In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May ‘68Ronald ShustermanLogics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May ‘68, by Peter Starr; xi & 232 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, $45.00 cloth, $14.95 paper.Failed revolt? For many people, current French theory is more a revolt of failed logic. Anyone yearning for a definitive refutation of these threatening foreign trends will get no satisfaction from Peter Starr’s volume. His (...) concept of the “logics of failed revolts” involves the obsession of revolutionaries with what they see as the inevitable return of the past. Starr proposes to examine the explanations given for the failure of revolutionary action “in representative texts by Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, and others” (p. 2). The “revolution” in question is the May 1968 uprising.George Orwell, as a defender of proper usage and an explorer of politics and the English language, always insisted that the title of his Nineteen Eighty-Four be written out in full; the informality of the abbreviation “May ‘68” is emblematic of the spirit of the events of that year: May ‘68 was supposed to be a liberation from useless tradition and constraint. That the movement was seen as a failure is the first premise of Starr’s argument; what he proposes to analyze is the theorization of the failure. Starr sees three “scenarios”: “the logic of specular doubling” is where “revolutionary action is doomed to repetition because revolutionaries inevitably construct themselves as mirror images of their rivals” (p. 2). There is also a “logic of structural repetition” and a “logic of recuperation” in which revolutionary actions actually reinforce established structures of power (pp. 2–3). Starr goes on to argue that “these logics served as argumentative pretexts, allowing Barthes, Kristeva, Cixous, and others to construct the existing political field as an impasse in order to justify significant displacements of political energies (including a politicization of the literary text)” (p. 7). This seems like a fancy way of saying that these thinkers used theory to find a decent way out of direct political commitment. Indeed, once one has understood and granted the point, there really is not much else in Starr’s book but fancy ways of repeating it.Starr tries to delineate a specific “theoretical moment” (p. 4) beginning in 1965 and ending in 1977, but it is difficult to be so definitive about the limits of a period when one is writing only twenty years later. This lack of temporal distance leads to certain debatable assertions. For example, Starr claims that tier-mondisme—France’s obsession with models taken from the Third World—“never recovered” from certain fatal “blows” (p. 4). Yet there is no actual evidence given for this claim. The problem with this kind of history is that it either makes concrete statements which are easy to contest, or it ends up vacuous: Starr sees in his period “a play of continuity and discontinuity” (p. 7). Who could deny such an assertion? All periods involve both continuity and discontinuity (except perhaps the period of the sinking of Atlantis...). Starr [End Page 191] mentions works on specific French thinkers by other theorists (such as Culler) and points out that his “aim has been to bridge the gap between such studies on the one hand and the work of historians and sociologists on the other” (pp. 10–11). The question is whether such an interdisciplinary project is feasible or even desirable. The theorists do not really care about the genealogy of the theory; the historians do not need to know if the theory is right. To take one example, Starr gives us statistics of the evolution of university enrollment in France (p. 113) a few pages after discussing Lacan’s “phallic comedy” (p. 104). How many readers are going to be equipped for, or interested in, a study which combines sociological statistics, political theory, general history, psychoanalytic principles, and feminist criticism?I was convinced by Starr’s basic argument that French thinkers were obsessed by this vision of the inevitable failure of revolt. Nevertheless, the point is both belabored and often tenuous. There are times when Starr’s... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May ‘68Ronald ShustermanLogics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May ‘68, by Peter Starr; xi & 232 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, $45.00 cloth, $14.95 paper.Failed revolt? For many people, current French theory is more a revolt of failed logic. Anyone yearning for a definitive refutation of these threatening foreign trends will get no satisfaction from Peter Starr’s volume. His (...) concept of the “logics of failed revolts” involves the obsession of revolutionaries with what they see as the inevitable return of the past. Starr proposes to examine the explanations given for the failure of revolutionary action “in representative texts by Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, and others” (p. 2). The “revolution” in question is the May 1968 uprising.George Orwell, as a defender of proper usage and an explorer of politics and the English language, always insisted that the title of his Nineteen Eighty-Four be written out in full; the informality of the abbreviation “May ‘68” is emblematic of the spirit of the events of that year: May ‘68 was supposed to be a liberation from useless tradition and constraint. That the movement was seen as a failure is the first premise of Starr’s argument; what he proposes to analyze is the theorization of the failure. Starr sees three “scenarios”: “the logic of specular doubling” is where “revolutionary action is doomed to repetition because revolutionaries inevitably construct themselves as mirror images of their rivals” (p. 2). There is also a “logic of structural repetition” and a “logic of recuperation” in which revolutionary actions actually reinforce established structures of power (pp. 2–3). Starr goes on to argue that “these logics served as argumentative pretexts, allowing Barthes, Kristeva, Cixous, and others to construct the existing political field as an impasse in order to justify significant displacements of political energies (including a politicization of the literary text)” (p. 7). This seems like a fancy way of saying that these thinkers used theory to find a decent way out of direct political