In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy by J. B. SchneewindFrederick RauscherJ. B. Schneewind. The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xxii + 624. Cloth $69.95.For most of the twentieth century ethics has been relegated to the status of a hanger-on to other pursuits in philosophy. Only in the past three decades has ethics re-emerged as (...) a significant independent subject in the discipline. J.B. Schneewind has taken this development a step further by examining the history of ethics as a distinct branch of philosophy. He argues that modern ethics responded to a separate set of concerns from the surrounding scientific revolution’s epistemological and metaphysical subjects, and while his analysis does not prove this in every case, his treatment certainly shows that ethics does have a vital role in the history of philosophy. The Invention of Autonomy offers the most comprehensive and informative review of moral philosophy in the modern era yet published. But Schneewind supplies more than just the best historical review; he also assesses theories and arguments within the context of the great political, social, religious, and moral debates of their time and shows how those debates brought us to our present conception of moral philosophy. The Invention of Autonomy is a superb example of how to do philosophical history of philosophy.Three interrelated themes thread their way through the narrative. The first concerns the gradual replacement of an ethic of obedience with the concept of self-governance, culminating in Kant’s idea of the dignity of all autonomous rational agents. The second involves the debate between voluntarists, who hold that God imposed morality on us by an arbitrary act of will, and intellectualists, who hold that morality stems from eternal standards in God’s intellect. The third conveys the debates about human moral psychology, in particular our awareness of morality and our motivations to act, and their relation to metaphysical and epistemological claims.These themes cut across the four main, roughly chronological groupings into which Schneewind divides his theorists. Here I can only generalize their characteristic tenets and must omit one of the best features of this book: the detailed analysis of the debates and differences even among theorists who are commonly taken to share the same views. The natural law theorists’ most influential voice is Hugo Grotius. Schneewind identifies a “Grotian problematic”—the existence of conflict stemming from self-interest amid our desire to form a society together—which is taken up by other natural lawyers and eventually by Kant [Hobbes’ theory is “Grotianism at the limit” (82)]. Most but not all natural lawyers gave no substantial role to God in ethics because disagreement about religion is one of the causes of conflict in society. Only by finding rules for behavior, backed by self-interested concerns and threats of punishment, could harmony [End Page 627] reign. The chief shortcoming of natural law theory was its inability to explain the ground of moral duty which concerned only the self.The perfectionists—primarily rationalists—put more emphasis on conforming our-selves to what we know of our place in God’s plans for the universe. The complete human being will not only treat others in decent ways but also adopt a virtuous character which seeks the good. Our motivation to take our proper place in the universe stems not from fear of punishment but from a desire to realize our own happiness and from obligation to the God who created us. Perfectionism’s faults lie with its strong ties to religious belief.The third set of philosophers includes mostly the eighteenth-century empiricists. They went further than the natural lawyers in seeking to divorce morality from dependence upon God by grounding it in human nature. A moral sense or sentiment generates moral normativity and indirectly motivates behavior. This dependence on human nature opens these theorists to the charge of voluntarism or worse, since there appears to be no truly objective foundation for morality.Finally come the theorists who develop autonomy, culminating in Kant. Some writers of the German and French Enlightenment, particularly Rousseau, sought to show that morality... (shrink)

In a paper presented at a symposium on structuralism at the Johns Hopkins University in 1968, the historian Charles Morazé analyzed the issue of invention largely with reference to mathematics and the theory of Henri Poincare.1 Poincare, along with the physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, was the first to put forward a theory of scientific discovery as occurring in discrete phases. In 1926, Joseph Wallas generalized this theory to apply to all creativity, positing phrases which closely resemble those of Morazé. While (...) both Poincare and Wallas use a four-phrase model of invention, Morazé reduces his to three phrases: information, cogitation, and intellection. In information, the inventor becomes familiar with the sign systems and knowledge, the "collective contributions of society," relevant to his field of problems. Cogitation assembles these materials and concentrates them until "a certain moment" when "a light breaks through." This "sudden illumination...forces us to insist upon the neurological character" of the inventive moment. Finally, in intellection, the inventor rationally evaluates the utility of his invention and thus, in a sense, steps outside of himself and rejoins society. The distinction which organizes Morazé 's entire account, as well as most of the discussion that followed his presentation, is between the "collective" support and control of the inventor and his own individual, or "neurological," act of synthesis or creation. · 1. See Charles Morazé 's "Literary Invention," in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, pp. 22-55. Loy D. Martin is an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago. He has written The Language of Invention, a study of Robert Browning and the genesis of the dramatic monologue. "A Reply to Carl Pletsch and Richard Schiff" appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

The “small” Ricœurian ethic disrupts the classical presentations of different ethics because of the place it gives to the moral imagination and the tragic. Difficult to classify in the panorama of contemporary ethics, the Ricœurian project values the pluralism of moral traditions as practical preunderstandings while giving practical creativity a prominent place. This tension of traditions and ethical imagination gives his practical wisdom a dynamic and heuristic character. This article shows the fruitfulness of this wisdom in an age of (...) pluralistic and complex societies, and deploys its practical significance. It analyzes, first, cells of good advice, where practical inventiveness is mobilized. Second, through discussion of the work of Ricœur and Nussbaum, it then studies, within the framework of the economy where the role and place given to play is central, the place of imagination in an anthropology of the capable human being. (shrink)

This article considers the notion of an event, of something happening to language, through a reading of Jacques Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other. In particular, the issues of language, translation and the untranslatable are linked to the three forms of madness that Derrida distinguishes. The paper, in turn, contends that there are only target languages, or again, that all languages are in fact target languages, languages-to-come, and that this experience of language is the only test worthy of the untranslatable. The (...) madness of language is thus associated with the singularity of not only every language and every speaker, but also with the non-programmable character of language. The literature of Kafka and Celan, among others, is henceforth invoked as exemplary, and examined as both an intra-lingual and inter-lingual event. The overall aim is to disrupt the Globish of global communication and the nationalism of linguistic proprietorship. (shrink)

In this article we will observe Sartre sketching, elaborating, and polishing characters, most of whom he carried around in himself for almost fourteen years. In short, we go back to the beginning of the question of the relationship of the writer and his work, relying above all on the manuscripts we have been able to consult. We postulate, and we will see in the course of this article if it is true, that the choice of writing in a certain way, (...) of inventing a character who takes shape in a particular way, can be conceived as the transformation of a real body into an imaginary one. J. F. Louette expressed it very well in 1996 when he stated that Sartre writes "to change his lymph and blood into ink: to get rid of himself thanks to the sheet of paper, which is not himself; in short … to change the contingency of the body into the necessity of art." Thus, the artist is the man who chooses to create imaginary objects in reality, but also and above all (from the ontological point of view), the man who chooses to create the real world in imagination, whose perception of the situation is in itself creation. (shrink)

This paper investigates how participants in cross-functional project groups use a formal work method in their sense making when dealing with the complexity of innovative work, especially in its inventive phase. The empirical basis of the paper is a prospective case study in which three project groups in three different companies are followed as they try to frame and solve their innovation tasks consisting in problems of a relatively general and vague character. The data are analyzed by means of (...) a modified version of the principles of grounded theory. This means that the lessons drawn from the empirical data are guided by a relational sense making perspective in which the formal method used by the participants is seen as a technological artifact. Among the lessons learned by using this frame of reference are that a formal method may be seen as an entity with a meaning depending on the relations it is embedded in; as an enacted cue for interpretation and action; and as a non-human actor. Compared to the tradition of organizational development, these lessons represent an alternative conception of the implementation of a work method and illuminate prevailing notions about the importance of improvisation in innovation. (shrink)

