In this wide-ranging conversation, Michael Hardt reflects on recent transformations within Empire. Several unique themes emerge concerning power and pedagogy as they intersect with subjectivity and global crisis. Drawing on the common in conjunction with the tradition of love in education uncovers a different path that attends to today’s real political, ecological, and social needs. Finally, a focus on collectivity points to a possible strategy—collective intellectuality—for educators to revise traditional notions of leadership to encourage more ethical, democratic, and sustainable futures. (...) Yet, what this looks like in practice remains for us to imagine. (shrink)

Michel Foucault was one of the 20th century’s great practitioners of study. Time in the archives and library, teaching, reading, thinking, and writing were all integrated aspects of his tireless la...

In this volume, critical scholars and educational activists explore the intricate dynamics between the enclosure of global commons and radical visions of a common social future that breaks through the logics of privatization, ecological degradation, and dehumanizing social hierarchies in education. In its institutional and informal configurations alike, education has been identified as perhaps the key stake in this struggle. Insisting on the urgency of an education that breaks free of the bonds of enclosure, the essays included in this volume (...) weave together bright threads of radical thought into a vivid tapestry illustrating a critical framework for enacting a global educational commons. (shrink)

This essay explores aesthetics, affect, and educational politics through the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière. It contextualizes and contrasts the theoretical valences of their ethical and democratic projects through their shared critique of Kant. It then puts Rancière's notion of dissensus to work by exploring it in relation to a social movement and hunger strike organized for educational justice in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood. This serves as a context for understanding how educational provisions are linked to the aesthetic (...) distribution of perception within the neoliberal city. It also serves as a powerful example of how these orders of perception are resisted and subverted at the local level by aesthetic and affective means. Through the Little Village hunger strike the essay argues that while Rancière allows us to recognize the aesthetic dimensions of the political, he falls short in addressing tactical and/or affective considerations. The essay concludes by seeking to extend the critical efficacy of Rancière's dissensus through a rendering of tactical affect within Deleuzian metaphysics. (shrink)

As it emerged in the late twentieth century, Empire promised a new era of global cooperation and stability through a seamless integration of late capitalism and neoliberal technocracy. Premised as an end to history itself, all that was left to accomplish was to tinker at the margins, stimulate corporate enterprise, embrace financialization and technological innovation, and encourage liberal rights and inclusion. As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the narrative fictions sustaining Empire have broadly collapsed at the (...) level of symbolic identification and belief. Empire has entered into a period of global emergency and mutation. Engaging with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s work, this paper considers what might emerge when we read education into the circuitry of Empire’s decay. First, we locate Empire within foundational tensions in modernity, using Kantian philosophy and colonialism as examples, to foreground the idea of education as immanent to historical processes of creativity, resistance, and innovation. Second, we highlight dead-end responses, from space colonization to neo-fascism, as representations of how modes of education circulate to stabilize and contain Empire’s crises, specifically in relation to capitalism, nationalism, and identity. Lastly, the paper develops a political ontology of education after Empire. (shrink)

Hardt and Negri’s Empire series has inspired twenty years of debate and experimentation across the social sciences and humanities in fields as divergent as international re...

The concept of biopolitics was first outlined by Michel Foucault (2003, 2007, 2009) in his lectures at the Collège de France in the late 1970s in order to name and analyze emergent logics of power...

Michael A. PetersBeijing Normal University, Beijing, PR China;There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds– Gregory Bateson (1972, p. 492)While there are classical anteced...

Sometime, at your leisure—if you want to know what philosophy is—go into a large bookstore and browse. Check a variety of books in psychology, anthropology, physics, chemistry, archeology, astronomy, and other nonfiction fields. Look at the last chapter in each book. In a surprising number of cases, you will find that the author has chosen to round out his work with a final summation of what the book is all about. That is, having written a whole book on a (...) specialized subject in which he is probably an authority, he finds that he also has ideas about the larger meaning of the facts that he has written about. The final chapter may be called “Conclusions,” “Epilogue,” “Postscript,” “My Personal View,” “Implications,” “Comments," ,“ “Speculations,” or (as in one case) “So What?” But in every instance, the author is trying to elucidate the larger implications of his subject matter and to clarify how he thinks it relates to other fields or to life. He has an urge to tell us the meaning of all his facts taken together. He wants to share with us the philosophic implications of what he has written. When he does this, the author has moved beyond the role of a field specialist. He is a philosopher. (shrink)