commitment. Indeed, once one has understood and granted the point, there really is not much else in Starr’s book but fancy ways of repeating it.Starr tries to delineate a specific “theoretical moment” (p. 4) beginning in 1965 and ending in 1977, but it is difficult to be so definitive about the limits of a period when one is writing only twenty years later. This lack of temporal distance leads to certain debatable assertions. For example, Starr claims that tier-mondisme—France’s obsession with models taken from the Third World—“never recovered” from certain fatal “blows” (p. 4). Yet there is no actual evidence given for this claim. The problem with this kind of history is that it either makes concrete statements which are easy to contest, or it ends up vacuous: Starr sees in his period “a play of continuity and discontinuity” (p. 7). Who could deny such an assertion? All periods involve both continuity and discontinuity (except perhaps the period of the sinking of Atlantis...). Starr [End Page 191] mentions works on specific French thinkers by other theorists (such as Culler) and points out that his “aim has been to bridge the gap between such studies on the one hand and the work of historians and sociologists on the other” (pp. 10–11). The question is whether such an interdisciplinary project is feasible or even desirable. The theorists do not really care about the genealogy of the theory; the historians do not need to know if the theory is right. To take one example, Starr gives us statistics of the evolution of university enrollment in France (p. 113) a few pages after discussing Lacan’s “phallic comedy” (p. 104). How many readers are going to be equipped for, or interested in, a study which combines sociological statistics, political theory, general history, psychoanalytic principles, and feminist criticism?I was convinced by Starr’s basic argument that French thinkers were obsessed by this vision of the inevitable failure of revolt. Nevertheless, the point is both belabored and often tenuous. There are times when Starr’s... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Twentieth-Century French PhilosophyRonald ShustermanTwentieth-Century French Philosophy, by Eric Matthews; 232 pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, $13.95 paper.Pace the habitual proverb, one of the best things about this volume is indeed its cover: a picture of Sartre lighting his pipe, in some Parisian cafe, in the midst of an animated discussion with Simone de Beauvoir and Mr. and Mrs. [End Page 188] Boris Vian. There is an (...) “arty” dimension to French philosophy which has mostly disappeared from English thought since the time of Russell. One could hardly imagine illustrating a history of recent English philosophy with (say) a picture of P. F. Strawson sitting in a bar with some rebellious trumpet-player-cum-novelist. Matthews manages to give the reader an exceptionally clear idea of the thought of those whom he considers to be the most significant French philosophers of our time. Perhaps the selection is too restrictive; some of the major figures who are completely—or almost completely—absent from this volume include Jacques Maritain, Michel Serres, Paul Ricoeur, Vladimir Jankélévitch, and Gilles Deleuze. Matthews’s work, however, is intended as an introduction, so his survey is necessarily light. The justification for the selection is that the essence of twentieth-century French thought involves an emphasis on subjectivity. This emphasis is examined in the work of Bergson who was the first of many to underline the role of the self and the body in our dealings with the world. Direct quotations of the major texts are infrequent; this, however, is probably for the best—or so one feels when one encounters examples such as “Value is the self in so far as the self haunts the heart of the for-itself as that which the for-itself is” (p. 76). Matthews excels at “translating” the ideas of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and others into an English acceptable to even the most pedestrian ordinary language philosopher.Many readers may, however, be dissatisfied with some of Matthews’s classifications. Structuralism, for example, is represented here by Lacan and Foucault. Matthews correctly underlines Foucault’s “suspicion of a priori theorizing” (p. 149) but one has to remember that many of the great literary structuralists such as Barthes or Genette did base their work on abstract reasoning. In their hands, structuralism was hardly anti-scientific, so for someone coming to philosophy from literary theory, Matthews’s definition and examples are confusing. But perhaps these classifications are not essential to Matthews’s argument about the growth of subjectivity. It is indeed this subjectivity which emerges not only as Matthews’s thesis but as his target as well. He notes in Lacan’s philosophy the “lack of any serious argumentative support” and a “failure to offer empirical evidence for what looks like an empirical account” (p. 147). After a brief discussion of Foucault’s overall project, Matthews concludes that “one may feel a lingering suspicion that it is fatally flawed” (p. 156). This is frustrating and unfair; there is no point mentioning this flaw if one does not go on to work it out. Other philosophers get the same treatment. For example, Matthews argues against Lyotard’s picture of science as discredited: “Society might... find it hard to believe in science any more, without it being true that science was unbelievable” (p. 186). One may agree with Matthews on this point, but all of these rapid end-of-chapter dismissals remain rather superficial.Unfortunately, Matthews rarely builds the necessary bridges to make his study more illuminating. There is a passage on Bergson’s distinction between [End Page 189] “analysis” and “intuition” which is quite close to Russell’s distinction between “knowledge by description” and “knowledge by acquaintance.” Other such bridges could be built between Merleau-Ponty and pragmatism, or Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. There is a reason for the absence of these connections: Matthews’s basic premise is that there is something specific about French philosophy; too many obvious bridges to other thinkers would undermine his entire argument. One of Matthews’s goals is to demonstrate that it is “important to the understanding of works of philosophy... (shrink)

