In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Lessons of TheoryJay PariniOne does not have to look far these days to find someone bashing literary theory, and in some respects it deserves it. Joseph Epstein, for one, has almost never tired of picking away at the motives of those who engage in literary theory: “The major impulse of theory was suspicion,” he has said. “In this regard theory gave that portion of (...) the professoriat who came through the sixties unfulfilled, and those younger professors—women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals—who chose to squeeze all they could out of their self-created status of victimhood, a large and lovely outlet for their resentment.” The irony is that one hears in this semi-hysterical cri de coeur the very suspicion that the author is supposedly complaining about. Mr. Epstein, neither female nor gay, apparently feels passed over. Inadvertently, he has become the Victim himself.Literary theory—or just “theory”—has frightened a whole generation of intellectuals into early mental retirement, mostly because they have not the stamina or will to enter into appropriate conversation with their younger colleagues. Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of the debate over theory has been this extension into the academy of what, in the sixties, used to be called the generation gap; indeed, many of the same dynamics seem to apply, with theorists pitting themselves against all forms of authority. “Never trust anyone under thirty” has been transmogrified into “Never trust anyone who doesn’t appreciate Foucault.”In the seventies, theory moved toward the center of the curriculum at most American graduate schools of literature, and it has remained in place for nearly a quarter of a century. The charge is often heard, perhaps with some justice, that students now spend more time reading [End Page 91] Foucault or Derrida than Shakespeare or Dante, and that this has created an imbalance. But even here, the situation is exaggerated; graduate students do indeed get a heavy dose of theory, yet one sees few undergraduate classrooms in the United States where anything resembling literary theory has displaced the teaching of canonical texts. For the most part what has happened is that the canon has been widened to include texts by previously overlooked writers—usually texts by women or minorities. Such a development hardly threatens to erase or even partially to occlude Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton.The charge that theory is unreadable is, for me, a more important criticism. (There’s a joke I like in this regard: Question: What do you get when you cross a deconstructionist with a mafioso? Answer: An offer you can’t understand.) Jargon has overwhelmed literary criticism to the point where the so-called Common Reader is now fiercely excluded from the conversations that take place in most professional journals and academic conferences, and the consequences of this exclusionary practice are profound. The most obvious effect is that serious literature itself, and thinking about literature and its place in the world, is removed from mainstream consumption. As a result, the general quality of our national discourse—in the arts as well as collateral areas, such as politics—is diminished.This said, I would still argue that an intellectual revolution of sorts has indeed occurred in the last thirty years, and that theory has permanently changed the ways that we—as readers and writers—go about our reading and, yes, our thinking. The peak of the battle over theory passed several years ago; in fact, we seem to have entered a “post-theoretical” moment, and so the time may have arrived for reassessing some of the lessons of theory. This “revolution” is pretty much a literal one: a turning of the wheel. But the wheel has been turning for a long time. Our ways of reading have been challenged almost continuously from the beginning of this century, when the belles-lettres style of criticism popular just after the Great War was dislodged by the philologists, and the philologists were attacked by the literary historians, and the historians were pushed temporarily to one side in the late forties and early fifties by the New Critics. And so forth. The history of criticism is simply a history of overturnings, or absorptions (I rather... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reason and Emotion. Essays in Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical TheoryEve Browning ColeJohn M. Cooper, Reason and Emotion. Essays in Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pp. xiii + 605. Cloth, $75.00.This collection of essays spans 27 years of John Cooper's career as an interpreter of ancient philosophy. Its earliest essay, "The Magna Moralia and Aristotle's Moral Philosophy," already shows Cooper's distinctive (...) approach; he seeks to discover "a simpler and more natural way" (200) to understand the discrepancies between this small treatise and Aristotle's major ethical works than by the comparatively convoluted theory of Dirlmeier. In seeking this simpler and more natural interpretive route, Cooper attends to "the philosophical content of the work" (202), rather than considerations of style and linguistic usage. He concludes with frank discussion of the problems which his interpretation cannot solve; these are dismissed with characteristic exasperation-italics: "... one must not expect to explain everything..." (210). He confines his rougher polemical points to footnotes (Dirlmeier "doesn't even face the question squarely" in note 19, hence he is "wildly off" in note 28). [End Page 430]These characteristics run through all the essays here collected. Only two of the 23 essays are previously unpublished: a reconsideration of Xenophon as a source on Socrates, and a treatment of pleasure and desire in Epicurus. Other essays take up moral problems examined by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and several Hellenistic philosophers or schools. A theme running through most if not all the discussions is the desire (shared by the ancient philosophers and by Cooper equally, it would seem) to develop and defend a viable eudaimonism. The relation between human goodness and human happiness must be shown to be one of extremely close affinity, such that the virtuous are also the happy, even in adversity. Thus though no attempt is made to connect the essays into a coherent argument leading to a global thesis about ancient moral philosophy, the book nevertheless contains the ingredients for such an argument and thesis. The book presenting such an argument and thesis could in some ways be both more elegant and more helpful than this collection; it could spend fewer of its pages in arguing against other interpreters over minor differences (the standard journal-article format for our time), more of its pages awakening the texts, eliciting their message, and presenting it in a form useful for guiding life. Perhaps Cooper will write such a book soon.But the present volume will certainly be of interest to scholars and students, who will find in it much to enjoy and ponder. Generally what is striking about Cooper's interpretations is their freshness. He is at his best when dislodging some stale orthodoxy. The essay on Xenophon's Socrates is a case in point. The portrait of Socrates which emerges in Xenophon's Memorabilia is usually taken to be far less accurate than that presented in Plato's earlier dialogues. The Memorabilia seldom appear on the required reading lists of Greek philosophy courses, nor does Xenophon's version of Socrates' approach to moral questions receive even a fraction of the scholarly attention devoted to Plato's early work. Cooper convincingly shows this neglect to rest on a prejudice. The Socrates of Xenophon's portrait addresses a different kind of audience than that of Plato; the difference in the style of questioning and in the topics discussed reflects the historical Socrates' sensitivity to his partners in conversation. He addresses them where they live (so to speak), and this makes him "all the more remarkable a person" (14).Two other strengths run throughout the essays here collected. No matter how intense the exegetical quibble may have become on any given page, Cooper is able to make a sudden soaring flight upward and provide a synoptic view of the broader philosophical terrain, both for any given philosopher and for that philosopher's contemporaries, predecessors, and successors. These flights are sometimes dizzying and often unpredictable, but always refreshing.In addition, Cooper is able to make connections with large issues in contemporary moral philosophy, relating the ancient controversies to their modern versions (John Rawls, Bernard Williams, Leo Strauss... (shrink)

