Jihad and Just War in the War on Terror explores the cases for war put forward by George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden. It systematically lays out how violence has been justified on both 'sides', and how these justifications have been criticised within the West and the Muslim world.

Despite the many contributions of nonhuman animals in history, nonhuman animal representations are seldom crafted with care and accuracy in curricular texts. Because of the anthropocentric vantage point of textbook creation, the nonhuman animal is often portrayed as an object, but as our relationship with the nonhuman world continues to deteriorate, we need now more than ever to consider the agency and subjectivity of nonhuman entities across time and space. In this article, I will use critical contextual analysis as a (...) research method to examine the representation of the horse in a commonly used textbook in middle and high schools in the United States titled World History: Patterns of Interaction to raise larger questions about how to engage with nonhuman animal presence in history with students. Using critical animal studies as a theoretical framework to illuminate the data, the findings reveal that the horse is depicted as agentless and is shown merely as a means for human animals to expand empire and perpetuate social norms. The exploration identifies a gap in the social studies scholarship that neglects the historical contributions of nonhuman animals in curriculum. This article will argue that juxtaposing anthropocentric curricular texts such as the one under investigation with narratives that illuminate nonhuman animal subjectivity is essential for building a more empathetic world and for cultivating a more inclusive historical narrative. (shrink)

I counter a tendency in critical phenomenology to read Frantz Fanon as derivative upon, indeed reducible to, other (European) phenomenologies, eliding the originality and contemporaneity of his method. I propose it is time to read phenomenology through Fanon, instead of centering analysis on his assumed debt to Maurice Merleau‐Ponty's body schema. Fanon reconfigures and ungrounds phenomenology in Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks). I show how he creates his own method through an anticolonial phenomenology of touch and affect (...) that breaks with the perceptual spectacle at the center of most phenomenologies before him. I read Fanon's “toucher du doigt”—in contrastive relation to Edmund Husserl's touch‐sensings—to define a phenomenology that dwells with colonial wounding and holds the memory of a “burning” colonial duration. This is to say that Fanon's phenomenology is not mere description; rather, Fanon invents a critical, distinctly temporal, and anticolonial method from the affective territory in which he has had to dwell. This method addresses the conditions of possibility for doing (critical) phenomenology. Fanonian phenomenology makes tangible the (de)structuring violence through which colonialism ontologizes itself, while providing tools to dwell with the wounding and critically mine it—to create possibilities for living otherwise than what colonialism makes of us. (shrink)

Eyewitnesses are often susceptible to recollection failures and memory distortions. These failures and distortions are influenced by several factors. The present review will discuss two such important factors, attention failures and stress. We argue that acute stress, often experienced by eyewitnesses and victims of crimes, directly influences attentional processes, which likely has downstream consequences for memory. Attentional failures may result in individuals missing something unusual or important in a complex visual field. Amongst eyewitnesses, this can lead to individuals missing details, (...) even unusual or important central details, regarding the crime. Surprisingly, few studies have investigated attentional failures in eyewitness scenarios, and none have investigated the relationship between stress, attention, and witness memory. This review will discuss the impact of attentional failures, mainly those resulting from inattentional blindness, in applied contexts in order to bridge to eyewitness scenarios. In addition, we will integrate the applied literature on attentional failures with literature that examines the influences of arousal and stress on attention. We will conclude by presenting how future research may tease apart the independent contributions of arousal and stress on attentional failures and successes and how this research may inform understanding of eyewitness reliability. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to offer a reparative framework for current feminist approaches, most of which seek to inhabit rather than assimilate previous forms of inclusivity or intersectionality, by vindicating the pioneering role of past feminisms. For this purpose, I will stick to a double-edged methodological tool that has been an object of dispute in feminist and literary studies for the last decades, namely, critique and postcritique, two concepts that could be said to bear witness to old (...) and new ways of doing feminism. My aim is not to dismiss recent feminist work but to render visible forgotten critiques that have been an essential heritage of feminism. To acknowledge such debts is part of the reparative reading I present here, for I hold that the desire for deep knowledge is accretive and demands a closer and more respectful attention to past practices and theoretical positions. (shrink)

Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy, traces the decisive role played by eighteenth century embryological research for Immanuel Kant’s theories of mind and cognition. I begin this book by following the course of life science debates regarding organic generation in England and France between 1650 and 1750 before turning to a description of their influence in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century. Once this background has been established, the remainder of Kant’s Organicism moves to (...) the influential role played by models of embryological development for Kant’s approach to understanding the cognitive processes responsible for the generation of knowledge, with special attention paid to Kant’s Precritical writings in the 1760s and 1770s. The book closes with a reinterpretation of Kant’s transcendental deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason. (shrink)

This book offers new answers to this persistent philosophical question by defining the question in specifically Husserlian terms and by means of a careful examination of Husserl’s later texts, including the unpublished Nachlass.

This paper asks how perception becomes racializing and seeks the means for its critical interruption. My aim is not only to understand the recalcitrant and limitative temporal structure of racializing habits of seeing, but also to uncover the possibilities within perception for a critical awareness and destabilization of this structure. Reading Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in dialogue with Frantz Fanon, Iris Marion Young and race-critical feminism, I locate in hesitation the phenomenological moment where habits of seeing can be internally (...) fractured. Hesitation, I claim, makes visible the exclusionary logic of racializing and objectifying perception, countering its affective closure and opening it to critical transformation. (shrink)

I develop a phenomenological account of racialized encounters with works of art and film, wherein the racialized viewer feels cast as perpetually past, coming “too late” to intervene in the meaning of her own representation. This points to the distinctive role that the colonial past plays in mediating and constructing our self-images. I draw on my experience of three exhibitions that take Muslims and/or Arabs as their subject matter and that ostensibly try to interrupt or subvert racialization while reproducing some (...) of its tropes. My examples are the Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2015), the exposition Welten der Muslime at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin (2011–2017), and a sculpture by Bob and Roberta Smith at the Leeds City Art Gallery, created in response to the imperial power painting, General Gordon’s Last Stand, that is housed there. My interest is in how artworks contribute to the experience of being racialized in ways that not only amplify the circulation of images but also constitute difficult temporal relations to images. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, I argue that such racialized images are temporally gluey, or stuck, so that we are weighted and bogged down by them. This essay received Honorable Mention from the American Society for Aesthetics Feminist Caucus Committee in the Feminist Research Essay prize in 2020. (shrink)

Is violence senseless or is it at the origin of sense? Does its destruction of meaning disclose ourselves as the origin of meaning? Or is it the case that it leaves in its wake only a barren field? Does it result in renewal or only in a sense of dead loss? To answer these questions, I shall look at James Dodd’s, Hegel’s, and Carl Schmitt’s accounts of the creative power of violence—particularly with regard to its ability to give individuals and (...) groups their sense of self-identity. I shall also follow up on Peg Birmingham’s suggestion that Socrates’ defense at his trial points to an alternate source of our self-identity—one that is ultimately less barren. (shrink)

El artículo aborda el proceso de conceptualización de la rememoración benjaminiana [Eingedenken], entendida por el pensador alemán como ejercicio crítico sobre una idea de historia que, desde Hegel, se asimiló al progreso como principio rector de las sociedades modernas. Partiendo, pues, de unos presupuestos epistemológicos distintos, Walter Benjamin procura en el recuerdo un nuevo tiempo histórico por venir, que se activa dialécticamente desde cierto mesianismo como resto escatológico en el ámbito de una moderna de la secularización.