Linguistic invention is a key feature of Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves. An exploration of its innovative verbal and syntactic procedures can add to an understanding of Woolf's importance for the philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze (and his sometime collaborator Félix Guattari). In A Thousand Plateaus, The Waves is used to exemplify an ontology of becoming. However, in their reference to The Waves, Deleuze and Guattari only draw attention to what they term the ‘vibrations, shifting borderlines’ between and across characters (...) in the novel. Given Deleuze's considerations of style, it is perhaps surprising that he never took up this idea in terms of how these movements also take place at the level of language in the novel, as the explorations in this essay of four different linguistic procedures from The Waves show. When Woolf completed writing The Waves, she wrote in her diary that she had ‘netted that fin in the waste of water’. By investigating the multiple, and often discordant, associations of this image of netting a fin, various connections between Woolf's linguistic procedures and Deleuze's philosophy can be configured, particularly in terms of the approach to language put forward in A Thousand Plateaus. Reading Woolf alongside Deleuze in this way reveals how ontology becomes intimately bound up with a problem of language. (shrink)

The arts of poetry and the arts of criticism are uncovered and studied in their products, in poems and in judgments. Poetry and criticism, however, the making and judging of poems, are processes. The study of literature as a product - existing poems and existing interpretations and appreciations of poetry - develops a body of knowledge which is sometimes called "poetic sciences." The recognition and use of poetic and critical processes - producing and judging poems which did not previously exist, (...) and uncovering and analyzing aspects of existing poems which were not previously discerned or appreciated - develop things and values by use of arts which are sometimes called "heuristic arts." Knowledge or science is used in the processes of deliberate or artful making; art or criticism is used in the production of things or knowledge of things, natural or artificial. Knowledge is a product of inquiry; criticism is a process of judgment; the two are joined - knowledge of things and use of knowledge - in critical inquiries or critiques of judgment. Richard McKeon is Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Greek at the University of Chicago; he was a member of the U.S. delegations to the first three General Conferences of UNESCO and served as U.S. counselor to UNESCO. His numerous publications include The Philosophy of Spinoza, Freedom and History, and Thought, Action, and Passion; he also has edited The Basic Works of Aristotle and coedited the forthcoming critical edition of Abailard's Sic et Non. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Canonic Books and Prohibited Books: Orthodoxy and Heresy in Religion and Culture" and Pride and Prejudice: Thought, Character, Argument, and Plot". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Greek Drama and the Invention of Rhetoric by David SansoneJon P. HeskDavid Sansone, Greek Drama and the Invention of Rhetoric. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. xi + 258 pp. Cloth $99.95.The central claim of this book is that the development of the art of rhetoric in fifth-century Greece was directly inspired by the revolutionary new genre of tragic drama. This entails a radical departure from what Sansone calls the (...) “standard view” of the origins of Greek rhetoric. As Ruth Scodel has recently and quite rightly pointed out, however, it would be more accurate to call it the “traditional view” (Scodel, Bryn Mawr Classcial Review 2013.06.16). The “standard” view of most of us is to be agnostic about the alleged Sicilian “origins” of rhetorical education and “handbooks” which we find in various ancient sources.Sansone’s thesis, while undoubtedly bold and original, is not completely unexpected. It was only a matter of time before the tragedians became “first inventors” of rhetoric given that some scholars now argue that Tisias and Corax probably did not even exist and that the output of Gorgias and Antiphon is best described as “pre-disciplinary” rather than an instantiation of the discipline of “rhetoric” itself. In other words, Sansone’s argument dovetails nicely with the long-held view, particularly associated with the work of Thomas Cole and Edward Schiappa, that proper rhetoric does not really exist before it is given its name (rhētorikē) in the fourth century.How could tragedy possibly beget rhetoric? Sansone’s answer is ingenious. Because drama presents embodied characters before the eyes of its audience, it is radically different from narrative forms such as epic poetry or lyric. In the latter format, only one character can speak at any one time. In tragedy, the audience also pays attention to the characters on stage who are present but not speaking. This focus on interlocutors’ simultaneous reactions as well as the speaker himself is dubbed “the counterpoint.” For Sansone, this innovation goes hand-in-hand with the fact that Greek texts nearly always describe the audience of narrative forms as “hearers” while the audience of drama are spectators or “viewers.” Sansone gives a good account of the way in which the tragedians can be felt to play with audience expectations through drama’s capacity to direct their focus towards silent or expressive reactions which are simultaneous with another character’s speech. He also writes well on the way in which tragedy entails the dimunition of a Muse-inspired authorial “poet’s voice” in favour of a plurality of characters’ viewpoints. The upshot here is that the playwright is required to compose speeches for characters who are often in a state of conflict, to use in interaction with one another, and before an audience in the theater. For Sansone, this fresh [End Page 155] dynamic is “sufficient to account for the self-conscious theorizing about forms of argumentation that is the essential feature of formal rhetoric” (x).It seems silly to deny some credence to this thesis. Sansone does not discuss the early tragedians’ possible interactions with other elite communicators beyond the thought that Gorgias and his predecessors may have had direct exposure to Aeschylus in Sicily. But one can imagine that politician-orators like Cimon, Themistocles, and Pericles or litigants and intellectuals who predated Antiphon were interested in, and influenced by, the tragedians’ discipline of writing arguments in the voice of a character, not to mention the related requirement to imagine what another character or internal audience of characters might say in reply. There must have been some early discussions in which these people talked about techniques of delivery, persuasion, and argumentation at some level of general principle, self-consciousness, and in relation to shared imperatives between their respective fields. As Sansone shows well, Aeschylus Suppliants 191–203 betrays some self-awareness of the playwright’s ethopoetic mission. This speech from Danaus can also be seen as a moment of quasi-rhetorical instruction.But there is an unassailable problem with the idea that tragedy’s basic formal properties and dynamics constituted the sole driving force behind the invention of rhetorical discourse. Aside from... (shrink)

Before Edward Gibbon began his history of the Christian empire, he ended the first volume of the “Decline and Fall” with two chapters on the rise of Christianity before Constantine. These were believed to deny or ignore its character as revelation. It was also pointed out that this purpose was irrelevant to the history he had set out to write. The church historians he read focussed on the interactions between the Christian gospel and Hellenic philosophy. Gibbon, however, chose to (...) emphasize the Christian rejection of cultic polytheism, and gave a Humean account of the early Christians as enthusiasts. Five years elapsed between the first and second volumes of his history. By the latter date his reputation as an unbeliever was established, and has since received more attention than the history he wrote. (shrink)

Contrary to the general belief that modernist art and architecture reflect the technological society, Jacques Ellul maintains in his L’empire du non-sens that they are justifications for the integration of humankind into what he called the technicist complex. Modernism in art and architecture meant that every product must be qualified by a technological character. This unassailable belief exerted some far-reaching influences on symbolic thought, on artistic expression, on architectural character. If imitation and invention were the two inseparable concepts (...) through which art and architecture were produced and symbolized, it is because they operate on a certain transparency between an exemplar and a work of art. By contrast, in the mentality of technique, artistic production operates based on a certain opacity to meanings outside of itself. Imitation and invention were separated. Thus, one of the principal beliefs in modernism, that art and architecture symbolize the technological society is actually one of its weakest. In considering technology as both the symbol and the product, the artistic idea and its representation collapsed into each other. (shrink)

Literary fiction is of crucial importance in human life. It is a source of understanding and insight into the nature of the human condition, yet ever since Plato, philosophers have struggled to provide a plausible explanation of how this can be the case. For surely the fictionality - the sheer invented character - of the literary text means that fiction presents not our world, but other worlds? In Fiction and the Weave of Life, John Gibson offers a novel (...) and intriguing account of the relationship between literature and everyday life, and shows how literature can give us an understanding of our world without literally being about our world. (shrink)

In what follows I shall investigate how the notions of truth and invention inform our moral life. In particular, I will show how this idea has been explored by William James in his seminal essay The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life (MPML), by far his most clear-cut piece of moral philosophy. I will claim that the dialectics of the essay cannot be apprehended independently from the understanding of the moral psychology and epistemology James elaborates in his writings on pragmatism (...) and the philosophy of mind. In fact, once framed in the relevant perspective, the essay conveys a very different and more radical position that the one usually acknowledged. In MPML James engages in an inquiry into the nature of moral thought and its ability to meet the difficulties of the moral life it should address. The essay criticizes a certain image of moral reflection by questioning its underlying assumptions about the nature of mindedness and the place of truth in the moral life. I shall thus articulate the discussion of James’ essay along two directions, one methodological and one substantive. They are, respectively, the anti-foundational and anti-theoretical character of moral reflection, and the rethinking of the relationship we have with our interiority that is relevant for ethics as informed by the notion of truth. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