There is no authoritative biography of Archimedes, but there are moments from his life which, apocryphal or not, have become the stuff of legend. These include accounts of Archimedes running naked through the streets after realizing that his body displaces water in the bath , how he sat musing over diagrams in the sand as sword-bearing Romans descended upon him during a siege of Syracuse, and of course, his mechanically-informed claim that a firm resting place is all he would need (...) to dislodge the world from its axis. This is the birth of the Archimedean point, which latter-day interpretations craft into a figure of thought that works according to the mechanical principle it describes: effortlessly, it .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reason and Emotion. Essays in Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical TheoryEve Browning ColeJohn M. Cooper, Reason and Emotion. Essays in Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pp. xiii + 605. Cloth, $75.00.This collection of essays spans 27 years of John Cooper's career as an interpreter of ancient philosophy. Its earliest essay, "The Magna Moralia and Aristotle's Moral Philosophy," already shows Cooper's distinctive (...) approach; he seeks to discover "a simpler and more natural way" (200) to understand the discrepancies between this small treatise and Aristotle's major ethical works than by the comparatively convoluted theory of Dirlmeier. In seeking this simpler and more natural interpretive route, Cooper attends to "the philosophical content of the work" (202), rather than considerations of style and linguistic usage. He concludes with frank discussion of the problems which his interpretation cannot solve; these are dismissed with characteristic exasperation-italics: "... one must not expect to explain everything..." (210). He confines his rougher polemical points to footnotes (Dirlmeier "doesn't even face the question squarely" in note 19, hence he is "wildly off" in note 28). [End Page 430]These characteristics run through all the essays here collected. Only two of the 23 essays are previously unpublished: a reconsideration of Xenophon as a source on Socrates, and a treatment of pleasure and desire in Epicurus. Other essays take up moral problems examined by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and several Hellenistic philosophers or schools. A theme running through most if not all the discussions is the desire (shared by the ancient philosophers and by Cooper equally, it would seem) to develop and defend a viable eudaimonism. The relation between human goodness and human happiness must be shown to be one of extremely close affinity, such that the virtuous are also the happy, even in adversity. Thus though no attempt is made to connect the essays into a coherent argument leading to a global thesis about ancient moral philosophy, the book nevertheless contains the ingredients for such an argument and thesis. The book presenting such an argument and thesis could in some ways be both more elegant and more helpful than this collection; it could spend fewer of its pages in arguing against other interpreters over minor differences (the standard journal-article format for our time), more of its pages awakening the texts, eliciting their message, and presenting it in a form useful for guiding life. Perhaps Cooper will write such a book soon.But the present volume will certainly be of interest to scholars and students, who will find in it much to enjoy and ponder. Generally what is striking about Cooper's interpretations is their freshness. He is at his best when dislodging some stale orthodoxy. The essay on Xenophon's Socrates is a case in point. The portrait of Socrates which emerges in Xenophon's Memorabilia is usually taken to be far less accurate than that presented in Plato's earlier dialogues. The Memorabilia seldom appear on the required reading lists of Greek philosophy courses, nor does Xenophon's version of Socrates' approach to moral questions receive even a fraction of the scholarly attention devoted to Plato's early work. Cooper convincingly shows this neglect to rest on a prejudice. The Socrates of Xenophon's portrait addresses a different kind of audience than that of Plato; the difference in the style of questioning and in the topics discussed reflects the historical Socrates' sensitivity to his partners in conversation. He addresses them where they live (so to speak), and this makes him "all the more remarkable a person" (14).Two other strengths run throughout the essays here collected. No matter how intense the exegetical quibble may have become on any given page, Cooper is able to make a sudden soaring flight upward and provide a synoptic view of the broader philosophical terrain, both for any given philosopher and for that philosopher's contemporaries, predecessors, and successors. These flights are sometimes dizzying and often unpredictable, but always refreshing.In addition, Cooper is able to make connections with large issues in contemporary moral philosophy, relating the ancient controversies to their modern versions (John Rawls, Bernard Williams, Leo Strauss... (shrink)

Phenomenalism is a philosophical theory of perception involving the idea that statements about material objects can be explained in terms of statements about actual and possible sense experiences. In this study James Giles explores the development of phenomenalism through the works of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and others. He shows how problems occur for phenomenalists precisely at the point where they abandon their empiricism. Holding to empiricism, Giles then presents his own version of phenomenalism as a metaphysical thesis in which (...) the material objects are constructed out of sense experience. He then argues that the major critiques of phenomenalism, including Wittgenstein’s private language argument and Sellars’ famous attack on the ‘myth of the given’, all fail to dislodge the basic phenomenalist insights. (shrink)

Can being, more specifically, black being, be thematized as visible from within the particularity of a given faith tradition, its practices and mode of being in the world? To narrow the question to one specific faith tradition, Christianity: Can blackness be visible within the visibility of the Christian factum---the incarnate God, Jesus of Nazareth? The first two chapters, drawing on the work of Albert J. Raboteau, Charles H. Long, and James H. Cone, show how African American religious scholarship, to varying (...) degrees, answers negatively, explicating the particularities of black being from a more fundamental genesis than the particularities of a given faith tradition itself. Various are the names of the fundament: Africanity, the religious consciousness, the ontological horizon of blackness, and so forth. Chapter 3 uncovers the Kantian philosophico-religious structure at work here, the very framework that spawned modernity's first thoroughgoing race theory. Chapters 4 and 5, drawing on Briton Hammon, Frederick Douglass, and Jarena Lee, offer a theological account of race. Black being is shown to be visible, iconically opaque, and, thus, theologically free as Christic and Paschal being. This theological transcription of being is coterminous with an emancipatory social arrangement of being: black being as 'Christified' is ecclesial being. This does not silence the historical cadences of black being; rather it dislodges the history of black being from the colonial gaze. ;The Proem on Irenaeus of Lyons , the Excursus on Gregory of Nyssa , and the Postlude on Maximos the Confessor indicate the Christology influencing this dissertation. Placing patristic Christology, as it culminates in Chalcedon I and refined in the neo-Chalcedonian debates, in conversation with the modern construction of race and being, I establish a vantage from which to criticize Immanuel Kant's supersessionistic Christianity, out of which emerged his race qua colonial theory. Yet, it also provides a vantage from which to articulate a non-supersessionistic Christianity of the embodiment of God in Jesus of Nazareth for the visibility of black being and, thus, speaks to a distressing aporia in African American religious studies and theology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in ContextPeter E. KnoxKathryn J. Gutzwiller. Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in Context. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. 358 pp.Cloth, $45.The publication of Alan Camerons The Greek Anthology from Meleager to Planudes in 1993 set a coronis upon one stage in the efforts of modern scholars to sort out the untidy garden that we know as ancient Greek epigram. We now (...) know as much about the history of this corpus as we are likely to discover without the introduction of new evidence, and scholarly attention might logically be expected to return to the interpretation and criticism of these poems. Transmitted for the most part in the socalled Palatine Anthology and filtered through the agency of anthologists ancient and medieval, the epigrams of the ancient practitioners of this minor genre have tended to be studied individually, [End Page 628] like gemstones dislodged from their original settings. The luster of each piece may be easily admired, but what has been lost is the color and clarity that is imparted by the contrast with its neighbors. The ambitious task that Kathryn Gutzwiller has set herself in this closely argued and learned book is no less than to recover from the collecta membra of the Palatine Anthology the contours of the epigram books of nine poets from the early Hellenistic period to Meleager in the first century B.C.E.The opening chapter provides an introduction, which, taken together with the following chapter ("Hellenistic Epigram Books"), lays the foundation for the remainder of the work and establishes its basic premise, that all the Hellenistic epigrammatists composed their work for "publication" in carefully constructed books, arranged on principles which Gutzwiller can recover. This is the basis for what she terms "a new interpretative strategy" in the criticism of Hellenistic epigrams, "to read them as if"—her emphasis—"we knew their place in historical collections" (7). The remainder of the book is occupied by her reconstructions of the epigram books of Anyte, Nossis, Leonidas of Tarentum, Asclepiades, Posidippus, Hedylus, Callimachus, Antipater of Sidon, and Meleager. Readers who are convinced by her arguments in these opening chapters will be swept along by her hypothetical arrangements, which she supports with close readings of individual poems set in their new contexts. Others, myself included, will remain suspicious of the solidity of the foundations of this edifice, while still finding much to admire in her sophisticated interpretations of individual poems.Much of Gutzwiller's theoretical underpinning depends upon rather strict adherence to the orthodox view of what she characterizes as the "Callimachean aesthetic preference for the miniature, the intricate, and the fragmented" (4). The Hellenistic epigram books that she posits correspond neatly with Callimachean aesthetics so described. She rejects out of hand Cameron's arguments for the social role of epigram in a sympotic setting, in favor of the bookish background described by (e.g.) Peter Bing. The hypothesis of a neat and well– ordered world of Hellenistic poetry books, as outlined by some modern scholars, is not undisputed, but readers will not hear much about that here. Gutzwiller sweeps aside skeptical challenges to this picture, and the possibility, for example, that Callimachus produced a collected edition of his poetry, advanced only as a hypothesis by Rudolf Pfeiffer, is here (19) represented as "the probability... that Callimachus published his complete oeuvre, ordered and divided into books." Her summary of the papyrus evidence paints a far more stable picture of the situation of books in the manuscript culture of the Hellenistic world than the evidence safely allows. For Gutzwiller, any references to the of a poet "indicate an authorially compiled epigram book" (20). This naïve extension of Pfeiffer's theory of the composition of a "Collected Works" of Callimachus, and unswerving allegiance to the communis opinio of Callimachean aesthetics, are recurring themes in Gutzwiller's reconstructions of ancient epigram books. Having settled upon the essential aesthetic that determines the [End Page 629] configuration of the book, it remains only to attach the surviving poems to this framework. Not surprisingly, the reconstructed books then offer further confirmation of the underlying assumptions. On this shaky foundation, for example, Gutzwiller... (shrink)