This volume is a collective exploration of major themes in the work of Crispin Wright, one of today's leading philosophers. These newly commissioned papers are divided into four sections, preceded by a substantial Introduction, which places them in the context of the development of Wright's ideas. The distinguished contributors address issues such as the rule-following problem, knowledge of our meanings and minds, truth, realism, anti-realism and relativism, as well as the nature of perceptual justification, the cogency of arguments such as (...) G. E. Moore's celebrated proof of an external world, and skepticism about the material world. Some papers explore the relationship of Wright's ideas with those of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose influence has always been a prominent aspect of Wright's philosophy. The essays collectively testify to the enormous interest and relevance of Wright's seminal contributions for present-day debates in areas as diverse as the philosophy of language and mind, metaphysics, and epistemology, and significantly advance research in these areas. The volume also contains Wright's substantial responses to his critics, which offer the most up-to-date versions of his ideas and a vigorous defense of his philosophy. (shrink)

This paper identifies several ways in which personality informs philosophical belief. In the present study, individuals holding doctorates in philosophy were given a personality inventory and asked to respond to nine philosophical questions, seven of which produced significant sample sizes. Personality predicted response to three of these seven questions, suggesting that philosophers' beliefs are determined in part by their personalities. This is taken as evidence that philosophy is intrinsically subjective, a claim which is herein developed more completely and (...) defended against several objections. (shrink)

The Book Focuses On Meaning And Linguistic Representations , And Links Them To Propose A Representational Theory Of Meaning. It Shows That Meaning As Truth-Conditions And As Justification-Conditions Are Equally Rooted In The Semantic Space Of Language-Use.

Thomas Kuhn with his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most influential and widely read philosophers of the 20th century. Kuhn's claim that the meanings of scientific terms change is often taken to be refuted by recent advances in the philosophy of language. Meaning Changes challenges this interpretation showing that meaning change in Kuhn has multiple aspects: Semantic, mental and historical. The author describes the traditional view with clarity, but demonstrates that Kuhn's idea stems from (...) his studies of history. The book explains how Kuhn's philosophy is supported by cognitive science and why meaning change is relevant to the history of ideas. It argues that Kuhn's case against Hilary Putnam's causal theory of reference constitutes serious criticism of the account. The book concludes by analysing Kuhn's 'historical perspective' in the coherentist epistemological framework, which regards the question of scientific progress ultimately as empirical. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of the history and philosophy of science. It also is valuable reading to anybody interested in philosophy or scientific change. (shrink)

Traditional views concerning musical meaning, in the field of philosophy, quite often oscillate around the discussion of whether music can transfer meaning (and if so if it happens by a means similar to language). Philosophers have provided a wide range of views – according to some, music has no meaning whatsoever, or if there is any meaning involved, it is only of a formal/structural significance. According to the opposing views, music can contain meaning similarly to language and what is (...) more, sometimes it can be even richer than language, as in music we are – arguably – able to encode “emotional meanings”. In recent years, several approaches – also speculative – to the old philosophical question have been proposed by evolutionary psychologists, one of the most controversial views being that of Stephen Pinker’s famous metaphor for music as “auditory cheesecake”. This anti-adaptationist view has been challenged f. ex. by Geoffrey Miller or Ian Cross. In this chapter, I enlist some main philosophical views on the titular problem and investigate some evolutionary-paradigm-based propositions for its solution, to examine whether – both from explanatory and methodological standpoints – the philosophy of music could gain something from recent developments in evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

