In a recent remarkable article, Froese (2023) presents his Irruption Theory to explain how motivations can make a behavioral difference in motivated activity. In this opinion article, we review the main tenets of Froese’s theory, and highlight its difficulty in overcoming the randomness challenge it supposedly solves, that is, the issue of how adaptive behavior can arise in the face of material underdetermination. To advance our understanding of motivated behavior in line with Froese’s approach, we recommend that (...) future work should endorse a multilevel pluralistic approach to causation and explanation in which motivations could genuinely play an irreducible role. Additionally, in line with the life-mind continuity thesis, we suggest that the best place to look for the interplay between motivations and nonmotivational physical, biological, and dynamical factors, may be at the level of the continuous feeling of being an embodied, living organism. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to find out whether Gadamer is entitled to hold together his finitist commitment to the heteronomy of art and thought, and his advocacy of an "endless conversation with itself" of humankind. We focus on three texts: Gadamer’s dismis­sal of Carl Schmitt’s outside-in account of the heteronomy implied by the "irrup­tion of reality" in the play Hamlet and, as Archimedean point, Shakespeare’s "excision of reality" according to Stephen Greenblatt, and its inside-out heteronomic consequences. The results: (...) Schmitt’s approach restricts Gadamer’s argument on the "endless dialogue", Gadamer’s rejoinder aggravates his own argumentative fragility, and Greenblatt’s perspectivation discloses a non-sequitur. The inspection of these texts attests that heteronomy per se does not entail any openness to "creative" interpretations, that a universalized logos endiéthetos is a chimera, and that there cannot be any "infinite conversation" which would sustain the Gadamerian interplay of question and answer. (shrink)

"An important contribution to contemporary jurisprudential debate and to legal thought more generally, Just Interpretations is far ahead of currently available work."--Peter Goodrich, author of Oedipus Lex "I was struck repeatedly by the clarity of expression throughout the book. Rosenfeld's description and criticism of the recent work of leading thinkers distinguishes his work within the legal theory genre. Furthermore, his own theory is quite original and provocative."--Aviam Soifer, author of Law and the Company We Keep.

Plus qu’à une théorie de l’engagement esthétique, Berleant invite à une réflexion sur ce que produit l’irruption de l’environnement pour la théorie esthétique classique. Nous l’abordons en trois temps : sa définition de l’environnement, la lecture critique qu’une telle définition permet d’opérer sur l’esthétique de la nature classique, notamment le pittoresque, ainsi que les ajustements qu’il préconise. S’opposeront une expérience comprise de manière dualiste et dont l’attitude relève du désintérêt vis-à-vis d’un objet autonome et une expérience holiste permise par (...) l’engagement d’un sujet animé par un sentiment de continuité. L’expérience esthétique offrirait alors la possibilité de redécouvrir l’environnement comme une part intégrante du déploiement de nos êtres. (shrink)

Jacques Rancière's theory of democracy shares a great deal with Derrida's. Both view democracy as founded on paradox, define it as the irruption of alterity and, most notably, explain the disjuncti...

The figure of today’s threat is the suddenly irrupting, locally self-organizing, systemically self-amplifying threat of large-scale disruption. This form of threat, fed by instability and metastability, is not only indiscriminate, it is also indiscrimin able; it is indistinguishable from the general environment. The figure of the environment shifts: from the harmony of a natural balance to the normality of a generalized crisis environment so encompassing in its endemic threat-form as to connect, across the spectrum, the polar extremes of war and (...) the weather. Michel Foucault characterizes the dominant contemporary regime of power, coincident with the rise of neoliberalism, as ‘environmental’: a governmentality which will act on the environment and systematically modify its variables. Its actions, he emphasizes, are not standardizing since the shift in the figure of the environment has moved it out of reach of normalization. Given the indiscriminateness of the environment’s autonomous activity, environmentality must work through the ‘regulation of effects’ rather than of causes. It must remain operationally ‘open to unknowns’ and catch nonlinear, transversal phenomena before they amplify the stirrings to actual crisis proportions. What systematicity is this? And: does power’s becoming-environmental mean that, politically, we are dealing with natural subjects? Where Foucault’s question ends is where, today, we must begin, in light of how the recomposition of power whose dawning he glimpsed in 1979 has since played out. In the context of Foucault’s theories of power, the question amounts to asking: is this still ‘biopolitics’? (shrink)

