Henry Longueville Mansel published his Bampton Lectures in 1858, twenty seven years after Hegel's death and twelve years before the publication of Ritschl's Rechtfertigung und Versoehnung. The timing is significant. As a sweeping critique of liberalism, frequently symbolized by the work of Hegel, the lectures react to the slow but inexorable permeation of English religious thought by German ways of thinking. By 1858, the process was sufficiently widespread that Mansel felt justified in devoting the principal portion of his work to (...) the attack. Ritschl marks the effective end of Hegel's direct influence on theology and a return to a more Kantian mode of thinking. His gambit had already been made, for Mansel is in many ways a more cautious version of Ritschl. Mansel, however, wrote in English and had the misfortune to say what he did at the beginning of a movement so strong that it allowed no quali fication. Thus Mansel's thought was rarely accepted. He was certainly not ignored, at least at the time. The lectures, entitled "The Limits of Religious Thought," were an immediate sensation. They were quickly reprinted both on the Continent and in America and went through two editions in 1858, two more in 1859, and a fifth in 1867. For a period they became "almost a textbook in the schools of the University. " 1 Few leading divines of the day were silent and fewer yet were neutral. (shrink)

In Foucault’s writing throughout the 1960s, in which he foregrounds the critical function of language and signification, works of art and literature – and works of avant-garde art and literature in particular – appear prominently and are the objects of sustained theoretical investment. In the 1970s, however, as Foucault moves away from his earlier concern with language’s capacity to dissolve “man” and begins to concentrate instead on the ways in which man is governed, works of art and literature no longer (...) possess the same political promise for him and drop out almost completely from his writing. Yet the question of aesthetics does not disappear for him entirely, and, in his final years, he returns to it, though with his analysis now directed at what he calls an “art” or “aesthetics of life.” In this paper, I examine these developments with the aim of drawing out the connections between Foucault’s changing view of aesthetics and the larger transformations that take shape within his overall project. Against this background, I argue that Foucault’s call for an art of life, in which the individual develops techniques for continually reinventing his or her existence, does not necessitate abandoning the avant-garde aesthetic practices that he had previously advocated. Rather, I assert, his conception of an art of life – when read in conjunction with his theorization of critique as a “permanent” questioning of the limits imposed on us – offers a new framework for reimagining both the function of those practices and their legacies in culture today. (shrink)

Psychotherapy holds out the promise of help for people who are hurting and in need. It can save lives and change lives. In therapy, clients can find their strengths and sense of hope. They can change course toward a more meaningful and healthy life. They can confront loss, tragedy, hopelessness, and the end of life in ways that do not leave them numb or paralyzed. They can discover what brings them joy and what sustains them through hard times. They can (...) begin to trust, or to trust more wisely. They can learn new behaviors in therapy and how to teach themselves new behaviors after therapy ends. They can question what they always believed was a given. They can find out what matters most to them, and how to stop wasting time. They can become happier, or at least less miserable. They can become better able, as Freud noted, to love and to work. They can learn how to accept and love themselves just as they are and accept others who are different from them. Our ethics acknowledge and affirm our profession's responsibilities. This book was written to help strengthen, deepen, and inform ethical awareness and the sense of personal ethical responsibility. Its job is to help you hold onto the ideals-including ethical ideals-that called you into the profession to begin with, to help you develop and fulfill those ideals. There will be so much-trust us on this-that tends to dull ethical awareness, to make ethics drift out of focus, to create barriers between you and your ideals, to replace ethics with pseudo-ethics and ethics placebos. Fatigue, endless paperwork, unrealistic expectations, illness, family crises, not being able to make ends meet, burn out, threats of job loss, insurance coverage that doesn't come close to meeting the needs of our clients, biases that have not been addressed, and so many other forces can pressure us into cutting ethical corners. This book is intended to help you develop a strong and healthy resistance to such forces, to help you weather them without losing your ethical awareness and ideals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Eudora Welty House & GardenJessica RussellIf the past year had one theme, it would have been the gift of friendship. How heartening to reunite with fellow admirers of Eudora Welty on the grounds of her family home as our flagship events made their post-pandemic returns. Even so, among staff, 2022 brought challenges that, while unexpected, served to deepen our commitment to our mission and each other. Moreover, for every (...) achievement to follow in this report, there is a friendship to thank—whether with the Eudora Welty Foundation, our colleagues at the Mississippi Department of Archives & History (MDAH), individual volunteers, or community partners too numerous to list—each one a treasured marvel. For, in Eudora Welty's words, "as is true of all friendships, it might not have happened—and it did."Although we were saddened to say goodbye to our dear friend and former director Lauren Rhoades, to our delight she has returned time and again, as a volunteer, a guest, and even a guest speaker. Most impactful, Rhoades now supports sites like ours in an official capacity as the new director of grants at the Mississippi Arts Commission, where she connects arts-based organizations with potential funding opportunities. In this role, Rhoades informed the Eudora Welty Foundation about the Building Fund for the Arts Grant, to which they successfully applied. Because of this very grant, we can make perhaps our biggest announcement of 2022, which is that the Eudora Welty Foundation will break ground on the much-needed community arts building behind our Visitor Center. The report in this volume by the Foundation, which is supervising construction, contains more details on this exciting development.After Rhoades's departure, I had the great honor of transitioning to director. By December, we welcomed Lauren Claret to fill my former role as Garden Projects Specialist, ending a lengthy staff shortage. We even grew our team, adding Mary Atchley as a part-time Visitor Center Associate to handle our gift shop and ticket sales. All the while, my seasoned colleagues, Special Projects Coordinator Rachel Lott, and Education Specialist Jennifer [End Page 189] Rose, continued to shine in their respective roles: Lott coordinates volunteers and plans exhibits, events, and social media. Rose leads educational programs for students of all ages, in groups large and small, onsite and away.With such a small team, our museum depends heavily on volunteers to lead house tours and maintain the Welty garden, and recruiting new volunteers is our greatest need as we look ahead to 2023. We saw a precipitous drop in volunteers at the onset of the pandemic. Although visitation has started a noticeable rise, volunteer numbers have not yet picked up. (On that note, if you or someone you know is interested in becoming a Welty House volunteer, please email [email protected].) To each of our house docents and Cereus Weeders, we say a heartfelt "thank you."Fortunately, we had the support of two interns last fall. Victoria Richard (Millsaps College, via the Eudora Welty Foundation) led Welty House tours and updated our digital plant records database with an emphasis on the rose collection. Meanwhile, Nikki Maxwell (University of Southern Mississippi, via MDAH) worked primarily off-site with the MDAH Eudora Welty Collection, noting the numerous references to gardening in the recently unsealed Welty family papers.The annual teachers' CEU workshop took place virtually in February of 2022, comparing the works of Welty and Poe. Michael Pickard, Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Millsaps College, and Millsaps College Professor emerita Suzanne Marrs, led the course, and they will do so again on February 24, 2023—this time in person at the Eudora Welty House & Garden Visitor Center—comparing the work of Welty and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Thanks to support from MDAH and the Eudora Welty Foundation, teachers may attend the 2023 workshop at no charge.The in-person return of the Mississippi Book Festival in 2022 made for an exciting weekend in late August, when museum staff treated 110 festival panelists to private tours of the Welty House and Garden. We spent the next day seeing old friends, and making new ones, as 500 fellow book lovers visited our booth at the... (shrink)

"But the point of Burke's work, and the significance of his achievement, is not that he points out that religion and language affect each other, for this has been said before, but that he proceeds to demonstrate how this is so by reference to a specific symbolic context. After a discussion 'On Words and The Word,' he analysess verbal action in St. Augustine's Confessions. He then discusses the first three chapters of Genesis, and ends with a brilliant and profound 'Prologue (...) in Heaven,' an imaginary dialogue between the Lord and Satan in which he proposes that we begin our study of human motives with complex theories of transcendence,' rather than with terminologies developed in the use of simplified laboratory equipment.... Burke now feels, after some forty years of search, that he has created a model of the symbolic act which breaks through the rigidities of the 'sacred-secular' dichotomy, and at the same time shows us how we get from secular and sacred realms of action over the bridge of language.... Religious systems are systems of action based on communication in society. They are great social dramas which are played out on earth before an ultimate audience, God. But where theology confronts the developed cosmological drama in the 'grand style,' that is, as a fully developed cosmological drama for its religious content, the 'logologer' can be further studied not directly as knowledge but as anecdotes that help reveal for us the quandaries of human governance." --Hugh Dalziel Duncan from Critical Responses to Kenneth Burke, 1924 - 1966, edited by William H. Rueckert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969). (shrink)

