decision. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 152–154 Levi R. Bryant. The Democracy of Objects . Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. 2011. 316 pp. | ISBN 9781607852049. | $23.99 For two decades post-anarchism has adopted an epistemological point of departure for its critique of the representative ontologies of classical anarchism. This critique focused on the classical anarchist conceptualization of power as a unitary phenomenon that operated unidirectionally to repress an otherwise creative and benign human essence. Andrew Koch may have inaugurated this trend in (...) 1993 when he wrote his influential paper entitled “Post-structuralism and the Epistemological Basis of Anarchism.” Koch’s paper certainly laid some of the important groundwork for post-anarchism’s continual subsumption of ontology beneath the a priori of an epistemological orientation, and his work continues to be cited as an early and important venture into post-anarchist philosophy. The problem is that Koch could not conceive of an anti-essentialist and autonomous ontological system, one not subject to regulation or representation by the human mind. Consequently, he was forced to assert a subjectivist claims-making ego as the foundation of a post-structuralist anarchist politics. Saul Newman was indebted to this heritage insofar as he also posited the ego (extrapolated from the writings of Max Stirner) and the subject (extrapolated from Jacques Lacan’s oeuvre ) as the paradoxical ‘outside’ to power and representation. Todd May fell into a similar trap in his book The Political Philosophy of Post-structuralist Anarchism when he wrote that “[m]etaphysics [...] partakes of the normativity inhabiting the epistemology that provides its foundations.” 1 Whereas Newman’s approach did not necessarily foreclose the possibility of metaphysics—at least to the extent that he began with the subject of the Lacanian tradition (wherein the subject is believed to be radically split between thinking and being)—May completely foreclosed the possibility of any escape from the reign of the epistemological. There laid the impasse of yesterday’s post-anarchism. This impasse at the heart of the project of post-anarchism has forced Koch, Newman, May, and many others, to come to similar conclusions about the place of ontology in post-anarchist scholarship. The post-anarchists have all formulated a response strikingly similar to Koch’s argument that any representative ontology ought to be dismantled and dethroned in favour of “a conceptualization of knowledge that is contingent on a plurality of internally consistent episteme .” 2 By dismissing all ontologies as suspiciously representative and as incessantly harbouring a dangerous form of essentialism, post-anarchists have overlooked the privilege that they have placed on the human subject, language, and discourse, at the expense of the democracy that the human subject shares with other animals, objects, and beings in the world. This epistemological characterization of post-anarchism has held sway for far too long. It is not by chance that post-anarchism, as a concept, was first formulated by Hakim Bey as an “ontological anarchism,” 3 and subsequently repressed by the canon of post-anarchist authors. Perhaps Bey’s ontological anarchism also lacked the ‘rigour’ required of today’s scholarly audience and for these two reasons (at least) he has received very little credit for his inaugurating efforts into post-anarchism. In any case, I want to challenge this reluctance and revive the roots of post-anarchism. Levi Bryant gives us a reason to believe that we can achieve the promise of Bey’s ontological anarchism without sacrificing the scholarly standard of rigour. Levi Bryant’s newest open-access book, The Democracy of Objects , is a tour de force . His book challenges post-anarchists to take their radical critique of representation a step further by questioning the “hegemony that epistemology currently enjoys in philosophy.” Bryant maintains that post-structuralism, and radical anti-humanisms, only appear to reject the subject as the locus of political agency. Their rejection is actually more of a disavowal, a replacement of the human subject with the equally human order of language or discourse. What post-structuralism attempts to elucidate is the manner in which the subject is colonized by the Other of language, discourse and social relations. What here appears as a movement away from the determining subject of humanism and existentialism is only replaced with the determining apparatuses of structures as they are conceived by astute analysts of political culture. Post-structuralism thus re-enters the anthropocentric discourse to the extent that the cultural analyst believes himself capable of conceiving the determinative structures of society. In contradistinction to the claims of post-structuralism and post-anarchism, the role of the ontologist is not to suture the gap between epistemology and the real but to de-suture it, as Bryant puts it: “[o]ntology does not tell us what objects exist, but that objects exist, that they are generative mechanisms.” Above all else, the role of ontology, for post-anarchists, ought to be a real de-centering of the subject in relation to other objects in the non-human world such that the subject becomes conceived as one object among others within a living democracy of equality. This inevitably leads to the conclusion that objects exist whether or not the subject or analyst is there to represent them: they represent themselves and are autonomous from our dictation, just as each object finds its autonomy in relation to other objects. Ontology must now be distinguished from representation. We must shift the terms of the debate and interrogate the hegemony that epistemology has been afforded within post-anarchist philosophy. At least two possibilities are now permitted. On the one hand, one could intervene into the reigning mode of philosophy, namely epistemology, by latching onto concepts from meta-ethical philosophy. Meta-ethics allows one to easily separate the ontological from the epistemological and to answer very particular questions about each in order to formulate an overarching meta-ethical position. 