Contributor biographies for special issue Thinking with Glissant.

Philosophy is the search for the large patterns of the world and of the large patterns of experience, perceptual, theoretical, . . . , aesthetic, and practical - the patterns that, regardless of specific contents, characterize the main types of experience. In this book I carry out my search for the large patterns of practical experience: the experience of deliberation, of recognition of duties and their conflicts, of attempts to guide other person's conduct, of deciding to act, of influencing the (...) physical world with one's doings, and the like. This is the experience that makes possible our social life, the formulation of plans for teamwork, the building of institutions, the development of nations, and the adoption of the ideal of morality. Here I develop a network of theories about the most fundamental aspects of practical thinking: what is thought in such thinking; what makes that thinking correct; what makes it practical; and the structure of the doings that accrue to the world when such thinking is effective. I have attempted to build each theory in sufficient detail, so that it il luminates its subject matter with a certain degree of fullness. But I have also aimed at producing an harmonious system of theories, so that the grand pattern of practical thinking can be admired, not only for the beauty of the separate structures of its parts, but also for its architectonic unity. Chapter 1 gives the details of the many facets of this project and discusses some methodological techniques. (shrink)

In writing this book I have received a considerable variety of assistance, which I am glad to acknowledge.

What is addiction? Why do some people become addicted while others do not? Is the addict rational? In this book, Craig Hanson attempts to answer these questions and more. Using insights from the beginnings of philosophy to contemporary behavioral economics, Hanson attempts to assess the variety of ways in which we can and cannot, understand addiction. Special consideration is given to a challenging (and controversial) proposal dubbed "hyperbolic discounting." Hanson proposes some modifications to the hyperbolic discounting view that permit it (...) to explain not only addiction, but also a variety of psychological maladies, such as self-deception. (shrink)

Biological phenomena can be investigated at multiple levels, from the molecular to the cellular to the organismic to the ecological. In typical biology instruction, these levels have been segregated. Yet, it is by examining the connections between such levels that many phenomena in biology, and complex systems in general, are best explained. We describe a computation-based approach that enables students to investigate the connections between different biological levels. Using agent-based, embodied modeling tools, students model the microrules underlying a biological phenomenon (...) and observe the resultant aggregate dynamics. We describe 2 cases in which this approach was used. In both cases, students framed hypotheses, constructed multiagent models that incorporate these hypotheses, and tested these by running their models and observing the outcomes. Contrasting these cases against traditionally used, classical equation-based approaches, we argue that the embodied modeling approach connects more directly to students’ experience, enables extended investigations as well as deeper understanding, and enables “advanced” topics to be productively introduced into the high school curriculum. (shrink)

Translated from the Dutch, this book offers a systematic interpretation of Heidegger's thought, focusing particularly on recently published works.

Evan Selinger’s review nicely captures the main concerns of my collection of essays, The Politics of Expertise. He raises an important question that is touched on in several essays but not fully developed: the problem of getting expert knowledge possessed by academics into something like public discussion or the public domain. This is of course only a part of the problem of expertise and the larger problem of knowledge in society. But it can be approached in more detail than was (...) done in the book, in terms of the basic ideas of the book, and I will try to do that here. Much of what I will say deals with issues I have addressed in other places, so I will, rather tiresomely, cite myself, for those who wish more elaboration. (shrink)

There is a deep cultural anxiety around public expressions of maternalism and the application of maternal values to society as a whole. Julie Stephens examines why postmaternal thinking has become so influential in recent decades and why there has been a growing unease with maternal forms of subjectivity and maternalist perspectives. In moving beyond policy definitions, which emphasize the priority given to women's claims as employees over their political claims as mothers, Stephens details an elaborate process of cultural forgetting that (...) has accompanied this repudiation of the maternal. Reclaiming an alternative feminist position through an investigation of oral history, life narratives, Web blogs, and other rich and varied sources, Stephens confronts the core claims of postmaternal thought and challenges dominant representations of feminism as having forgotten motherhood. Deploying the interpretive framework of memory studies, she examines the political structures of forgetting surrounding the maternal and the weakening of nurture and care in the public domain. She views the promotion of an illusory, self-sufficient individualism as a form of social unmothering that is profoundly connected to this ethos. In rejecting both traditional maternalism and the new postmaternalism, Stephens challenges prevailing paradigms and makes way for an alternative feminist maternalism centering on a politics of care. (shrink)