Der lebende Organismus stellt einen bestimmten, individuellen Teil des Universums dar, indem er seine Selbständigkeit abgetrennt von dem übrigen Universum erhält, durch den Teilungseffekt, welcher durch die Anordnung seiner Teile bestimmt wird. Es ist anerkannt, dass die Teilung nicht vollständig ist, jedoch eine beschränkte gegenseitige Beziehung zulässt. Es ist auch anerkannt, dass der Grad der Organisation in einer verwandten Reihe sich ändert von den tiefen Verwickelungen der einfachen Zelle zu den mannigfachen Abwandlungen wie sie beim Menschen auftreten. Die Auffassung von (...) effektiver Teilung ist ausserdem auch fest und substantiell auf der Tatsache begründet, die durch das Vorhandensein der Plasmamembran und Grenzflächen kolloidaler Aggregaten gegeben ist. Betont ist die dynamische Natur der charakteristischen Gleichgewichtszustände und es wird aufmerksam gemacht auf die kontinuierliche Bildung von effektiven Teilungen bei verschiedenen Gleichgewichtszuständen. Weitere Untersuchung der Bedeutung dieser Teilungen ergibt viele interessante Folgerungen. Schwierigkeiten finden sich, wenn man eine derartige Beschreibung auf geistige Phänomena ausdehnt. Zwar bestehen grundlegende Übereinstimmungen, aber es ist schwer sie genau zu definieren. Es ist klar, dass eine Synthese dieser Art notwendigerweise unvollständig ist, aber es schien wertvoll den Versuch zu machen, L'organisme vivant est présenté ici comme une partie définie et individualisée de l'univers maintenant son individualité propre au moyen de „l'effet de partition” déterminé par l'arrangement de ses parties. Il est entendu que la partition n'est pas complète mais permet encore des relations réciproques mais limitées. Il est reconnu aussi que le degré d'organisation varie dans le cours d'une série, des complexités profondes de la cellule aux innombrables modifications exhibées par l'organisme humain. Le concept de la partition effective est basé solidement sur l'évidence présentée par la membrane plasmatique et les limites de phases dans les aggrégations colloidales. De plus il est important de noter spécialement la nature dynamique des équilibres caractéristiques et l'on ne saurait manquer d'attirer l'attention sur la formation continue de partitions effectives aux différents niveaux d'équilibre. L'étude ultérieure de la signification de ces partitions présente un grand nombre d'implications intéressantes. Il est à noter que des difficultés sont rencontrées quand on essaie d'inclure en une description de ce genre les phénomènes mentaux et psychiques. Des stabilités fondamentales existent, mais elles sont difficiles à définir avec précision. Il est évident du reste au lecteur qu'une synthèse telle que celle-ci est nécessairement incomplète mais néanmoins intéressante à faire. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 33.2 (2005) 71-97 [Access article in PDF] The Subject of Religion Lacan and the Ten Commandments Kenneth Reinhard Julia Reinhard Lupton Despite Freud's Nietzschean unmasking of religion as ideology, psychoanalysis has frequently been attacked as itself a religion, a cabal of analyst-priests dedicated to the worship of a dead master. Such critics "do not believe in Freud" in much the same way as atheists "do not believe (...) in God," and their rejections of psychoanalysis in the name of the secular partake in the very structure of religious thought they claim to repudiate. In Seminar XXI: Les non-dupes errent, Lacan comments on the blindness of the atheistic insight concerning religion: "I know that you're not believers, right? But that doesn't mean that you aren't all the more conned... because even if you are not believers, you still believe in that aspiration [for the love of God]. I won't say that you suppose it; rather, it supposes you" [Dec. 18, 1973; our trans.]. In Lacan's analysis, it is not that secular intellectuals suffer from unexamined religious "suppositions" or assumptions, to be swept away through a little ideology-critique or time on the couch. The case is rather, in Lacan's strong formulation, that religious discourse supposes us—supports and underwrites our very structures of being, subjectivity, and social interaction. That is, the secular subject is produced by the religious discourses that precede and continue to speak through it; the challenge for the contemporary critic is not to silence or debunk those discourses, but rather to bring the modern subject to assume responsibility for their enunciation.Throughout the decades of his seminar, Lacan addressed the monotheistic foundations of Western subjectivity as a set of discursive ruptures or cuts which continue to scar and brand the modern subject beyond their secular abrogation. Distinguishing between Freud "the individual with his atheistic profession of faith" and "the Freud who was the first to acknowledge the value and relevance of [the] myth... we call the death of God" [S VII 192–93], Lacan insists that Freud regarded monotheism as an epochal divide that irrevocably altered all that came before and after it: "On the left of this [monotheistic] message, there are some things that are henceforth outdated, obsolete; they no longer hold beyond the manifestation of the message. On the right, things are quite different" [172]. What, in Lacan's analysis, is the difference that monotheism has made, both during its periods of dominance and after? The laws, narratives, and symbols of monotheism continue to undergird key fantasies of personhood, nationhood, and neighborhood in the modernity that purports to have supplanted them. In Lacan's formulation, monotheism "supposes" the subject of these fantasies, precipitating it from out of the expanse of signifiers and in relation to a sublime object of both unbearable enjoyment and social obligation. Moreover, it is the scandal and the gift of monotheism that it not only creates moments of traumatic singularity, but also thinks the singular as trauma, rending the fabric of an animistic nature which would unite every polarity of being in the fullness of a sexual relation. Unlike the gods of Greek philosophy, the monotheistic God is not part of the nature he creates. In its decisive thinking of singularity, monotheism elicits and eludes all rapprochement with philosophical conceptions of the One, whether in the guise of Hellenized Judaism, Pauline theology, or Arab Aristotelianism. Lacan extends the monotheistic project of thinking singularity [End Page 71] by insisting that "there is something of One" [il y a de l'Un]—not the self-identical One of Greek logic, mathematics, and cosmology, but the One of a violent rupture that creates subjects and their worlds around a void, an un that un-does the primacy it speaks.If, from the Lacanian vantage, the singular invention of the God shared by the People of the Book forever separates religion from philosophy, we would also insist that religion is not simply a subset of "culture," understood as the symbolic practices that unify a people... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric and AngerKenneth S. Zagacki and Patrick A. Boleyn-FitzgeraldSince most believe anger can be either good or bad, rhetors face a moral problem of determining when anger is appropriate and when it is not. They face a corresponding rhetorical problem in deciding when and how to express anger and determining the role that it might play in public discourse, with specific audiences and in particular rhetorical situations. Rhetorical scholars (...) have catalogued whole genres of angry rhetoric—apocalyptic genres, jeremiads, the demonizing rhetoric of religious and political leaders—wherein the rhetorical display of anger is explained in terms of situational conventions and cultural norms.1 Yet these scholars have not easily resolved the moral problems associated with angry rhetoric. Aristotle suggested the earliest and most obvious solutions to these problems. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he outlines a typology for discerning the moral limits of anger and, by implication, angry rhetoric. And in Book II of the Rhetoric he asserts that the orator needs to know the structure of emotions like anger and how to intensify and dissipate them. Or, in other words, the orator must know how to make it reasonable to be angry. Some contemporary philosophers have gone further, suggesting that a failure to feel and express anger in public betrays an insufficient concern for justice and self respect.In this essay, we follow Aristotle in arguing that anger is sometimes the emotion we expect people to feel or the rhetorical response we expect them to display and evoke in others. But we also challenge part of Aristotle's argument by asking: "Even when angry rhetoric would appear to be a reasonable, morally appropriate response, is there a way in which rhetors might manage anger in their public discourse in order to achieve ends which are both morally and pragmatically productive?" The answer, we propose, lies in what we call "non-angry" rhetoric, which involves transforming and reflecting upon anger in public discourse. Because such rhetoric often promotes noble ends such as reconciliation and forgiveness, it is at least morally permissible and more likely morally virtuous.2 In order to establish these claims, our analysis focuses on the case of Nelson Mandela and his "Address to the Interfaith Commissioning Service for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission."3 In this speech, Mandela, as our [End Page 290] analysis demonstrates, managed anger and turned it into an object of reflection, thereby illustrating what opportunities for reconciliation and democratic deliberation would look like during the difficult period attending the political transition in South Africa in general and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings in particular. His "Address" exemplified a unique moment when the rhetoric and the ethics of anger came together in a public performance. While acknowledging the understandable anger of blacks, Mandela (who may in fact have harbored considerable anger himself) simultaneously suggested that by engendering a less hostile social-political context, in which participants maintained their self-respect without necessarily sacrificing justice, a new democratic community could emerge. This would be a community where, as he described it, individuals began to reconcile with and no longer persecute one another. As Aristotle might explain, the purpose of Mandela's speech was to manage the anger of blacks, so that they would then be able to deliberate properly about the issues before the TRC and about the larger democratic transition. As the philosopher Eugene Garver says, the particular passions Aristotle chooses to explore in the Rhetoric serve a role necessary for the kind of public, political decision making he assigns to rhetoric. These emotions serve to integrate—or segregate, as the case may be—"distinct individuals into a deliberative or judging body, or demos" (1994, 131).What we are recommending, then, is that rhetoric encompasses both considerations of moral desert as well as broader moral concerns. While there are times when individuals seem to deserve our angry rhetoric, it may not be justified from a broader moral perspective, especially when the goal is the good of the state or the community—viz., if angry rhetoric leads to the violent dissolution of democratic community. Ultimately, we argue that the moral constitution of political, deliberative communities must be viewed in terms... (shrink)

Bhabha, Georges Didi-Huberman, David Morgan and Lee Siegel, as well as a series of focused contributions by Yve-Alain Bois, Wendy Doniger, Kenneth Frampton, Martin E. Marty, John Hallmark Neff, Annemarie Schimmel, and Helen Tworkov consider how rapture resonate's both in a cultural context and within the experience of a single human being.

David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is a philosophical and literary classic of the highest order. It is also an extremely relevant work because of its engagement with issues as alive today as in Hume's time: the design argument for a deity, the problem of evil, the dangers of superstition and fanaticism, the psychological roots and social consequences of religion. In this outstanding and unorthodox collection, an international team of scholars engage with Hume's classic work. The chapters include state-of-the-art contributions (...) on the central interpretive questions posed by the Dialogues as well as major contributions relating it to contemporary issues in philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, moral psychology, and social philosophy. Additional contributions tackle the historical and philosophical background of the Dialogues, relating it to Hume's own systematic philosophy, to the work of other key seventeenth and eighteenth-century figures - Locke, Clarke, Bayle, Cudworth, Malebranche, Spinoza, Lord Bolingbroke, and Voltaire, among others - to early modern neo-Epicureanism in the life sciences, and, notably, to what Darwin missed by thinking too much like William Paley and not enough like Hume's Philo. Overall, this volume provides fresh and even groundbreaking perspectives on Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. It is essential reading for students and scholars of Hume, the history of modern philosophy, philosophy of religion and the history and philosophy of science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Paradox of Kandinsky's Abstract RepresentationKenneth BerryThere is a paradox in the relationship between Kandinsky's use of the terms, "abstract" and "concrete," which is presented in the expression, "Kandinsky's abstract representation." Thisexpression, while being apparently contradictory, may point to a feature underpinning Kandinsky's art, which is pivotal to a proper experience of his work, just as, in Christopher Middleton's view, a poetic language may be pivotal to the formation (...) of cultures.1 Art and cultural artifacts are vital to aesthetic experience and aesthetic education, and both the language of art and other languages are instrumental to this end. However, how may Kandinsky's mature abstraction, being in essence objectless, have any claim to representation, and consequently the higher cultural goals of aesthetic expression and the aesthetic enrichment of society?According to Thomas M. Messer, the position of centrality that Kandinsky has assumed in our understanding of modern art is largely due to his having brought to bear on his art, an instinctive awareness of what constituted the central aesthetic issues of his era.2 Kandinsky's writings in Concerning the Spiritual in Art elaborate on his aesthetic theories, and, in particular, [End Page 99] present the view that paintings should be looked at as a graphic representation of a mood rather than as a representation of objects. Messer observes that, for Kandinsky, abstraction, defined as a mode of painting extending beyond the depiction of recognizable objects, having gradually stripped itself of mimetic vestiges, thus becomes paramount. Michael Carter has similarly pointed out that with the pure forms of absolute abstraction, the non-objective colors and shapes of Kandinsky's paintings were regarded as distillations of the aesthetic properties of the artistic sign3 — separable from any referential aspect of art.4 This aesthetic aspect of Kandinsky's work, which became known as nonfigurative, nonobjective, or nonrepresentational,goes along with the cultural — and, as sculptor Anish Kapoor has remarked, "in the deepest, deepest depths of human history the cultural has always been a motivator of people," and has the power to transform society through finding visual equivalents for an emotional language.5Much has been written about Kandinsky's use of color, but perhaps the primary innovation that he made, as in the case of Barnett Newman, was in the field of drawing. Kandinsky was influenced by Gauguin's idea that drawing was an abstraction from memory after nature, just as Gauguin had been affected by the simplified contours and flattened forms of Puvis de Chavannes. Drawing did not come so easily to Kandinsky as color — he had to work harder at drawing, but in his early improvisations, forms and their outlines as graphic symbols came welling up from the unconscious, and eidetic motifs only had to be copied — almost as the art of calligraphy. Kandinsky's "organic" drawing developed as an urge to nonnaturalistic impulses, and during the period of Point and Line to Plane became almost a grammar of form, saved from mere pedantry by the living forces or visual tensions that made various kinds of line operate not just as contours but as dynamic or restful elements within themselves. In 1913, Kandinsky wrote in his "Reminiscences" that, "painting is a thundering collision of different worlds, intended to create a new world in, and from, their struggles with one another, a new world which is the work of art."6 It is clear from this that the Modernist work of art was intended to be a "new world" operating according to its own universal aesthetic laws.Kandinsky is not just a painter; he is also a visual poet. Poetry, according to Tony Curtis, involves the expression of the intensification of experience — the elevation of banal facts of life into something beyond the merely prosaic — something unique and perceptively heightened.7 It involves both imagination and poetic license to explore both ambiguity and paradox. As Scottish poet Norman MacCaig observed, poetry renders the ordinary extraordinary, seeing the unfamiliar in the familiar.8 Creative analogical thinking such as evinced in Kandinsky's art, often involves breaking free of a clichéd representation.Malcolm Budd has remarked that, in its most exclusive sense, a work... (shrink)

The Wofford symposium was the first of the North American bi-centennial conferences on Hegel. Except for a considerable number of troublesome misprints, the present volume preserves the quality of the meeting, and its editor is to be thanked for bringing off the conference and bringing out the volume. Circumstances led him to substitute a general exposition of Hegelian concepts for an intended introduction to the conference theme. As a result the Introduction is too general for most readers of the volume. (...) The spirited use of examples - an Eskimo, an apprentice, a burglar and Moses - will interest pedagogues who have tried to present Hegel. I am not sure, however, that the student would be made sufficiently aware of Hegel’s departure from ordinary dualistic modes of thought. Thus, we read of ideas as “contents coming before the mind,” of Hegel’s “theory of innate ideas,” of mind “having” its thoughts. I am, moreover, puzzled by assertions which I may not have understood well. For example, I do not know what it means to say that for Hegel the unity of a concept “cannot contain a contradictory content,” ; it seems to me that Hegel demands something like this for the concept as notion. Nor does it seem true to say that “the concept of God… is … an exemplification of the triumph of the monistic principle in Hegel’s philosophy”, since he closes the Encyclopedia with an exposition of the necessity for a Trinitarian conception of the divine. These points also seem to trouble the much more sophisticated study which the editor contributed to the conference itself. Although somewhat removed from the specific theme of the conference, it raises one of the most serious questions in Hegelian studies. In what way can Hegel’s readers judge the truth of his assertions? Mr. Christensen sets out to answer by clearly stating the “formal properties” of Hegel’s dialectic method, so that its results will be falsifiable and thereby meet a test which every historical account must meet. It seems to me, however, that Mr. Christensen has shifted from Hegel’s logic to some alleged “method,” and from his philosophical account of history to an “historical” account. Now this introduces presuppositions alien to Hegel’s enterprise, however compatible they may be with some theory of falsifiability. Moreover, we read of two types of content belonging to the Notion, which look very much like an a priori formal and an a posteriori material content. Furthermore, Mr. Christensen seems to suppose that the dialectic must present only those stages which advance spirit and contain their predecessors in a straightforwardly accumulative way. Towards the end of what is a vigorous paper, he confesses that Hegel’s “blurring” of the distinction between method and notion renders a dialectical account of history in principle not falsifiable. It seems to me, however, that in framing the question - while the author has avoided gross reductions of Hegel to formalism or dualism - his thought has shifted towards Verstand and away from Begriff. He is uneasy with his more abstract approach, and with good cause, for the shift works at cross-purposes to the expressed intent of his analysis. Professor Findlay recognizes the importance of calling Hegel to some kind of critical account, but at the end of his prudent comment he returns to an initial scepticism regarding any single formulation of the vital and revisionary character of the dialectic. While he finds many Hegelian accounts “profoundly illuminating”, he also finds that he “cannot further illuminate this illumination”. (shrink)