Meaning, Understanding, and Practice is a selection of the most notable essays of leading contemporary philosopher Barry Stroud on a set of topics central to analytic philosophy. In this collection, Stroud offers penetrating studies of meaning, understanding, necessity, and the intentionality of thought. Throughout he asks how much can be expected from a philosophical account of one's understanding of the meaning of something, and questions whether such an account can succeed without implying that the person understands many other things (...) as well. Most of the essays work with ideas derived from Wittgenstein, and five of the essays focus specifically on Wittgenstein's philosophy. Stroud's helpful introduction draws out the recurring themes he pursues and explains how his ideas and aims have developed over the years. (shrink)

'The unconsidered life is not worth living' - Socrates. Thinking about life, what it means and what it holds in store does not have to be a despondent experience, but rather can be enlightening and uplifting. A life truly worth living is one that is informed and considered so a degree of philosophical insight into the inevitabilities of the human condition is inherently important and such an approach will help us to deal with real personal dilemmas. This book is an (...) accessible, lively and thought-provoking series of linked commentaries, based on A. C. Grayling's 'The Last Word' column in the Guardian. Its aim is not to persuade readers to accept one particular philosophical point of view or theory, but to help us consider the wonderful range of insights which can be drawn from an immeasurably rich history of philosophical thought. Concepts covered include courage, love, betrayal, ambition, cruelty, wisdom, passion, beauty and death. This will be a wonderfully stimulating read and act as an invaluable guide as to what is truly important in living life, whether facing success, failure, justice, wrong, love, loss or any of the other profound experience life throws out. (shrink)

Hermeneutics has had a pervasive influence on contemporary philosophy, social and cultural theory, literary criticism, and aesthetics. In this book one of Europe's foremost contemporary philosophers provides hermeneutics with a fresh relevance and a substantive account of its philosophical meaning for science, ethics, religion, and art. Vattimo argues for a reading of hermeneutics that radicalises it according to what the author calls its 'nihilistic vocation', a term referring to the interpretive character of truth and taken from Nietzsche's statement that (...) there are, in the modern period, no facts, only interpretations. Modernity, for Vattimo, is conceived as the advent of nihilism, and the central question of the book is to ask what it means to take this nihilistic vocation seriously. This involves not simply accepting the current status of hermeneutics, but evaluating why it appears when, and where, it does. (shrink)

Review of: The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought: The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, Morality, and Art, Mark Johnson (2018)Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 304 pp.,ISBN 978-0-22653-894-5, p/bk, USD 30.

Herman Parret and Jacques Bouveresse Introduction. As Rosenberg remarks, " Understanding ... is evidently difficult to understand" (in this volume, p. 29). ...

Meaning and Purpose of Life are perhaps the most thought about, if not talked about, issues on the planet since human beings have walked on earth. This book is another attempt to understand the Meaning and Purpose of Life using ideas of Vedanta in Indian philosophy, and of mainstream economics. Starting from first principles, Dr Agarwal explores the core concept of Brahman in Vedanta, and builds an axiomatic foundation for understanding the meaning and purpose of life using the fundamental (...) ideas of the Prasthana Traya, and in particular of The Bhagavad Gita and The Principal Upanishads. Dr Agarwal adheres to the philosophy of Karma Yoga as his chosen area of interest for the exploration of meaning and purpose, which allows him to seek linkages between the concepts of social welfare in Vedanta and economics. Ideas of lokasamgraha in Indian Philosophy and of externalities in economics provide a clear common ground between the two apparently disparate disciplines. Throughout the book, he emphasizes simple practical approaches for making life more meaningful and happier, while relying fundamentally on the basic ideas of Vedanta. (shrink)

Trans Philosophy: Meaning and Mattering will be the first authoritative collection to establish trans philosophy as a unique field of inquiry. It defines trans philosophy as philosophical work that is accountable to and illuminative of transgender experiences, histories, cultural production, and politics. The book will showcase work from a range of fresh and established voices in this nascent field. It will address a variety of topics (e.g. embodiment, identity, language, law, politics, transphobia), utilize diverse philosophical methods (e.g. (...) analytic, continental, and pluralist; theoretical, experimental, and applied), and attend to significant intersections between trans identity and class, disability, race, and sexuality. Across language and politics, feminism and phenomenology, decolonial theory and disability studies, trans philosophy concerns itself with trans worldmaking in all its excruciating beauty and mundanity. (shrink)