“Sentiment” is a term of art, intended to refer to object-directed, irruptive states, that occur in relatively transient bouts involving positive or negative affect, and that typically involve a distinctive motivational profile. Not all the states normally called “emotions” are sentiments in the sense just characterized. And all the terms for sentiments are sometimes used in English to refer to longer lasting attitudes. But this discussion is concerned with boutish affective states, not standing attitudes. That poses some challenges that will (...) be my focus here. Rational sentimentalism is a cousin of fitting attitude theories of value, but other fitting attitude theories appeal to attitudes that are widely assumed to be governable by certain kinds of judgments. The basic challenge is this: are these boutish sentiments the sorts of things that we can and do regulate in the ways that are required for treating ‘shameful’, ‘funny’, ‘disgusting’ and the like as values? In what follows I briefly sketch some necessary conditions on treating something as a value, from which it emerges that treating sentimental values as values requires regulating the sentiments for fittingness. The rest of the paper is devoted to two ways of understanding how such regulation might work. I argue first that sentiments are susceptible to regulation by evaluative judgment, though perhaps not in quite the same way that philosophers have thought “judgment-sensitive attitudes” are regulated by judgment. I then suggest more tentatively that sentiments are also susceptible to regulation for fittingness in a different way: by educating sensibilities. (shrink)

Que Burke se soit vu rapproché de Rousseau peut déconcerter : l'intéressé d'abord, sans doute, le lecteur des deux ensuite. Burke fait en effet de Rousseau le responsable sur le plan de la moralité des divagations et des excès de l'époque révolutionnaire et lui confère ainsi la dimension d'un Contre-éducateur. Le rapprochement cependant n'est pas inconcevable à partir du moment où chez tous deux l'écart se marque avec les théories contractualistes et où l'on prend en compte la conception organique que (...) se fait Burke du corps social. Mais Rousseau est un bien médiocre théoricien à ses yeux et ses talents littéraires sont nettement plus dévastateurs. Ce qu'il fait des passions humaines provoque l'irruption de la sentimentalité intempérée dans le champ du politique et cet effet est bien plus décisif pour le juger. La réponse de Burke est donc morale; cela fait qu'il peut se dispenser d'une réfutation — qui aurait pu être plus délicate — des thèses politiques.It must have seemed strange enough for Burke to be told that there was a deep agreement between himself and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau's ideas are for Burke the storehouse of revolutionary morals and the Nouvelle Héloïse provides the members of the National Assembly with a convenient textbook. This kind of thinking is unfit, in Burke's eyes, for a serious perusal and his followers must be hold in disgust. Nevertheless, likes and dislikes are not satisfactory explanations and as Burke is, even unwillingly, a political philosopher, he needed to be compared to Rousseau on some essential topics : the general will, the organic nature of society, the critique of contractualism. (shrink)

The innovation of Alain Badiou’s theory of change, which has attracted a great amount of attention from scholars working in disciplines across humanities, social sciences, and art over the past two decades, cannot be appreciated independently of the account of situations prior to an event’s irruption, namely, the order of being that is conceived using modern set theory in his treatise on general ontology. Retracing the meticulous systematicity with which pre-evental situations are conceived in Being and Event, (...) this paper offers a reconstruction of Badiou’s general ontology that points toward the potential therein for articulating an account of structures and situations that may be qualified as social. (shrink)