Michelle Garcia Winner’s Social Thinking Curriculum is widely used by schools across the USA and has garnered attention internationally. The curriculum addresses social language and behavior deficits among those on the autism spectrum. Although many embrace this curriculum without reservation, the emphasis on social conformity, including avoiding behaviors that make others uncomfortable, merits scrutiny. Individuals who have difficulty understanding social cues and conventions can derive tremendous benefit from learning to fit in, for example, or learning what is likely to make (...) others uncomfortable and why. However, too much emphasis on pleasing others can reinforce undesirable tendencies. For example, autism is already linked to avoidant personality disorder. An emphasis on avoiding making others uncomfortable may also inhibit the development of principled ethical thinking and action. Reframing social thinking to treat it not (or not only) as an end in itself, but as a way to achieve a variety of social and personal goals would go a long way toward addressing the weaknesses of the Social Thinking Curriculum. (shrink)

A vibrant example of living literature, the Bhagavata Purana is a versatile Hindu sacred text written in Sanskrit verse. Finding its present form by the tenth century C.E., the work inspired several major north Indian devotional (bhakti) traditions as well as schools of dance and drama, and continues to permeate popular Hindu art and ritual in both India and the diaspora. Introducing the Bhagavata Purana's key themes while also examining its extensive influence on Hindu thought and practice, this collection conducts (...) the first multidimensional reading of the entire text. Each essay focuses on a key theme of the Bhagavata Purana and its subsequent presence in Hindu theology, performing arts, ritual recitation, and commentary. The authors consider the relationship between the sacred text and the divine image, the text's metaphysical and cosmological underpinnings, its shaping of Indian culture, and its ongoing relevance to contemporary Indian concerns. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Individual in Relation to the Sangha in American Buddhism:An Examination of "Privatized Religion"Kenneth K. TanakaIn his celebrated book Bowling Alone (2000), Robert Putnam noted the increased level in the phenomenon of "privatized religion" within the previous thirty-five years. Many of the Baby Boomer generation left churches in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Some sought out new religious movements and religious therapies, but most simply "dropped out" (...) of organized religion altogether. He cites Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, specialists in American religion, who describe the outcome of this trend in American religious behavior: "[The consequence was a] tendency toward highly individualized religious psychology without the benefits of strong supportive attachments to believing communities. A major impetus in this direction in the post-1960s was the thrust toward greater personal fulfillment and quest for the ideal self.... In this climate of expressive individualism, religion tends to become "privatized," or anchored in the personal realms."1 Putnam observes that although privatized religion may be "morally compelling and psychologically fulfilling," it involves less social capital than environments in which individuals are connected to other individuals in shared faith commitment.Interestingly, American Buddhism may be one of the beneficiaries of this trend, for the recent growth of Buddhism in the United States is partly attributable to the climate of "privatized" religion. Nowhere is this symbolized more than by the so-called Nightstand Buddhists.2The Nightstand Buddhists derive their name from their practice of placing a Buddhist meditation book on the nightstand after reading it before they go to sleep. They get up the next morning and practice to the best of their ability the meditation they had read about the night before. Further, they may frequently attend lectures at the local university and visit a Buddhist center's web-page or participate in an online Buddhist discussion group. And if we were to visit them, we might find their homes decorated with Buddhist artifacts.But these Nightstand Buddhists do not show up in any statistics on the [End Page 115] American Buddhist population because they would not identify themselves as Buddhists. According to Thomas Tweed, who coined the term Nightstand Buddhists, "Sympathizers (= Nightstand Buddhists) are those who have some sympathy for Buddhism but do not embrace it exclusively or fully. When asked, they would not identify themselves as Buddhists. They would say they are Methodists, or Jewish, or unaffiliated."3 However, they have been an important part of the story of Buddhism in America from its beginning and continue to be so today.Among the three million Buddhists currently estimated to be in the United States, I believe there are Buddhists who exhibit many of the same characteristics as the Nightstand Buddhists. And this number is significant, particularly among those converts to Buddhism whose main practice is meditation. This group of convert Buddhists is one segment of the larger Buddhist community in the United States, which I have categorized into four groups.41. New Asian American Buddhists (those who have mostly arrived in the United States since the 1960s: Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Cambodian, Myanmar, Laotian, and Sri Lankan).2. Old-line Asian American Buddhists (those who were established before World War II: Chinese and Japanese).3. Convert Buddhists whose main practice is meditation (predominately Euro-Americans practicing in the Zen, Vipassanā, and Tibetan traditions).4. Convert Buddhists whose main practice is chanting (Sōkagakkai International–USA, a sizable percentage of whom are African and Hispanic Americans).In this paper, I wish to focus on a Jōdo Shinshū temple from the second group (old-line Asian American Buddhists) and on several centers collectively that belong to the Zen, Vipassanā, and Tibetan traditions from the third group (convert Buddhists whose main practice is meditation), looking at the manner in which individuals relate to their respective institutions and traditions, with special attention given to the phenomenon of "privatized religion."For purposes of this paper, my definition of "privatized religion" is based on the observation of Roof and McKinney, cited above, as "a tendency for individuals (1) to emphasize practicing at home over religious centers, and (2) to value the subjective and the inward." The homebound orientation is connected... (shrink)

Garry Wills is the polymathic public intellectual bemoaned as missing from American letters. A professor emeritus at Northwestern University, he has built upon his early studies in classics and patristics, while bringing his considerable intellect to bear on American culture, politics, and religion, notably through provocative articles and books on wars, past and present presidents, and the Catholic Church Wills has distinguished himself in the crowded field of Civil War history; fearlessly taken on the legacies of Richard Nixon and Ronald (...) Reagan, among other presidents; and offered a critical voice in many fraught ethical discussions, especially in the areas of war and peace. Nation and World, Church and God gathers original critical reflections by leading writers and scholars on Garry Wills's life work. Organized around the themes of "Classics," "Civil War," "War and Peace," and "Theology, Church, and the Arts," the book reflects the cultural acumen, fine-grained political analysis, ethical candor, and theological wisdom of one of America's most prolific writers. (shrink)

In 300 BCE, the tutor of the heir-apparent to the Chu throne was laid to rest in a tomb at Jingmen, Hubei province in central China. A corpus of bamboo-strip texts that recorded the philosophical teachings of an era was buried with him. The tomb was sealed, and China quickly became the theater of the Qin conquest, an event that proved to be one of the most significant in ancient history. For over two millennia, the texts were forgotten. But in (...) October 1993, they were unearthed. The discovery of the Guodian texts, together with other recently discovered Warring States manuscripts, has revolutionized the study of early Chinese intellectual history. Kenneth Holloway argues that the Guodian corpus puts forth a political philosophy based on the harmonious interconnection of individuals engaged in moral self-cultivation. This unique worldview, says Holloway, cannot meaningfully be categorized as "Confucian" or "Daoist," because it shares important concepts and vocabulary with a number of different textual traditions that have anachronistically been characterized as competing or incompatible "schools" of thought. He finds that within the Guodian corpus familiar philosophical concepts and texts are applied in distinctive ways, presenting a worldview that is quite different from the received textual traditions. In the corpus, the most important function of government is to assist in the harmonization of state and family relations. It sees the relationship between these two entities - the family and the collection of families that ultimately constitute the state - as being inherently conflicting social groupings. The texts posit an interesting solution: State and family disharmony can be overcome by developing a hybrid government that employs both meritocratic and aristocratic methods. Without knowledge of the emphasis on hybridization found in the Guodian texts, however, scholars were unable to understand the interrelationships between these two methods of government. This new understanding illuminates central issues of government, religion, and philosophy in early China that were overlooked in received texts. As part of the contribution to our understanding of this particular body of texts, Holloway proposes a methodology for assessing a corpus of texts without relying on assumptions and definitions that derive from two thousand years of scholarship. The Guodian corpus, and Holloway's analysis of it, are now absolutely indispensable to any student or scholar of ancient Chinese intellectual history. (shrink)

Orthodox Christianity affirms a bodily resurrection of the dead. That is, Christians believe that at some point in the eschatological future, possibly after a period of (conscious or unconscious) disembodied existence, we will once again live and animate our own bodies. However, our bodies will also undergo radical qualitative transformation. This creates a serious problem: how can a body persist across both temporal discontinuity and qualitative transformation? After discussing this problem as it appears in contemporary philosophical literature on the resurrection, (...) I will argue that George Berkeley's immaterialist metaphysics is more successful than either physicalism or dualism in escaping objections to resurrection based on the problem of qualitative transformation. In order to accomplish this, I will first discuss Berkeley's views on the metaphysics of so-called 'ordinary' objects, including human bodies, and then apply this view to the resurrection of the dead, ultimately showing that, for Berkeley, the radical transformation of the body in the resurrection is no more problematic than the case of a straight oar appearing bent when one end is inserted in water. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Gadamer On Art, Morality, and AuthorityKenneth L. BuckmanMary Devereaux claims that the problem of morality in the twentieth century and the anxiety caused by the fear of moral chaos fall into two main responses: (1) one looks to the past because the past seems to afford what the present lacks, i.e., a commonly shared and stable moral reality; and (2) one looks to the present and comes to terms (...) with the way things are, a strategy of accommodation that revises our over inflated notions of knowledge and justification, particularly moral justification. 1 She sees Gadamer’s work as an additional option that responds to this problem. Devereaux says Gadamer’s response to the collapse of traditional morality is a turn to the experience of art wherein one derives morals from an extra-moral sense. Thus, Gadamer’s aesthetic example serves as a source of moral value. Devereaux says Gadamer’s project fails, in that his account contains an optimistic and unquestioned assumption that art always operates to our benefit (p. 71). However, Gadamer is appreciative of the deficiencies and dangers inherent in the kind of view he holds and does not hold an excessively optimistic, romanticized, naive, or prescriptive view of tradition. Gadamer’s account is a descriptive explication of the manner in which societies acquire the authority to form values.Devereaux’s account is to a large extent fair and accurate. However, despite her empathy with Gadamer’s account, she has reservations about the accuracy of Gadamer’s description of art and questions the depth to which he understands the current ethical crisis. She maintains that Gadamer’s analysis indicates a preference for a certain kind of art [End Page 144] (i.e., classical), and much of twentieth-century art (Tinguely, Cage, Burden, etc.) is outside the purview of Gadamer’s analysis. Though each individual artwork, in Gadamer’s view, can serve as a metaphor for ordering in general, Burden et al. aim, “not simply to introduce new materials or new subject matter within an existing artistic framework, but to alter the frame” (p. 69). These artists reconceive the very nature of artistic activity and change the rules by substituting the accidental, the incomplete, and the self-contradictory in place of selection and craft (pp. 69–70). Recent artistic principles have deconstructed the notion of order, showing the failure of order itself. Should we even grant that certain types of traditional art function as Gadamer has indicated? Though we might hope for the desired result of moral cohesion, Devereaux says, we are still faced with the problem of availability and the extent to which a person’s contact with art generates the necessary moral education. Her most serious charge is Gadamer’s “unquestioned assumption” that art always operates to our benefit (p. 71). The reliance on shared tradition, Devereaux argues, positions Gadamer to argue that the interaction with texts serves the positive moral function of social cohesion. However, Gadamer’s willingness to assign normative authority to tradition opens him to serious charges of conservatism, most prominently from the criticism and viewpoint of feminists and black scholars, and he “does not acknowledge those for whom the authority of that tradition is deeply and unquestionably problematic. Might not a coherent tradition, if achieved, function oppressively?” (p. 71). Devereaux claims that Gadamer rejects this possibility.Devereaux’s criticisms thus fall into these five areas: (1) Gadamer privileges a certain kind of art (i.e., classical); (2) for Gadamer art serves as an ordering, but it does not fulfill that capacity; (3) Gadamer is unclear about the availability and the degree of contact members of a society must have with art in order for the artwork to function in its moral capacity; (4) Gadamer wrongly assumes that art always operates to our benefit; and (5) Gadamer’s acceptance of the normative authority of tradition is oppressive. Devereaux errs in all of these criticisms.Devereaux’s criticism of Gadamer’s aesthetic theory in general, disconnected for the moment from its supposed moral implications, is that his analysis is concerned with traditional or classical forms of art, ignoring the less integrative forms of art of the late twentieth century. Though it may... (shrink)