The present article is written by a theoretical physicist who, for some time, has endeavored to trace the origin of the concepts and principles of quantum theory to an empirical background broader than that afforded by delicate optical and mechanical experiments on a microphysical scale involving the microconstant h. In particular he tried to reduce the dominant role of probability in modern physics to irrefutable evidence of a quite general nature. As long as quantum probability is deduced from experience (...) with seemingly uncontrollable micro-mechanisms—think of radioactive disintegration as the most typical example—there will always be the objection that one day we still may find a hidden causality behind those small scale gambling devices called atoms, although one example of an exactly predictable atomic event would make present-day quantum theory untenable. In order to dislodge the remaining classicists from their fortress of doubt one may try to show that quantum probability is not an alibi for a temporary impotence of predicting microphysical events, but is a positive conclusion drawn from experience of a most general type, namely, from the principle of continuity, the basic tenet of the philosophy of Leibniz. (shrink)

Fragmented regions face a range of collective action problems on issues ranging from transportation to affordable housing. Specifically, within regions, free-rider and race-to-the-bottom problems both abound. This Article offers theoretical lenses to clarify the sources of, and barriers to solving, these problems. First, it introduces the concept of concentricity to better understand the region. The municipality and the region represent coexisting, concentric communities and nodes of competition. The geographically based identity that one espouses may toggle between the local and the (...) regional across different contexts. Second, this Article describes a community-competitor feedback loop. Drawing on social science literature, the Article shows how encouraging deep identification with a community can inspire competition with other communities. And encouraging competition between communities can deepen community identity. The Article then applies these theories to practical considerations. Given the persistent nature of hyperlocal identity, intraregional competition, and the resultant feedback loop, mandatory regional solutions may often be politically unattainable, even when they are the optimal solution. Accordingly, this Article presents two voluntary, cooperative regionalist solutions that embrace and potentially exploit regions’ concentric identities, instead of doing the more costly work of dislodging local identity. (shrink)

Environmental ethics is based on the extension of the morality sphere as a consequence of an enlarged moral community beyond the limits of human community. I argue in this paper that the turning point in this extension is the notion of intrinsic value. But the process of extension produces some theoretical puzzles. One of them is the essential tension between the aim to include more and more entities into the moral community and the need for a hierarchy in order to (...) preserve the interests of a good life for more complex living beings. My suggestion is that if the suppositions of traditional anthropocentrism are dislodged, the theoretical conflict is balanced or even dissolved at a managerial level. Biocentrism is the theory that could assume this task. (shrink)

I aim to provide a satisfying response to radical scepticism, a view according to which our knowledge of the external world is impossible. In the first chapter I investigate into the nature and the source of scepticism. Radical scepticism is motivated both by the closureRK-based and the underdeterminationRK-based sceptical arguments. Because these two sceptical arguments are logically independent, any satisfying anti-sceptical proposal must take both of them into consideration. Also, scepticism is a paradox, albeit a spurious one, so we need (...) to provide a diagnosis as to why we are lead into the paradox and why the alleged paradox misrepresents our epistemic standings. Hence, I advocate an obstacle-dissolving strategy for combating the sceptical problem. In chapter two, I discuss the anti-sceptical import of transcendental arguments. Although ambitious transcendental arguments are vulnerable to Stroud’s dilemma, I argue that modest transcendental arguments are promising. Modest transcendental arguments start from an undoubted psychological fact and then reveal some necessary theoretical commitments that we must make. Regarding these commitments, I submit that we are type II epistemically justified in believing them. Our commitments are type II justified in the sense that making these commitments can promote our epistemic goals, namely, the attainment of true beliefs and the avoidance of false beliefs. After that, in light of Cassam’s objection to transcendental arguments, I contend that a modest transcendental argument should be used as a stepping stone for a diagnostic anti-sceptical proposal. In chapter three, I develop a Davidsonian response to closureRK-based radical scepticism. This form of sceptical argument rests on the idea that there is no limitation on our acquisition of rationally grounded knowledge. I discuss Davidson’s theory of radical interpretation, the principle of charity and triangulation. Crucially, he argues that the content of a knowledge-apt everyday belief is determined by its typical cause and other relevant beliefs. Further, among different propositional attitudes, belief is prior to doubt. What follows is that doubt must be local because it must presume other content-determining beliefs. Also, I explore Davidson’s view on the concept of belief. On his view, in order to have a knowledge-apt belief, we must have the concept of knowledge-apt belief. We can command this concept by having the concept of objective truth. Objective truth requires that we are aware of and are capable of appreciating the possibility of a belief’s being true or false. And this possibility cannot be appreciated unless we have some related contentful beliefs to identify the content of the very belief. However, we are committed to, as opposed to believing, the proposition that the sceptical hypothesis does not obtain. It is impossible to appreciate the possibility of our fundamental commitments being false from our own perspective, because fundamental commitments specify the general cause of our beliefs. A change in this regard would cause a total change of the content of all beliefs, which leaves us no contentful belief at all to make this possibility intelligible. Therefore, the closureRK principle is not applicable to the evaluation of the sceptical hypothesis. Hence, we can retain the closureRK principle while evading the closureRK-based sceptical challenge. Unfortunately, the Davidsonian response cannot deal with the underdeterminationRK-based sceptical challenge, because we are not shown whether our rational support in the good case favours one’s everyday belief over its sceptical counterpart. In chapter four, I examine how epistemological disjunctivism can deal with underdeterminationRK-based radical scepticism. This form of sceptical argument assumes that our rational support provides at best inconclusive support for our beliefs. Therefore, a belief’s being rationally supported, no matter in the good case or in the bad case, is compatible with the belief’s being false. Epistemological disjunctivism claims that in paradigm cases of perceptual knowledge, our rational support can be both factive and reflectively accessible. The factive rational support at issue is one’s propositional seeing. I discuss both McDowell’s and Pritchard’s proposals for motivating factive seeing, and I argue for epistemological disjunctivism against three prime facie objections, i.e., the distinguishability problem, the basis problem and the access problem. When epistemological disjunctivism is shown to be a plausible view, I argue that underdeterminationRK-based radical scepticism can be dismissed. In particular, in the optimal case, factive rational support favours our everyday belief over the sceptical hypothesis. However, regarding closureRK-based radical scepticism, epistemological disjunctivism seems to licence a robust answer. The ambitious answer is that, in the good case, we can after all know the denial of the sceptical hypothesis in virtue of possessing factive rational support. And it is the immodesty of this answer that renders this response unpalatable. In the last chapter, I propose a combined treatment of the sceptical problem. Although both the Davidsonian response and the epistemological disjunctivist response can only deal with one aspect of the sceptical problem, their views are in fact mutually supportive. On the one hand, the Davidsonian response, together with a Wittgensteinian insight, shows that why rational support can only be provided in a local manner; on the other hand, epistemological disjunctivism reminds us that rational support can be factive in the good case. Putting these two points together allows us to answer the whole sceptical challenge in a uniform way. This combined proposal has three claims. First, our rational support can be both local and factive, so we can dismiss both sceptical arguments in one go. Second, the sceptical problem is a spurious paradox, so the combined treatment involves a diagnosis. This diagnosis starts from a modest transcendental argument which reveals some necessary commitments that we must make, and then proceeds to expose faulty assumptions in the sceptical paradox. Third, once the dubious assumptions are dislodged, we can evade the sceptical problem once and for all. In the end, we are offered with a satisfying response to radical scepticism. (shrink)

A phenomenological account of an extended encounter with feminist theory in translation, the entirety of ‘Subjects through translation’ is best condensed in these three lines from the poet Adrienne Rich: it will be short, it will not be simple // You are coming into us who cannot withstand you // you are taking parts of us into places never planned. What is it like to read text after text in translation? How do familiar words become so strange? How to (...) express the dizziness, the blurring, the sharp and sometimes painful dislocations of meaning, sense? Thoughts dislodged from their usual paths begin to wander, to wonder anew. Subjects are changed. (shrink)

Sextus Empiricus represents the only school of ancient scepticism to have developed views on happiness as our final end. He gives arguments to dislodge our commitment to all positive theories of happiness, aiming to produce suspension of judgement, which is alleged to result in tranquility. But what replaces it is not substantial enough to be plausibly articulated as a theory of happiness, and is too dependent on actual agreement to ground scepticism's alleged therapeutic value.