This thesis argues that the concept of contingency plays a central role in Althusser's recasting of Marxist philosophy and in his attempt to free the Marxist conception of history from concepts such as teleology, necessity and origin. It is critically placed both against those readings that see the emergence of the problematic of contingency only in the late Althusserm and to the most recent attempts to establish a straightforward continuity in Althusser's work. Drawing on published and unplublished material and covering (...) the entirety of Althusser's philosophical itinerary, the thesis seeks both to unearth the latent presence of this problematic, and its various implications, at each stage in the development of his work. It seeks to clarify, in a systematic way, the conceptual consequences of Althusser's commitment to contingency to the received understanding of his conceptions of structural change, ideology and political action. In particular, it argues that the standpoint of contingency allows us to locate in Althusser's 'Structural Marxism' the emergence of a 'logic of irruption' and structurally under-determined development of becoming. By emphasising this logic of contingency, it then seeks to produce a more nuanced assessment of his theory of ideology through the introduction of the concept of 'overinterpellation'. It finally attempts to distinguish two moments in the emergence of a materialism of contingency, first political and then philosophical; the problematic coexistence of these two aspects helps to account for the unstable charactoer of Althusser's late philosophical project. (shrink)

En prenant pour objet le droit, l'épistémologie ne fait pas irruption dans un monde qui lui est totalement étranger dans la mesure où, prétendant fixer le statut de la connaissance, elle n'a cessé de se poser des questions " de droit ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Let’s Start AgainSarah Wood (bio)Nicholas Royle. After Derrida. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995.Robert Smith. Derrida and Autobiography. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.start... v. i. to shoot, dart, move suddenly forth, or out: to spring up or forward: to strain forward: to break away: to make a sudden or involuntary movement as of surprise or becoming aware: to spring open, out of place, or loose: to begin to move: of a car, (...) engine, etc. to begin to work, to fire, combust: to set forth on a journey, race, career.—v. t. to begin: to set going: to set on foot: to set up: to drive from lair or hiding place: to cause or undergo displacement or loosening of: to startle (obs.): to pour out or shoot.—n. a sudden movement: a sudden involuntary motion of the body: a startled feeling: a spurt: an outburst or fit: a beginning of movement, esp. of a journey, race, or career: a beginning: a setting in motion: a help in or opportunity of beginning: an advantage in being early or ahead: the extent of such advantage in time or distance: a beginning of building work on a new house-site....—Chambers DictionaryAh, did you once see Shelley plain, And did he stop and speak to you And did you speak to him again? How strange it seems and new!But you were living before that, And also you are living after; And the memory I started at— My starting moves your laughter.—Robert Browning, “Memorabilia”The Shelley whose appearance regularly shocks Browning is, of course, a ghost. The bare fact of talking with a ghost is bound to be curious and impressive—enough to make one start. But at the same time it’s not unusual to converse with ghosts, and this generalization can be taken beyond the sphere of literature, beyond the notion of writers struggling with the mighty dead for imaginative priority, as it is conceived in Harold Bloom’s readings of Browning, for instance. Derrida insists that relationship in general requires the spectral: “[w]hat happens between two, and between all the ‘two’s’ one likes, such as between life and death, can only maintain itself with some ghost, can only talk with or about some ghost [s’entretenir de quelque fantôme]” [Derrida, Specters of Marx xviii]. Perhaps, then, what happens in and between the two books reviewed here needs to be approached in terms of ghosts and the psychoanalysis of ghosts, so powerfully thematized by Nicholas Royle. [End Page 4] Both his After Derrida and Robert Smith’s Derrida and Autobiography seek to make contact with something in writing that gets things going and produces breaks, that displaces and startles. Although each volume could still be called a monograph on Derrida, it responds to something other than a corpus.The sense of shock, wonder, and discontinuity that makes the imagined interlocutor in “Memorabilia” laugh illuminates also something playing itself out across the reception of Derrida’s work. Part of that reception could be conceived in familiar terms—the development of a canon of what could be called Derrida commentaries, the establishment of a set of themes readily associated with Derrida studies (charlatanism, the deconstruction of a metaphysics of presence, and so on). Yet to speak with or about ghosts entails having to start reading, listening, and thinking again, in order to broach familiarity anew without innocent recourse to sheer intuition. These books also, despite their scholarly knowledge of the field, share a sense of responsibility to discuss an aspect of writing—hard to ignore in Derrida—that has begun without commentary, that gets commentary started and that subjects the movement of thought to something like fits. Whether these fits are of phobia, laughter, melancholy, delirium, or anger, their irruption marks interesting gaps in thought’s continuity. More than moods, these strange outbursts might be understood better in terms of the theory of metapsychological “phantoms.” The phantom, according to Nicolas Abraham, is “sustained by secreted words, invisible gnomes whose aim is to wreak havoc, from within the unconscious, in the coherence of logical progression” [“Notes on the Phantom” 175]. The phantom is also “alien to the subject... (shrink)