The two volumes to which this is apreface consist of the Proceedings of the Second International Conference on History and Philosophy of Science. The Conference was organized by the Joint Commission of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science (IUHPS) under the auspices of the IUHPS, the Italian Society for Logic and Philosophy of Science, and the Domus Galilaeana of Pisa, headed by Professor Vincenzo Cappelletti. Domus Galilaeana also served as the host institution, with some help from the (...) University of Pisa. The Conference took place in Pisa, Italy, on September 4-8, 1978. The editors of these two volumes of the Proceedings of the Pisa Conference acknowledge with gratitude the help by the different sponsoring organizations, and in the first place that by both Divisions of the IUHPS, which made the Conference possible. A special recognition is due to Professor Evandro Agazzi, President of the Italian Society for Logic and Philosophy of Science, who was co opted as an additional member of the Organizing Committee. This committee was otherwise identical with the Joint Commission, whose members were initially John Murdoch, John North, Arpad Szab6, Robert Butts, Jaakko Hintikka, and Vadim Sadovsky. Later, Erwin Hiebert and Lubos Novy were appointed as additional members. (shrink)

This provocation critiques the notion of long-term thinking and the claims of its proponents that it will help address failures in dominant conceptions of time, particularly in regard to environmental crises. Drawing on analyses of the Clock of the Long Now and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, the article suggests that we be more wary of the concept’s use in what we might call chronowashing. Like the more familiar greenwashing, where environmental issues are hidden by claims to (...) be addressing the problem, the article explores how these examples of long-term thinking distract from extractivism, racism, and environmental injustice, making it harder to address the complexities involved. In particular, the article discusses examples where long-term thinking provides a veneer of environmental concern that actually disconnects from the work of building more equitable forms of relation. As a contrast, the article’s author asks: What is lost when we diagnose a problem as arising due to short-term thinking and propose long-term thinking as the solution? Against chronowashed environmental time, the author argues for more complex approaches that explicitly take into account the temporalities of inequality, political organization, ethical responsibilities and much else. The article engages with approaches to time that foreground the work needed to create time and move ethically within it, including Charles W. Mills’s white time and Kyle Powys Whyte’s kinship time. The author suggests that a stronger emphasis on the temporality of community, solidarity, and coalition—versus what James Hatley and Deborah Bird Rose have described as temporal narcissism—can better foreground the kinds of work that needs to be done, particularly by those with privilege. (shrink)

Questioning the dominant view that Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty have little of substance in common, Judith Wambacq draws on unpublished primary sources and current scholarship in English and French to bring them into a compelling dialogue to reveal a shared concern with the transcendental conditions of thought.

Bu çalışmada, düşünme ile karşılaşmalar arasındaki içkin ilişkinin irdelenmesi amaçlanmaktadır. Karşılaşmalar içinden yaratıcı düşünmenin sahih bir analizini yapabilmek için, antik dönemden modern döneme kadar düşünce tarihi içinden bir güzergah izlenecektir. Bu anlamda, temel amaç olarak, içinde kritik düşünürlerin düşüncelerinin karşılaşarak hep biraz fazlasını açığa vurarak ilerlediği düşünsel bir patikanın izi sürülecektir. Buradaki, biraz fazlası ifadesi önemlidir. Çünkü o, biraz fazlası, kendini hep daha fazla kritik ve üretici karşılaşmalar içinden devam ettirmek isteyen yaratıcı düşünmenin edimsel gücüyle ilgilidir. Bunu açığa çıkarmak adına, (...) trajik diyaloglarda köklenen ve devam ederek Deleuze düşüncesine ve belki de ötesine uzanan eleştirel düşünmenin bir yolu takip edilecektir. Bu yönüyle, iki trajik yazar olan Sophocles ve Euripides’ in düşüncesinden, Nietzsche, Heidegger ve Deleuze düşüncesine kadar kritik düşünürler arasında gerçekleşen her bir kritik karşılaşmanın, yaratıcı düşünmenin edimsel gücü olarak kendini hep yeniden açığa vurduğu iddia edilecektir. Bu iddia ortaya konulurken, öznellik temelli ve akılcı bir eksende hareket eden ve yaratıcı düşünmenin gücünü zayıflatan geleneksel düşünce, Platon düşüncesi merkeze alınarak eleştirilecektir. (shrink)