The purpose of this article is to incorporate trans‐national actors and institutions into citizenship theory both theoretically and empirically. We analyze three cases of recognition movements promoting gender, ethnic/minority and indigenous rights. Using one societal context, Sweden, we map the processes and mechanisms of power and agency (boundary‐making and brokering) that shape how trans‐national institutions and actors offer new forms of leverage politics to recognition movements as well as constrain their agency. These mechanisms of power are formalized in a (...) model showing the multi‐level effects of leverage politics on recognition movements. Our three cases of recognition politics demonstrate the increasingly complex links between actors in policy communities across regional, national, European and international levels. They also reveal the processes implicit in our model: that policy imports are reframed when translated into specific national political cultures; and more broadly, that national citizenship frames of membership and inclusion are not easily dislodged. (shrink)

This thesis offers a fresh interpretation and defense of epistemological disjunctivism about perceptual knowledge. I adopt a multilevel approach according to which perceptual knowledge on one level can enjoy factive rational support provided by perceptual knowledge of the same proposition on a different level. Here I invoke a distinction Ernest Sosa draws between ‘judgmental’ and ‘merely functional’ belief to articulate what I call the bifurcated conception of perceptual knowledge. The view that results is a form of epistemological disjunctivism about perceptual (...) knowledge specifically at the higher judgmental level, layered over a straightforward externalism about perceptual knowledge at the lower merely functional level. The first chapter orients the reader to epistemological disjunctivism— with particular emphasis on the ‘reflective epistemological disjunctivism’ defended by Duncan Pritchard with inspiration from John McDowell. Here I review the arguments for thinking such a proposal true, as well as highlight some problems and three emerging challenges for the view: what I call the internalist challenge, the new access challenge, and the ‘new evil genius’ challenge. These challenges largely inspire the chapters to follow. In the second chapter I present the positive proposal: a fresh interpretation of epistemological disjunctivism in terms of perceptual knowledge at the specifically judgmental level. I argue that this is a modification that epistemological disjunctivists should adopt since it inoculates their view against the internalist challenge: the challenge of explaining why perception should provide one with knowledge by providing one with motivating reasons for belief. In the third chapter I motivate the view further in connection with the more familiar ‘basis problem’ for epistemological disjunctivism. I argue that this approach supports a unique strategy for solving that problem: one that is consistent both with what is known as ‘the entailment’ thesis and the thought that we can reduce perceptual knowledge to a kind of rationally supported belief. In the fourth chapter I move to playing defense. I defend the proposal against the so-called ‘new evil genius’ challenge. This is the challenge to explain why subjects in pairs of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ cases can seem equally justified for sustaining their perceptual beliefs. I argue that what we are being sensitive to here, rather, is the fact that both subjects can be equally epistemically responsible and/or reasonable for believing what they do. Before concluding this chapter I also offer an error theory. In the fifth chapter I defend the proposal against the new access challenges raised in chapter one. These alleged challenges for epistemological disjunctivism arise specifically for versions of reflective epistemological disjunctivism that hold that one’s rational support for perceptual beliefs is not only factive but reflectively accessible as well. Rather than address the challenges head on, I try to dislodge the thought they depend upon—viz., that one’s factive rational support for perceptual beliefs is reflectively accessible to the subject. Here I argue that the reflective accessibility of one’s factive rational support is actually a wheel turning idly in the debate with the underdetermination-based radical sceptic—so that we can simply drop it without consequence. The result is an epistemological disjunctivism that is immune to access problems. I then offer a final summary and conclude. At the end of this thesis I have attached an appendix, which is an excursion into religious epistemology and an exploration of a form of religious epistemological disjunctivism. Here I apply the epistemological disjunctivist insight to the case of religious perception in order to defend the idea that one can offer independent rational support for theistic belief by appealing to religious beliefs that are justified on the basis of religious experiences. This appendix chapter is in keeping with the general spirit of the thesis insofar as it seeks to developed epistemological disjunctivism in new and fruitful directions. (shrink)

Civilization is now more than ever bombarded with the rapid innovation and technological development of all nations, which threatens to dislodge religious and moral traditions. Jürgen Habermas, a staunch defender of critical theory, has a very distinct philosophical position that theology is bound to come to grips with it. Theologians would argue that moral lift with its wide range of exclusions and virtues is of necessity grounded in a God, who is a transcendent entity. Failing such grounding, humanity is (...) susceptible to secular relativism that, by its very nature, weakens the moral fabric of society. What is the role of religion in postmodernist society? This article is a critical meta-analysis of what Habermas has to say on the matter This article thus provides a critique of Habermas's views on religion and the role of religion particularly in the public sphere. It is noticeable that Habermas has a different view with Immanuel Kant in that religion is not philosophical in nature, but rather involves a very unique and private matter off faith in a God. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:No Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye: Transgression and Masculinity in Bataille and FoucaultJudith Surkis (bio)In August 1963 Critique published an “Hommage à Georges Bataille,” a special issue commemorating the death of its founder. How did the volume’s contributors go about the seemingly tricky business of pledging fealty to the philosopher of sovereignty? How did they profess loyalty to, in effect recognize, the sovereign subject known to (...) insistently refuse masterful identity?Apparently undisturbed by this difficulty, the articles written by Bataille’s acquaintances—Alfred Metraux, Michel Leiris, Raymond Queneau, André Masson, and Jean Piel amongst them—establish an explicitly fraternal relation to their contemporary. Piel begins his homage with an account of their initial encounter chez Queneau in 1927, noting his “impression of extraordinary fraternity, an impression which, through our last meeting days before his death, never diminished” [721]. Intermingling intellectual and personal history, these occasional pieces remember Bataille in a variety of contexts: the awakening of his interest in ethnology and work on Documents in the 1920s, his early “confrontations” with Hegel and work on Critique sociale and Contre-attaque in the 1930s, his sensitivity to events and developments in post-World-War-II Europe. While significantly diverse in focus, these articles manifest a similar approach, at once biographical and autobiographical, detailing the unfolding of shared intellectual amitié in favorite cafés, apartments, and studios. Bataille emerges here as a historical subject whose interests and investments, while multiple and, to use Leiris’s metonym, even “impossible,” are repeatedly linked to a variety of intellectual and political milieux.Michel Foucault’s “Preface to Transgression” assumes a more reverential tone than the pieces written by members of Bataille’s own generation. While framed as an explicit “homage” in its recognition of a certain debt to Bataille, Foucault’s essay also plays upon the contradiction of pledging loyalty to a “sovereign” who repeatedly renounces his own claim to mastery. Bataille’s death becomes an occasion on which to herald the “breakdown” and “shattering” of the masterful philosophical subject conventionally assumed to be in control of the “natural” language of dialectics [42–43]. For Foucault, a new possibility for philosophy is seen to arise in “the non-dialectical language of the limit which arises only in transgressing the one who speaks” [44], a transgression repeatedly performed, according to Foucault, in Bataille’s own writing and metaphorically enacted in and by his death. Bataille had, after all, proclaimed in the conclusion to Erotism: “To give transgression to philosophy as a foundation (it is the approach of my thought)...” Bataille’s theory of transgression aims to evoke a “world of play” in which “philosophy disintegrates” [275]. Yet, if the disintegration of philosophy in and through transgression is already Bataille’s “project,” we might inquire into why Foucault frames his article as a preface. [End Page 18]In introducing this presumably already achieved transgression, the “Preface” affects a curious, alternating temporality, a certain confusion of anteriority and posteriority. 1 At once following and preceding Bataille, Foucault remains out of sync and hence unable to coincide with Bataille in the shared amitié inscribed by the author’s contemporaries; it would appear that this generational gap introduces a certain shift in the recollection of Bataille’s legacy. Following in his footsteps, Foucault appropriates one of Bataille’s own disorienting gestures—the tactical use of prefaces, itself mentioned in the “Preface” [43]—in order to dislodge Bataille from his anterior position; instead, Bataille comes to epitomize the transgression predicted by Foucault’s “philosophical” preface. Bataille’s (and, by implication, Foucault’s own) “location” becomes confused and obscured; as I hope to show, Foucault is invested in achieving this state of indeterminacy for both himself and Bataille.To honor Bataille in death assumes a double significance for Foucault: it represents a “transgression of the philosopher’s being” which “has sent us to the pure transgression of his texts” [40] and simultaneously allows Foucault to sacralize Bataille. “Pure transgression” becomes liberated from the historically located being of the philosopher. And further, since the language of transgression is linked by Foucault to the “death of God,” Bataille becomes, in a sense, “deified” in the announcement and celebration of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Du Bois’s “Afterthought”A Pedagogical Variant for Continental PhilosophyHernando A. EstévezThe Souls of Black Folk is a pedagogical text that echoes continental philosophy’s aim of preparing humankind for the genuine practice of philosophical life through critique. In this text, Du Bois uses pedagogy to expose destructive and oppressive aspects of the Western tradition in its conflicting ideas and practices. In particular, I read Du Bois’s “afterthought” in Souls of Black (...) Folk as a form of critique that is expressly pedagogical, in that it prepares black individuals to play their destined role in this new era of history, and it calls for a continuous rethinking of the politics of higher education. While describing his early academic, political, and intellectual journey, Du Bois alludes to his initial and persistent concern with the impact of education on the formation of black men’s civil subjectivity. According to Du Bois, “My problem then was how, into the inevitable and logical democracy which was spreading over the world, could black folk in America and particularly in the South be openly and effectively admitted; and the colored people of the world allowed their self-government?” (Du Bois [1940] 1983, 29). For Du Bois such a question has sufficient political and social force to de-center the truths produced by the Western tradition as well as the precepts determining individuals’ subjectivity and self-government. Self-governance underlies Du Bois’s pedagogical and political projects as it is responsible for transforming black individuals’ self-perception and their relation to society. Du Bois approaches autonomy and self-governance pedagogically, by awakening individuals’ capacities for them by means of critique, through [End Page 82] questioning the historical basis on which the black race has been determined politically by the Western tradition.Du Bois’s essay Of the Training of Black Men (1902)1 begins by describing three “streams of thought,” which carry within the depth of their ideological flow ideas and ideals about humanity. Each stream has an epistemological and ontological force, which organizes the source of knowledge about the nature of black individuals’ being and existence. The force of the first stream of thought calls for an ethos that could unify humanity by multiplying its wants through worldwide cooperation. The second stream affirms the racism produced by theories explaining the origin of the black race, and the third calls for a civil struggle of black and whitened individuals whose political ideals challenge the presumed universal validity of the first two. Each stream of thought is followed by an afterthought, which questions the epistemological ground for moral and ontological claims of each of the three streams regarding the relationship between black individuals and the world. Du Bois deploys the pedagogical force of the afterthought most effectively in the political strength of the third stream of thought, in the emergence of suspicion. Through suspicion, a different possibility appears for thinking black individuals’ relationship with the world. This suspicion initiates a descriptive and normative analysis by challenging the pedagogical system on which beliefs and ideas about black individuals’ reality and future have been invented. In other words, suspicion dislodges history’s determinism by provoking self-reflection through critique of the Western philosophical tradition.In the words of Du Bois,And last of all there trickles down that third and darker thought—the thought of the things themselves, the confused, half-conscious mutter of men who are black and whitened, crying “Liberty, Freedom, Opportunity—vouchsafe to us, O boastful World, the chance of living men!” To be sure behind the thought lurks afterthought,—suppose, after all, the World is right and we are less than men? Suppose this mad impulse within is all wrong, some mock mirage from the untrue?(Du Bois [1903] 2006, 68; my emphasis)Furthermore, the “afterthought” and its immanent force of suspicion explore other subjective dimensions—the desires, struggles and dreams of the black race—which reveals alternative modes of being in the world.2 The political shift initiated by the afterthought’s critique is capable of opening up new historical categories and reconstructing the arena in which subjectivity occupies a new theoretical framework. The afterthought identifies and supersedes... (shrink)

