This collection of specially written papers on F. H. Bradley's philosophy makes accessible the writings of one of England's greatest philosophers. The contributors, finding in Bradley's writings arguments that extend topics currently at the forefront of philosophical thought, aim to show the relevance of Bradley's work to contemporary issues in logic, metaphysics, and moral and political philosophy.

It is with much sadness that we record the death of Professor Anthony Manser on 19 January, 1995. He had recently agreed to be President of the Bradley Society.

Books reviewed in this essay: Robert Arrington and Hans‐Johann Glock (eds), Wittgenstein & Quine John Koethe, The Continuity of Wittgenstein’s Thought P.M.S. Hacker, Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth‐Century Analytic Philosophy Hans Sluga and David G. Stern (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein Marie McGinn, Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations.

A draft copy of this article, dated 13th February 1988, was given by Tony Manser in 1989 to Stewart Candlish, who has edited it for publication in Bradley Studies in the hope that the finished result will not only be of value to students of Bradley and Russell but also stand as a worthy memorial to a valued colleague and friend. Editing has been confined to a minimum, such as correcting errors in punctuation, quotation, referencing and typography; no attempt (...) has been made to alter the substance of any of the original version. The article is published with the kind permission of Jutta Manser. (shrink)

Rousseau seldom gets a mention as a philosopher in the conventional histories; if he appears at all it is in connection with that strange and rather suspect discipline ‘political philosophy’. Even then there is a tendency to look upon him as an unsystematic thinker, as a ‘ philosophy ’ rather than as a genuine philosopher. His ideas are held to be interesting, but the connections between them are thought to be emotional rather than logical. Again, Émile is read by students (...) of education, but not by those studying philosophy. This is both because the ‘philosophy of education’ is thought not to be of great importance and again because of Rousseau's lack of logical rigour. Now it is true that Rousseau himself was an emotional figure, and from reading his Confessions it is easy to get the idea that there is no point in looking for interesting philosophical points in his works. (shrink)

In his Philosophical Investigations , Wittgenstein introduces the notion of a ‘family resemblance’ to deal with certain problems. Talking of games and what they seem to have in common, he points out that there are no common features in virtue of which we call all games ‘games’. Instead there are, he claims, many different similarities and relationships; he says ‘we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail’. He then goes on to (...) add: ‘I can think of no better expression to characterise these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way,—And I shall say: “games form a family”.’ Wittgenstein also instances numbers as forming a ‘family’ in the same manner. This notion of a ‘family resemblance’ has come to be used by many philosophers to deal with a range of situations where there appears to be a difficulty in finding a single definite common property and yet there exists a desire to call some set of things by the same name. I myself have succumbed to this temptation. Perhaps the widest claim for the use of this device is that made by Mr Bambrough in an article entitled ‘Universals and Family Resemblances’ . This begins with the words ‘I believe that Wittgenstein solved what is known as “the problem of universals”’. (shrink)

This book collects new studies of the work of F. H. Bradley, a leading British philosopher of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and one of the key figures in the emergence of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Well-known contributors from Britain, North America, and Australia focus on Bradley's views on truth, knowledge, and reality. These essays contribute to the current re-evaluation of Bradley, showing that his work not only was crucial to the development of twentieth-century philosophy, but illuminates contemporary debates (...) in metaphysics, logic, and epistemology. (shrink)