Ronald S Laura, Michael Leahy; Religious Upbringing and Rational Autonomy, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 23, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 253–265, h.

This article provides an overview of current knowledge about the relationship between mental illness, violence, homicides, and suicides, with a view towards crafting sensible public policy options for reducing gun violence towards self or others. With this knowledge as a backdrop, the limitations of the federal National Instant Background Check System as both over-inclusive and under-inclusive in identifying people with mental illness who pose potential risks are discussed. Finally, the article describes emerging approaches for identifying and removing firearms from persons (...) who pose potential risks of gun violence towards self or others, including Extreme Risk Protection Orders and other options. (shrink)

The Daoist–Buddhist syncretism movement helped popularize Buddhism, which in turn enabled monks to exercise social influence. Such influence eventually contributed to the four major Buddhist persecutions in China and further shaped the development of Buddhist philosophy in East Asia. This chapter indicates the shift from Indian and Central Asian to Chinese founders, which is not only an ethnic change but a doctrinal one. The philosophies of these East Asian Mahāyāna schools and the Zhenyan tradition are described in the chapter. The (...) traditions discussed include New Sanlun, Tiantai, Huayan, Pure Land, Chan, and Faxiang traditions. (shrink)

Revision of the author's thesis (Ph. D.--Harvard University, 1985).

Ronald S Laura, Michael Leahy; Religious Upbringing and Rational Autonomy, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 23, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 253–265, h.

I propose to show that the use that has often been made of wittgenstein's work in the philosophy of religion is innocuous. the notion that the meaning of a word or a sentence is the use to which it is put has been exploited in such a way that it neither does justice to religious belief nor to wittgenstein's thought. i endeavour to show that the burden of the positivist programme was not to withold from religious language the accolade of (...) 'meaning'. it was to show that no piece of language could be both meaningful and true (or false) which did not satisfy the conditions of either the analytic or the synthetic category. i conclude that wittgenstein's work can provide an effective liberation from positivism if it can be shown that wittgenstein gives us sufficient reason to reject the analytic-synthetic distinction not only as an inadequate criterion of 'meaning', but as an inadequate criterion of 'truth' as well. (shrink)

The New Social Disease is about how we personalize our computers and associated technologies while depersonalizing others and ourselves.