This research aimed at investigating the assessment procedures for evaluating the prospective teachers' abilities, developed through the new B.Ed. /ADE curriculum in teacher education institutions of Baluchistan, this research study will also highlights the emerging problems in the use of new modern assessment procedures. The research was conducted in seven Teacher Training institutions of Baluchistan. The data was collected through the survey questionnaire, based on a pilot project, from the seven Heads of the institutions and the nine Teacher Educators/school, involved (...) in teaching different courses of B.Ed. /ADE at different semesters. Focus group discussion with head and nine teacher educators/institution was also conducted. The quantitative and qualitative data from two instruments helped in-depth understanding of the assessment procedure and the emerging problems. The results showed that teacher educators are trying to implement the new competency-based curriculum and are engaged in using interactive and innovative teaching pedagogies suggested in the new curriculum of B.Ed. / ADE program. But they feel difficulty to assess the content knowledge and skills developed among the prospective teachers through this new curriculum. Teacher educators feel difficulty in the use of modern assessment procedures. They are still focusing the paper-pencil test. Teachers lack competencies to assess students’ actual strengths and learning needs, they don’t, know how to measure cognitive, affective and psychomotor objectives. Teacher educators also face problems to make judgments on students’ learning through formative assessment. (shrink)

: Hisbah is the most important institution in a society and nation.Enforcement parties are those who are directly involved in executing this. Incarrying out their duties, they bear heavy responsibility because it involvesthe rights of Allah and the rights of human. Hisbah implies theimplementation of al-amr bi-l-maʿrūf when it is clear thatit is abandoned, and wa-n-nahy ʿani-l-munkar when itis clear that it is done. This study is based on the concept of Hisbah in SharīʿahLaw which is of a general and (...) widespread aspect of enjoining good andpreventing evil. Literature reviews and library searches have been conductedintensively to clarify the principles of hisbah. Additionally, descriptiveand content analysis of textual content was done on the provisions of lawsand regulations as well as guidelines on the prevention of sharīʿah crimeparameters in Malaysia. In general, our country has implemented the conceptof hisbah in its own form without the branding of an institution specifically as“the institution of hisbah”. The roles and functions of hisbah are given to theSharīʿah Enforcement Division, Islamic Religious Department in the states. (shrink)

Problematic perceptions about race damage our society. These attitudes can seem impossible to overcome, but philosophers Dr Jennifer Mensch, at Western Sydney University in Australia, and Dr Michael Olson, at Marquette University in the US, beg to differ. They are compiling a collection of 18th-century philosophical and scientific texts that helped shape the way people saw race across the Western world, and were used to justify colonisation. They believe that by exposing these historical roots of racism, opportunities to improve societal (...) attitudes to race will become easier to identify. -/- This article was produced by Futurum Careers, a free online resource and magazine aimed at encouraging 14-19-year-olds worldwide to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEM), and social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy (SHAPE). (shrink)

While the various forms of violence have been the subject of special studies, we lack a paradigm that would allow us to understand the different forms of violence (physical, social, cultural, structural, and so on) as aspects of a unified phenomenon. In this article, I shall take violence as destructive of sense or meaning. The relation of violence to embodiment arises through the role that the body plays in our making sense of the world. My claim is that violence is (...) destructive of this role. It undoes the role of the bodily “I can” in making sense of our surrounding world - be this its physical, cultural, or socialsignificance. (shrink)