He upon whom has descended the “amor intellectualis Dei” must make up his mind to walk much alone. In the world of “intellectuals” he is at present “out of the swim,” and his work must be done against the prevailing current. And among the generality of religious people, he is regarded as rather a disturbing presence in matters of faith, apt to fall short, apparently, of their own standards in the service of God. “The love of the mind for God” (...) has little popular esteem in English-speaking Christianity. The nineteenth century valued feeling as the chief element in religion, and the emphasis of to-day is on the practical service of the will. But in our tradition, from Colet and the Cambridge Platonists to Westcott and von Hiigel, the “amor intellectualis Dei” has produced a line of great men of God, and surely will never be without its witnesses. Their message is a two-fold one. First that every experience of life can be “produced” into an experience of God by an effort of personality in which creative thought and constructive imagination has its part, second that this “love of the mind” is natural in some degree to all men, and an end in itself, giving to each lover an original vision. “It is Origen,” writes Dean Inge, “who in words thrilling alike by their humility and confidence, proclaims that ‘as the eye seeks the light, as our body craves for food, so our mind is impressed with the natural desire of knowing the truth of God and the causes of what we observe.’”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Asura’s Harp: Engagement with Language as Buddhist PathKenneth K. TanakaAsura’s Harp: Engagement with Language as Buddhist Path. By Dennis Hirota. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2006. 156 pp.In Asura’s Harp, Hirota focuses on the Pure Land Buddhist thought of Shinran (1173–1263), the founder of Jōdo Shinshō school and one of the major figures of Japanese Buddhism. I believe Hirota’s main argument of the book is succinctly expressed on its back (...) cover blurb: “Unlike monastic traditions that seek the eradication of delusional attachments through transcendence of ordinary thought and speech, Shinran teaches that human existence is inevitably characterized by linguisticality and that the genuinely practicable path to realization lies in engagement with language.” For Hirota, language plays a central role in the religious transformative experience called Shinjin, considered a genuine awareness of the self and the world. This way of understanding religious language goes against the dominant view, especially that of Zen with its proverbial “beyond words” approach 1 and contemporary Buddhist discussions on language as being limited and even false.In the prologue of the book, Hirota points out the growing convergence in the Buddhist outlook and the current interest in Western thought. Both traditions see that “persons are not autonomous agents making judgments and initiating actions independently of others, their past, and their location in society and history” (p. 2). Instead, humans are now seen to be situated in particular temporal and spatial circumstances, with its attendant limitations, prejudices, and finitude. In terms of language, this realization has led to a shift in Western thought from metaphysical to hermeneutical concerns, thus resonating with Buddhism’s view of ordinary language [End Page 182] as “inevitably warped by attachments and informed by falsely reifying conceptualization” (p. 2).At the same time both traditions recognize the adaptive use of language, as seen especially in the Buddhist conception of “skillful means,” to provide guidance to self-realization and awareness. This, Hirota believes, offers an opportunity for a dialogue between contemporary Western thought and Buddhism.With this as the backdrop, Hirota sets out to clarify the nature and significance of language in Shin Pure Land thought with an intent to contribute to this broader discussion of religious language across religious and cultural boundaries, a formidable task for any scholar. However, there is no one, in my opinion, more qualified to carry out this task than Hirota, for he served as the chief translator of the twenty-year project that culminated in the Collected Works of Shinran (CWS)2 and has been publishing insightful and provocative writings in the study of language from Shin Buddhist perspective in both English and Japanese.3 There are very few, if any, scholars in Japan dealing with this subject with the ability to talk about it in a cross-religious and disciplinary context. In more recent years, he has taken his findings to gatherings outside Japan, particularly to Europe. In fact, this book is, in large part, an outcome of the talks he delivered several years ago in the Fürst Franz-Josef and Fürstin Gina Memorial Philosophy Lecture Series at the Internationale Akademie für Philosophie in Liechtenstein.Before I focus in on some of the central points in this book, it would be helpful to get a bird’s eye view of this book, Asura’s Harp by listing the chapter titles. The book comprises four parts: “Buddhist View of Language,” “Engagement with the Pure Land Teaching,” “Truth as Transformative Event,” and “Language and Religious Awareness.” Part 1 contains three chapters: “Shinran’s Buddhist Critique of Language,” “Reality as Language,” and “The Dialogical Structure of True Language.” Part 2 also includes three chapters: “Modes of Engagement with the Teaching,” “The Encounter with Truth,” and “The Context of Encounter.” Part 3 contains two chapters: “Shinran Face to Face” and “Hearing the Vow.” In part 4, we find two chapters: “Language and Realization of Shinjin” and “Living from the Name of Buddha.” The postscript, “Shinran and Hermeneutical Thought,” is a helpful aid in getting a little more insight into Hirota’s view on language.As is evident by the chapter titles, there is much to comprehend and digest, particularly... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 39.4 (2006) 333-339MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]On Persuasion, Identification, and Dialectical SymmetryKenneth BurkeEdited with introduction by James ZappenNote: This untitled paper was found in two typed copies among the books and papers in Kenneth Burke's personal library in July 2006—one copy folded into a heavily used Loeb edition of Aristotle's Rhetoric, the other in a small file cabinet in the library.1 The two copies are (...) nearly identical carbon copies, probably typed by Burke's wife Libby; the original has not been found.2 The paper includes brief discussions of persuasion, identification, and dialectical symmetry (hence the current title), plus brief critiques of behaviorism and general semantics, with specific reference to Alfred Korzybski's notion of the structural differential. It was probably written in the mid-1940s, after the second edition of Korzybski's Science and Sanity and The Philosophy of Literary Form, both published in 1941; perhaps at roughly the same time as the more extended discussions of behaviorism and Korzybski in A Grammar of Motives, published in 1945; and before the full development of Burke's ideas about persuasion, identification, and dialectical symmetry in A Rhetoric of Motives, published in 1950. The paper might have been prepared for a public lecture or for circulation among Burke's literary friends, as a brief commentary on some of the key concepts in A Rhetoric of Motives, while he was completing A Grammar of Motives or perhaps shortly following its publication. If so, then it might have been written as late as 1947.3This paper suggests that Burke's concept of identification was in part a creative response to current issues in behaviorism and general semantics, formulated in sympathy with George Herbert Mead's observations on identification, communication, and community in Mind, Self, and Society and The Philosophy of the Act and in opposition to Korzybski's general semantics and his structural differential. Moreover, and more important, this paper suggests that the final section of A Rhetoric of Motives, titled simply "Order," is essential to a complete understanding of Burke's ideas about persuasion and identification since only in this last section does Burke show how competing points of view [End Page 333] might be reconciled in an ultimate identification via the dialectical symmetry that he traces through the long history of Platonic thought.4James P. Zappen Department of Language, Literature, and Communication Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute* * *What, in sum, would be the salient traits of Aristotle's Rhetoric?5 And what would be our attitude towards them?His "art" is constructed about his stress upon persuasion as the purpose of rhetoric. Hence he surveys the resources of rhetoric, to the end that one might use the best means available for a given situation. To narrow down the choice of means, he makes a division into kinds of oratory: deliberative (concerned with the expediency of steps still to be taken); forensic (concerned with the justice or injustice of past acts); and demonstrative or epideictic (concerned with praise and blame, primarily involving the present). But to be effective in any of these kinds, one must appeal to the opinions of one's audience—hence the lists of "topics" reviewing such opinions. First he considers the components of happiness, on the grounds that all men aim at happiness, hence this topic figures in all persuasion and dissuasion. For deliberative oratory specifically, he lists the topics naming men's opinions as to the good, the expedient, and their opposites (along with relevant observations on different forms of government). His topics for epideictic, dealing with praise and blame, comprise the things men consider virtuous and vicious. And his list of forensic topics has to do with the motives and effects of just and unjust acts. Also, there are such general topics as the possible and impossible, the more and the less, the likely and the unlikely.Enthymemes (deductions based on opinion) fit well with forensic, he says. Rhetorical induction (example) best suits the deliberative. And to epideictic, amplification (auxesis... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 155-157 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Buddhist Peacework: Creating Cultures of Peace Buddhist Peacework: Creating Cultures of Peace. Edited by David W. Chappell. Somerville, Massachusetts: Wisdom Publications, 1999. 253 pp. This earnest book demonstrates the continuing vitality of Buddhism in many parts of the world. The contributing authors are the leading figures of contemporary engaged Buddhism, and they write from firsthand experience. The Dalai (...) Lama outlines methods for promoting harmony among different religious traditions. Thich Nhat Hanh shows how the principle of nonviolence was tested in the rescue ofVietnamese boat people during the 1970s. A.T. Ariyaratne presents the work of the influential Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka. Shih Cheng-yen, sometimes called "the Mother Theresa of Asia," describes the relief work ofTzu Chi, the largest charitable organization in Taiwan. Dhammachari Lokamitra documents the impact of an adopted Buddhism among former "untouchables" in India. Robert Aitken surveys engaged Buddhist activity in North America, including hospice work, prison reform, and sustainable farming. Many of the writers have personally suffered the deprivations of war and oppression; in some cases they continue their work amid threats of violence or arrest.An aim ofBuddhist Peacework is to offer a Buddhist response to a declaration that emerged from a 1994 meeting of world religious leaders organized by UNESCO. This document, "Declaration of the Role of Religion in the Promotion of a Culture of Peace," is included as an appendix. Two of the book's contributors, the Dalai Lama and the senior Cambodian monk Maha Ghosananda, participated in the UNESCO meeting. Indeed, some of the declaration's language has an engaged Buddhist ring: "We must be at peace with ourselves; we strive to achieve inner peace through personal reflection and spiritual growth, and to cultivate a spirituality which manifests itself in action."One of Buddhism's distinctive teachings on the subject of peace is the practice of "internal disarmament," the term used by the Dalai Lama in his essay. Unless individuals are able to tame the forces of greed, anger, and delusion in their own minds, the prospects for peace between communities and between nations are slim. For an engaged Buddhist, there must be alignment between "inner" and "outer" disarmament. One cannot work for peace--or any other worthy social goal--in an agitated, antagonistic way. In this collection, peacework is something one does as spiritual practice.Shakyamuni Buddha approached the existential problem of suffering by analyzing the causes of suffering. In a similar spirit, engaged Buddhists have embarked on a Buddhistic analysis of the causes of war and peace. Contributor José Ignacio Cabezón writes: "Peace cannot arise simply by wishing it into existence, but only by the cultivation of its causes.Viewing peace in this way has the salutary effect of shifting the emphasis of peacework from result to causes." Somewhere in that mix of causes we [End Page 155] eventually encounter ourselves. If the world is truly interdependent, we share responsibility for violence and atrocities occurring "elsewhere."Thich Nhat Hanh, in his essay, declares: "If we look deeply, we will observe that the roots of war are in the unmindful ways we have been living. We have not sown enough seeds of peace and understanding in ourselves and others, therefore we are co-responsible: 'Because I have been like this, they are like that.'" The notion of sowing "seeds of peace" is reinforced in the image on the book's cover: two hands tenderly plant a seedling in receptive soil.But internal disarmament is not enough. As editor David Chappell asserts, "Today there is a new urgency for that [inner] peacework to be manifest socially, ecologically, and materially."Witness the plight of several Buddhist (and formerly Buddhist) nations in Asia. "Recently, Buddhist countries have become notorious arenas of genocide and brutality," writes Karma Lekshe Tsomo. Citing Burma, Cambodia, China, Sri Lanka, and Tibet, Tsomo asks, "What went wrong?" Peacework also has new meanings in an age of ecocrisis. For Stephanie Kaza, "a first step in keeping peace with nature calls for contact with ecological suffering." Kaza highlights four ways to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kandinsky, Kant, and a Modern MandalaKenneth BerryWhat gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man's imagination?—Joseph Campbell, "The Way of the Myth"Michele Roberts has written of the "joy of the human imagination, without which we would be unable to understand one another, and would thus wither and perish."1 This is the baseline for my discursive analysis of imagination and beauty in art as (...) it relates to the work of Kant and Kandinsky. While both accepted the forward movement of cognition in art and aesthetics, my concern is that some cognitively minded individuals neglect the part played by imaginative intuition in the creative process. Much recent art is lacking in both imagination and beauty. Although it may be rich in concept, according to Kant creative intuition is also necessary. Postmodernists' focused emphasis on the oblique, fleeting, transient, and ephemeral—short-lived, fugitive fashions or superficial trends in art and aesthetics—confuses the fleeting and moving present, rushing us forward into the future when we might do better to look back historically and constructively at the more enduring influence of Kant and Kandinsky. Of course, it might in one sense be in the "apparently unremarkable and evanescent that our lives sometimes find their greatest meaning,"2 but this does not imply that we cannot also learn from the past.Imaginative Representation in Kant and KandinskyIn his painting of 1926, Several Circles, Kandinsky depicts a group of overlapping, partially transparent discs that appear to drift freely against a black background. Will Grohmann has described this abstract scenario as a "cosmic metaphor" that points symbolically to a "limited infinite."3 Clearly, Kandinsky is concerned here with some transcendent meaning. Jung has remarked on the poetic association of the avian contour at the lower left of the painting—perhaps this is a metaphor for flight or spiritual freedom.4 The picture, he says, seems to represent a state of universalized equilibrium and harmony. This picture constitutes, to my mind, the expression, in a Kantian sense, of aesthetic ideas,5 mediating as it does between concepts and intuitions [End Page 105] and concerned as it is with the expression of artistic ideas in an imaginative, aesthetically harmonious form. On this topic Kandinsky has said: "If your imagination is not powerful enough to develop visions which are truly your own, and which, reduced to the state of ideas, can be translated into images, then go back to the study of nature"6Nature, we are told, Kant elevated above fine art in the sense that the beauty of nature's handiwork is the sole basis of the immediate interest that is taken in it7—it is untainted by desire or any concept of perfection or use (the merely agreeable), it is pleasurably imbued with "purposiveness without purpose" in the teleological implication of the "kingdom of ends." The dynamical and morally sublime, however, implied genius. Had Kant been living in our modern age, though he still might not have been a great art lover as such, he would surely not have dismissed Kandinsky's abstract compositions—as El Lissitzky did—as being mere wallpaper patterning, decorative arabesques, and the like; Kant would surely have recognized the symbolic power of these images as art!The Gestalt TheoryAccording to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), aesthetic ideas are representations of the imagination. Following Rudolf Arnheim, a "representation" may be understood as either a man-made image or external figuration or, in another sense, as a "mental image."8 These ideas suggest that representation, through art, involves both the internal and the external. Representation in science is the means by which we generate images of the object "out there"—the basis of an objectivist epistemology. A scientific "representation" of the Giant's Causeway, supposedly built by Finn MacCool, might involve a computer simulation of columnar polygonal fractures in topographical detail. Kant, however, was concerned with representations of ideas, specifically aesthetic ideas as distinct from rational ideas. These were based on the animating principle of the soul, or Geist. In at least one language, Icelandic, which is an aesthetically pleasing language and very visual in language terms—abstract words... (shrink)