Justification for reading Pride and Prejudice as a philosophical novel may be found in its much cited and variously interpreted opening sentence: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." This universal law is the first principle of a philosophical novel, although I shall also interpret it as the statement of a scientific law of human nature, a characterization of the civility of English society, and (...) as a pronouncement on the manners of an economic class. Pride and Prejudice is a philosophical novel both in the sense of presenting a philosophy in exposition and of embodying a philosophy in action, and literary criticism exercises its proper function by expounding that philosophy and by explicating and clarifying the thought and action of the novel by means of it. The thought of Pride and Prejudice may be uncovered by interpreting it in accordance with any of a variety of philosophies, but it is peculiarly appropriate, and enlightening, to recognize its Platonizing echoes since the dialogues of Plato have gone through a history of interpretation that has evolved distinctions which are useful in interpreting Pride and Prejudice. Many interpreters of Plato's dialogues, in antiquity and later, argue that they are not statements of thoughts or opinions but are simply exhibitions of how philosophers talk; others, beginning with the Old Academy, interpret them as the expression of the truth not of the doctrines of one philosopher, but of all philosophers; some, beginning with the skepticism of the Middle or New Academy, hold that the method of Socrates was to demonstrate that all doctrines are false and therefore, by the same token, true; and some, following the Neoplatonists, sought in them the adumbration of a truth transcending human thought and expression. Neoplatonic truths are suited to tragedy and epic; skeptical Academic opinions provide a place and expectation proper to comedy. All Platonisms share hierarchical structures of being, thought, and aspiration. Plato himself describes three ladders of being, knowledge, and love in the Republic and the Symposium. The New Academic skepticism chooses a low place on those ladders, which is excellently named in the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice: knowledge is based on self-evident truths, opinion can rise no higher than "a truth universally accepted," "possession of a good fortune" is a dubious degradation of vision of the ideal God to possession of material goods, and "want of a wife" is a transformation of charity or agape or love of the good in itself to concupiscence or eros or matrimony. Richard McKeon is the editor of The Basic Works of Aristotle and coeditor of Peter Abailard, Sic et Non: A Critical Edition. He delivered an earlier version of this paper at the 1977 Modern Language Association's session of the Division on Philosophical Approaches to Literature. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Arts of Invention and Arts of Memory: Creation and Criticism" and "Canonic Books and Prohibited Books: Orthodoxy and Heresy in Religion and Culture". (shrink)

We want to consider anew the question, which is recurrent along the history of philosophy, of the relationship between rationality and mathematics, by inquiring to which extent the structuration of rationality, which ensures the unity of its function under a variety of forms, could be considered as homeomorphic with that of mathematical thought, taken in its movement and made concrete in its theories. This idea, which is as old as philosophy itself, although it has not been dominant, has still been (...) present to some degree in the thought of modern science, in Descartes as well as in Kant, Poincaré or Einstein. It has been often harshly questioned, notably in the contemporaneous period, due to the failure of the logistic programme, as well as to the variety of “empirical” knowledges, and, in a general way, to the character of knowledges that show them as transitory, evolutive and mind-built. However, the analysis of scientific thought through its inventive and creative processes leads to characterize this thought as a type of rational form whose configurations can be detailed rather precisely. In this work we shall propose, first, a quick sketch of some philosophical requirements for such a research programme, among which the need for an harmonization, and even a conciliation, between the notions of rational, of intuitive grasp and of creative thought. Then we shall examine some processes of creative scientific thought bearing on the knowledge and the understanding of the world, distinct from mathematics although keeping tight relations with them. Contemporary physical theories are privileged witnesses in this respect, for in them the rational thought of phenomena makes an intrinsic use of mathematical thought, which contributes to the structuration of the formers and to the expression of their concepts. The General Theory of Relativity and the Quantum Theory are exemplar to this, as they directly reveal what can be called the “drag of physical thought par the mathematical form”, which makes possible to overcome the limitations of the physical knowledge previously adquired. This process is tightly related to the modalities and to the stucture of the rational thought underlying it. This is what we would like to show. (shrink)

This article focuses on the distinction between psychosocial types and conceptual personae advanced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in What is Philosophy? The conceptual persona is the tool that a philosopher invents in order to create new concepts with which to bring forth new events. Although they present it as one of the three elements of philosophy, its nature and function and, above all, its conjunctions with psychosocial types have been overlooked by scholars. What is Philosophy? contains a list (...) of character traits of which each conceptual persona is composed. The central argument of this article is that this list can well be regarded as a table of categories that enable the exercise and experience of philosophy’s creative thinking. Since the character traits of a conceptual persona match the characteristics of the given psychosocial types, it is necessary to keep inventing new conceptual personae always starting from the historical presuppositions. The philosopher requires the conceptual persona to transfer his or her movements of thought to philosophy’s plane of immanence and thereby transform them in such a manner that philosophy can unfold as a creative power. It emerges as the subject of creative thinking at the same time as the concepts that subject creates, with which it coincides in the moment of creation. With the conceptual persona in What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari determine the one element of philosophy that makes the transcendental empiricism a method of creation that appears as a precise operation with all its convincing and transparent results. (shrink)