In the early years of this century the debate as to the nature of judgment was a central issue dividing British philosophers. What a philosopher said about judgment was not independent of what he said about perception, the distinction between the a priori and empirical, the distinction between external and internal relations, the nature of inference, truth, universals, language, the reality of the self and so on.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cicero the Advocate, and: The Roman World of Cicero's De OratoreAnthony CorbeillJonathan Powell and Jeremy Paterson, eds. Cicero the Advocate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. xii + 448 pp. Cloth, $150.Elaine Fantham. The Roman World of Cicero's De Oratore. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. x + 354 pp. Cloth, $120.Emphasis falls emphatically on "advocate" in the fine Powell and Paterson collection. Each essay concentrates on the forensic speeches (...) and the various strategies that Cicero employs "to ensure that the person he represents is acquitted or that the person he is prosecuting is found guilty" (from the dust jacket, the only place advocacy is defined). Well-organized and unusually coherent (given the genre), all of Cicero the Advocate can be read with profit.The book has three parts: an "editorial introduction," "themes," and "case studies." The concise and accurate introduction (1–57) provides a context for understanding Roman forensic oratory. Topics include a helpful comparison between Greek, Roman, and modern expectations; the mechanics of the Roman courts; the role of rhetorical theory in the construction of Cicero's orations; and, [End Page 144] finally, a review of the possible relationship between Cicero's published and original speeches. Indeed, the coverage is so comprehensive that it occasionally overlaps unnecessarily with the treatment of individual contributors (e.g., Lintott, Burnand, Laws).Needless polemics, however, tend to mar the introduction's tone. In advocating advocacy, the editors adopt a Ciceronian rhetoric of deniability, attacking a position that a subsequent statement grudgingly acknowledges. For example, the editors note early on: "Reading the work of some recent scholars [one relevant eighteen-page essay is cited], one might think that a Roman law court was a place in which all kinds of considerations, personal, social, or political, mattered more than the legal and factual points that the court was supposed to be deciding" (3). Before one can ponder this assessment of recent scholarship on Cicero (characteristic of "the individualistic 1980s" [3, n. 11]), the next paragraph begins, "Nobody, of course [my emphasis], denies that the outcome of a trial—in any legal system—can sometimes be affected by extraneous (especially political) issues." So perhaps these "recent scholars" are worth reading after all; indeed, the study of the cultural background that contributes to persuasion certainly warrants consideration in a book on advocacy. Fortunately, the individual contributions that follow adopt a more conciliatory tone.The range and number of essays preclude active engagement, so in what follows I will summarize key issues. After a survey of "Legal Procedure in Cicero's Time" (61–78) by Andrew Lintott, Jeremy Paterson's "Self-Reference in Cicero's Forensic Speeches" (79–95) assesses the oratorical function of self-praise. Attributing this practice to the original role of the patronus (80), Paterson identifies the advertisement of wealth and status as an important element of Roman advocacy, necessarily changing in tone for Cicero as his own status increases. Paterson's fine analysis, however, would need to change if applied to non-forensic speeches, in which Ciceronian self-praise is particularly pronounced. This surely would affect his conclusion that "Cicero never forgot what he was about, which was to win the case for his client" (95). In the dramatically titled "A Volscian Mafia? Cicero and his Italian Clients in the Forensic Speeches" (97–116; "mafia" refers simply to "local networks of obligations and contacts," 114), Kathryn Lomas surveys the role of Italian communities in five of Cicero's works (Pro Roscio Amerino, Pro Cluentio, Pro Caecina, Pro Caelio, Pro Plancio) to try to discover why there is a "relatively low level of visibility" of Italians even in those cases in which such connections are vital (98). The Italians defended by Cicero fall into two categories: municipals who, like Cicero, seek prominence in Rome (Caelius, Plancius), and the wealthy who have key connections within the capital but do not seek political office in Rome (Roscius, Cluentius, Oppianicus). Lomas convincingly demonstrates that Cicero defends clients from regions where he could hope for political support (especially in southern Latium). In "Reading Cicero's Narratives" (117–46), D. S. Levene employs a reader-response approach to the narrationes of three speeches (Pro Roscio... (shrink)

A decade on from its founding, it is the right time to take stock and consider the manner of Performance Philosophy’s constitution and its projection into and onto the world. There are questions about how it narrates itself, both inwardly to its network (though the global reach of Performance Philosophy suggests that ‘inward’ is not the right word here) and outwardly towards interlocutors nominally outside the network. One challenge concerns the “performative materialisation” of Performance Philosophy’s many practitioners. This can (...) be unpacked with a few questions: Who witnesses events? Who intervenes materially? Who contributes to the network? Whose collaboration increases social capital? Who evaluates practitioners’ self-management? Other questions are possible. This essay considers some of these questions. (shrink)