Textbooks function as an important resource for teaching and learning of mathematics at the school level across the world. At least at the primary grades the contents of textbooks are situated in the larger society around the learners, in order that the learners can relate to what is taught to them. This opens the possibility for textbooks to uncritically reinforce the prevailing stereotypes or use the opportunity textbook provide to creatively break the stereotypes. Mathematics education research has engaged with (...) the question of gender stereotypes in mathematics textbooks which has had an impact how gender figures in textbooks. However, gender is neither a binary nor monolithic. In the Indian context, gender is not the only social hierarchy that operates. The National Curriculum Framework 2005(hence forth referred to as NCF 2005) addresses the question of prevailing stereotypes about children from social margins and says care must be taken to ensure that the curriculum, textbooks and classroom interaction do not reinforce the stereotypes. Moreover, in the last two decades transgender people have been able to demand recognition and acceptance at least in the higher educational spaces as transgender people. Given these, it would be important to understand how textbooks reflect the changes and demands. This paper analyses the content of the mathematics textbooks developed by the State Council of Education Research and Training (SCERT) of one Indian state, namely Kerala, to understand how they represent gender, caste, class and religious differences and to investigate if the textbooks are inclusive of the disabled learners. Based on the content analysis of the textbooks the paper argues that even as the textbooks try to ensure representation of both girls and boys in the pictures and word problems and make an attempt to be inclusive of different religions and marginalised cultures ( for example by incorporating the picture of Theyyam, which uses an art form of the marginalised people in Kerala) in a textbook, they end up strengthening the existing gender, class, religious stereotypes. It also draws attention to the complete absence of disabled children in the textbooks. (shrink)

_Mirroring and Attunement_ offers a new approach to psychoanalysis, artistic creation and religion. Viewing these activities from a broadly relational perspective, Wright proposes that each provides a medium for creative dialogue: the artist discovers himself within his self-created forms, the religious person through an internal dialogue with ‘God’, and the analysand through the inter-subjective medium of the analysis. Building on the work of Winnicott, Stern and Langer, the author argues that each activity is rooted in the infant’s preverbal relationship with (...) the mother who ‘holds’ the emerging self in an ambience of mirroring forms, thereby providing a ‘place’ for the self to ‘be’. He suggests that the need for subjective reflection persists throughout the life cycle and that psychoanalysis, artistic creation and religion can be seen as cultural attempts to provide the self with resonant containment. They thus provide renewed opportunities for holding and emotional growth. _Mirroring and Attunement_ will provide essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and art therapists and be of interest to anyone working at the interface between psychoanalysis, art and religion. _ _. (shrink)

This essay examines Russell's historical writing, views on historical knowledge, and what history meant to him. In addition to frequent historical references in writing on ethics, religion, social issues, education and politics, and some half- dozen works mostly historical in character, he wrote four reflective essays on history and its uses. They are "On History" (1904), "The Materialistic Theory of History" (1920), "How to Read and Understand History" (1943) and "History as an Art" (1954). There are additional scattered, brief examples (...) of historical exposition and interpretation in works for the popular press, but these 80 pages or so stand out from an enormous body of work from about 1895 to 1970. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Books ReceivedAt the Eleventh Hour: The Biography of Swami Rama. By Pandit Rajmani Tigunait, Ph.D. Honesdale, Pennsylvania: Himalayan Institute Press, 2002. Pp. 427. Hardcover $18.95.Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy. Edited by Polly Young Eisendrath and Shoji Muramoto. Hove, England: Brunner-Routledge, 2002. Pp. xii + 275. Paper $24.95.Beyond Metaphysics Revisited: Krishnamurti and Western Philosophy. By J. Richard Wingerter. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2002. Pp. vii + (...) 391. Hardcover $71.00.Bhāmatī and Vivaraṇa Schools of Advaita Vedānta: A Critical Approach. By Pulasth Soobah Roodurmun, foreword by V. N. Jha, and edited by Kanshi Ram. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 2002. Pp. xv + 297. Price not given.A Bibliography of Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy. By James S. Crouch. New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 2002. Pp. 430. Price not given.Crisis Theory and World Order: Heideggerian Reflections. By Norman K. Swazo. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Pp. x + 289. Hardcover $78.50. Paper $26.95.Devotional Literature in South Asia: Current Research 1997-2000: Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Early Literature in New Indo-Aryan Languages, Leuven, 23-26 August 2000. Edited by Winand M. Callewaert and Dieter Taillieu. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 2002. Pp. xxii + 324. Price not given.Dharma Bell and Dhāraṇī Pillar: Li Po's Buddhist Inscriptions. By Paul W. Kroll. Kyoto: Italian School of East Asian Studies, 2001. Pp. viii + 95. Price not given.Essays on the Moral Philosophy of Mengzi. Edited, with introduction, by Xiusheng Liu and Philip J. Ivanhoe. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002. Pp. xiv + 249. Hardcover $39.95. Paper $16.95. Professional price $12.95.Ethical Questions: East and West. Edited by Bina Gupta. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002. Pp. vi + 279. Hardcover $70.00. Paper $26.95.Ethical Relativism and Universalism. By Saral Jhingran. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 2001. Pp. xiv + 385. Price not given.Genius-In Their Own Words: The Intellectual Journeys of Seven Great 20th Century [End Page 431] Thinkers. Edited and with introduction by David Ramsay Steele, foreword by Arthur C. Danto. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2002. Pp. xxii + 366. Paper $24.95.The Hatha Yoga Pradipika. The original Sanskrit by Svatmarama, an English translation by Brian Dana Akers. Woodstock, New York: YogaVidya.com, 2002. Pp. xii + 115. Hardcover $19.95. Paper $11.95.Human Rights and Chinese Thought: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry. By Stephen C. Angle. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xviii + 285. Hardcover $65.00. Paper $23.00.Indestructible Truth: The Living Spirituality of Tibetan Buddhism. By Reginald A. Ray. Boston and London: Shambhala Publications, 2002. Pp. x + 495. Paper $17.95.Introduction to Eastern Thought. By Marietta Stepaniants. Edited by James Behuniak and translated by Rommela Kohanovskaya. Lanham, Maryland: AltaMira Press, a division of Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002. Pp. xiv + 293. Hardcover $69.00. Paper $24.95.Jainism and Ecology: Nonviolence in the Web of Life. Edited by Christopher Key Chapple. Cambridge: Harvard University Press for the Center for the Study of World Religions, 2002. Pp. xliv + 252. Hardcover $32.95. Paper $22.95.Mediating the Power of Buddhas: Ritual in the Mañjuśrīmūlakalpa. By Glenn Wallis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Pp. xiii + 263. Hardcover $86.50. Paper $29.95.Methodology in Religious Studies: The Interface with Women's Studies. Edited by Arvind Sharma. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 253. Hardcover $78.50. Paper $26.95.Persons and Valuable Worlds: A Global Philosophy. By Eliot Deutsch. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002. Pp. x + 309. Hardcover $80.00. Paper $34.95.Philosophy and Art in Gurdjieff's Beelzebub: A Modern Sufi Odyssey. By Anna T. Challenger. Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2002. Pp. xi + 145. Paper EUR 27,00, U.S. $25.00.The Pratyabhijñā Philosophy. By G. V. Tagare. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 2002. Pp. xii + 165. Price not given.Reflections on Reality: The Three Natures and Non-Natures in the Mind-Only School: Dynamic Responses to ong-ka-a's The... (shrink)

This article investigates a tension that arises in Hegel’s aesthetic theory between theoretical and practical forms of reason. This tension, I argue, stems from Hegel’s appropriation of an Aristotelian framework for a historically unfolding social teleology which puts practical reason to work for the aims of theoretical reason. Recognizing that this aspect of Hegel’s dialectic is essential in overcoming problems left in Kant’s transcendental idealism, the appearance of incongruence does not lessen. Grouped together with absolute spirit, Hegel positions art as (...) a transitory mode of mind, a vehicle, which aims to raise spirit to the higher cognition of philosophy. When the unfolding absolute concept becomes too complex for articulation in the material, art must end, as spirit’s message can be expressed only through the non-material form of philosophy. This study focuses on the ambivalence found in Hegel’s writings regarding his account of historical completion. Though Hegel sees in the Absolute a metaphysical solution to the unity of subject and object, the practical aspects of the unity appear to falter when philosophy becomes the dominant mode of expression at the close of a historical cycle. In Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel links his notion of the Absolute, albeit with modification, to Aristotle’s nous. As described in De Anima, this entails a progression in which active and possible intellect rise to the level of the eternal, while passive intellect, the imaginative element, passes on with the body. Because the architecture of Aristotle’s nous, which is not in line with his defense of poetry, is integrated into the blueprint of Hegel’s absolute, an unresolved tension emerges in the spirit of art. A divergence of aims is forced to the surface through Hegel’s application of a template for achievement of theoretical knowledge, with an end in the universal, to a form of practical knowing which has an end in the particular. (shrink)

Levels of Analysis in Psychopathology draws research from psychiatry, philosophy, and psychology to explore the variety of explanatory approaches for understanding the nature of psychiatric disorders both in practice and research. The fields of psychiatry and clinical psychology incorporates many useful explanatory approaches and this book integrates this range of perspectives and makes suggestions about how to advance etiologic theories, classification, and treatment. The editors have brought together leading thinkers who have been widely published and are well-respected in their area (...) of expertise, including several developers of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and authors of the US National Institute of Mental Health's Research Domain Criteria Project (RDoC). Each main chapter has a commentary provided by one of the other authors and an introduction written by one of the editors to create an accessible, interdisciplinary dialog. (shrink)

It is a matter of fact that Europe is facing more and more crucial challenges regarding health and social care due to the demographic change and the current economic context. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has stressed this situation even further, thus highlighting the need for taking action. Active and Assisted Living technologies come as a viable approach to help facing these challenges, thanks to the high potential they have in enabling remote care and support. Broadly speaking, AAL can be referred (...) to as the use of innovative and advanced Information and Communication Technologies to create supportive, inclusive and empowering applications and environments that enable older, impaired or frail people to live independently and stay active longer in society. AAL capitalizes on the growing pervasiveness and effectiveness of sensing and computing facilities to supply the persons in need with smart assistance, by responding to their necessities of autonomy, independence, comfort, security and safety. The application scenarios addressed by AAL are complex, due to the inherent heterogeneity of the end-user population, their living arrangements, and their physical conditions or impairment. Despite aiming at diverse goals, AAL systems should share some common characteristics. They are designed to provide support in daily life in an invisible, unobtrusive and user-friendly manner. Moreover, they are conceived to be intelligent, to be able to learn and adapt to the requirements and requests of the assisted people, and to synchronise with their specific needs. Nevertheless, to ensure the uptake of AAL in society, potential users must be willing to use AAL applications and to integrate them in their daily environments and lives. In this respect, video- and audio-based AAL applications have several advantages, in terms of unobtrusiveness and information richness. Indeed, cameras and microphones are far less obtrusive with respect to the hindrance other wearable sensors may cause to one’s activities. In addition, a single camera placed in a room can record most of the activities performed in the room, thus replacing many other non-visual sensors. Currently, video-based applications are effective in recognising and monitoring the activities, the movements, and the overall conditions of the assisted individuals as well as to assess their vital parameters. Similarly, audio sensors have the potential to become one of the most important modalities for interaction with AAL systems, as they can have a large range of sensing, do not require physical presence at a particular location and are physically intangible. Moreover, relevant information about individuals’ activities and health status can derive from processing audio signals. Nevertheless, as the other side of the coin, cameras and microphones are often perceived as the most intrusive technologies from the viewpoint of the privacy of the monitored individuals. This is due to the richness of the information these technologies convey and the intimate setting where they may be deployed. Solutions able to ensure privacy preservation by context and by design, as well as to ensure high legal and ethical standards are in high demand. After the review of the current state of play and the discussion in GoodBrother, we may claim that the first solutions in this direction are starting to appear in the literature. A multidisciplinary debate among experts and stakeholders is paving the way towards AAL ensuring ergonomics, usability, acceptance and privacy preservation. The DIANA, PAAL, and VisuAAL projects are examples of this fresh approach. This report provides the reader with a review of the most recent advances in audio- and video-based monitoring technologies for AAL. It has been drafted as a collective effort of WG3 to supply an introduction to AAL, its evolution over time and its main functional and technological underpinnings. In this respect, the report contributes to the field with the outline of a new generation of ethical-aware AAL technologies and a proposal for a novel comprehensive taxonomy of AAL systems and applications. Moreover, the report allows non-technical readers to gather an overview of the main components of an AAL system and how these function and interact with the end-users. The report illustrates the state of the art of the most successful AAL applications and functions based on audio and video data, namely lifelogging and self-monitoring, remote monitoring of vital signs, emotional state recognition, food intake monitoring, activity and behaviour recognition, activity and personal assistance, gesture recognition, fall detection and prevention, mobility assessment and frailty recognition, and cognitive and motor rehabilitation. For these application scenarios, the report illustrates the state of play in terms of scientific advances, available products and research project. The open challenges are also highlighted. The report ends with an overview of the challenges, the hindrances and the opportunities posed by the uptake in real world settings of AAL technologies. In this respect, the report illustrates the current procedural and technological approaches to cope with acceptability, usability and trust in the AAL technology, by surveying strategies and approaches to co-design, to privacy preservation in video and audio data, to transparency and explainability in data processing, and to data transmission and communication. User acceptance and ethical considerations are also debated. Finally, the potentials coming from the silver economy are overviewed. (shrink)