The word “nihilism” today is everywhere. A staple of common speech ever since its coinage by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi in the eighteenth century, is there any other term of philosophical provenance more descriptive of our times? Finding Meaning: Essays on Philosophy, Nihilism, and the Death of God deepens the longstanding and ongoing debate about the problem of nihilism. Drawing upon a wide range of philosophical and theological schools, traditions, and figures, the eleven specially commissioned essays by international scholars enrich (...) the discussion of how to meet the challenge of nihilism. Fundamental problems and topics include the existence of God, the origins and status of morality, the nature and meaning of history, the relation between reason and faith, the status and role of philosophical knowledge, the place of art and religion in society, the future of modernity, the nature of postmodernity, the perils of technology, the specter of transhumanism, and the history of philosophy from Augustine to Kant and Hegel, Nietzsche to Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, and Heidegger to Sartre and Camus. Based on a popular series of online essays published at London artist and philosopher Richard Marshall’s 3:16 AM, Finding Meaning is essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and theology, and for anyone with a genuine interest in making sense of what it means to be human in an age of nihilism. (shrink)

The theory of essential definitions is a fundamental anti‐sceptic element of the Aristotelian‐Avicennian epistemology. In this theory, when we distinguish the genus and the specific differentia of a given essence we thereby acquire a scientific understanding of it. The aim of this article is to analyse systematically the sceptical reasons, arguments and conclusions against real definitions of three major authorities of twelfth‐century Arabic philosophy: Faḫr al‐Dīn al‐Rāzī, Šihāb al‐Dīn al‐Suhrawardī and Abū l‐Barakāt al‐Baġdādī. I focus on showing how their (...) refutation of our capacity to provide essential definitions of things is rooted in their semantic theory: we only know things under certain descriptions which are identical to the meanings of the words that we use to refer to them, yet these descriptions do not capture the essences of things in themselves. The best result one can achieve with Aristotelian‐Avicennian scientific definitions is a “nominal definition”. With this, Rāzī, Suhrawardī and Abū l‐Barakāt will put some serious epistemic limitations on our capacity to attain scientific knowledge of things, at least as Aristotle and Avicenna would have it. (shrink)

Professor Recanati's book is a major new contribution to the philosophy of language. Its point of departure is a refutation of two views central to the work of speech-act theorists such as Austin & Searle: that speech acts are essentially conventional, & that the force of an utterance can be made fully explicit at the level of sentence-meaning & is in principle a matter of linguistic decoding. The author argues that no utterance can be fully understood simply in terms (...) of its linguistic meaning, but that only a contextual inference can provide an adequate framework. In pursuit of this argument, he deals with the major issues of pragmatics & speech-act theory: conversational implicatives & indirect speech acts, the classification of illocutionary forces, the performative/constative distinction, delocutivity, locutionary meaning, non-literal uses of languages, the principle of expressibilty, & the difference between institutional & communicative illocutionary acts. (shrink)

Émile Meyerson (1859–1933) is an epistemologist, in the French meaning of the term: he himself introduced the word in French as a synonymous for “philo- sophy of science” in his major book of 1908 Identity and Reality. First educated as a chemist, Meyerson discovered philosophy while reading Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive. However, he strongly rejected Comte’s positivism: metaphysics, he said, penetrates science and even common sense; men, whether they are scien- tists or not, are interested in finding (...) a cause behind the stream of phenomena. This anti-positivism is justified in so far as Meyerson used the same method and pursued the same goal as Comte: the philosopher must practice an “a posteriori analysis of the products of thought”, so as to determine the laws of human mind. Consequently, Meyerson’s work is not a mere philosophy of science, it is more than an “épistémolo- gie” in the French sense. Its ambition is to reach the intellectual basis of all thought. The philosopher can resort to the resources of metaphysics to reach the psychologi- cal foundations of humanity, when he reflects on the historical products of thought. He establishes the transcendent or metaphysical logic involved in the process of thought. Meyerson’s work consequently deserves the name its author eventually gave to it in his posthumous Essais: a “philosophy of intellect”. But is such a philoso- phy wide enough to embrace the meaning of all the products of human thought? It seems that Meyerson was embarrassed and limited by his very starting point, namely Comte’s system. I argue that scientific or common conceptions may need more than the anti-positivist claim of the preservation of one substance behind phenomena. Truth to tell, men generally tend to identify a large and rich configuration of causes or substances. Only such architectonics can give an idea of what people mean by invoking their “vision of the world”. (shrink)