This article provides somephilosophical ``groundwork'' for contemporary debatesabout the status of the idea(l) of critical thinking.The major part of the article consists of a discussionof three conceptions of ``criticality,'' viz., criticaldogmatism, transcendental critique (Karl-Otto Apel),and deconstruction (Jacques Derrida). It is shown thatthese conceptions not only differ in their answer tothe question what it is ``to be critical.'' They alsoprovide different justifications for critique andhence different answers to the question what giveseach of them the ``right'' to be critical. It is (...) arguedthat while transcendental critique is able to solvesome of the problems of the dogmatic approach tocriticality, deconstruction provides the most coherentand self-reflexive conception of critique. A crucialcharacteristic of the deconstructive style of critiqueis that this style is not motivated by the truth ofthe criterion (as in critical dogmatism) or by acertain conception of rationality (as intranscendental critique), but rather by a concern forjustice. It is suggested that this concern should becentral to any redescription of the idea(l) ofcritical thinking. (shrink)

EMBARGOED - expected end date 06.06.2025.

The development of modern science, as everybody knows, has come largely through naturalizing domains of inquiry that were traditionally parts of philosophy – a process that philosophers have, by and large, applauded. But could this worthwhile endeavor now move on to include critical thinking? Here we argue that critical thinking, a discipline devoted principally to the study of the normative aspects of reasoning, cannot be assimilated to purely naturalistic, descriptive studies of reasoning of the sort now prevalent in the social (...) sciences and in what is now called „experimental philosophy.‟ Critical thinking, on our view, is a discipline whose central task is not that of constructing a catalogue of common patterns of reasoning, but instead of accounting for the normative worth of such patterns. Plainly, it is an enterprise that raises philosophical questions about the nature of such normativity and requires an evaluation of possible answers. The normativity issues at stake in critical thinking are parallel in significant ways to those arising in normative ethics and traditional epistemology. And this is why successful arguments offered against attempts at eliminating or reducing the latter disciplines to the sciences could be adapted to support the philosophical autonomy of critical thinking. A glance at the naturalistic approaches to reasoning currently on offer reveals that there is so far no naturalistic account of the normativity of reasoning in the offing. Not surprisingly, naturalistic studies of reasoning concerned with such normativity either fail to account for it or simply rehash traditional philosophical accounts. In a recent study, Sripada and Stich (2005) 1 seem to assume that all there is to explaining what moral judgments are can be captured by some results of experimental tests about what people standardly make of moral norms in general (e.g., Turiel‟s moral/conventional task experiments) – perhaps together with some psychological account of the role of emotions and motivation in normative judgment.. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s concept “the banality of evil” was subverted by Bettina Stangneth’s recent research. But with the concept of the banality of evil, the inherent continuity of her “radical evil,” Arendt enriched the discourse of evil which allows us to gain insight into the relationship between evil and ordinary human beings. At the same time, Arendt also raised the question about law, ethics and politics when evil was put to justice. In fact, what she cares about, is justice to everyone; (...) what she wants is to understand the evil and to make her own critical thinking about it. (shrink)

What unites friends and distinguishes them from others? Is the preference we give to friends rationally and morally justifiable? This collection of new essays on the philosophy of friendship considers such questions.

1990년대 벌어진 구-현실사회주의권의 붕괴 이후 진보적 지식인들에게는 ‘좌파 멜랑콜리’가 낯선 것이 아니었다. 그것은 노동해방과 인간해방의 전면적 혁명이란 ‘실체화된 절대적 동일성’에 대한 희구가 남아 있어 생겨난 사태였다. 이런 부분적으로 병적인 절대적 동일성은 현실과 건강한 관계를 맺을 수 있도록 형태변화 되어야 한다. 멜랑콜리 개념을 반성철학적으로 재구성하면, 그것은 “타자와의 부등성, 자신과의 부등성, 그리고 폐쇄적 자아내부에서 자신과 그것의 타자와의 부등성”으로 정리된다. 이런 구조는 헤겔의 『정신현상학』의 ‘불행한 의식’ 및 『논리학』의 ‘상이성’ 범주 등과 구조적 유사성을 지닌다. 이들 모두는 그 다음 단계로의 이행을 위해 존재 자체가 지닌 (...) 절대적 부정의 힘을 호출한다. 그렇다면 헤겔에서와 마찬가지로 ‘이행운동’의 동력은 어떤 낭만적으로 신비화된 특정 사회체제, 혹은 실체화된 절대적 동일성에서 얻어질 수는 없다. 그것은 더 이상 분할/환원 불가능한 궁극적 단위로서의 인권과 같은 절대적 부정성이어야 하는 바, 좌파 멜랑콜리의 지양은 바로 이런 전환에서 얻어질 수 있을 것이다. (shrink)