(1985). The Philosophical Foundations of Medical Education* Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 17, No. 2, pp. 29-43. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.1985.tb00027.x.

The authors of this book show that the failure of public health arises, not from a failure of contemporary medicine, but from a failure of the philosophical assumptions upon which it rests. They suggest an alternative approach to health care that derives from a ecological and holistic philosophy of nature.

In a recent essay, Tasos Kazepides has used the later Wittgenstein’s account of religious beliefs as either ‘superstitions’ or non-rational to condemn such beliefs as ‘doctrines’. By this term he means teachings which close minds to alternative truth-claims. In this paper we criticise his interpretation and use of Wittgenstein and argue that, far from closing minds, an appropriate education in religious beliefs can open minds to possible realms of existence unconsidered in other subjects of the curriculum.

In a recent essay, Tasos Kazepides has used the later Wittgenstein’s account of religious beliefs as either ‘superstitions’ or non-rational to condemn such beliefs as ‘doctrines’. By this term he means teachings which close minds to alternative truth-claims. In this paper we criticise his interpretation and use of Wittgenstein and argue that, far from closing minds, an appropriate education in religious beliefs can open minds to possible realms of existence unconsidered in other subjects of the curriculum.

There are two ways of understanding experimental philosophy's process of appealing to intuitions as evidence for or against philosophical claims: the positive and negative programs. This chapter deals with how the positivist method of conceptual analysis is affected by the results of the negative program. It begins by describing direct extramentalism, semantic mentalism, conceptual mentalism, and mechanist mentalism, all of which argue that intuitions are credible sources of evidence and will therefore be shared. The negative program challenges this view by (...) questioning if there can be in fact a shared intuition about a specific hypothetical case, as conflicting intuitions are as likely to arise. The chapter then discusses other issues raised by the negativists such as the limits of surveys and the proper domain problem. (shrink)

Although in most situations approaching desired end-states entails decreasing distance between oneself and an object, and avoiding undesired end-states increases such distance, in some cases distancing can also be a means to approach a given goal. We highlight examples involving responses to obstacles to achievement and self-control dilemmas, showing that motivational direction is not equivalent to the motivational strategy involved when people pursue their goals.

In a recent essay, Tasos Kazepides has used the later Wittgenstein’s account of religious beliefs as either ‘superstitions’ or non-rational to condemn such beliefs as ‘doctrines’. By this term he means teachings which close minds to alternative truth-claims. In this paper we criticise his interpretation and use of Wittgenstein and argue that, far from closing minds, an appropriate education in religious beliefs can open minds to possible realms of existence unconsidered in other subjects of the curriculum.

Politics in America are polarized and trivialized, perhaps as never before. In Congress, the media, and academic debate, opponents from right and left, the Red and the Blue, struggle against one another as if politics were contact sports played to the shouts of cheerleaders. The result, Ronald Dworkin writes, is a deeply depressing political culture, as ill equipped for the perennial challenge of achieving social justice as for the emerging threats of terrorism. Can the hope for change be realized? (...) Dworkin, one the world's leading legal and political philosophers, identifies and defends core principles of personal and political morality that all citizens can share. He shows that recognizing such shared principles can make substantial political argument possible and help replace contempt with mutual respect. Only then can the full promise of democracy be realized in America and elsewhere. Dworkin lays out two core principles that citizens should share: first, that each human life is intrinsically and equally valuable and, second, that each person has an inalienable personal responsibility for identifying and realizing value in his or her own life. He then shows what fidelity to these principles would mean for human rights, the place of religion in public life, economic justice, and the character and value of democracy. Dworkin argues that liberal conclusions flow most naturally from these principles. Properly understood, they collide with the ambitions of religious conservatives, contemporary American tax and social policy, and much of the War on Terror. But his more basic aim is to convince Americans of all political stripes--as well as citizens of other nations with similar cultures--that they can and must defend their own convictions through their own interpretations of these shared values. (shrink)