In the Introduction to the Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Berkeley attacks the “received opinion that language has no other end but the communicating our ideas, and that every significant name stands for an idea” (PHK, Intro §19). How far does Berkeley go in rejecting this ‘received opinion’? Does he offer a general theory of language to replace it? If so, what is the nature of this theory? In this chapter, I consider three main interpretations of Berkeley's view: (...) the modified ideational theory, the speaker intentions theory, and the use theory. I argue that the use theory does, and its competitors do not, make sense of Berkeley's remarks on language in both the earlier and later works. (shrink)

While Hegel’s infamous “end of art” thesis states that art is “for us, a thing of the past” he insists that philosophy and, to a degree that is often underestimated by contemporary readers, religion endure within the structure of modern life. In this paper I aim to demonstrate how by focusing on Hegel’s claim that religion meets no end, we can come to a better understanding of how and why he thinks art does end. This will lead us away from (...) common, but false, picture of Hegel as being indifferent (or even hostile) to art’s sensuous mode of intelligibility. Inasmuch as religion remains both necessarily sensuous and a component of social life that realizes freedom and divinity within modernity, the “problem” with art cannot be its sensuousness per se. What art ultimately finds itself unable to do, and what religion can do, is find a way to reconcile the destabilizing force of individual, subjective freedom with a jointly-held representation of who and what we are and what we value most, what Hegel calls “divinity” (das Göttliche). By countenancing the vital role of religion in Hegel’s thought, we can therefore better understand one of his most famous, and least understood philosophical claims. (shrink)

While Hegel’s infamous “end of art” thesis states that art is “for us, a thing of the past” he insists that philosophy and, to a degree that is often underestimated by contemporary readers, religion endure within the structure of modern life. In this paper I aim to demonstrate how by focusing on Hegel’s claim that religion meets no end, we can come to a better understanding of how and why he thinks art does end. This will lead us away from (...) common, but false, picture of Hegel as being indifferent (or even hostile) to art’s sensuous mode of intelligibility. Inasmuch as religion remains both necessarily sensuous and a component of social life that realizes freedom and divinity within modernity, the “problem” with art cannot be its sensuousness per se. What art ultimately finds itself unable to do, and what religion can do, is find a way to reconcile the destabilizing force of individual, subjective freedom with a jointly-held representation of who and what we are and what we value most, what Hegel calls “divinity” (das Göttliche). By countenancing the vital role of religion in Hegel’s thought, we can therefore better understand one of his most famous, and least understood philosophical claims. (shrink)

This text is organized around the distinction between finite and infinite. It includes a brief overview of what different philosophers have said about infinity, and looks at some of the arguments to the effect that one should adopt a pro-infinity attitude. Other chapters contain an exposition of the ontological schools; interactions among these schools and various theories of truth; the relationship between mathematics and values; a history of mathematics; an analysis of mathematical knowledge; the role of mathematics in eduction; the (...) implications of religion for the philosophy of mathematics; and referenc eto mathematical objects. (shrink)

The ‘learning society’ expresses principles of a universal humanity and a promise of progress that seem to transcend the nation. The paper indicates how this society is governed in the name of a cosmopolitan ideal that despite its universal pretensions embodies particular inclusions and exclusions. These occur through inscribing distinctions and differentiations between the characteristics of those who embody a cosmopolitan reason that brings social progress and personal fulfilment and those who do not embody the cosmopolitan principles of civility and (...) normalcy. Mapping the circulation of the notion of the ‘learning society’ in arenas of Swedish health and criminal justice, and Swedish and US school reforms is to examine the mode of life of the citizen of this society, the learner, as an ‘unfinished cosmopolitanism’ and also directs attention to its ‘other’—those that are outside. (shrink)