Historians don’t seem to be concerned by the “back to Marx” trend observed in many fields during the last decade. After an initial, very limited breakthrough in the inter-war years, Marxism irrupted in the academy in the 1960’s, when it established its hegemony on historical studies, merging with a multiplicity of social sciences. This “golden age” was followed by an epoch of decline, the climax of which was reached in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin’s wall. Since this turning (...) point, historiography has being shaped by the return to neoconservative tendencies as well as by the emergence of postmodernism, which marginalized the traditional Marxist paradigms. Instead of reducing this change to a theoretical battle, the author interprets the decline of Marxist historiography as the result of a political defeat. The absence of any utopian horizon at the beginning of the twentieth first century explains the persistence of this decline. Once liberated from both teleology and Eurocentric views – its secret tendencies from the time of its transformation into a “science” – Marxist historiography could reinvent itself and redefine its goal, which does not consist in the “application” a preformed theory but, according to E.P. Thompson, in “recovering, explaining and to understanding its object : real history”. Such a reinvention means, in the wake of W. Benjamin, to conceive the past not as definitely closed but as a whole of experiences and recollections to “reactivate” in the struggles of the present. (shrink)

This article seeks to identify and address the normative void that resides at the heart of postmodernist-feminist theory, and to propose a philosophical framework – beyond postmodernism, but incorporating its central insights – for thinking through the normative questions with which feminists are inevitably confronted in their engagements with positive law. Two varieties of postmodernist-feminism are identified and critically analysed: the ‘corporeal feminism’ of Elizabeth Grosz and Judith Butler, which seeks to ground feminist critical practice in the irruptive capacities (...) of the material body considered as an arte fact of social construction; and the deconstructionist feminism of Drucilla Cornell, for whom ‘the feminine’ is an indeterminate but disruptive force beyond its construction in law and in other social sites. The first component of the argument elaborated here is that each of these approaches ultimately reduces to a form of aestheticism which is incapable of generating a worthwhile and workable feminist approach to the restructuring of politics and law. The second component of the argument involves a return to aesthetics, in particular to the philosophical aesthetics of Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Kant’s aesthetic philosophy, it will be suggested, yields a framework of concepts which, duly re-manipulated, could speak to the very concerns that have inspired postmodernist-feminism: how to attend to (bodily) particularity while avoiding the dangers associated with ‘essentialism’; and how to theorise the propensity of the unrepresentable power of the feminine to exceed both embodied human capacities and the confining rein of socially privileged rationalities. Crucially, however it also responds to a set of preoccupations – those of the feminist lawyer – that cannot be accommodated by postmodernism: how to translate embodied experience into (legal) norms; generalise from the particular; seek consensus; and codify an endless potentiality in the form of law. (shrink)

La « camera-réalité », néologisme qualifiant la nature du médium photographique, est un « objet théorique » qui interroge l’irruption de l’image photographique en philosophie. Siegfried Kracauer définit dans Théorie du film le réalisme propre à l’image photographique, en revisitant le concept d’affinité, dans une discussion serrée avec l’héritage kantien qu’il connaît parfaitement : il y va d’une redéfinition de l’expérience esthétique par l’enregistrement, entre déliaison et rédemption, le trait d’union entre caméra et réalité signant un effort conceptuel à (...) notre avis remarquable. (shrink)