Scandals in business (such as Volkswagen’s dieselgate and, earlier, the Enron scandal), politics and the public sector (the Petrobas affair in Brazil, for in-stance), sports (think of the corruption charges against fifa’s Sepp Blatter) and the military (Abu Ghraib springs to mind) have brought the matter of ethical leadership to the forefront. But although this increased attention has had the collateral benefit that most handbooks on leadership now pay more attention to the importance of leading ethically, this will generally still (...) be in a separate chapter. To make thing worse, that chapter on leadership is more often than not one the last chapters of the book, perhaps followed by a chapter on, say, diversity. This all testifies to the fact that leadership and ethics are ha-bitually treated as related though separate spheres. It would be much better, of course, if leadership and ethics were treated as belonging to a single domain. Ethics is clearly an aspect of leadership, and not a separate approach that ex-ists alongside other approaches to leadership such as the trait approach, the situational approach, etc.. Interestingly, this thinking and writing about ethical leadership as just one approach among many other leadership styles appears to be a relatively recent invention. In the works of Plato, Plutarch, Machiavelli and Locke, for example, we see (political) leadership and ethics dealt with as a single subject. It was not before the twentieth century that we saw the rise of a separate leadership industry. Its results are largely unimpressive; it has not made leaders necessarily more effective, let alone more ethical. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Grand Theory on Trial:Kafka, Derrida, and the Will to PowerNina Pelikan StrausIn summa: so that man may respect himself he must be capable of doing evil.(Nietzsche, The Will to Power)1IThe following pages offer evidence that in The Trial Kafka invents characters who deploy a Nietzschean-sourced language of deconstruction related to what we now call theory; that in "Before the Law" Kafka's priest deconstructs The Law to which K. is (...) subjected, and that Kafka exposes the discursive devices by which laws can be deconstructed. Kafka's text then opens the way to another kind of deconstruction of that-which-is-already-deconstructed as performed by Jacques Derrida in his 1987 essay, "Before the Law."2 Although this claim may seem self-evident or rhetorically circular to some readers of Kafka and his commentators, it is the result of years of puzzlement concerning the impact of Grand Theory in American criticism.This puzzlement, often accompanied by antagonism, is shared by critics whose essays comprise Patia's and Corral's Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent. The 2005 volume includes major reassessments of poststructuralist theory, notably Derrida's, by Tzetan Todorov, Thomas Nagel, M. H. Abrams, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Frederick Crews, René Welleck, David Bromwich, and others. While the deconstructionist idea of the arbitrariness of the signifier appears to be a central target of these critics' analysis, it is precisely the arbitrariness of the signifier called the Law that Kafka explores in The Trial.Kafka's intended relation to what he exposes has been much debated. [End Page 378] Stanley Corngold refers to the "undecidability" of Kafka's work and its "narrative mood of neutrality."3 The emphasis on "undecidability" in Kafka can be viewed as symptomatic of the influence of French Theory embraced by the American literary academy in the 1970s and 1980s. This latter view of Kafka's writing contrasts sharply with an earlier view, such as Hannah Arendt's, that The Trial, for all its ambiguity and multivalence, carries precise political meanings and warnings that Kafka fully intended. The deconstructionist moment did not bury convictions such as Adorno's or Canetti's that "from the beginning, Kafka sided with the humiliated,"4 or that for "a generation of early readers Joseph K.'s arrest was... a prophetic anticipation of the fate awaiting Hitler's victims."5 But deconstruction's skeptical effect undermined the certitude that Kafka was a politically important novelist. For its detractors, the deconstructionist view that there is "nothing outside of the text" ignores that texts like Kafka's have shaped human lives and human history. Wellek, who helped to introduce French theory to American literature departments, now asserts that theory has destroyed literary studies, while Frederick Crews argues that "Derrida's judgment that 'there is nothing outside the text' automatically precludes recourse to evidence." In Crews's view, "both Derrida and his myriad followers think nothing of appropriating and denaturing propositions from systems of thought whose premises they have already rejected." Thomas Nagel goes further in condemning "post-modern relativism" as a "quick fix" which puts reason to sleep. In Theory's Empire, Derrida's language is described as a "maze," a "prison house of language," a "limbo of combined attention and nonassertion."6The arguments against deconstruction theory can scarcely be summarized here, but a sampling of the commentaries in Theory's Empire on Derrida can lead us through and eventually back to what is or isn't at political stake in reading The Trial. Two questions are of concern: How much of Kafka's political acumen does Derrida ignore or misread in his commentary on "Before the Law"? And: to what degree do Derrida's rhetorical devices and ingenious language games resemble the language of the Courtiers who torture Joseph K.? What might such an analogy imply? Other questions follow, such as David Bromwich's very important ones. "About the status of Derrida's procedures there was always a puzzle," he writes. "Was deconstruction a technique proper to the commentator, and necessary as a tactic against the naïve constructionism of the author? Or was it something the author's writing practiced for itself, in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob DylanPeter CheyneThe Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan; 422 pp. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2022.Bob Dylan, like Dante's Virgil, takes us on an odyssey through sixty-six levels, not of the Underworld but of Songworld, in The Philosophy of Modern Song. With playful prose rhythms measured for pleasure and effect, these vistas are almost all seen through second-person portrayals. His gorgeous (...) write-up on Uncle Dave Macon's "Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy" (1924), for instance, conveys the "happy wanderer, the chicken thief," embodying the flagrant aristocracy of freedom: "You're the Dalai Lama, the Black Monk … The Thief of Baghdad … prowling and shoplifting … Multiracial, bisexual, celibate … freethinking … fucking and farting … Long John Silver … a pastry chef … hash slinger" (pp. 237–38). In Dylan's telling, this great song shimmies through a Whitmanesque catalogue of types united in aesthetic thrill.Invented characters inhabit this book, as they do Dylan's songs. Most prominent are the personae he extemporizes from others' songs in barnstorming flights of fancy. Upheld by writerly performance rather than argument, they act out his view that "it's what a song makes you feel about your own life that's important" (p. 9).The standout weird turn is the antihero he conjures from Webb Pierce's "There Stands the Glass" (1953). This is a country song about alcoholic consolation after a breakup, the toper hoping his love still thinks of him, in his misery. Simple, clichéd even, but Dylan invents a backstory hell of a Vietnam vet who "doesn't recall ever having a soul" and is "betrayed by politicians back home." Standard old-drunk fare, but then comes the nightmare of having "stuck a bayonet into babies' bellies and gouged out old men's eyes," "assassinated priests," and a concatenation of sins. "He rounds up the elderly, women and children, torches their huts" (p. 21). No bar-time happy hours for him; all those become "zero hour," "surrounded by the enemy" (p. 22). Dylan still protests the empire grotesque. Following each dark dive or wild fantasia is a straighter section that zooms out to more objective viewpoints, factoids, and historical analysis."You," ubiquitous and protean. "You," Dylan's projected center of subjective meaning. "You," his device, as he brings you along to reinvent a mood and mind frame, a world for each song. A thesis on mimesis, the second-person fantasies urge the reader to identify with the original first-person narrative, then fly it sky high. Dylan maintains that a successful song sings the listener into an alternative existence, a temporary self, through imagery and rhyme. This is just what Plato warned against, and what Dylan values: the art of making the listener mimetically become, for a few timeless minutes, what the writer and performer sing into being. In the ancient tussle between philosophers and poets, Dylan holds the agora through the harp. [End Page 254]Popular song as fiction is nothing unusual, but criticism as fiction? Is this critical license in extremis or is Dylan stressing the idea that music is always subjective? According to Dylan, songs earn their wings not just in the hearing but in how far and wide hearers can take them. While Dylan fabricates characters that weren't even dreamt of by the song performers, this book is also autobiographical throughout. The commentary relates as much of himself as the records he highlights. The book sustains a mood where the host impishly swaps masks all the while (as when he reveals, in a tiny chapter, that "Long Tall Sally" [1956] is about a one-story-tall woman from the Nephilim tribe in antediluvian Samaria). On Bobby Bare's "Detroit City" (1963), he writes, "Everybody assumes you're a bigwig, that things are cool and beautiful, but they're not." Here, many readers will flash back to young Zimmerman in Greenwich Village, desperate to pull off his move to the big city, "and the disgrace of failure is overwhelming" (p. 1). Through songs by selected others, Dylan recounts Dylan.Channeling small-hour talk radio, pulp Westerns, and hardboiled prose, the bourbon-scented mood evokes... (shrink)

According to the dominant theory of intentionalism, fiction and non-fiction are in a “mix-and-match” relationship with truth and falsity: both fiction and nonfiction can be either true or false. Intentionalists hold that fiction is a property of a narrative that is intended to elicit not belief but imagination or make-belief in virtue of the audience’s recognizing that such is the intention of the fiction-maker. They claim that in unlikely circumstances these fictions can turn out to be accidentally true. On the (...) contrary, I argue in this paper that fictionality and truth are incompatible. I distinguish narratives based on whether they contain invented characters or not, and offer respective sets of arguments to the effect that there is no case when a fiction is accidentally true. A narrative is either fiction or accidentally true but not both. (shrink)

Horace C. 2.4 is an ironical address to Xanthias , who, it appears, is rather ashamed of his love for Phyllis, a slave-girl. It has long been held that ‘Xanthias’ is a pseudonym, but so far there has been no convincing explanation of why Horace chose that appellation rather than any other. Of course, there is no way of telling if the situation of the ode is real or imaginary, but, whether ‘Xanthias’ is the pseudonym of an actual person or (...) a name given to an invented character, I believe that it does have particular point. (shrink)

The pascalian use of indivisibles is here considered in the context of the theological and mathematical debates of the time, by distinguishing it clearly from this of Cavalieri. The combinatory and geometrical approaches are closely linked in Pascal’s work. His use of indivisibles has a heuristic, inventive character and not only a demonstrative one. Ontologically speaking, it stems out from the acceptance of actual infinite. The use of the symmetry axiom of Archimedes is the basis of the pascalian use (...) of the infinitesimals, which has, in other respects, some close connexions with the Leibnizian conception of infinitesimals. (shrink)