Student-centered pedagogy has been embraced by many feminist practitioners and educational theorists as an antidote to more “traditional” or “masculinist” forms of classroom relations, epistemological constructs, and theories of self. I will show that the margin-center schema, student-centered pedagogy’s foundational metaphor, undermines feminist projects when applied to teacher-student relations. Although the margin-center schema has been a useful diagnostic tool in feminist theory, it operates prescriptively in student-centered pedagogy. Student-centered pedagogy designates teachers’ “proper place” at the margins of classroom life, (...) a place that echoes bygone visions of domestic femininity. This paper is simultaneously a critique of student-centered pedagogy and a recuperative project to dislodge the work of John Dewey from the teacher-centered/student-centered binary. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:William James’s Ethical RepublicTrygve ThrontveitFor William James (1842–1910), all philosophical problems were ultimately ethical. In Pragmatism (1907), James invoked the logical theory of his friend Charles Peirce to argue that the “meaning” of any belief consisted solely in “what conduct it is fitted to produce.” There was “no difference in abstract truth,” he elaborated, “that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent (...) upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen.” Indeed, James concluded that truth was not just reflected in the consequences of conduct but shaped by them: “Truth is made,” he wrote, “just as health, wealth, and strength are made, in the course of experience.”1 This major thesis of Pragmatism distilled a career spent describing an unfinished world, in which human thoughts and actions made differences for which thinkers and actors were responsible. As early as 1878, James insisted that beliefs imply action to advance goals, creating effects valued in light of those goals. The mind, he reiterated in his 1890 masterpiece The Principles of Psychology, is a “fighter for ends,” and thinking, a “moral act.” Later, in “The Will to Believe” (1896), James argued that when evidence is inconclusive, belief might create conditions in which hypotheses could be verified and potential goods realized—or lost. That frank (if often overlooked) assessment of the moral risks as well as rewards of intellectual life echoed James’s most explicitly ethical work, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” [End Page 255] (1891), where he asserted that when choosing what to believe, it is “simply our total character and personal genius that are on trial; and if we invoke any so-called philosophy, our choice and use of that also are but revelations of our personal aptitude or incapacity for moral life.”2In short, James, as John Dewey elegized in 1910, “was everywhere and always the moralist.”3 Yet for much of the twentieth century critics deemed James’s philosophy ethically vacuous, a warrant for moral solipsism. In 1909, Bertrand Russell criticized James for privileging belief over suspension of judgment, and thus encouraging people to live in private moral universes rather than seek objective grounding for common values. Today, some intellectual historians continue to echo Russell and likeminded contemporaries, judging ethical pragmatism tantamount to moral relativism, even moral apathy.4 Others, acknowledging James’s impassioned pronouncements on lynching, industrial conflict, imperialist expansion, and other public moral issues, have interpreted them as expressing a particularly cosmopolitan but otherwise unremarkable American liberalism, rather than a coherent moral philosophy.5These criticisms are unfounded, but understandable. They reflect a general [End Page 256] antipathy toward James’s broader conceptions of knowledge, truth, and experience, and frustration with his unorthodox mode of philosophizing. In Pragmatism, James followed Peirce in arguing that beliefs are not copies of reality, but “rules for action” resembling the probabilistic predictions guiding scientific inquiry. James, however, extended Peirce’s argument, claiming there is no static reality that beliefs can once-for-all describe. A self-proclaimed “radical empiricist,” James held that the universe is pluralistic, and the only reality accessible to human minds is constantly changing—not least through the ceaseless flux of human consciousness, a fact as natural and consequential as any other.6 This blurring of subject-object distinctions scandalized contemporaries. It also underpinned James’s equally scandalous claim that ideas not only demonstrate their meaning through conduct, but derive both meaning and value from their origins and verification in human activity. To ask what is true in such a world was to ask which ideas, moral or otherwise, allow people to navigate it successfully—which “carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part”—and which do not.7 Because of these commitments James never made hard distinctions between ethics and other branches of inquiry, or defined his ethics as a separable component of his philosophy easily analyzed on its own terms. Meanwhile, his further refusal to dislodge theory from practice has frustrated those conceiving ethics as a logically and temporally consistent program of conduct. Instead, James insisted that ethical principles emerge organically from individuals’ collective experience in... (shrink)

This essay suggests that common themes in recent feminist ethical thought can dislodge the guiding assumptions of traditional theories of free agency and thereby foster an account of freedom which might be more fruitful for feminist discussion of moral and political agency. The essay proposes constructing that account around a condition of normative-competence. It argues that this view permits insight into why women's labor of reclaiming and augmenting their agency is both difficult and possible in a sexist society.