Translated by Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith. Excerpted from Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy , (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2012). THE END TIMES OF PHILOSOPHY The phrase “end times of philosophy” is not a new version of the “end of philosophy” or the “end of history,” themes which have become quite vulgar and nourish all hopes of revenge and powerlessness. Moreover, philosophy itself does not stop proclaiming its own death, admitting itself to be half dead (...) and doing nothing but providing ammunition for its adversaries. With our sights set on clearing up this nuance, we differentiate philosophy as an institutional entity, and the philosophizability of the World and History, of “thought-world,” which universalizes the narrow concept of philosophy and that of “capital.” We also give an eschatological and apocalyptical cause to this end, of “times” or “ages” rather than those of philosophical practice. Last but not least, it is the Future itself in the performativity of its ultimatum that determines this end times, reversing these times from the Identity the Future accorded to it, withdrawing the thought-world from the lie of its death. Why this style of axioms and oracles, these more or less subtle distinctions, old and debased, with an appeal to the ultimata , to end times and last words? We fight to give, parallel to the concept of Hell, its new theoretical position, for its philosophical return and its non-philosophical transformation. No more so than any other word, Hell is not a metaphor here, just the Principle of Sufficient World. Every man, no doubt, has his “hell” readily available, connivance, control, conformism, domestication, schooling, alienation, extermination, exploitation, oppression, anxiety, etc. We have our little list that the Contemporaries established in the previous century in the same way one used to construct lists of virtues and vices or honors and wealth. They invented it for us without knowing it, for us-the-Futures who have as our responsibility to invent its use. In the Christian and Gnostic tradition, the struggle of the End Times takes place “on earth.” The most sophisticated of believers have it taking place in Heaven as well, above all in Heaven. The various kinds of gnosis imagine infinite falls and vertiginous highs, the vertigo of salvation. On Earth as in Heaven, a hell is available. The Marxists have the law of profit and the control of production, the class struggle Capital imposes on man. The Nietzscheans, the dull grumble of the struggle in the foundations of World and History, the domestication of man, the society of control. The phenomenologists, the capture of being, the most superficial amongst them, the age of suspicion. But all of these “hells” are taken from World, History, Society, and Religion. What we call Hell is no longer of the order of these specific and total intra-worldly generalities, it is both more singular and more universal, no longer being at all of the same order, it is the determinant Identity of these small hells strung out through history but unified here in the name of the last Humaneity. It is even found within the French idiom for hell [ enfer ], en-fer literally means “in-irons.” We are as much “in-irons” as we are “alive” [ en-Vie ]. We believe in Hell but as non-philosophers and it is even because we are non-philosophers that we can believe in it outside of any sort of religion. Hell is less mythological than ideological, it combines philosophizability with universal capital. Under what form? A single term could work for them without being a metaphor or something they would participate in by analogy, a more innovative and conjectural term than control, more universal than profit. It would denote the growing and permanent extortion of a surplus-value of communication, of speed and of urgency in change, in productivity and in work, in the pressure of images and slogans. It would be worse than solicitation, more tenacious than capture, more active and persecutory than control, softer and more insidious than a frontal attack, just as perverse as questioning and accusation, less brutal and offensive than extermination, less ritualized than inquisition, it would be soft and dispersed, instantaneous and vicious, it would be a crime without declared violence. Collusion and conformism, it would be afraid to show itself. Related to rumor, from which it borrows its infinite and tortuous ways. It is harassment. As a modernized form of Hell, perhaps harassment has a long future in front of it, of innocent torture, slow assassination, in short the fall, but radical with no way of recovering and which tolerates only salvation. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PAST OF NON-PHILOSOPHY Non-philosophy is thus Man as the utopian identity of the philosophical form of the World, a utopia destined to transform it. We still have to understand these equations, in particular that of the being-uni-versed from Man, and this book adheres to this by re-exposing non-philosophy in a different way via one of its new possibilities. It uses this opportunity to once again take up formulations that lead to objections answering certain external critics, as well as revisiting diverging interpretations specific to non-philosophers. A portion of this book is devoted to going through these theories via a strict or “lengthy” presentation of non-philosophy, and its defense against more expeditious solutions. This work of rectification is the occasion, merely the occasion, for refocusing non-philosophy on Man (the “Man-in-person,” “Humaneity”), and in a more innovative manner, on its utopian vocation established since the book Future Christ . As for this “occasion,” it is quite obvious. A school of posture, not to say a school of thought, supposes a minimum of closure from the most liberating of knowledge, a heritage, its utilization, and its no less certain dispersal. Within its development, a variety of interpretations will no doubt appear, deviations that are as much normalizations, and a struggle against this multiplication of divergent tendencies. These are perhaps not inevitable evils, especially here, merely a normal development according to the twisting paths of history. But the problem is made worse by the fact that this school of non-philosophers is that of utopia. Not the former attempts devoted to commenting on the worst authoritarian and criminal forms of the past and the present, but utopia as the determinant principle for human life, or to put it another way, of the Future as an irreducible presupposition of (for) thinking the World and History. Non-philosophers are engaged in an aleatory navigation between the respect for the most rigorous utopia, whose rules are not that of the reproductive imagination but those from the Future determining imagination itself, as well as the temptations, diversions, and remorse of history. Little by little, we will begin to understand that the Future as we understand it no longer has any temporal consistency or positive content, without being an empty form or a nothingness, but that it is foreclosed to past and present History, just as it is foreclosed to the place of places, the World, and that it is the only method for establishing the practice of thinking in a non-imaginary instance. Because it is the World and History that are imaginary and have a terrible materiality, it is not necessarily utopia. We will overlap two objectives here: the defense of non-philosophy against the (non-) philosophers that we are, only occasionally, and the introduction of philosophy to a rigorous future. Together they set out to definitively render, without any possible return to philosophical conformism or towards the facilities of the past and present, the non-philosophical enterprise understood as utopia or uchronia. Imagination and speculation, left to themselves and thus undistinguished, are quite good for participating in the grand game of History but have little value or worse for the Future which is unimaginable and unintelligible and must be maintained as such. MAN-IN-PERSON AS SUSPENSION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHORA The point where philosophical resistance is concentrated is without a doubt the invention of the Name-of-Man, first name, oracular as much as axiomatic, of the determining cause for the non-philosophical posture. And that which concentrates the differends is the style of non-philosophy as identity that possesses the dual aspect, of discipline and of the oeuvre, of the theorem and of the oracle. But the real difficulty in understanding the simplicity of non-philosophy is profoundly hidden in the depths of philosophy itself. Because philosophy, from Parmenides to Derrida, even Levinas, continues to be a divided gesture, without a veritable immanence, transforming its thematic contents of transcendence in also forgetting to transform the operative transcendence in the element from which the ontology of surface is established which we will call, in memory of Plato, the chorismos. The general effect of the chora literally gives place to philosophy, demanding binding and sutures to which we will once and for all “oppose” the Man-in-person, his power of cloning, and his future being. All philosophy contains a hinter-philosophy in which it deploys its operations and weaves its tradition like an understudy of a topographical nature and in the best of cases being itself topological. Philosophy as well consists of two levels, its pre-ontological operative conditions on the one hand, and its superficial theme on the other, it too has its presupposed, but is not aware of it or erases it within the unity of appearance named Logos. Rightly, the Logos, and its flash or lightning nature, possesses a “dark precursor,” the chora, which is as much a virtual image, and philosophy, dazzled by its own lightning flash, seems to completely forget about it at the same time it sets itself up within it. Non-philosophy risks taking this same path, of confusing what it believes to be the real with its phantom double, contenting itself to working on the thematic level of philosophy, not its surface objects and its idle chatter (we stopped talking about this a long time ago and in any case they are merely simple materials for inducing a work of transformation), but the transcendence-form of its objects. In the end it risks, through precipitation, taking back up the heritage of philosophy, a heritage of a misunderstood presupposed, even more profound than the play of transcendences. This is what the imperative of the radicality of immanence meant, to treat immanence in an immanent manner, not to make a new object out of it. And from here we get non- (philosophy) and its refusal of the Platonic chorismos , symbol of all abstraction, and thus all transcendental appearance. There are no illusions. The message will leave a heritage in tattered pieces and interpretations. But it was difficult not to dispute the differend to its core. There will be complete confusion of the multiple, possible, and necessary effectuations of non-philosophy with its interpretations. The non-philosophical or human freedom of philosophical effectuation and the philosophical freedom of interpretation. Effectuations demand non-philosophy to return to zero from the point of view of its philosophical material and thus also but within these limits the formulation of its axioms , but in no way providing from the outset divergent interpretations of the aforementioned axioms. They are divergent because they do not take into account the material from which these axioms are derived within non-philosophy, and because they do not see themselves as symptoms of another vision of the World. The utterances of non-philosophy are not mathematical theorems and pure axioms, they merely have a mathematical aspect . They are, by their extraction or origin, mathematical and transcendental. And by their determined function in-Real, within non-philosophy, they are identically in-the-last-Humaneity entities which have an aspect of an axiom and an aspect of interpretation (or an oracular aspect as we say) that attempts (sometimes it is ourselves who provide the occasion) to isolate and transform, in complete freedom of interpretation. There will be an opportunity to complain about the complex character of the language of non-philosophy, an idiom saturated with classical references, sophisticated in a contemporary way. Its freedom of decision up against the whole of philosophy demands these effects of “complication” and “privatization,” as the saying goes. But it also demands fighting against the drift [ dérive ] of the pedagogical-all and the mediatic-all that leads philosophy into the shallow depths of opinion, which is the site of its impossible death. The noble idealism of “pop-philosophy” has been consumed into a “philo-reality;” against this we propose philo-fiction. Parricide, which is at the bottom of these interpretations and which we can judge as being quite fertile, although it has informed tradition, only takes place once or within one lone meaning. In regards to Parmenides, it was possible; Plato introduced the Other as non-being and language, bringing into existence the philosophical system of the World, but is it possible to repeat it again with the same fecundity in regards to non-philosophy, this time in introducing (non) religion or (non) art, still mixing them without taking into account this mixture, alternatively as a philosophical or religious resentment? If philosophy begins via a crime, it is no doubt obliged to continue down similar pathways, to the effect that the crimes of philosophy, once the founding crime has been committed, are a reaction of self-defense. It is undoubtedly from this that we get Marx’s declaration that history begins by tragedy and repeats itself or ends in farce. The preservation of rigor and fecundity is, in every respect, a psychologically difficult task within a theory such as non-philosophy. Having posited an essential objective of liberation in regards to philosophy and its services, one has often understood this objective as an authorization of providing particular interpretations of its axioms and ends up obliterating their scope. This ends up confusing, on one hand, two kinds of freedoms in regards to non-philosophy, the freedom of its interpretations and the freedom of its effectuations. On the other hand, any defense of “principles” against precipitated interpretations is immediately taxed with a will to orthodoxy, a prohibitive objection when we are dealing with, as is the case here, a heretical theory of thought. Nevertheless, it is time to stop confusing heresy as the cause of thought with an ideology of heresies, which is certainly not at all our object, but rather a form of normalization. As for the “disciplinary” aspect, which is not the only aspect, it demands something other than philosophical “answers to objections,” a precision in the definition and use of its procedures in the formation of utterances, since non-philosophy is neither a supplementary doctrine interior to philosophy nor a vision of the world but one whose priority is a “vision of Man,” or rather Man as “vision” that implies a theory and a practice of philosophy. In the end, struggle is only one aspect of non-philosophy, not its whole or telos, struggle coming only from its materiality. In particular, if the discipline of non-philosophy is inseparable from struggle, it is not a question of reducing the monomaniacal obsession of its “marching orders.” This would reduce its complexity and kill its indivisibility, deploying it in a “long march” and a form of Maoization whose philosophical presuppositions no longer have any pertinence here, a case of the One and the Two, which are now cloned and no longer tied together. More generally, non-philosophy is a complex thought composed of a multitude of aspects, which is to say, unilateral interpretations, of a philosophical origin but reduced by their determination in-the-last-instance . The “liberalism” of non-philosophy is merely one of the aspects of which it is capable, not an essence. Similarly, it is only capable of having a “Maoist” aspect. Let us generalize. The weakness of non-philosophy is due to a specific cause, the determination-in-the-last-Humaneity of a subject for the World. Everything that has a right to the philosophical city can be said about it in turn and in a retaliatory mode since Man contributes nothing of himself that Man takes from the World. We can consider non-philosophy as being pretentious, absurd, idealistic, empty, materialistic, formalistic, contradictory, modern, post-modern, Zen, Buddhist, Marxist; it endures or tolerates, perhaps “appeals” to, or at least renders possible, sarcasms, ironies, and insults without even talking about the misunderstandings, partly for the same reason as psychoanalysis. All of this goes beyond simple “deviations.” They are its aspects, which is to say, its “unilateral” philosophical interpretations in both senses of the word, being either sufficient coming from the mouth of philosophers, or reduced to their absolute dimension of sufficiency and totality in the mouths of non-philosophers, and both times due to the weakness and strength of Man-in-person as their determination only in-the-last-instance. The non-philosopher is certainly not a Saint Paul fantasizing about a new Church. The non-philosopher is either a (Saint) Sebastian whose flesh is pierced with as many arrows as there are Churches, or a Christ persecuted by a Saint Paul. What is engaged in here is the practice of retaliation. A negative rule of the non-philosophical ethics of outlawed discussion by way of argumentation (the sufficient is you, the orthodox one is always you, you are the fashionable one, and when a master you are someone else) that is founded on the confusion of effectuations of non-philosophy and of its overall interpretations. Retaliation is the law but as with any too-human law, it must acquire a dimension that displaces it, or rather emplaces it and takes away its authority but not all of its effectiveness. If the non-philosopher is only authorized by himself, which is to say by philosophy but limited by the Real-of-the-last-instance, its critique of other non-philosophers can merely be retaliatory under the same conditions, only by the Real limited in-the last-instance. THE TREE OF PHILOSOPHICAL SAINTLINESS The thematic horizon or material of these debates is in the relationships between philosophy, religion as gnosis, and non-philosophy. It is inevitable, regarding non-philosophers in general (whether they are non-philosophers by name or simply its neighbors) that we often end up evoking Marx’s Holy Family and imagining, arranged on the neighboring branches of the tree of philosophy and annexed, sometimes abusively, to non-philosophy, authors who would quite evidently and quite rightly refuse this label. So it is that we find, for example, a Saint Michel, a Saint Alain, a Saint Gilles 1 without even mentioning the youngest who aspire as well to the freedom of “saintliness” and who make their muted voices heard here. If there is a Holy Family of non-philosophers, it extends completely beyond these three, provided that the sectarian spirit can save us. This book is organized in the following manner: To begin, in order to recall the essential part of the problematic, we have organized a Summary of Non-Philosophy , a vade-mecum of notions and basic problems, in a classical style. Secondly, there is Clarifications On the Three Axioms of Non-Philosophy , designed to posit their proper use as much as to elucidate their meaning. Thirdly, an analysis of Philosophizability and Practicity , both being extreme constituents of philosophical material or the contents of the third axiom. Fourthly, the heart of this work: Let us Make a Tabula Rasa of the Future or of Utopia as Method . Fifthly, we have a theoretical outline of a non-institutional utopia, The International Organization of Non-Philosophy, L’Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale, (ONPHI) already created in practice but under the conditions of possibility and functioning from which here we put into question “de jure,” thus not without a perplexity concerning “facts,” in any case, without the capability of “getting to the bottom of things.” Sixthly, an essay characterizing The Right and the Left of Non-Philosophy , a brief topology of several philosophizing and normalizing positions of proponents or tenants of this problematic. Seventhly, Rebel in the Soul: A Theory of Future Struggle , a systematic discussion starting from a confrontation of non-philosophical gnosis and non-religious gnosis to the extent that they pose, posed or perhaps still will pose themselves as rivals to non-philosophy in a mixture of fidelity and infidelity. Despite the fact that it can also be read as putting non-philosophy into perspective: it pits against a standard Platonism two contemporary appropriations of Gnosticism. On the basis of the paradigm of Man who never ceases to come as the Future-in-person, each one of these moments strives to reestablish not the “true” non-philosophy and its orthodoxy, but the minimal conditions to respect in order to allow for its maximum fecundity. And in order to bring about one of the last possibilities of its development, making explicit Humaneity as a utopia-for-the-World. In introducing these considerations in the form of a “testament” and “ultimatum,” we want to indicate two things: First, that this is the last time we will intervene in order to caution non-philosophers against the temptation of returning and looking backwards towards philosophy. Only a disillusioned nostalgia for the former World and its traditions barely remain permissible to us.… Secondly, that non-philosophy is also a sort of ultimatum for considering one’s life and transforming one’s thought from the perspective of a uni-version rather than a conversion. Man as future is this ultimatum in action, not an impatient self-proclaimed genius, and philosophy is his testament. It is obviously the ultimatum that determines this testament as “old” with a view towards a life that is, itself, non-testamentary. In and of itself, the “old” can never bear a veritable eschaton. Thus, this book intersects according to the logic of this paradigm, under the sign of the ultimate or “last” as future, philosophy as testament and cautionary note for maintaining the non-philosophical oeuvre as “future” or “utopian.” We will see that between these two dimensions it cradles a theory of struggle. In the end, this book envisions non-philosophers in multiple ways. It inevitably sees them as subjects of knowledge, most often academics insofar as life in the world demands, but above all as close relatives of three great human types. The analyst and political militant are quite obvious, for non-philosophy is close to psychoanalysis and Marxism insofar as it transforms the subject in transforming philosophy. Here again, one must have a sense not of certain nuances but of aspects (of the interpretations, albeit unilateralized) and not in order to construct a simple proletarization or militarization of thought as theory. To be rigorous, rather than authoritarian or spiteful, is its task. And lastly, non-philosophy is a close relative of the spiritual but definitely not the spiritualist. Those who are spiritual are not at all spiritualists, for the spiritual oscillate between fury and tranquil rage, they are great destroyers of the forces of Philosophy and the State, which are united under the name of Conformism. They haunt the margins of philosophy, gnosis, mysticism, science fiction and even religions. Spiritual types are not only abstract mystics and quietists; they are heretics for the World. The task is to bring their heresy to the capacity of utopia, and their utopia to the capacity of the paradigm. NOTES We will recognize allusions, and sometimes references, to closely related or distant themes, but which are related, in the work of Michel Henry, Alain Badiou and via the representative of “non-religious” gnosis of a Platonic origin, in Gilles Grelet. It goes without saying that these discussions are current and local, neither concerning the ensemble of doctrines nor prejudging the eventual evolution of certain amongst them. This concerns defining certain proximities with non-philosophy (rather than adversaries which in some sense they are) and typological and emblematic differends (rather than conflicts with a certain author). (shrink)

This article explores the significance of Hegel’s aesthetic lectures for Dewey’s approach to the arts. Although over the last two decades some brilliant studies have been published on the “permanent deposit” of Hegel in Dewey’s mature thought, the aesthetic dimension of Dewey’s engagement with Hegel’s heritage has not yet been investigated. This inquiry will be developed on a theoretical level as well as on the basis of a recent discovery: in Dewey’s Correspondence traces have been found of a lecture (...) on Hegel’s Aesthetics delivered in 1891 within a summer school run by a scholar close to the so-called St. Louis Hegelians. Dewey’s deep and long-standing acquaintance with Hegel’s Aesthetics supports the claim that in his mature book, Art as Experience, he originally appropriated some Hegelian insights. First, Dewey shared Hegel’s strong anti-dualistic and anti-autonomistic conception of the arts, resisting post-Kantian sirens that favored instead an interpretation of art as a separate realm from ordinary reality. Second, they basically converged on an idea of the arts as inherently social activities as well as crucial contributions to the shaping of cultures and civilizations, based on the proximity of the arts to the sensitive nature of man. Third, this article argues that an original re-consideration of Hegel’s thesis of the so-called “end of art” played a crucial role in the formulation of Dewey’s criticism of the arts and of the role of aesthetic experience in contemporary society. The author suggests that we read Dewey’s criticism of the removal of fine art “from the scope of the common or community life” in light of Hegel’s insight that the experience of the arts as something with which believers or citizens can immediately identify belongs to an irretrievable past. (shrink)

Traditionally, religious doctrines and practices have been divided into two categories. Those that purport to be justified by natural reason alone are said to be part of natural religion, while those which purport to be justified only by appeal to supernatural revelation are said to be part of revealed religion. One of the central aims of Berkeley's philosophy is to understand and defend both the doctrines and the practices of both natural and revealed (Christian) religion. This chapter will provide a (...) survey of this aspect of Berkeley's thought. (shrink)

