In _Necropolitics_ Achille Mbembe—a leader in the new wave of Francophone critical theory—theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world—a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror, as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side, or what he calls its “nocturnal body,” which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. This shift has (...) hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. As a result, war has become the sacrament of our times, in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating all those considered to be enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucault debates on biopolitics, war, and race, as well as Fanon's notion of care as a shared vulnerability, to explore how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might come to pass. These new conceptions would allow us to encounter the Other not as a thing to exclude, but as a person with whom to build a more just world. (shrink)

In _Critique of Black Reason_ eminent critic Achille Mbembe offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness—from the Atlantic slave trade to the present—to critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. Mbembe teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity while mapping the relations among colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital. Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorizes Black (...) reason as the collection of discourses and practices that equated Blackness with the nonhuman in order to uphold forms of oppression. Mbembe powerfully argues that this equation of Blackness with the nonhuman will serve as the template for all new forms of exclusion. With _Critique of Black Reason_, Mbembe offers nothing less than a map of the world as it has been constituted through colonialism and racial thinking while providing the first glimpses of a more just future. (shrink)

We tend to talk about parts in the same way in which we talk about whole objects. Yet a part is not something to be included in an inventory of the world over and above the whole to which it belongs, and a whole is not something to be included in an inventory over and above its own parts. This paper is an attempt to clarify a way of dealing with this tension which may be labeled the Minimalist View: an (...) element in the field of a part‐whole relation is to be included in an inventory of the world if, and only if, it does not overlap any other element that is itself included in the inventory. As it turns out, a clarification of this view involves both a defense of mereological extensionality and an account of the topological distinction between detached and undetached parts. (shrink)

The paper proposes a notion of fairness which overcomes the conflict arising between efficiency and the absence of envy in economies with uncertainty and asymmetrically informed agents. We do it in general economies which include, as particular cases, the main models of differential information economies, providing in this framework a natural competitive equilibrium notion which satisfies the fair criterion. The analysis is conducted allowing the presence of large traders, which may cause the lack of perfect competition.

Standard lore has it that a proper name, or a definite description on its de re reading, is a temporally rigid designator. It picks out the same entity at every time at which it picks out an entity at all. If the entity in question is an enduring continuant then we know what this means, though we are also stuck with a host of metaphysical puzzles concerning endurance itself. If the entity in question is a perdurant then the rigidity claim (...) is trivial, though one is left wondering how it is that different speakers ever manage to pick out one and the same entity when a host of suitable, overlapping candidates are available. But what if the entity in question is neither a continuant nor a perdurant? What if the things we talk about in ordinary language are time‐bound entities that cannot truly be said to persist through time, or stage sequences whose unity resides exclusively in our minds ‐ like the “wave” at the stadium or the characters of a cartoon? In such cases the rigidi‐ ty claim can't be right and a counterpart‐theoretic semantics seems required. Is that bad? I say it isn't. And it had better not be, if that turns out to be the best metaphysical option we have. (shrink)

The so-called ‘argument from vagueness’ is among the most powerful and innovative arguments offered in support of the view that objects are four-dimensional perdurants. The argument is defective – I submit – and in a number of ways that are worth looking into. But each ‘defect’, each gap in the argument, corresponds to a model of change that is independently problematic and that can hardly be built into the common-sense picture of the world. So once all the gaps of the (...) argument are filled in, the three-dimensionalist is left with the burden of a response that cannot rely on a passive plea for common sense. The argument is not a threat to common sense as such; it is a threat to the three-dimensionalist faithfulness to common sense. (shrink)

An overview of contemporary part-whole theories, with reference to both their axiomatic developments and their philosophical underpinnings.

What sort of logic do we get if we adopt a supervaluational semantics for vagueness? As it turns out, the answer depends crucially on how the standard notion of validity as truth preservation is recasted. There are several ways of doing that within a supervaluational framework, the main alternative being between “global” construals (e.g., an argument is valid iff it preserves truth-under-all-precisifications) and “local” construals (an argument is valid iff, under all precisifications, it preserves truth). The former alternative is by (...) far more popular, but I argue in favor of the latter, for (i) it does not suffer from a number of serious objections, and (ii) it makes it possible to restore global validity as a defined notion. (shrink)

Is a whole something more than the sum of its parts? Are there things composed of the same parts? If you divide an object into parts, and divide those parts into smaller parts, will this process ever come to an end? Can something lose parts or gain new ones without ceasing to be the thing it is? Does any multitude of things (including disparate things such as you, this book, and the tail of a cat) compose a whole of some (...) sort? Questions such as these have occupied us for at least as long as philosophy has existed. They define the field that has come to be known as mereology-the study of all relations of part to whole and of part to part within a whole-and have deep and far-reaching ramifications in metaphysics as well as in logic, the foundations of mathematics, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of science, and beyond. In Mereology, A. J. Cotnoir and Achille C. Varzi have compiled decades of advanced research into a comprehensive, up-to-date, and formally rigorous picture. The early chapters cover the more classical aspects of mereology; the rest of the book deals with variants and extensions. Whether you are an established professional philosopher, an interested student, or a newcomer, inside you will find all the tools you need to join this ever-evolving field of inquiry and theorize about all things mereological. (shrink)

I focus on three mereological principles: the Extensionality of Parthood (EP), the Uniqueness of Composition (UC), and the Extensionality of Composition (EC). These principles are not equivalent. Nonetheless, they are closely related (and often equated) as they all reflect the basic nominalistic dictum, No difference without a difference maker. And each one of them—individually or collectively—has been challenged on philosophical grounds. In the first part I argue that such challenges do not quite threaten EP insofar as they are either self-defeating (...) or unsupported. In the second part I argue that they hardly undermine the tenability of EC and UC as well. (shrink)

L’Afrique a participé jusqu’a présent, souvent à titre de laboratoire, au développement de la science occidentale. Les défis rencontrés par la théorie critique aujourd’hui sont l’instrumentalisation de la théorie par les gouvernements, la prolifération de pratiques critiques diverses, notamment écologique, et surtout l’émergence d’un capitalisme de l’image et de l’affect. C’est en relation avec la Chine que l’Afrique peut apporter de nouvelles réponses et relever ces défis.