From the beginning of the environmental crisis, a constellation of ecosophies, theories, ideologies, discourses, and narratives have irrupted in the emergent complex ground of environmental philosophy and political ecology. In this non-unifyable field of forces, sociological analysis has been intended to sketch maps and derive typologies to order the different views and standpoints in science, ecological thinking, and environmental ethics so as to guide academic research or political action. From this will to set and settle differences in thought and strategy, (...) a diversity of environmentalisms has emerged; the lines are drawn from North to South, rich to poor, masculine to feminine, naturalism to culturalism. Environmentalisms differentiate their sources, attachments, and derivations from mother theories and their approaches from different disciplines. Thus, the prefix eco- or the adjective environmental are attached to traditional disciplines. Latin American environmental thinking draws its sources from critical philosophical thought; it differs from other systems of thought by a radical epistemological concept of environment; and it acquires its identity from the cultural heritage of its peoples and the ecological potentials of its territories. (shrink)

Manola Antonioli se donne pour tâche d'élucider la nature du rapport controversé de Deleuze avec l'histoire de la philosophie. Pour ce faire, elle passe en revue chacune des monographies que Deleuze a consacrées aux philosophes: Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, Kant, Spinoza et Leibniz. Seul Foucault, qui fait l'objet de la dernière étude d'auteur de Deleuze, manque à l'appel. Lorsqu'il revient sur les figures de la tradition, Deleuze est impétueux et les textes dont il s'occupe font l'objet d'une violence interprétative qui rend (...) les auteurs étudiés méconnaissables du point de vue des commentaires canoniques. Les acteurs de l'histoire de la philosophie sont essentiels à la définition de la modernité deleuzienne. Mais l'exigence de tracer un portrait ressemblant des philosophes du passé n'est pas maintenue. À propos de ses habitudes exégétiques peu orthodoxes, Deleuze affirme vouloir faire un enfant à un auteur qui soit bien le sien mais qui soit aussi étranger à ses préoccupations premières. Les tableaux deleuziens sont toujours «anexacts» au sens husserlien où le critère de l'exactitude est périmé. Mais contrairement à la doctrine husserlienne, le souci deleuzien d'anexactitude est motivé par le renoncement à toute idée de progrès dialectique de l'histoire. Deleuze refuse de tracer une lignée philosophique à la manière idéaliste où tous les auteurs correspondraient entre eux à travers un sens global et unificateur. Il tente plutôt de dégager le caractère singulier des philosophes en analysant librement un ou quelques-uns des concepts qui font irruption au cours de l'histoire. Ainsi en va-t-il pour le Spinoza de Deleuze tout entier contenu dans la notion d'expression alors que le terme ne fait l'objet d'aucune définition par l'auteur de L'Éthique, ou encore son Leibniz qui devient le dramaturge d'une théorie de la «compossibilisation des incompossibles» de prime abord incompatible avec l'idéal leibnizien d'harmonie préétablie. C'est toujours à un problème particulier soulevé par un philosophe et jamais à une vérité éternelle que Deleuze tente de raccrocher sa pensée. Comme l'affirme très justement Antonioli. (shrink)

As humans, we use the power of thinking to make scientific discoveries, develop technologies, manage social interactions, and transmit knowledge to the next generations. With the ability to think, we can trace back and discover the origin of the universe, the natural world, and ourselves. The content of this book, Mindsponge Theory, is part of that discovery process. -/- Product Details -/- Publisher ‏ : ‎ Walter de Gruyter (December 6, 2022) Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 6, 2022 (...) Language ‏ : ‎ English Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 214 pages ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 8367405145 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-8367405140 Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.3 x 0.71 x 9.29 inches -/- . (shrink)

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition.

Although the cognitive neurosciences are currently conducting research to determine the brain networks that are implicated in the production of ‘earworms’, my project seeks to address the technical nature of these abstract parasites that hears their spontaneous irruption in thought as both a product and source of contemporary capitalism’s aim to draw value from involuntary nervous activities. In this respect, I approach the earworm from a deliberately speculative perspective in order to conceptualize its appearance as a technical matter expressive (...) of the way historically ‘useless thinking’ is being imaginatively recuperated as a passive technology of the self. However, the earworm is a peculiar case of useless thinking, for its redundancy not only implicates it in the broader process of recuperation, but seems to realize a fatal tendency in sonic technics in ways that at once rely on, advance and disturb contemporary capitalism’s encroachment on human cognitive capacities. (shrink)

If the world itself is metaphysically indeterminate in a specified respect, what follows? In this paper, we develop a theory of metaphysical indeterminacy answering this question.