MARINA PAOLA BANCHETTI-ROBINO is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Florida Atlantic University. Her areas of research include phenomenology, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and zoosemiotics. Her publications have appeared in such journals as Synthese, Husserl Studies, Idealistic Studies, Philosophy East and West, and The Review of Metaphysics. She has also contributed essays to The Role of Pragmatics in Contemporary Philosophy (1997), Feminist Phenomenology (2000), and Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology on the Perennial (...) Issue of Microcosm and Macrocosm (2006). She co-edited Philosophies of the Environment and Technology (1999) and is currently working on a book-length project entitled The Birth of Science Out of the Spirit of Myth: A Historico-Phenomenological Re-Examination of the Crisis of the European Sciences. BERNARD BOXILL was born in Saint Lucia, West Indies where he received his primary and secondary education. He studied philosophy at the University of New Brunswick, Canada and at the University of California, Los Angeles where he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy in 1971. He has published numerous articles, a book, Blacks and Social Justice (1992), and is professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ED BRANDON was born and educated in England, studying philosophy and linguistics at The University of York, England, and later philosophy at The University of Oxford with the late John Mackie. After teaching in Sierra Leone and briefly in England, he went to teach philosophy of education at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica in 1978. From 1992 he has been attached to a policy unit of the Vice-Chancellery, based at the Cave Hill campus in Barbados, where he has been assisting since 2000 with a new major in philosophy. His academic work can be accessed from http://cavehill.uwi.edu/bnccde/epb/personalpage.html CAROLYN CUSICK is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She is a founding member of the Phenomenology Roundtable. Her research focuses on feminist epistemology, Africana philosophy, and phenomenology. LEWIS GORDON is President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is Laura H. Carnell Professor, the most distinguished chair, at Temple University, where he holds appointments in philosophy, religion, and Judaic studies and directs the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies. He is also Ongoing Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning Her Majesty's Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Paradigm, 2006), An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and co-editor of A Companion to African-American Studies (Blackwell, 2006) and Not Only the Master's Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice (Paradigm, 2005). CLEVIS HEADLEY is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, director of the Ethnic Studies Certificate Program, as well as director of the Master's in Liberal Studies. Professionally, he serves as the Vice-President and Treasurer of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Professor Headley has published widely in the areas of Critical Race Theory and Africana philosophy. He has also published in Analytic philosophy, focusing specifically on Gottlob Frege. PAGET HENRY is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, Peripheral Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Antigua, and the co-editor of C. L. R. James' Caribbean. Professor Henry also serves as the editor of the C. L. R. James Journal, and has published numerous articles on the political economy of the Caribbean as well as on African, African-American, and Afro-Caribbean philosophy. ESIABA IROBI is Associate Professor of International Theatre/Performance Studies at Ohio University, Athens. His groundbreaking book: A Theatre for Cannibals: Resisting Globalization on the Continent and Diaspora since 1441 will be published by Palgrave Macmillan, London, in 2007. He has been invited to be an External Resident Fellow at the prestigious Dartmouth College Humanities Institute for the 2007-2008 academic year. CHIKE JEFFERS is a graduate student in the Ph.D. program of the Philosophy Department at Northwestern University. His interests are in Africana philosophy, social and political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of religion and aesthetics. He is originally from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. CATHERINE JOHN is Associate Professor of African Diaspora Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her book Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing was co-published by Duke University Press and UWI Press in 2003. She has published several articles on Caribbean literature and culture and her current book project is entitled The Just Society and the Diasporic Imagination. She spends her summer working in Woodside, St. Mary, Jamaica helping with a summer school for children and participating in the community's emancipation celebration. KENNETH KNIES is a doctoral student in philosophy at Stony Brook University. His areas of focus are phenomenology and ancient philosophy. He is also a contributing editor for Political Affairs magazine. EDIZON LEN is a photographer and coordinator of the Fondo Documental Afro-Andino at the Universidad Andina Simòn Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador. In 2006, he was curator of the photo exhibit "The Color of the Diaspora" presented at the Cultural Center of the Catholic University of Ecuador and the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He is currently completing his doctorate at the Universidad Andina Simòn Bolivar with a focus on Maroon thought. REKHA MENON is Associate Professor of Art History at State University of New York, Buffalo State. She is the author of Seductive Aesthetics of Post Colonialism (forthcoming). Her area of research focuses on current philosophical investigations in colonial and neocolonial aspects of Indian art, artistic/cultural practices and philosophies and their relationship to Western arts and philosophies. Her manuscripts under review are: Ashamed of Our Nakedness, Is There Ever a Naked Body? Ambivalence in Contemporary Indian Expressive Aesthetics and Insatiable Desire. MICHAEL R. MICHAU is a Ph.D. candidate in the Philosophy and Literature Program at Purdue University, and during the 2006-2007 school year, a lecturer in the Department of Comparative Studies and Department of Philosophy at Ohio State University. He is the co-founder and co-secretary of the North American Levinas Society. CHARLES W. MILLS is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He works in the general area of oppositional political theory, and is the author of numerous articles and three books: The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997), Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell University Press, 1998), and From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). MABOGO P. MORE is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He has published articles on African philosophy and social and political philosophy in a number of academic journals, such as South African Journal of Philosophy, Dialogue and Universalism, Alternation, Theoria, and African Journal of Political Science. MARILYN NISSIM-SABAT, Ph.D., M.S.W. is Professor Emerita and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Lewis University. Dr. Nissim-Sabat is also a psychotherapist in private practice. She is the author of numerous book chapters and papers in the fields of philosophy (Husserlian phenomenology), psychoanalysis, feminism, and critical race theory. Citations of her works can be found on her website: marilynnissim-sabat.com. FREDERICK OCHIENG'-ODHIAMBO is a Senior Lecturer of Philosophy and Coordinator of the discipline at The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. His major research areas are African philosophy and social philosophy. He has published several articles on philosophic sagacity. IVAN PETRELLA is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. He is author of The Future of Liberation Theology: An Argument and Manifesto (SCM Press, 2006) and editor of Latin American Liberation Theology: The Next Generation (Orbis Books, 2005) as well as co-editor of the series Reclaiming Liberation Theology (SCM Press) RICHARD PITHOUSE is a research fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. He is editor of Asinamali: University Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Africa World Press, 2006). SATHYA RAO is Assistant Professor in French translation at the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, Canada. His research fields include: theory of translation, continental philosophy, postcolonial studies, discourses on Africa, and Francophone cinema and literature. He has published articles in various peer-reviewed journals and written chapters in several collective books such as: De l'Ecrit Africain a l'Oral le Phenomene Graphique Africain, Simon Battestini (Ed.) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006) and Thèorie-rèbellion. Un Ultimatum, Gilles Grelet (Ed.) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2005). He has a co-edited a book on Francophone African cinema L'Afrique fait son cinema (Montreal: Memoires d'encrier, forthcoming). Sathya Rao is vice-president of the International Non-Philosophical Organisation (INPhO), member of the Canadian Association of Translatology (CATS), coordinator of the research team Poexil, and Secretary of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is co-founder of an online journal Alternative Francophone. CATHERINE WALSH is Professor and Director of the doctoral program in Latin American Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador. Her research interests include the geopolitics of knowledge, interculturality and concerns related to the Afro-Andean Diaspora and the production of decolonial thought. Among her recent publications are Pensamiento crìtico y matriz colonial (Quito: Abya Yala, 2005), "Interculturality and the Coloniality of Power. An 'Other' Thinking and Positioning from the Colonial Difference," in Coloniality of Power, Transmodernity, and Border Thinking, R. Grosfoguel, J.D. Saldivar, and N. Maldonado-Torres (Eds.) (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming) and "Shifting the Geopolitics of Critical Knowledge: Decolonial Thought and Cultural Studies 'Others' in the Andes," Cultural Studies (forthcoming). KRISTIN WATERS has published widely in the areas of race and gender. Her anthology Enlightened Conversations: Women and Men Political Theorists (Blackwell, 2000) challenges political theorists to be more inclusive of race and gender in their research and teaching. Her book Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, co-edited with Carol Conaway (University of Vermont Press, forthcoming), addresses the varied intellectual traditions of black women's thought that spans more than two hundred years in North America. She is currently Professor of Philosophy at Worcester State College and Visiting Research Associate at Brandeis University. (shrink)

Jewish German philosopher Ernst Cassirer was a leading proponent of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. The essays in this volume provide a window into Cassirer’s discovery of the symbolic nature of human existence—that our entire emotional and intellectual life is configured and formed through the originary expressive power of word and image, that it is in and through the symbolic cultural systems of language, art, myth, religion, science, and technology that human life realizes itself and attains not only its (...) form, its visibility, but also its reality. Thought and being are set in opposition and united in genuine correspondence by the symbolic strife between them that Cassirer calls _Auseinandersetzung,_ which determines the ethical relationship of the self to the other. (shrink)

Respondeat superior is a legal doctrine conferring liability from one party onto another because the latter stands in some relationship of authority over the former. Though originally a doctrine of tort law, for the past century it has been used within the criminal law, especially to the end of securing criminal liability for corporations. Here, I argue that on at least one prominent conception of criminal responsibility, we are not justified in using this doctrine in this way. Firms are not (...) answerable for the crimes committed by their employees, because firms cannot answer as to why the crime was committed; they lack the authority to offer the employee’s reasons for action. Though this rules out respondeat superior as a general principle, I show contexts in which vicarious liability is still appropriate in the criminal law, and I respond to a number of other concerns raised by this picture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kenneth Burke, John Dewey, and the Pursuit of the PublicPaul StobIn Deliberation Day, Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin argue for the creation of a national holiday, "Deliberation Day," in which citizens come together over a two-day period in their local schools and community centers to deliberate over the merits of presidential candidates and their platforms (Ackerman and Fishkin 2004). While Ackerman and Fishkin propose that the government pay (...) each citizen a $150 stipend for voluntary participation, the purpose is not so much to monetarily to reward citizens for "showing up" as it is to foster an enriched civic culture that would send shockwaves through America's political infrastructure: "If Deliberation Day succeeded, everything else would change: the candidates, the media, the activists, the interest groups, the spin doctors, the advertisers, the pollsters, the fund raisers, the lobbyists, the political parties. All would have no choice but to adapt to a more attentive and informed public" (3). The task of Deliberation Day would be to create a new social context in which citizens could become enlightened through public participation. As the authors conclude the book, "We can, through an act of political imagination, create new institutions for redeeming the ancient promise of democratic citizenship. Ordinary men and women need not be the hapless playthings of the powerful. They can and must find new ways to hold their leaders to account, and redeem their dignity as human beings by responsibly shaping their collective destiny" (219).Ackerman and Fishkin's proposal is indeed filled with political imagination. I bring their proposal to light not to critique the possibilities and limitations of Deliberation Day, but to understand the way in which the authors understand "the public." At the bottom, what the polity needs, Ackerman and Fishkin believe, is a public space dedicated to the reinvigoration [End Page 226] of political culture. It is not that the citizenry is incapable of hammering out intelligent political solutions, but that it needs access to social contexts that facilitate deliberation and the emergence of a common good. To foster a culture of political intelligence, the public needs only the chance to enter the forums that will facilitate thorough, cooperative political decision-making.Ackerman and Fishkin are not alone in calling for access to or creation of these types of forums. Habermas's bourgeois public sphere—a public space in which citizens could come together and rationally debate the activities of the state—essentially represents the evolution of a context, a social space, a public arena (Habermas 1989). The bourgeois public sphere is meant to be egalitarian, providing citizens a forum in which to debate openly and foster a common political consciousness.1 But this sphere has proved problematic for a number of scholars. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge (1993), for example, propose a proletarian public sphere to counter capitalism's socioeconomic domination over public resources. Joan Landes (1988) argues that the bourgeois public sphere entails male domination in public life, to the exclusion of women. Nancy Fraser (1992) builds on the feminist critique by adopting the term "counterpublics," collectives of citizens—women, peasants, the working class, and other groups demarcated by issues of race, gender, and ethnicity—that arise in reaction to the dominant public sphere.2In the introduction to Counterpublics and the State (2001), Robert Asen and Daniel Brouwer argue that critiques of the bourgeois public sphere specifically and public sphere theory generally amount to three "reconfigurations" in the way in which scholars think of the public. First, scholars have come to recognize the existence and interaction of multiple public spheres. Second, they have come to acknowledge permeable boundaries of access to the multiple public spheres. Third, scholars have come to recognize the dynamic role of the state in shaping public discourse. One considerable result of these three reconfigurations is an increasing recognition of the political divisions that permeate society (Asen and Brouwer 2001, 17-25).If Asen and Brouwer are right, and I think they are, these three reconfigurations represent the general thrust of contemporary public sphere scholarship, including as it is understood among communication scholars.3 And however diverse such scholarship may be, a few common themes seem to recur across... (shrink)