Several other commentators capably articulate and defend an important objection to Christie, Brusse, et al.: the claim that the existence of a trait is entirely, rather than partially explained by the effects for which it was selected is stronger than the selected effects theorist needs or seeks to defend. Nonetheless, Christie, Brusse, et al.’s cases do draw our attention to a point about the explanatory relation between selected effects functions and their bearers that has not been emphasized by selected effects (...) theorists, although some have quietly accommodated it. This is the idea that, for a trait T to be for performing F, T’s ability to perform F must figure in an explanation of T’s existence in a particular way. It is not T’s absolute propensity to produce F as an effect but its comparative propensity, as compared with alternatives to T, that must figure in the explanation. The pattern of explanation sought by selected effects theorists to underwrite function attributions therefore requires a correct choice of comparison class. When we spell this idea out, we arrive at a hypothesis about what is bothering Christie, Brusse, et al. about the cases they find problematic. Consider their Gouldian finches. Focusing on the role of comparative propensities, the difficulty becomes clear: the claim that the red-heads’ hormonal levels have persisted in the finch population because they have had the effect of dislodging competitors more reliably than the black-heads’ hormonal levels is incorrect. The red-head phenotype doesn’t stick around by outdoing the black-heads at dislodging, since the black-heads can’t be outdone at something they are not in the business of doing in the first place. However, this point is not in the end a serious problem for selected effects theories because the problem comes from a wrong choice of comparison class: namely, black-heads, rather than inferior red-heads. If the hormonal trait of today’s red-heads reached or persists at its present frequency because of some historical selection against other, perhaps quite similar, hawkish variants, this trait will be for dislodging competitors, since it is around because it outdid those alternatives at dislodging. (shrink)

The word "metacritique," as present in the title, strikes the American reader as strange. Perhaps the closest English translation of the title would be "Philosophy of Formal Logic." For what is in question is not the formal structure of logic; instead, the question is: What is the relation between formal logic and the world? The thesis that Eley seeks to dislodge is that of nominalism. His interest is not in formal logic as such, but in the philosophical thesis purported by (...) logicians that formal logic has no intrinsic relation to the world but is, at best, an instrument for our scientific understanding of the world. This postfoundational, instrumental theory is for him nominalistic dogmatism. Correlative to this dogmatism is the transformation of the world into a "technical world of things" or, as he also contends, "the medium of an industrial society." Opposed to nominalism and such a technical world, Eley proposes a transcendental-phenomenological critique of formal logic by means of which the origin of formal logic in life-world structures is to be uncovered. Through such a return to the life-world, he believes he is able to reintegrate formal logic and the world. Insofar as those schematic operations essential to a logic of statements and an elementary predicate logic are to be traced to their origin in the life-world, the method employed is a genetic one. (shrink)

Fred Dallmayr is one of the most perceptive commentators on the implications of continental philosophy for political thinking. Following Hannah Arendt he describes his essays as "exercises in contemporary political theory." Whether exploring the meaning of Heidegger's reflections on freedom, Gadamer, Oakeshott or Rorty on conversation and dialogue, Habermas on communicative action and rationality, or Foucault on power, Dallmayr has the rare gift of enabling texts "to speak to us" in new and illuminating ways. He beautifully exhibits a theme (...) that he explores in several of these essays--authentic conversation, where he shows us how to listen to the other and to pursue in depth the common subject matter--die Sache. These exercises continue the investigations begun in his Twilight of Subjectivity: Contributions to a Post-Individualist Theory of Politics. The important and intriguing aspect of Dallmayr's project is the way in which he confronts contemporary critiques of individualism, subjectivism, and humanism--and yet dialectically seeks to incorporate the "truth" of what is being criticized. His primary concern is with reconstruction rather than deconstruction. Throughout there is the exercise of good judgment and phronësis in his balanced interpretations. The dominant figure in Dallmayr's own meditative thinking is Heidegger. Dallmayr presents us with one of the most judicious, sensitive, and insightful interpretations of Heidegger's relevance for understanding the meaning of polis and praxis. The opening sentence of Heidegger's Letter on Humanism may well be taken as an epigraph for the entire volume: "We are still far from pondering the essence of action seriously enough." Like Heidegger, Dallmayr wants to dislodge the concepts of freedom and power from human willfulness and subjectivity, and to show that the essence of freedom involves solidarity--a reciprocal effort of liberation or a mutual "letting-be." Dallmayr underscores "the exploratory, non-systematic, or en route" character of his essays. One source of uneasiness that a reader may feel arises from the sheer variety of political views represented by the thinkers that Dallmayr examines including Strauss, Heidegger, Gadamer, Oakeshott, Rorty, Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault. For they cover the political spectrum. There are many directions that a post-individualist theory of politics may take. It is not entirely clear from these exploratory essays where we or Dallmayr are being led. To use a Hegelian turn of phrase, one needs more "determinate negation"--more specificity--in Dallmayr's own Holzwege. The type of tensions that have been characteristic of the Hegelian legacy where one can read Hegel as a potentially radical and revolutionary thinker or as a fundamentally conservative thinker--tensions which have continued to plague a good deal of political thinking since Hegel are implicit in and not yet resolved by Dallmayr. Nevertheless, although one follows the many pathways opened up for us with a certain amount of intellectual caution, the journey is an exciting and revealing one.-Richard J. Bernstein, Haverford College. (shrink)

Post-Marxism emerged in the 1970s and 80s as a way to retain certain insights from Marxism while disposing of its indefensible and destructive elements, especially the tendency to reduce all social change to the economic base. This book offers a new and critical reading of post-Marxism, arguing that whilst it convincinly deconstructs the prevalent economism in Marxism as the necessary logic of social reproduction, it nonetheless still retains an ontology of a closed capitalist economy, inhabited by a set of necessary (...) logics. Through a careful symptomatic reading of the works of influential post-Marxian thinkers, Ernesto Laclau and Étienne Balibar, the book argues that while post-Marxian positions have constructed a theory of social contingency, it has failed in different ways to dislodge the constitution of class and capitalist reproduction from essentialist narratives. (shrink)