In ‘Semantic Foundations for the Logic of Preference’ (Rescher, ed.,The Logic of Decision and Action, University Press, Pittsburgh, 1967), Nicholas Rescher claims that, on the semantics developed in that paper, a certain principle - call it ‘Q’ turns out to be ‘unacceptable’. I argue, however, that, given certain assumptions that Rescher invokes in that same paper,Q can in fact be shown to be a ‘preference-tautology’, and henceQ should be classified as ‘acceptable’ on Rescher's theory.

Lane, K. A., Banaji, M. R., Nosek, B. A., & Greenwald, A. G. (2007). Understanding and using the Implicit Association Test: IV. What we know (so far) (Pp. 59–102). In B. Wittenbrink & N. S. Schwarz (Eds.). Implicit measures of attitudes: Procedures and controversies . New York: Guilford Press. PDF - 652KB ].

The Situationist International (1957-1972) was a small group of communist revolutionaries, originally organised out of the West European artistic avant-garde of the 1950s. The focus of my thesis is to explain how the Situationist International (SI) became a group able to exert a considerable influence on the ultra-left criticism that emerged during and in the wake of the May movement in France in 1968. My wager is that the pivotal period of the group is to be found between 1960 and (...) 1963, a period marked by the split of 1962. Often this is described as the transition of the group from being more concerned with art to being more concerned with politics, but as I will argue this definitional shorthand elides the significance of the Situationist critique of art, philosophy and politics. The two axes of my thesis are as follows. First, that the significant minority in the group which carried out the break of 1962, identified a homology between the earlier Situationist critique of art — embodied in the Situationist ‘hypothesis of the construction of situations’ — and Marx’s critique and supersession of the radical milieu of philosophy from which he emerged in the mid- 1840s. This homology was summarised in the expression of the Situationist project as the ‘supersession of art’ (dépassement de l’art). Secondly, this homology was practically embodied in the resolution of the debates over the role of art in the elaboration of the Situationist hypothesis, which had been ongoing since 1957. However, it was the SI’s encounter with the ultra-left group Socialisme ou Barbarie that would prove decisive. Via Guy Debord’s membership, the group was exposed to both the idea of a more general revolutionary criticism, but also ultimately what was identified as the insufficiently criticised ‘political militancy’ of this group. Indeed, in the ‘political alienation’ found in Socialisme ou Barbarie, a further homology was established between the alienation of the political and artistic avant-gardes. This identity would prove crucial to the further elaboration of the concept of ‘spectacle’. By way of an examination of the peculiar and enigmatic ‘Hamburg Theses’ of 1961, and the relationship between these ‘Theses’ and the Situationist criticism of art and politics worked out over the first five years of the group, I will argue that the break in 1962 should be conceived as one against politics as much as art (rather than just the latter, as it is more often represented). Additionally, I will outline how the SI, through the paradoxical reassertion of their artistic origins, attempted to synthesise their criticism of art with the recovery of the work of Marx beyond its mutilation as Marxism. Indeed, it was the synthesis of these critiques that enabled the considerable development of the concept of ‘spectacle’, opening the way to the unique influence the SI exerted in the re-emergence of a revolutionary movement at the end of the 1960s. (shrink)

Book reviewed: The Voices of Wittgenstein: The Vienna Circle– Ludwig Wittgenstein and Friedrich Waismann (Transcribed, Edited and with an Introduction by Gordon Baker; Translated by Gordon Baker, Michael Mackett, John Connolly and Vasilis Politis); Routledge; London and New York, 2003 (Pp xlviii + 558. German and English Texts on Facing Pages.).