4 Post-anarchism is particularly adept at this task because of its resounding ability to frame itself as an ethical political philosophy in relation to the strategic political philosophy of classical Marxism. On the other hand, Bryant argues that “[p]erhaps the best way to defeat [the privilege currently held by epistemology] is to shift the terms of debate.” Shifting the terms of debate is also something that post-anarchists have been very good at doing. Thus, instead of asking the question ‘how do representative ontological systems harbour concealed epistemological orientations toward the political?’ one might ask ‘ do epistemological orientations toward the political always harbour representative and subject-centred ontological systems?” The genius of Bryant’s book rests in its ability to convincingly argue for the radical autonomy of being and of objects. This claim speaks to some of the most compelling theories of the political in anarchist and marxist political philosophy (for instance, hegemony, representation, democracy, and so on) and it re-stages the political drama of our times across a much wider terrain. The fallacy of strategic political philosophy in the Marxist tradition, as Todd May quite correctly points out, is that it remains committed to a concept of power that is unitary in its analysis, unidirectional in its influence, and utterly repressive in its effect. Similarly, Bryant’s ontology allows one to argue that there is a fallacy that occurs “whenever one type of entity is treated as the ground or explains all other entities.” Whereas May’s post-structuralist anarchism moved away from the fallacy of the unitary analysis of power, whereby subjects are constituted by the influence of a single site of power, it nonetheless remained committed to a tactical political philosophy which is monarchical in the final analysis . It remains monarchical to the extent that the human world, the world of epistemology, is treated as the yardstick of democracy. Bryant’s argument is quite instructive: “[w]hat we thus get is not a democracy of objects or actants where all objects are on equal ontological footing [...] but instead a monarchy of the human in relation to all other beings.” The real fallacy is thus not against strategic political philosophy but philosophy itself and the way it has played out over so many centuries. “The epistemic fallacy,” writes Bryant, “consists in the thesis that proper ontological questions can be fully transposed into epistemological questions.” The point that Bryant is making relates to the way ontology is today always reduced to an epistemology and thereby loses its significance as a philosophical question. This book should be applauded for its novelty and its thesis ought to be taken seriously by post-anarchists today. Because of this book, and the attendant post-continental movement that is being called ‘speculative realism,’ we can now distinguish three stages in the life of post-anarchism. First, we can deduce what Süreyya Evren has described as its ‘introductory period.’ The introductory period of post-anarchism is defined by its inability to side-step the ontological problem in the literature of classical anarchism. During this period, post-anarchism needed to distinguish itself from classical anarchism while nonetheless remaining committed to its ethical project. The second period overcomes the problem of the separation of post-anarchism from classical anarchism by re-reading the classical tradition as essentially post-anarchistic. Some of the critiques of post-anarchism—especially that from Cohn & Wilbur 5 —are included into this period insofar as post-anarchism, for them, was always already anarchism. Whereas the first and second phases have included only explicitly anarchist literature under their rubric of worthwhile investigation, in the third period this no longer holds true. To be certain, the second period permitted the incorporation of post-structuralist literature into post-anarchist discussions (but always with a certain amount of reservation). This third period, the one that is to come—the one that is already here if only we would heed its call—will not take such care with attempts at identification or canonization. Indeed, post-anarchism is already here, like a seed beneath the snow, waiting to be discovered. Levi Bryant teaches us that the third period is already here: and yet where is it? NOTES 1) Todd May. The Political Philosophy of Post-Structuralist Anarchism . University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. 1997. 2. 2) Andrew Koch. “Post-structuralism and the Epistemological Basis of Anarchism” [1993] in Post-Anarchism: A Reader . Eds. Duane Rousselle & Sureyyya Evren. London: Pluto Press. 2011. pp. 23-40. 3) Bey, Hakim. “ Post-Anarchism Anarchy .” 1987. 4) I have attempted to do this in my paper on Bataille’s post-anarchism; see Duane Rousselle. “Georges Bataille’s Post-anarchism.” Journal of Political Ideologies . 17(3): in press. 5) Jesse Cohn & Shawn Wilbur. “ What’s Wrong with Post-anarchism? ” 2010. (shrink)

While painted wooden icons of the Nursing Virgin were relatively common in fifteenth-century Ethiopia, only one miniature of the motif of the time has come to light. This image, bound into a later manuscript of the Miracles of Mary, is painted in a decidedly abstract style, comparable to other representations of the Virgin in fifteenth-century Ethiopian book illustration. Relying on Peirce’s distinction between index and icon, this article considers how such abstract representations might have been meant to evoke the divine (...) presence of Mary as a spiritual trace of the artist’s and the audience’s devotional practices, rather than as a potentially miracle-working depiction of her corporeal presence based on figural likeness, as was the case with painted wooden panels. Incorporating references to Ethiopian and Western theorists of modernity, the essay further proposes to view the multiple and interlocking mirror effects in book art as instances of second-order observation, in which, for example, the Virgin sees herself depicted in a book of her miracles, the compilation of which she commissioned and aided; the scribe and artist is featured in one of the miracles he himself is writing and illustrating; and the donor is depicted gazing at the viewer. Whether enabling skeptical distance or a more fully immersive spiritual experience undisturbed by attempts to capture corporeal likeness, or both, this essay proposes to analyze the politics and theology of abstraction in fifteenth-century Ethiopian book art by centering on a rare depiction of the Nursing Virgin. (shrink)