A foundational question in Luigi Pareyson Aesthetics is the ontological character of the formant form. This character is based on the following principle: the ontology of the formant form is in the action of inventiveness and is not in a static state. For the philosopher of formativity it is in this creative, ontological, persevering action that the artist invents the way of doing, unique in the formant form. This unique way of doing makes the work of art blossom (...) as a formed form. In this paper we will try to show both the invention of the way of doing and the work of which one has an image ratify the singularity of the formant form. If the inventor does the work at the same time he invents the formed form, the just form, it is not a matter of passivity or inertia, but an action of inventiveness. Therefore, one can say the artist's personality is not separated from the formant form, on the contrary, it emphasizes the inseparability of the concepts of making / inventing, formant form and person, without however, affecting neither the unity, nor the identity of the work. (shrink)

Dans cet article, nous nous intéressons à la façon particulière dont Diderot envisage le caractère productif de l'esprit en mettant en rapport certains aspects de son épistémologie et de son esthétique avec trois lieux théoriques hérités de ses prédécesseurs. D'abord, ce problème touche la question de l'invention en tant que méthode de construction du discours peu à peu assimilée à une méthode de découverte par Bacon et Descartes. Dans un second temps, il semble que Diderot, qui fait grand cas de (...) la conjecture, définisse avant tout la connaissance comme une anticipation, prolongeant ainsi ce retour de l'épicurisme dans la pensée moderne. Enfin, du point de vue esthétique, Diderot développe une conception du modèle idéal qui s'accorde avec une théorie nominaliste de l'abstraction comme production d'un instrument conceptuel. Ces trois facettes de la pensée de Diderot contribuent, à notre sens, à la formation d'une véritable théorie matérialiste de la connaissance.In this article, we try to give an account of the way Diderot treats the productive character of the mind, relating aspects of his epistemology and his aesthetics with three theoretical instances. Firstly, this question touches the problem of invention as a rhetorical method which becomes assimilated by Bacon and Descartes to a method leading to discovery. Secondly, Diderot, who emphasizes the use of hypothesis, defines knowledge as a kind of anticipation, as it is defined in the modern epicureanism. Finally, regarding aesthetics, Diderot puts forth a theory of the « modèle idéal » which is tied to a nominalist conception of the abstraction. These three aspects of Diderot's thought are important, in our opinion, for the formation of a materialist theory of knowledge. (shrink)

Recent criticisms of traditional understandings of risk, responsibility and the division of labour between science and politics build on the idea of the co-produced character of the natural and social orders, making a case for less ambitious and more inclusive policy processes, where questions of values and goals may be addressed together with questions of facts and means, causal liabilities and principled responsibilities. Within the neo-liberal political economy, however, the contingency of the world is depicted as a source of (...) unprecedented opportunities for human craftsmanship, rather than of possibly unmanageable surprises. Gene technologies offer a vantage point for reflecting on the consequences of the drift from discovery to invention as a master frame in the appraisal of human intermingling with the world. Biotech patenting regulations carve out a sovereign agency which, by crafting nature, also crafts the distinction between the manufactured and non-manufactured world. Difficulties in ascribing responsibility stem as a consequence. It is likely that politics and economy can be democratized and responsibilities rearranged not by ‘democratizing’ knowledge production, but rather the reverse. (shrink)

Ayn Rand, through her character Fransisco d’Anconia in Atlas Shrugged, taught that the Apostle Paul is wrong when he says money is a root of all kinds of evil. Instead, she argues that money is perhaps the greatest invention of humanity and is the foundation of civilization. In this article, Dr. Anderson challenges Rand’s understanding of good and evil first by comparing d’Anconia to Thrasymachus and then by considering good and evil in the Biblical Worldview. These connections make it (...) possible to see how economics and religion are closely connected through basic assumptions about reality and our highest good. Without knowing our highest good we cannot make sense of either religion or economics. (shrink)

Some of the characters of „In Verrem“ carry evocative names that aptly describe the characters’ occupation or personality traits. Cicero most likely invented these names, and this probable name manipulation can be reconciled with the expectation(s) of his contemporary reading public. This observation, however, begs the question why Cicero does not make any explicit use of the inherent potential of these types of names for his argument. Probably, his preference for odd, catchy names instead of inconspicuous ones enables him (...) to speak about certain persons without actually naming them and - at the same moment - to clearly inform his recipients that he is treading on dangerous territory. (shrink)

Background: Ethics stimulation in nursing education focuses on human, non-technical factors in a clinical reality. Simulation as a teaching method began in the 1930s with flight simulators. In the beginning of the 1990s, simulations developed further in tandem with other technological and digital inventions, including touchscreen and three-dimensional anatomical models. Medical science first used simulation as a pedagogical teaching tool. In nursing education, simulation has been used for approximately a hundred years. Teaching has mainly focused on medical-technical, patient-specific interventions and (...) their management. Objective: The objective of this study was, from a caring science didactic perspective, to deepen the understanding of ethics simulation in nursing education. Design: Qualitative design and explorative, descriptive and hermeneutic approach of an inductive character. Methods: Semi-structured face-to-face interviews in 2016–2017 with six Norwegian nursing students who were encouraged to narrate about their experiences of ethics simulation in nursing education. Ethical considerations: Informed consent was obtained from the participants. Anonymity and confidentiality regarding data material were guaranteed. Results: Interpretation of the nursing students’ narratives resulted in the following meaning units: ethical being and ethos, nursing students’ formation process, bridge-building between theory and clinical practice, and teacher and ethics simulation. Conclusion: Through ethics simulation, nursing students can obtain an increased knowledge and a sense of being able to handle difficult ethical situations. Nursing students’ values, moral actions and ethical value base offer a positive point of departure, for both theoretical and practical ethics teaching, and an awareness of the unique human being, the patient, in clinical reality. The implementation of ethics simulation needs more attention in nursing education. (shrink)

Plato’s invention of the metaphor of carving the world by the joints gives him a privileged place in the history of natural kind theory in philosophy and science; he is often understood to present a paradigmatic but antiquated view of natural kinds as possessing eternal, immutable, necessary essences. Yet, I highlight that, as a point of distinction from contemporary views about natural kinds, Plato subscribes to an intelligent-design, teleological framework, in which the natural world is the product of craft and, (...) as a result, is structured such that it is good for it to be that way. In Plato’s Philebus, the character Socrates introduces a method of inquiry whose articulation of natural kinds enables it to confer expert knowledge, such as literacy. My paper contributes to an understanding of Plato’s view of natural kinds by interpreting this method in light of Plato’s teleological conception of nature. I argue that a human inquirer who uses the method identifies kinds with relational essences within a system causally related to the production of some unique craft-object, such as writing. As a result, I recast Plato’s place in the history of philosophy, including Plato’s view of the relation between the kinds according to the natural and social sciences. Whereas some are inclined to separate natural from social kinds, Plato holds the unique view that all naturalness is a social feature of kinds reflecting the role of intelligent agency. (shrink)

This masterly study has a grand sweep. It ranges over centuries, with a long look backward over several millennia. Yet the history it unfolds is primarily the story of individuals: thinkers and dreamers who envisaged an ideal social order and described it persuasively, leaving a mark on their own and later times. The roster of utopians includes men of all stripes in different countries and eras--figures as disparate as More and Fourier, the Marquis de Sade and Edward Bellamy, Rousseau and (...) Marx. Fascinating character studies of the major figures are among the delights of the book. Utopian writings run the gamut from fictional narratives to theoretical treatises, from political manifestos to constitutions for a new society. The Manuels have structured five centuries of utopian invention by identifying successive constellations, groups of thinkers joined by common social and moral concerns. Within this framework they analyze individual writings, in the context of the author's life and of the socio-economic, religious, and political exigencies of his time. Concentrating on innovative works, they highlight disjunctures as well as continuities in utopian thought from the Renaissance through the twentieth century. Witty and erudite, challenging in its interpretations and provocative in the questions it poses, the Manuels' anatomy of utopia is an adventure in ideas. (shrink)