I argue that Universalism (the thesis that mereological composition is unrestricted) entails Extensionalism (the thesis that sameness of composition is sufficient for identity) as long as the parthood relation is transitive and satisfies the Weak Supplementation principle (to the effect that whenever a thing has a proper part, it has another part disjoint from the first).

Jeffery et al. suggest that three-dimensional environments are not represented according to their volumetric properties, but in a quasi-planar fashion. Here we take into consideration the role of visual experience and the use of technology for spatial learning to better understand the nature of the preference of horizontal over vertical spatial representation.

One logic or many? I say—many. Or rather, I say there is one logic for each way of specifying the class of all possible circumstances, or models, i.e., all ways of interpreting a given language. But because there is no unique way of doing this, I say there is no unique logic except in a relative sense. Indeed, given any two competing logical theories T1 and T2 (in the same language) one could always consider their common core, T, and settle (...) on that theory. So, given any language L, one could settle on the minimal logic T0 corresponding to the common core shared by all competitors. That would be a way of resisting relativism, as long as one is willing to redraw the bounds of logic accordingly. However, such a minimal theory T0 may be empty if the syntax of L contains no special ingredients the interpretation of which is independent of the specification of the relevant L-models. And generally—I argue—this is indeed the case. (shrink)

Some have argued that the vagueness exhibited by geographic names and descriptions such as ‘Albuquerque’, ‘the Outback’, or ‘Mount Everest’ is ultimately ontological: these terms are vague because they refer to vague objects, objects with fuzzy boundaries. I take the opposite stand and hold the view that geographic vagueness is exclusively semantic, or conceptual at large. There is no such thing as a vague mountain. Rather, there are many things where we conceive a mountain to be, each with its precise (...) boundary, and when we say ‘Everest’ we are just being vague as to which thing we are referring to. This paper defends this view against some plausible objections. (shrink)

'Her mouth was like the bloom of a rose, when the rose begins to part the lips of its petals. As soon as I saw, I was done for...All my dreams were of Leucippe.' Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon is the most bizarre and risqué of the five 'Greek novels' of idealized love between boy and girl that survive from the period of the Roman empire. Stretching the capacity of the genre to its limits, Achilles' narrative covers adultery, violence, evisceration, (...) pederasty, virginity-testing, and an improbable happy ending. Ingenious and sophisticated in conception, Leucippe and Clitophon is in execution at once subtle, stylish, moving, brash, tasteless, and obscene. This new translation aims to capture Achilles' writing in all its exuberant variety. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

I argue that the conjunction of perdurantism (the view that objects are temporally extended) and universalism (the thesis that any old class of things has a mereological fusion) gives rise to undesired complications when combined with certain plausible assumptions concerning the semantics of tensed statements.

We tend to talk about (refer to, quantify over) parts in the same way in which we talk about whole objects. Yet a part is not something to be included in an inventory of the world over and above the whole to which it belongs, and a whole is not something to be included in the inventory over and above its constituent parts. This paper is an attempt to clarify a way of dealing with this tension which may be labeled (...) the Minimalist View: An element in the field of a part-whole relation is to be included in an inventory of the world if and only if it does not overlap any distinct element that is itself included in the inventory. (shrink)

Cities are mysteriously attractive. The more we get used to being citizens of the world, the more we feel the need to identify ourselves with a city. Moreover, this need seems in no way distressed by the fact that the urban landscape around us changes continuously: new buildings rise, new restaurants open, new stores, new parks, new infrastructures… Cities seem to vindicate Heraclitus’s dictum: you cannot step twice into the same river; you cannot walk twice through the same city. But, (...) as with the river, we want and need to say that it is the same city we are walking through every day. It is always different, but numerically self-identical. How is that possible? What sort of mysterious thing is a city? The answer, I submit, is that cities aren’t things. They are processes. Like rivers, cities unfold in time just as they extend in space, by having different temporal parts for each time at which they exist. And walking though one part and then again through another is, literally, walking through the same whole. (shrink)

This book is a conceptualization of the literary aesthetic in relation to ethics, in particular, an ethics for a concern for the Self. Bringing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's constructivist thinking into a practical domain, Sabrina Achilles rethinks the ways in which literature is understood and taught. Through an interdisciplinary approach, literature is viewed from the position of a problem without any pre-given frame.

Partendo dal problema della dignità umana e della sua libertà come fondamento del pensiero popperiano, questo saggio approfondisce, attraverso un confronto aperto con alcune significative linee di pensiero, il valore rilevante che la lezione antropoetica di Karl Popper, finalizzata a porre in luce il “carattere speciale” della mente umana, assume nella realtà contemporanea.

David Lewis has argued that impossible worlds are nonsense: if there were such worlds, one would have to distinguish between the truths about their contradictory goings-on and contradictory falsehoods about them; and this--Lewis argues--is preposterous. In this paper I examine a way of resisting this argument by giving up the assumption that ‘in so-and-so world’ is a restricting modifier which passes through the truth-functional connectives The outcome is a sort of subvaluational semantics which makes a contradiction ‘A & ~A’ false (...) even when both ‘A’ and ‘~A’ are true, just as supervaluational semantics makes a tautology ‘A v ~A’ true even when neither ‘A’ nor ‘~A’ are. Connections with discussive logics and complications of the account are discussed, and some general morals are drawn. (shrink)