Reasons have recently occupied the centre of the theory of value. Some writers, such as Tim Scanlonthink that they are not only central, but exhaust the topic, since everything important that we want to say about the good or the valuable, or the obligatory and the required, can be phrased in terms of reason. An action is good to perform if the reasons in favour of performing it are stronger than those in favour of doing anything else or doing (...) nothing. An action is the right thing to do, or ought to be performed, if the reasons for doing it are so strong that it would be unreasonable to do anything else. In this kind of way, reasons can occupy the whole territory of ethics. Furthermore, if people who choose badly are choosing against reason, then this might seem to be a special and grave defect. It would locate the kind of fault they are indulging. It would give us, the people of reason, a special lever with which to dislodge their vices. For reason seems to have a peculiar compulsion about it. It is sometimes tempting to be bad, but surely not tempting to be irrational or unreasonable. Being able to corral knaves and villains in a compound reserved for those who trespass against reason and rationality may therefore represent definite progress. Reasons have another feature that attracts many contemporary theorists. They are just there, anyway. They exist whether or not agents take any notice of them. They do not only exist in the light of mere desires or mere inclinations. They are ‘external’ not ‘internal’. They bear on us, even when through ignorance or wickedness we take no notice of them. They thus very conspicuously shine the lights of objectivity, and independence, and even necessity. By basking in this light, ethics is rescued from the slough of sentiment and preference, and regains the dignity denied to it by theorists such as Hobbes or Hume, Gibbard or myself. Whole books have therefore been written stressing the external nature of reasons. These lines of thought contain less than meets the eye, however, if talk of reason just turns out to be another idiom for talking about the good and the right.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Platonic Ethics: Old and NewEve Browning ColeJulia Annas. Platonic Ethics: Old and New. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. vii + 196. Cloth, $35.00Readers of Plato's dialogues in our time are almost unanimously affected by what Annas here calls "the developmental thesis." We bring to Plato's texts as a dogma the [End Page 114] view that his doctrines evolved over time, that later dialogues return to problems (...) unsuccessfully addressed in earlier dialogues, and in short that the Platonic corpus as a whole should be arranged as a kind of intellectual "Bildungsroman." The early and inconclusive explorations of Socrates give way to mature and expansive metaphysical doctrines, which in turn are tested and revised in subsequent works.This developmentalist dogma has dominated interpretations of Plato, with few exceptions (notably Paul Shorey), for a century and more. Yet this makes it a rather young dogma after all. Annas argues that it is a product of Victorian scholars, and especially targets the highly influential work of Benjamin Jowett (95 n.56). Jowett placed the Republic at the center of Plato's works and interpreted others backward and forward from it. The influence of this developmental thesis has been sweeping and, Annas argues, unfortunate. Armed with it, we are reluctant to consider the doctrines of the dialogues on their own terms; we make problems for one dialogue with concerns expressed in quite another; we tend to force our readings to fit the progressive picture and distort the works in the process.To achieve some distance from developmentalism and other modern preconceptions and dogma, Annas proposes listening with an open mind to ancient readings of Plato, especially those of the so-called Middle Platonists. Most modern students of ancient philosophy have been accustomed to discount these ancients as either too marginal to deserve a hearing or too biased to be fair readers. (In addition, access to their works in reliable texts and translations has been impossible until quite recently.)But such ancient readers as Albinus, Alcinous, Arius Didymus, Philo, and Numenius have (Annas argues) much to offer.First, they are active participants in an ongoing intellectual conversation about "eudaimonism," or the sufficiency of virtue for happiness. They comfortably engage Plato in this conversation as a proponent of eudaimonism. This is as true for the Plato of Republic and Laws as for the earlier dialogues. These older readers of Platonic ethics demonstrate that it is indeed possible to discern a unified view of the relation between goodness and happiness, without violence to the texts. While Plato may speak with "many voices," as Arius Didymus averred, this does not entail that he held "many doctrines" (9).Another modern shibboleth which the older readers can help us dislodge concerns the proper understanding of the Republic. We have tended to classify it as political theory (and in this are supported by the Library of Congress, as Annas points out). While recognizing the hefty core of more individual ethical thinking which goes into the definition of justice in the soul, we have insisted that the "Fairest City" is a serious utopian project description and should shape and contain the Republic's ethical teachings. Here too the ancients were much less inhibited than we; most of them cheerfully ignore the city-building and attend mainly to the implications for moral life. Annas finds this not only salubrious and unity-supporting but more faithful to the text, whose political content she finds "brief and underdeveloped" (82).Many readers will find the treatment of Republic's political significance (or lack thereof) objectionable. Many readers will also find the idea of relinquishing developmentalism to be unappealing or even frightening. But Annas makes a strong case for [End Page 115] seriously consulting the ancient readers if only for their medicinal value; they can "... wake us from our developmental slumbers" (165). Moreover, she provides a friendly and accessible entree to their world, one which will be of value to many modern readers who have been mystified by them heretofore.All texts quoted are in translation, and the occasional bits of original texts are transliterated. An extremely helpful "cast of characters" (which everyone will be tempted to xerox and... (shrink)

Many despair at trying to understand something’s meaning and express dissatisfaction with language wholesale. What if some things simply are not understandable? Thich Nhat Hanh coined interbeing to name the fundamental principle of interdependence defining Buddhist ontologies, and uses interbeing to dislodge despair resulting from rigid expectations of how things must be. Thich also criticized a standard view of language as generating those rigid expectations. Drawing upon classical humanist traditions, Hans-Georg Gadamer promoted a hermeneutics whereby interpreters overcome existential alienation. In (...) his theory of understanding meaning, Gadamer rehabilitated language as having its being in revealing aspects of truth. By situating Gadamer’s hermeneutics within Thich’s interbeing, I develop limits of understanding that facilitate freedom from despair about meaning and language. Thich and Gadamer both taught that the quest for stability within change is misguided. This requires rigorous attention to the limits of understanding. Attention to these limits serves to liberate people from clinging to the illusion that all things are understandable and despair accompanying the incapacity to understand some things. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Platonic Ethics: Old and NewEve Browning ColeJulia Annas. Platonic Ethics: Old and New. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. vii + 196. Cloth, $35.00Readers of Plato's dialogues in our time are almost unanimously affected by what Annas here calls "the developmental thesis." We bring to Plato's texts as a dogma the [End Page 114] view that his doctrines evolved over time, that later dialogues return to problems (...) unsuccessfully addressed in earlier dialogues, and in short that the Platonic corpus as a whole should be arranged as a kind of intellectual "Bildungsroman." The early and inconclusive explorations of Socrates give way to mature and expansive metaphysical doctrines, which in turn are tested and revised in subsequent works.This developmentalist dogma has dominated interpretations of Plato, with few exceptions (notably Paul Shorey), for a century and more. Yet this makes it a rather young dogma after all. Annas argues that it is a product of Victorian scholars, and especially targets the highly influential work of Benjamin Jowett (95 n.56). Jowett placed the Republic at the center of Plato's works and interpreted others backward and forward from it. The influence of this developmental thesis has been sweeping and, Annas argues, unfortunate. Armed with it, we are reluctant to consider the doctrines of the dialogues on their own terms; we make problems for one dialogue with concerns expressed in quite another; we tend to force our readings to fit the progressive picture and distort the works in the process.To achieve some distance from developmentalism and other modern preconceptions and dogma, Annas proposes listening with an open mind to ancient readings of Plato, especially those of the so-called Middle Platonists. Most modern students of ancient philosophy have been accustomed to discount these ancients as either too marginal to deserve a hearing or too biased to be fair readers. (In addition, access to their works in reliable texts and translations has been impossible until quite recently.)But such ancient readers as Albinus, Alcinous, Arius Didymus, Philo, and Numenius have (Annas argues) much to offer.First, they are active participants in an ongoing intellectual conversation about "eudaimonism," or the sufficiency of virtue for happiness. They comfortably engage Plato in this conversation as a proponent of eudaimonism. This is as true for the Plato of Republic and Laws as for the earlier dialogues. These older readers of Platonic ethics demonstrate that it is indeed possible to discern a unified view of the relation between goodness and happiness, without violence to the texts. While Plato may speak with "many voices," as Arius Didymus averred, this does not entail that he held "many doctrines" (9).Another modern shibboleth which the older readers can help us dislodge concerns the proper understanding of the Republic. We have tended to classify it as political theory (and in this are supported by the Library of Congress, as Annas points out). While recognizing the hefty core of more individual ethical thinking which goes into the definition of justice in the soul, we have insisted that the "Fairest City" is a serious utopian project description and should shape and contain the Republic's ethical teachings. Here too the ancients were much less inhibited than we; most of them cheerfully ignore the city-building and attend mainly to the implications for moral life. Annas finds this not only salubrious and unity-supporting but more faithful to the text, whose political content she finds "brief and underdeveloped" (82).Many readers will find the treatment of Republic's political significance (or lack thereof) objectionable. Many readers will also find the idea of relinquishing developmentalism to be unappealing or even frightening. But Annas makes a strong case for [End Page 115] seriously consulting the ancient readers if only for their medicinal value; they can "... wake us from our developmental slumbers" (165). Moreover, she provides a friendly and accessible entree to their world, one which will be of value to many modern readers who have been mystified by them heretofore.All texts quoted are in translation, and the occasional bits of original texts are transliterated. An extremely helpful "cast of characters" (which everyone will be tempted to xerox and... (shrink)

Analysts studying the nexus between language and ethnic identity have characterized ethnolinguistic ideologies as the deep structure of overt language practices. By contrast, this exploratory analysis argues for the advantages of shifting from a multi-level to a single-level explanatory model, consisting of interpretive frames and data (= aspects of sociocommunicative behavior) interpreted by way of those frames. The single-level model affords, arguably, a more unified treatment of people’s everyday inferences about ethnolinguistic identity, on the one hand, and research paradigms for (...) studying language as an ethnosemiotic resource, on the other hand. Yet the “singletiered” model does not void socioideological considerations. Instead, it assumes that a continuum stretches between (1) entrenched language prejudices, (2) efforts to use language theory to question or dislodge such prejudices, and (3) the moment-by-moment hypotheses and inferences in terms of which humans make sense of their conspecifics’ linguistic behavior, along with other ethnosemiotic cues. (shrink)