The scientist Richard Lovell Edgeworth, educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and Oxford, was a Member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, where he exchanged ideas with other scientists, including James Watt, and was known for his significant mechanical inventions. However, Edgeworth's real interest was education: in this 1788 two-volume work, written with his daughter, the poet Maria Edgeworth, he draws on his own experience of raising twenty children, from which the work derives its authority and innovative character. The work (...) was very influential, and led to his Essays on Professional Education. The two volumes discuss the theories of philosophers and educationalists, while in general arguing for the importance and formative character of early childhood experiences. Volume 1 deals with different areas of childhood education, including play, learning, and obedience and good behaviour. (shrink)

After Confucius is a collection of eight studies of Chinese philosophy from the time of Confucius to the formation of the empire in the second and third centuries B.C.E. As detailed in a masterful introduction, each essay serves as a concrete example of thick description - an approach invented by philosopher Gilbert Ryle - which aims to reveal the logic that informs an observable exchange among members of a community or society. To grasp the significance of such exchanges, it (...) is necessary to investigate the networks of meaning on which they rely. Paul R. Goldin argues that the character of ancient Chinese philosophy can be appreciated only if we recognize the cultural codes underlying the circulation of ideas in that world. Thick description is the best preliminary method to determine how Chinese thinkers conceived of their own enterprise. Who were the ancient Chinese philosophers? What was their intended audience? What were they arguing about? How did they respond to earlier thinkers, and to each other? Why did those in power wish to hear from them, and what did they claim to offer in return for patronage? Goldin addresses these questions as he looks at several topics, including. (shrink)

Having been invented by scientists, who first saw it as a new tool of inquiry and only later began to suspect the possibility of photographic art, photography's special epistemic character has dominated thinking about its nature. Photographs are introduced as evidence in scientific reports, journalism, and courts of law. They can also be used to make discoveries. According to the new theory of photography, a photograph is a product of a photographic process where an artifactual image is rendered (...) from a photographic event that records information in a light image of a pro‐photographic scene. One class of photographic practices is epistemic, centering on norms that restrict the photographic process in order to ensure belief‐independent feature‐tracking. For historical reasons, this restricted conception of photography dominated both the design of the technology and its use. It would be perfectly accurate to call the epistemically centered practice as standard photography. (shrink)

Jurgen Habermas' construction of a critical social theory of society grounded in communicative reason is one of the very few real philosophical inventions of recent times that demands and repays extended engagement. In this elaborate and sympathetic study which places Habermas' project in the context of critical theory as a whole past and future, J. M. Bernstein argues that despite its undoubted achievements, it contributes to the very problems of ethical dislocation and meaninglessness it aims to diagnose and remedy. Bernstein (...) further argues that the precise character of the failures of Habermas' program demonstrate the necessity for a return to the first generation critical theory of Adorno. Reading across nearly the whole range of Habermas' corpus, Recovering Ethical Life traces the development of the theory of communicative reason from its inception in Knowledge and Human Interests through its elaboration in The Theory of Communicative Action and into its defense against postmodernism in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity . In separate chapters Habermas' readings of Freud, Durkheim amd Mead, Adorno and Foucault, Castoriadis and Taylor are critically examined. The focus of Bernstein's analyses, however, is always problem centered and thematic rather than textual psychoanalytic theory as an account of self knowledge, the competing claims of ethical identity and moral reason, the place of judgment in practical reason, and the debate between philosophies of language based communities versus those oriented towards world-disclosure. Critical theory is unique among current philosophies in engaging with the problems of social injustice and nihilism by siding with an abstract moral reason that forfeits the processes of intersubjective recognition it intended to salvage. Even in the fine grain of Habermas' account of performative contradictions and the theory of discourses of application, Bernstein perceives a squandering of the resources of an ethical life in need of transfiguration. (shrink)

As the interpretation of Plutarch’s prooemium to the Parallel Lives of Sertorius and Eumenes shows, an author’s capacity of irony often lies in the eyes of the beholder: While most historians take for granted that this passage is meant to make fun of Plutarch’s contemporaries for drawing ridiculous conclusions from historical parallels like namesakes or similar external attributes, most translators fail to see its humorous undertone. It becomes clear, though, that it is possible to establish objective criteria for ironic speech (...) in Plutarch that can be found in the prooemium as well, if one takes a closer look at ironic strategies in his polemical or colloquial writings. One of these is the ironic use of allusive names for dialogue partners or even the invention of characters bearing telling historical names. With this special ironic technique in mind one might even reconsider the authenticity of (Ps.‐)Plutarch’s Parallela Minora commonly termed spurious because of its cunning invention of fictitious sources on similar principles as those of the ironic Plutarch. (shrink)

'you'll find another man to harvest, Glycerion: let this one go' The Greek satirist Lucian was a brilliantly entertaining writer who invented the comic dialogue as a vehicle for satiric comment. His influence was immense, not only in the Greek world, but on later European writers such as Rabelais and Swift. His dialogues puncture the pretensions of pompous philosophers and describe the daily lives of Greek courtesans; they are peopled by politicians, historians and ordinary citizens, as well as by (...) gods and mythic figures. This selection provides a cross-section of Lucian's styles and satirical targets, from serious polemic to lighter squibs and character portrayals. It includes How to Write History and his most famous piece, A True History, a fabulous tale of space travel and a monstrous whale which prefigures the fantasies of Jules Verne. This lively new translation is both accurate and idiomatic, and the introduction highlights Lucian's importance in his own and later times. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

Seweryn Blandzi Plato and the Protestant Principle of Autarchy of the Scripture (sola scriptura)The author gives reasons why the new holistic Tübingen-interpretation of Plato (H. Krämer, K. Gaiser, Th. A. Szlezák), which combines the Dialogues with his unwritten teaching is still difficult to accept (especially in Germany). The discovery (on the basis of indirect testimonies of Aristotle and his commentators) that there was a separate oral (“exoteric”) metaphysics of principles, which was parallel to dialogues but more valuable (timiotera) in content, (...) and which Plato did not popularize in his writings, has been an antithesis to the traditional romantic paradigm (particularly strong in Germany) of F. Schlegel-Schleiermacher, founded on the conviction of the primacy of autarchy of the written (“exoteric”) text in general. This conviction leads us to the Protestant postulate of Biblical exegesis treated as self-sufficient (sola scriptura), interpreted exclusively on its own basis (sui ipsius interpres), and Schleiermacher transposes this requirement onto Plato’s writings. On the other hand, F. Schlegel, who emphasizes the fragmentary and asystematic character of Plato’s thought in dialogues, sees Plato as a thinker who constantly moves toward infinity, unable ever to reach it. With respect to the dialogues, the reader finds himself in a similar situation as the limited individuality of finite being to infinity. For the romantics (inspired by the idealistic philosophy of subjectivity and identity), man’s greatness as a finite being manifests itself in creating works which reflect infinity. The infinity of the Absolute manifests itself in the absolute freedom and the power of creation, which man – so to speak – meets halfway, with his infinite reflection, creativity, invention, interpretation as an expression of spirit’s freedom. Hence the lasting attraction of this traditional approach, which is unlike the new paradigm that imposes great requirements and constraints on the reader (studying doxographic literature, finding in it testimonies of Plato’s disciples regarding the intra-academic teaching). When Plato’s literary dialogue is treated as a kind of an “open text,” it thus justifies all the possible “hermeneutic” attempts at free and creative interpretations. Keywords: Plato, Hans Krämer, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schlegel, romantic paradigm, sola scriptura, infinity of reflection, new paradigm, unwritten teaching, metaphysics of principles. (shrink)

Film production is the process of creating a film, involving stages such as progress, pre-production, invention, post-production, and sharing. It encompasses planning, scripting, shooting, editing, and finalizing the film for public viewing. The process of imagination drives innovation in scripting, directing, and cinematography, resulting in unique, engaging experiences that captivate audiences with their emotive stories. The principle of this investigation is to assess how psychological factors add to enhancing imagination in film production, focusing on their impact on creative processes and (...) outcomes. A study surveyed 680 students from college film program students to analyze their creative personality and imaginative capabilities using structured questionnaires. Key psychological constructs included Creative Self-Efficacy, Emotional Resilience, Cognitive Flexibility, and Intrinsic Motivation. The study investigated the impact of psychological factors on college cinema students' creative imagination in filmmaking, demonstrating high validity and reliability with Factor Loadings exceeding 0.76, Composite Reliability higher than 0.88, and Average Variance Extracted (AVE) range as of 0.59 to 0.67. Discriminant validity was confirmed as every construct AVE was better than its square correlations by other constructs. Psychological factors significantly influence film production imagination, fostering creative thinking and emotional depth. Understanding and harnessing these factors enhances storytelling, character development, and audience engagement, ultimately enriching the cinematic experience. (shrink)