It was in 1980 that John Searle first opened the door of his Chinese Room, purporting to show that the conscious mind cannot, in principle, work like a digital computer. Searle, who speaks no Chinese, stipulated that locked in this fictitious space he had a supply of different Chinese symbols, together with instructions for using them . When Chinese characters were passed in to him, he would consult the instructions and pass out more symbols. Neither input nor output would mean (...) anything to him, but it would look to the outsider as though he were answering in Chinese the questions in Chinese that were being passed into him. That, claimed Searle, is exactly the situation with the notorious Turing test for computer intelligence . Only from the outside does the computer appear understand the questions and answers. Inside, all is a formal shuffling of meaningless symbols. John Preston and Mark Bishop, ed., Views into the Chinese Room: New Essays on Searle and Artificial Intelligence, Oxford University Press, 2002, 410pp, ?50 ISBN 0198250576. (shrink)

Essays, articles, artworks, and documents taken from and inspired by the symposium on Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, which took place in March 2011 at The New School. Hailed by novelists, philosophers, artists, cinematographers, and designers, Cyclonopedia is a key work in the emerging domains of speculative realism and theory-fiction. The text has attracted a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary audience, provoking vital debate around the relationship between philosophy, geopolitics, geophysics, and art. At once a work of speculative theology, a (...) political samizdat, and a philosophic grimoire, Cyclonopedia is a Deleuzo-Lovecraftian middle-eastern Odyssey populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, and the corpses of ancient gods. Playing out the book's own theory of creativity - "a confusion in which no straight line can be traced or drawn between creator and created - original inauthenticity" - this multidimensional collection both faithfully interprets the text and realizes it as a loving, perforated host of fresh heresies. The volume includes an incisive contribution from the author explicating a key figure of the novel: the cyclone. CONTENTS: Robin Mackay, "A Brief History of Geotrauma" - McKenzie Wark, "An Inhuman Fiction of Forces" - Benjamin H. Bratton, "Root the Earth: On Peak Oil Apophenia" - Alisa Andrasek, "Dustism" - Zach Blas, "Queerness, Openness" - Melanie Doherty, "Non-Oedipal Networks and the Inorganic Unconscious" - Anthony Sciscione, "Symptomatic Horror: Lovecraft's 'The Colour Out of Space'" - Kate Marshall, "Cyclonopedia as Novel (a meditation on complicity as inauthenticity)" - Alexander R. Galloway, "What is a Hermeneutic Light?" - Eugene Thacker, "Black Infinity; or, Oil Discovers Humans" - Nicola Masciandaro, "Gourmandized in the Abattoir of Openness" - Dan Mellamphy & Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, "Phileas Fogg, or the Cyclonic Passepartout: On the Alchemical Elements of War" - Ben Woodard, "The Untimely (and Unshapely) Decomposition of Onto-Epistemological Solidity: Negarestani's Cyclonopedia as Metaphysics" - Ed Keller, "...Or, Speaking with the Alien, a Refrain..." - Lionel Maunz, "Receipt of Malice" - Öykü Tekten, "Symposium Photographs" - Reza Negarestani, "Notes on the Figure of the Cyclone". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Exception or EkklesiaSolution to a Girardian Dead EndAnthony Bartlett (bio)The 2023 Colloquium on Violence & Religion conference held in Paris on the centenary of Girard's birth had as its theme "The Future of Mimetic Theory," suggesting both taking stock and a forward perspective. Lucid historical moments do not coincide necessarily with centenaries, but the pressures of our present time are great and the prompt of a hundred-years anniversary (...) marks an opportune point to take a reckoning in a certain crucial aspect. This aspect—which presents at the moment as a kind of practical and theological impasse—has always been there, but the centennial inflection serves to lift it to deserved prominence as a central, if neglected, issue of the Girardian world-disclosure. I was struck at the conference by what seemed to me the profound inadequacy of a conversation that seemed to hasten on—by passivity of response—the very horror it discloses. The often-voiced complaint that Girard lacks the full academic recognition that is his due should perhaps be inverted as the absence of the theological breakthrough that will carry mimetic theory to the epochal value that its analysis truly calls for. [End Page 129]The collection of essays edited by Robert Hamerton-Kelly and entitled Politics and Apocalypse was published by Michigan State University Press in 2007, the same year Girard's final book came out in its initial French, Achever Clausewitz, later translated and published in English as Battling to the End (2008).1 In many ways this collection serves as prologue for the dramatic statement that Achever/Battling was to represent, and it provides essential context for that climactic book of Girard's career. The essays were actually papers delivered at a conference in Stanford, California, in 2004, a select affair as Hamerton-Kelly's preface tells it—a group of eight participants conversing over a period of six days to give the opportunity for a "leisurely" conversation. The conference took place against the feverish background of post-9/11 politics under the George W. Bush administration. Hamerton-Kelly quotes affirmingly from Peter Thiel's essay in the book, "The brute facts of September 11 demand a reexamination of the foundations of modern politics."2 As such, the papers probably represent a high-water mark of Girardian reflection on the possibility of politics in the light of mimetic crisis and analysis. Girard's conversations with Benoît Chantre, which were to become the content of Achever Clausewitz, were likely happening concurrently, or perhaps realized soon after the Stanford conference. Girard's own piece in the Stanford collection gives little hint of the Achever tone and content—it is in fact a tour de force exegesis of the gospels, displaying their unique clarity in revealing the foundational victim of culture—so the feeling must be that Girard was keeping his revelatory powder dry for his final book. While the other contributors were hotly preoccupied with questions of political theology, especially as developed by the twentieth-century theorists Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, Girard, with Chantre, focuses almost solely on the nineteenth-century theoretician of war, Clausewitz, and with that a version of biblical apocalyptic within the determining framework of mimetic theory. In effect, Girard sidesteps political theology and heads, as he sees it, to the heart of New Testament revelation. As may often be the case with Girard, attempts by collaborators to frame him within more standard theological and intellectual contexts were ever exceeded by the original thinker's more daring and provocative biblical vision.Carl Schmitt was a German jurist (and prominent member of the Nazi party) who argued the necessity of the friend–enemy distinction for the cohesion of a given society or state. In his paper for the conference, Wolfgang Palaver devotes considerable space to Schmitt, demonstrating his proximity in certain respects to mimetic theory. Palaver quotes a letter from Leo Strauss to Schmitt summarizing the latter's viewpoint: "The ultimate foundation of the Right is the principle of the natural evil of man; because man is by nature evil, he therefore [End Page 130] needs dominion. But dominion can be established, that is, men can be unified, only... (shrink)