Greco-Roman antiquity is often presumed to provide the very paradigm of Western humanism. This paradigm has been increasingly thrown into question by new theoretical currents such as posthumanism and the "new materialisms", which point toward entities, forces, and systems that pass through andbeyond the human and which dislodge it from its primacy as the measure of things. Antiquities beyond Humanism seeks to explode this presumed dichotomy between the ancient tradition and the twenty-first century "turn": fourteen original essays explore the myriad (...) ways in which Greek and Roman philosophy and literature can be understood as foregrounding the non-human rather thansimply reflecting the ideals of classical humanism. Greek philosophy is filled with metaphysical explanations of the cosmos grounded in observations of the natural world. Other areas of ancient humanistic inquiry - ethics, poetry, political theory, medicine, rhetoric - extend into the realms ofplant and animal life, even stone life, continually throwing into question the ontological status of living and non-living beings. By casting the non-human or more-than-human in a new light in relation to contemporary questions of gender, the environment, and networks of communication, the volumedemonstrates that encounters with ancient texts, experienced as both familiar and strange, can help forge new understandings of life, whether understood as zoological, physical, psychical, ethical, juridical, political, divine, or cosmic. (shrink)

Freud’s late works established the schema of a more or less inexorable civilizational course built around one drive—the death drive—despite his emphatic insistence on a dual structure of two drives. This schema became influential for Critical Theory and in a more subterranean way, also for decolonial thought, and has been widely invoked during the pandemic. It indicates the extent to which drive, destruction, and mastery have consolidated into a, which not only fails to be dislodged by but even informs (...) Derrida’s readings of Freud. Instead, we have to be attentive to the play of homology in Freud as of life, psyche, and civilization, as archaic inheritance. Freudian homology distinguishes itself from what Derrida called “genealogical drive.” The Freudian assumptions in this regard need to be addressed in a step beyond which works with a concept of origin—as its own interruption—that can neither comprehend nor deconstruct the concept of origin as a single and perpetually active homological power as is to be found in Freud. (shrink)

The book, ‘The Crisis of World and Krishna Pure Monism: A Long Essay’, is more a cathartics of the crisis of world as viewed from the plane of Krishna pure monism than critique of hither to development of idea and philosophy. It sees a correlation of the crisis of world in praxis of objectification of subject, undermining of the knowledge and violation of Krishna pure monism-one has become all and inherence of knowledge. If objectification of subject is juxtaposed with resultant (...) objectification of women, nature, ‘other’, knowledge and idea or Reason or Dharma, it would certainly validate the hypothesis of the essay. The main hypothesis of the essay is as to how objectification of subject on the plane of sciencitization of philosophy and violation of Krishna pure monism-one has become all and inherent knowledge and , and its subversion by muses have led to the crisis of world. The objectification of subject or consciousness or spirit in sciences seems to be cause and effect of objectification of the Woman, Nature, Other, Knowledge and Reason or Idea or Dharma. When one has become all or creator has become creation, the plurality and difference is transitory which appear to have been assigned the permanent value. The transitory value has been given permanence, while the permanent has been dislodged from discourse, conveniently tucked to the abstract. This seems to be real narrative of the crisis of the world. -/- . (shrink)

In ‘Fuzzy gender: between female embodiment and intersex’, Ashley Tauchert offers a ‘fuzzy’ model for gender. Her proposed model aims to account for the normative boundaries of sex and gender, especially between females, transwomen, and intersexuals, in terms of a ‘gender line’ on which different gender categories are located. This reply paper aims to clear the fuzziness in Tauchert’s model by pointing out two critical problems. First, her model appears to be self-defeating, since the marginalized gender categories it attempts to (...) empower are defined in terms of the hegemonic binarism of the ‘pure’ heterosexual male and the ‘pure’ heterosexual female, which it tries to dislodge. Second, her model implies an infinite number of possible gender categories along the gender line; being so, it becomes theoretically inert and practically inadequate. In lieu of the fuzzy model, this paper suggests an alternative model of thinking through the black/white and grey gender categories. This model utilizes the metaphor of gender galaxies, where each gender category is treated as an independent, socially-conferred galaxy; each having specific societal concerns and political agenda. This model, as will be argued, provides firmer grounding for the political aspirations of these various gender categories. (shrink)

What is it about conspiracies that make them so attractive and easy to believe yet difficult to debunk? Is the epistemological process of debunking the best or only pedagogy for dislodging conspiracies? Are all conspiracies irrational and/or unverifiable? To what extent, if at all, do today’s social media conspiracies differ from conspiracies in the past?

In the 1970s and 1980s a strong opposition and anxiety towards biological and naturalizing knowledges was the norm in feminist discourse. In the past decades the certainties of that ‘anti-biologism’ have been challenged, in part because of a new recognition of the role of contingency in both biological determination and biological science. What seems to have survived the shift is a set of normative assumptions concerning the role of determinacy and contingency (or being-born and becoming) in the political implications of (...) ontological claims: an assumed political valorization of contingency. This article challenges those assumptions. It draws attention to the embrace of contingency and processuality on the part of supremacist biopolitical discourse, and suggests the need to think again about the politics of contingency and becoming (in constructivist as well as biologistic discourses). Focusing on the issue of racism and supremacist-specification, the article takes a genealogical look at ‘second-wave’ feminist anti-biologism. Monique Wittig’s materialist feminist attack on naturalizing ideology and ‘the myth of woman’ provides the (ideal-typical) historical example. The article draws attention to curious absences in Wittig’s (and Rosalind Rosenberg’s) anti-biologistic statements concerning early 20th-century biologistic feminism: the absence of a critique of eugenics, racism and supremacism. Arguably the condemnation of biology as a conservative ‘ideology of the status quo’ created masks for biopolitical ontology, obscuring the progressive, dynamic, processual character of biologism and of modern racism. While dislodging some powers of biologistic discourse, feminist anti-biologism might also have played a part in facilitating the revitalization of biopolitical racism within the constructivist culturalist rubric. The aim of the article is not to critique ‘second-wave’ feminism from the perspective of contemporary scholarship, but to help generate new ways of thinking and feeling about the role of ontology, contingency and temporality in the present politics of classification. (shrink)

Over the last decade and a half, in a literature otherwise obsessed with citizenship in all its forms, a broad array of scholars has downplayed, criticized, and at times trivialized national citizenship. The assault on citizenship has had both an expansionary and a contractionary thrust. It is expansionary in that the language of citizenship is no longer linked with nationality, but rather protest politics. An earlier generation of social scientists would have described these actions as lobbying; they have now become (...) “citizenship practice.” It is contractionary in that what one might have thought to be the core of citizenship; nationality, the possession of a nation-state’s passport is viewed as less and less relevant to citizenship. Scholars have dislodged both the substance of citizenship, what it is, and the location of citizenship, where it “happens,” from the nation-state and national citizenship. The article challenges this devaluation of citizenship and the nation-state on empirical, conceptual, and normative grounds. Empirically, scholars, whom I link together under the umbrella term “postnationalists,” have based their anti-statist arguments on evidence that, when subjected to further inspection, wholly fails to support the arguments advanced. Conceptually, postnationalists rely on categories that are confused and untenable, being that national variables are cited as evidence of transnational developments. Normatively, postnationalists have lost the emancipatory thrust that once gave concerns with citizenship real-world purchase. (shrink)

Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy approaches human transformation as an overcoming of Western metaphysics. The nature of this transformation does not imply a mere change of a worldview, an ethical or spiritual fulfillment, or even self-transcendence. Instead, Heidegger speaks about a dislodgement of human essence. In the article I address the notion of dislodgement as central for understanding the nature of the shift required for the human selfhood to be grounded in Da-sein. I stress the relation between dislodgement and an overcoming (...) of reason as the basis of overcoming metaphysics. I then focus on the way dislodgement transforms the nature of experience, freeing it from the metaphysical constriction of a priority of beingness and the psychological subjectivity that accompanies it. I point out that such a dislodged experience transgresses the ontological-ontic distinction and thus offers a phenomenological basis for experiencing the truth of Beyng. I also suggest that the way to become prepared for such a full-fledged dislodgement is to be attentive to the moments in which our experience betrays its belonginess to Beyng. (shrink)