Published in 1935, George Santayana's The Last Puritan was the American philosopher's only novel. It became an instant best-seller, immediately linked in its painful voyage of self discovery to The Education of Henry Adams. It is essentially a novel of ideas, expressed in the birth, life, and early death of Oliver Alden.The Last Puritan is volume four in a new critical edition of The Works of George Santayana that restores Santayana's original text and provides important new scholarly information. Books in (...) this series - the first complete publication of Santayana's works - include an editorial apparatus with notes to the text, textual commentary, discussions of adopted readings, lists of variants and emendations, and line-end hyphenations. Irving Singer's new introduction to this edition takes up Santayana's philosophical and artistic concerns, including issues of homosexuality raised by the depiction of the novel's two protagonists, Oliver and Mario, and of the relationship between Oliver and the rogue character Jim Darnley. In his thoughtful analysis Singer finds the term "homosexual novel" too reductionist and imprecise for what Santayana is trying to achieve. Singer brings to light the author's skillful and inventive methods for perceiving and interpreting reality, including ideal forms of friendship, and his success in exploring the pervasive moral problems that people face throughout their existence. (shrink)

Funding policies for science are usually directed at supporting technological innovations. The im-pact and success of such policies depend crucially on how science and technology are connected to each other. I propose an “interactive view” of the relationship between basic science and technol-ogy development which comprises the following four claims: First, technological change derives from science but only in part. The local models used in accounting for technologically relevant phenomena contain theoretical and non-theoretical elements alike. Second, existing technologies and rules (...) of experience constitute another major repository of technological inventions. Third, technology dynamics is only weakly coupled to progress in basic science but it is closely related to science. There is a dependence of technological change on a more fundamental understanding, to be sure, but it is of an indirect and long-term character. Fourth, progress in basic research is some-times the effect of technological change. Technological change sometimes brings about increased theoretical understanding. (shrink)

This essay argues that the depiction of two female characters’ situations, friendship, and self-understandings in The Mandarins (Les mandarins, 1954) develops Beauvoir's theorization of feminine complicity in The Second Sex (Le deuxième sexe, 1949). Through its prolonged focus on the concrete situations of two female characters, the novel enables Beauvoir to explore the (hetero)sexual and metaphysical sources of feminine complicity in depth. The result is that The Mandarins illustrates why women who are, to greater or lesser degrees, complicit with the (...) structures of their own oppression can be understood neither as agents of gender-based oppression nor as passive victims of it, but only as human beings forced to invent means to survive the mutilation of their transcendence. (shrink)

This author offers of narrative of hope in response to the coronavirus pandemic by viewing it as a wake-up call to lean into the adaptive moral challenge of stewardship for the future of humanity and the planet. Acknowledging the many material and social benefits of a global regime of free market urbanism built on advances in science and technology, this is a point in geohistory, the Anthropocene, when the impact of human activities on the Earth has begun to outcompete natural (...) processes. The coronavirus has illuminated systemic moral failures and new moral challenges of the Anthropocene that call for adaptive response if we are to build a hopeful future for humanity and the planet. Pointing to millennia of human adaptive response to threats and disasters, the author asserts an evolutionary hardiness attributable as much to moral capacities as rational intelligence as a singularly defining trait fueling millennia of human adaptive learning and thrival. The current pandemic is the latest point in humanity’s moral evolution of adaptive response to moments of urgent threat that have tested, expanded, and defined our character and moral capacities as a species. Rather than falter under the moral burden of the coronavirus threat and its consequences, the author views this pivotal point as an opportunity to stretch human moral horizons by taking responsibility for the urgent moral challenges we have created and inventing new ethical frameworks and tools that will lead us to new moral understandings and solutions to the moral challenges we face. (shrink)

Do academics who commercialize their inventions have a different professional character than those who do not? The author conducted a nationwide survey in Hungary including 1,562 academics of hard sciences from 14 universities. According to the cluster analysis based on their participation in research commercialization, university scholars can be divided into three distinct groups: ‘traditional faculty’, ‘market-oriented faculty’, and ‘academic entrepreneurs’. Traditional faculty members typically do not participate in RC, while, within the framework of the university, market-oriented academics are (...) engaged in RC the most frequently. Academic entrepreneurs, in addition to their university positions, work for spin-off firms that commercialize research findings. Multinomial logistic regressions revealed that university scientists in various engineering fields, and especially in chemical technology, as well as in biotechnology and pharmaceutics have a considerably greater potential to engage in RC, similar to scholars with industry work experience, high number of publications, and professorial rank. Discipline, work experience, scientific performance, and academic rank seem to outweigh the effect of the university and its location on RC behavior. These findings underscore the inherent diversity of the academic profession and question the necessity of implementing uniform RC policies such as the Bayh–Dole model across universities, disciplines, and segments of university scientists. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Politics and Peace Tobin Siebers University ofMichigan To Perpetual Peace. Whether this satirical inscription on a certain Dutch shopkeeper's sign, on which a graveyard was painted, holds for men in general, or especially for heads ofstate who can never get enough of war, or perhaps only for the philosophers who dream this sweet dream, is not for us to decide. However, the author of this essay does set out (...) one condition.... The practical politician must not claim, in the event of a dispute with a theorist, to detect some danger to the nation in those views that the political theorist expresses openly and without ulterior motive.... By this clausula salvatoria, the author ofthis essay will regard himselfto be expressly protected in the best way possible from all malicious interpretation. (Immanuel Kant, Preface to Perpetual Peace) My goal is to work my way back to Kant's defensive preface to Perpetual Peace, the prophetic essay situated by many at the origin ofmodern conceptions ofpeace and international diplomacy. Suffice it to say for the moment that the following reflections are intended to reveal the epitaph in Kant's epigraph—the eternal repose residing in perpetual peace. Imagining relation One of the master ideas to come down to us from the eighteenth century holds that the imagination is central to all relations between self and other, however one might designate this otherness. The imagination is central to Adam Smith's idea of sympathy, and Kant uses it as a bridge to 86Tobin Siebers unify his critical philosophy. Whether referring to objects or other people, we require a faculty by which to extend understanding to them, and this faculty continues even today to be described as imaginative. Postmodern theorists, for example, conceive of human relations in terms of identity politics, but at the core of identification is the power to imagine, be it the power to sympathize or to conceive of a party different from oneself. In effect, then, relation is itself a function of the imagination. Moreover, no relation, I want to claim, exists for long that cannot be well imagined, for which some symbolic object or idea cannot be found. The four dominant modes of relation are religion, aesthetics, ethics, and politics.1 They deserve to be called modes insofar as they name different others to which the self (or another principal) may relate imaginatively. Religion is about the relation of goodness between subject and god called the sublime. Often nature, fate, or providence as personified forces or overarching systems are also called sublime. Aesthetics is about the relation of goodness between subject and object called beauty. Ethics is about the relation of goodness between subjects called character or virtue. Finally, politics is about the relation ofgoodness between communities called peace. Peace may seem at first glance to be an odd choice to name the relation of goodness in politics. A more obvious candidate might be the idea of utopia. But utopia comes into being as a concept only with Thomas More's treatise in 1516, and this late invention seems to exclude its being considered as the privileged good of politics. Moreover, the traditional opposition between ethics and politics exposes the unfitness ofutopia as a candidate for the political good. Ethics and politics are often at war because ethics does not want to sacrifice even one person to improve the relations among other people. Ethics strives for a wholly inclusive community, but it defines this community as a collection of autonomous individuals having value in themselves only as ends and never as means to an end. If ethics aims at a wholly inclusive community of individuals, then "utopia" may be described by rights as an ethical concept, regardless ofthe fact that Utopian desire seems to stress the wrong perspective on this community, coming as it does from the collective rather than the individual point of view. The ethical dimension of the Utopian is made obvious by the realization that a 1 I will not discuss cognition, although it is surely dominant, because its objects are various, whereas the modes ofrelation of interest to me here tend to represent their objects as being of a certain kind. Politics and Peace87 utopia... (shrink)

Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre was a true nineteenth-century visionary—a painter, printmaker, set designer, entrepreneur, inventor, and pioneer of photography. Though he was widely celebrated beyond his own lifetime for his invention of the daguerreotype, it was his origins as a theatrical designer and purveyor of visual entertainment that paved the way for Daguerre's emergence as one of the world's most iconic imagemakers. In Speculating Daguerre, Stephen C. Pinson reinterprets the story of the man and his time, painting a vivid picture (...) of Daguerre as an innovative artist and savvy impresario whose eventual fame as a photographer eclipsed everything that had come before. Drawing upon previously unpublished correspondence and unplumbed archival sources, Pinson mixes biography with an incisive study of Daguerre's wide-ranging involvement in visual culture. From his work as a commercial lithographer to his coinvention of the Paris Diorama—a theater in the round in which Daguerre employed natural light and special effects to simulate time and movement in large-scale paintings—here we are given access to Daguerre the artist, whose tireless experimentation, entrepreneurial spirit, and exceptional talent for popular spectacle helped to usher in a new visual age. Filled with more than one hundred illustrations and including the first complete catalogue of Daguerre's paintings, works on paper, and daguerreotypes to appear in print, the publication of Speculating Daguerre will be a much-heralded event for anyone with even a passing interest in one of the most fascinating characters in the history of photography. (shrink)

How would you feel if you thought God wrote a personal note to you...on His website...and it was about some of the stuff that makes you wonder if He really exists at all? This book does make you feel...while it makes you think. Maybe God isn't who we thought He was. Maybe His thoughts aren't what we have been taught. God's Blogs contains some insightful, fresh thoughts that help us see more of God's character, His love, and His grace (...) as He reflects on marriage, death, laughter, dads, and questions like "Why are we here?" and, "What about tsunamis and poverty?" A fascinating read that will make you laugh and cry and search your own thoughts about who He is. What Might God Say on His Blogsite? Basically I'm entering into your blogdom because somehow the rumor got started that I was kind of boring. For those of you who bought into that craziness, you should know that I'm the one who created all the stuff you love...all the stuff that makes life exciting. I invented funny and laughter. I created adventure and romance... I laugh a lot. "Divinely inspired. This is an awesome book!" Jeff Foxworthy Very funny, smart man who loves God "Fresh thoughts on life with God from one of the most creative--and quirky--communicators I know." Louie Giglio Founder of Passion Conferences and author of I Am Not But I Know I AM "This book went through me like liquid fire. It is so inspiring, uplifting, and refreshing." Dolly Parton (everybody knows Dolly) "Wonderfully fresh and imaginative." John C. Maxwell Founder of INJOY Stewardship Services & EQUIP "I found myself reading it out loud to anybody who would listen. You are going to love this book." Andy Stanley Pastor, North Point Community Church Story Behind the Book "Blogging is a huge thing on the Web all over the world. Millions of people are logging on to millions of other people's journals just to see what they have to say. Some blogs have a larger audience than the New York Times. With blogging being so trendy right now, it occurred to me, What might people do if they thought God was blogging online about what He was seeing or what He thought was important? That being the hook, I wanted to take biblical principles written in a form similar to Eugene Peterson's The Message and attempt to use what is cultural to say what is timeless. God's truths about His love and grace and fatherhood, written in a contemporary fashion, might just penetrate the hearts of those who need Him during times of trial, or of those who aren't even sure He exists." -- Lanny Donoho. (shrink)

Cultural forms are constrained by cognitive biases, and writing is thought to have evolved to fit basic visual preferences, but little is known about the history and mechanisms of that evolution. Cognitive constraints have been documented for the topology of script features, but not for their orientation. Orientation anisotropy in human vision, as revealed by the oblique effect, suggests that cardinal orientations, being easier to process, should be overrepresented in letters. As this study of 116 scripts shows, the orientation of (...) strokes inside written characters massively favors cardinal directions, and it is organized in such a way as to make letter recognition easier: Cardinal and oblique strokes tend not to mix, and mirror symmetry is anisotropic, favoring vertical over horizontal symmetry. Phylogenetic analyses and recently invented scripts show that cultural evolution over the last three millennia cannot be the sole cause of these effects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Foucault’s Renaissance Episteme Reassessed: An Aristotelian CounterblastIan MacleanThere seem to me to be two good reasons for looking at Foucault’s Renaissance episteme again, even though specialists of the Renaissance have given it short shrift and Foucault himself does not seem to have set great store by it in his later writings. 1 The first is that in general books on Foucault accounts of it are still given in a (...) neutral or even approving way, as though neither the concept of episteme (which suggests both that mind-sets or paradigms or epistemes are all-constraining) nor the account of the Renaissance episteme in particular (which is given a predominantly Platonic and hermetic character) require modification, if not refutation. 2 I shall suggest that although in some sense we are all prisoners of our mind-sets, there are ways in which we can escape from this prison 3 ; and with respect to the Renaissance in particular, I shall claim that Aristotelianism, not Platonism, is the appropriate context in which to see the dominant universe of discourse of the day and that this philosophy can be shown to possess the resources for escaping its limitations. To do this I shall [End Page 149] give a brief resume of Foucault’s episteme in general and the Renaissance episteme in particular. Then I shall show first, that the Platonist features which he cites as typical are actively refuted at that time and cannot be described as dominant without severe qualification; second, that the versions of Aris-totelianism widely taught in universities and schools give quite different accounts of these features; and third, that this form of thinking can be shown to have the freedom of self-critique in the very areas in which Foucault chooses to see Renaissance philosophy as both constraining and constrained.In 1969 Foucault produced his “theoretical work” L’Archéologie du savoir as the methodological systematization of his earlier historical writings, L’Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (l961), La Naissance de la clinique (l963), and Les Mots et les choses (1966). In this work man is described as a modern self-invention, fashioned from a particular configuration of knowledge and destined soon to disappear. Foucault’s history of man is a story about the way he constituted himself as a subject and then made his body, his behavior, his reason, and his consciousness the object of his study and a field to be controlled, regulated, trained, and coerced. In this analysis man’s “rationality” becomes not a faculty but an authoritarian straitjacket. What Foucault sets out to investigate is a very fundamental form of ontology but not one associated with profound knowledge; it is a superficial and finite, if largely invisible, field, which is discontinuous, not defined by the agenda of the modern state of any associated discipline, and peopled by “utterances” (énoncés) which are only graspable in their differences and their dispersion. If coagulations of these “utterances” (formations discursives) occur at all, they appear only in the form of consistent relations: the objects to which they “refer” are no more than objectifications whose scientific status cannot be established and whose meaning cannot be recovered by semantic or rhetorical analysis. In calling his previous book Les Mots et les choses, he was being explicitly ironic, for neither the words nor the things of the title have any substance to them: they are not presences but absences. The description made by the historian is remote from his object, indirect, incomplete; it describes a “preconceptual field” in which the “preconcepts” are no more than organizing operators or functions revealing relationships of dependence, processes of validation, contingent theories of truth. The “utterances” which these “preconcepts” inform come together in “discourses” which are neither systems nor mere aggregations of knowledge; archaeological history as practiced by Foucault uncovers not a “mentality” but an “episteme,” which he defines as follows:By episteme we mean... the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, possibly formalized systems.... The episteme is not a form of knowledge or type of rationality which, crossing the boundaries [End Page 150] of the most... (shrink)