While the academic separation of policing and regulation is still largely operative, points of convergence are more significant than ever in the digital age, starting with concomitant debates about algorithms as a new figure of power. From the policing of illegal activities to the regulation of legal ones, the algorithmization of such critical social ordering practices has been the subject of growing attention. These burgeoning discussions are focused on one common element: big data surveillance. In accordance with such similarities and (...) paralleled developments in policing and regulation, the article aims to further bridge the gap between literatures to respond to the calls for studying big data surveillance across institutional domains and social fields. To do so, it is focused on one case study that articulates algorithmic policing and regulation domains, in-between security and economic fields. This is the fight against illicit finance, i.e. ‘the global action against the financial flows that fuel crime and terrorism’. To what extent does big data surveillance make a difference in the main global policy of crime-fighting and financial regulation? Drawing on a fieldwork in a large North American bank, the present article takes stock of the algorithmic overlap between policing and regulation. It argues that the final result is policing and regulation of neither too much nor too little, which gives rise to automated and everyday mass surveillance while remaining as far removed from regulatory and crime-fighting ambitions as it is from dystopian visions of big data and algorithmic drama. (shrink)

This is a critical review of In the Agora: The Public Face of Canadian Philosophy. It argues that this book does not adequately represent the public face of Canadian philosophy, though it contains some first-rate contributions.