Quantum theory is one the most important and successful theories of modern physical science. It has been estimated that its principles form the basis for about 30 per cent of the world's manufacturing economy. This is all the more remarkable because quantum theory is a theory that nobody understands. The meaning of Quantum Theory introduces science students to the theory's fundamental conceptual and philosophical problems, and the basis of its non-understandability. It does this with the barest minimum of jargon and (...) very little mathematics in the main text. Readers wishing to delve more deeply into the theory's mathematical subtleties can do so in an extended series of appendices. The book brings the reader up to date with the results of new experimental tests of quantum weirdness and reviews the latest thinking on alternative interpretations, the frontiers of quantum cosmology, quantum gravity and potential application of this weirdness in computing, cryptography and teleportation. (shrink)

What is the meaning of life? It is a question that has intrigued the great philosophers--and has been hilariously lampooned by Monty Python. Indeed, the whole idea strikes many of us as vaguely pompous, a little absurd. Is there one profound and mysterious meaning to life, a single ultimate purpose behind human existence? In What's It All About?, Julian Baggini says no, there is no single meaning. Instead, Baggini argues meaning can be found in a variety of ways, in this (...) life. He succinctly breaks down six answers people commonly suggest when considering what life is all about--helping others, serving humanity, being happy, becoming successful, enjoying each day as if it were your last, and "freeing your mind." By reducing the vague, mysterious question of meaning to a series of more specific (if thoroughly unmysterious) questions about what gives life purpose and value, he shows that the quest for meaning can be personal, empowering, and uplifting. If the meaning of life is not a mystery, if leading meaningful lives is within the power of us all, then we can look around us and see the many ways in which life can have purpose. We can see the value of happiness while accepting it is not everything. We can see the value of success, without interpreting that too narrowly. We can see the value of seizing the day as well as helping others lead meaningful lives. We can recognize the value of love, as perhaps the most powerful motivator of all. Illustrating his argument with the thoughts of many of the great philosophers and examples drawn from everyday life, Baggini convincingly shows that the search for meaning is personal and within the power of each of us to find. (shrink)

This article defends a conception of philosophy popular outside the discipline but unpopular within it: that philosophy is unified by a concern with the meaning of life. First, it argues against exceptionalist theses according to which philosophy is unique among academic disciplines in not being united by a distinctive subject matter. It then presents a positive account, showing that the issue of the meaning of life is uniquely able to reveal unity between the practical and theoretical concerns (...) of philosophy, while meeting a range of desiderata for a typical specification of subject matter. After showing how recent analytic work on “the meaning of life” has conflated the traditional question with issues of social meaningfulness, it offers an explanation of why the traditional question has become marginalised in philosophy. The reasons are not good, however, so it concludes that philosophy should embrace its popular image. (shrink)

In this 1970 introduction to philosophy Mr Taylor concentrates on two central topics - explanation and meaning. He takes the argument far enough to acquaint the reader first-hand with the methods and approach of analytical philosophy, and yet because of the scope of these two topics he is able to introduce many of the traditional philosophical problems in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and logic. By this approach he avoids the dangers both of superficiality and of undue technicality. Philosophers (...) are concerned to analyse and describe certain concepts and modes of argument, not to establish facts or conclusions of any sort that can be tested by formal demonstration or controlled observation; their findings cannot be conveniently categorized or graded into a comprehensive and progressive course of studies. Mr Taylor meets this difficulty with his extended discussions of specific topics and questions which have implications over the whole subject. (shrink)

Preface -- What is this thing called "philosophy" -- The process of coming to know -- Knowing in common sense, science, history, and art -- Positions on the theory of knowledge -- Metaphysics : what philosophy can tell us about reality -- A short introduction to ethics -- Philosophy of religion and the question of God -- Concluding remarks.