In Alice Walker’s vignette “The Flowers,” a young black girl’s walk in the woods is interrupted when she treads “smack” into the skull of a lynched man. As her name predicates, Myop’s age and innocence obstruct her from seeing deeply into the full implications of the scene, while the more worldly reader is jarred and confronted with a whole history of racial violence and slavery. The skeleton, its teeth cracked and broken, is a temporal irruption, a Gothic “smack” that (...) shatters the transience of the pastoral scene with the intrusion of a deeper past from which dead matter/material de-composes the story’s present with the violent matter/issue of racism. Walker’s story is representative of an important trope in fiction, where the pastoral dead speak through the details of their remains, and the temporal fabric of text is disrupted by the very substance of death. Against the backdrops of Terry Gifford’s post-pastoral and Fred Botting’s Gothic understanding of the literary corpse as “negative[ly] sublime,” this essay explores the fictional dead as matter unfettered by genre, consistently signifying beyond their own inanimate silences, revealing suppressed and unpalatable themes of racial and sexual violence, child abuse and cannibalistic consumerism. Along with Walker’s story, this study considers these ideas through new readings of Stephen King’s novella The Body, Raymond Carver’s story “So Much Water So Close to Home,” and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. While these writers may form an unlikely grouping in terms of style, each uses pastoral remains as significant material, deploying the dead as Gothic entities that force the reader to confront America’s darkest social and historical matters. (shrink)

This chapter surveys hybrid theories of well-being. It also discusses some criticisms, and suggests some new directions that philosophical discussion of hybrid theories might take.

"Feminism, Theory and the Politics of Difference" looks at the question of difference across the full spectrum of feminist theory from liberal, radical, lesbian ...

Post-truth is a complex phenomenon which could be analysed from a variety of perspectives. In this paper, attention will be paid to the theoretical and practical aspects concerning the role of law in contrasting the fake-news. These are the most important and evident results of the impact of post-truth in the legal and political world. A following focus is dedicated to the new forms of activism aiming at developing a critical conscience. The Author concludes that it is time to promote (...) practices of active citizenship, developed by new technologies, social network and digital platforms, as well as to organize dialogues and discussions in the educational environments and, more broadly, in the neighbourhoods of the city. (shrink)

Résumé La question énergétique a été à l’origine du mouvement écologiste et l’article montre comment cette question a été intégrée par encastrement de l’économique par l’écologique. L’image de la pollinisation illustre la nouvelle conception de l’économie requise par l’écologie de demain. Les abeilles génèrent avec le miel un produit marchandisable, mais le travail le plus utile est la pollinisation des plantes. Ceci implique de revisiter l’ensemble du programme de la vieille économie politique reposant sur la rareté. La première écologie, confrontée (...) au capitalisme industriel, était dominée par l’économie du monde matériel. L’écologie d’aujourd’hui (la deuxième écologie) montre le chiasme qui s’est opéré. Le monde de l’économie politique se présente comme un emboîtement de systèmes complexes, d’écologies diverses dont l’humain cesse d’être le centre. La sphère de l’esprit — celle des relations entre les idées et de la coopération entre les cerveaux — connaît une indéniable croissance et constitue l’autre partie du chiasme. Son économie fait apparaître de nouvelles formes d’efficience et d’organisation, comme le réseau d’ordinateurs. Le capitalisme cognitif est l’autre et le rival mimétique de la seconde écologie. Il peut accepter de se dessaisir de la maîtrise de la biosphère s’il devient le maître de la noosphère. Les contradictions propres au capitalisme cognitif s’ajoutent alors à celles du capitalisme industriel. (shrink)

Proof Theory of Modal Logic is devoted to a thorough study of proof systems for modal logics, that is, logics of necessity, possibility, knowledge, belief, time, computations etc. It contains many new technical results and presentations of novel proof procedures. The volume is of immense importance for the interdisciplinary fields of logic, knowledge representation, and automated deduction.