Having asked, “What, then, is time?” Augustine admitted, “I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.” We all have a sense of time, but the description and explanation of it remain remarkably elusive. Through a series of detailed descriptions, Husserl attempted to clarify this sense of time. In my book, I trace the development of his account of our temporal self-awareness, starting (...) with his early 1905-1909 lectures on time consciousness and proceeding through the 1917-18 Bernau Manuscripts, the Analyses of Passive Syntheses of the 1920’s and ending with the C, B and E manuscripts on time and instincts of the 1930s. Although my book covers all the stages of Husserl’s account of temporality, it is nonetheless systematic in its approach. It is organized about a number of basic topics in the theory of time and presents and critically appraises Husserl’s positions on the issues pertaining to each. • THE ONTOLOGICAL STATUS OF TIME: Is time objective or subjective? Is it “out there,” a part of external reality or does it have a merely subjective existence, residing only in our memories and anticipations? Does Husserl’s “subjective” account presuppose ob-jective time? • THE “PRESENCE” OF THE PAST AS PAST: Memory, if it is to be distinguished from a direct, sensuous perception, must grasp the past as past. It must somehow “see” what no longer exists as no longer existing. The issue is: how do we do this? The same question arises with regard to our grasp through anticipation of the future as future. • THE TEMPORALITY OF OBJECTS: For Husserl, the apprehension of any sort of extended event, such as a melody, involves the synthesis of the “retentions” (the short term memories) of its notes and the anticipations these retentions awake in us. The question, here, is: what exactly is involved in this synthesis of retentions and anticipa-tions? How can these elements come together to present a single, individual object rather than presenting us with merely a collection of disparate presentations? In other words: How does temporal synthesis accomplish this presentation? • THE TEMPORALITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: Husserl asserts that consciousness, in placing its object in time also places itself in time. How does it do this? What is the relation between the consciousness that places itself in time and the consciousness that is placed in time? How do we unify them? • THE ONTOLOGICAL STATUS OF TIME-CONSTITUTING PHENOMENA: Husserl claims that “time-constituting phenomena are evidently objectivities fundamentally different than those constituted in time. They are neither individual objects nor individual processes, and the predicates of such objects or processes cannot be meaningfully ascribed to them.” This assertion raises a number of questions about the ontological status of these time-constituting phenomena. If we cannot apply the predicates of individual objects to them, what is the nature of their being? Given that such phenomena com-pose the field of consciousness, what is the ontological status of consciousness? Furthermore, if our apprehension directs itself towards individual objects, how can our consciousness grasp the pre-individual, time-constituting phenomena that make it up? At issue here is the status of Husserl’s own descriptions of consciousness and the temporal process. Does his theory undermine the possibility of the evidence he presents for it? • THE RELATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS TO THE EGO: Our sense of self involves more than our consciousness, more than the memories, perceptions, and anticipations that give it its content. It involves our sense as the subjective referent of every act, as the person to whom the world appears, as the one who is affected by the world and who acts with regard to it. What is the relation of this sense of self to our time consciousness? How does the simultaneous constitution of consciousness and its object result in the presence of the I that is the subject of consciousness? (shrink)

James Mensch, 1970 No philosophical activity is immune from the question of its grounds, its origin, its arche. Philosophizing is not carried out in a vacuum. The philosopher in any inclusive view cannot be seen to be a being set apart from the world about which he philosophizes. He is distinct neither from the world nor its history considered in its totality. A truth so obvious requires only a brief meditative reflection: A philosopher sits writing at his desk. Without even (...) raising his head, he directs his glance about him. What is the reality that appears? The most immediate objects of his perception, the pen, the paper, the desk, the printed book which lies open before him, even the words which he writes, all have a historical character. Paper, pen, desk and book, these objects are all the products of a historically defined type of work. They are the creations, the phenomenal manifestations of modern technological work.1 Even the words which he writes presuppose a history, a personal history insofar as these words are not empty signs but rather consist in meaningfully arranged characters, which he has learned to write and which someone has, therefore,. taught him to write. The meaning of words has to be won through a continuing encounter with reality, an encounter both personal and historically transcendent of the individual person, an encounter which is never the same, never repeated in an identical fashion. What is the reality that is present to him now, what is the totality of all that is now confronting us as beginning philosophers? As the above observations point out, the briefest of reflections leads us to the questions of the history and genesis of the things that confront us. But what is the condition of this confrontation, this encounter between the philosophizing subject and the world which he wishes to comprehend? Aristotle noted that all men naturally desire to know. Why? Our question is actually, “How does Being come to know itself?” This, of course, can be... (shrink)

Jean Améry’s memoir of his imprisonment and torture by the Nazis links the loss of “trust in the world” to the violence he experienced. The loss of trust makes him feel homeless. He can no longer find a place in the intersubjective world, the world for everyone. What is this “trust in the world”? How does violence destroy it? In this article, I use Améry’s remarks as guide for understanding the relation of violence, trust, and homelessness. Trust, I argue, is (...) crucial to the constitution of the intersubjective world. Violence, by undermining trust in Others, destroys the sense that this world is “for everyone.” In excluding the victim from its “for everyone,” it enforces a homelessness that transforms the victim’s very being-in-the-world. (shrink)

It is, without a doubt, a difficult task to address at once the state of philosophy as embodied by the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and the place of one’s own thought within it. This is the task that a co-director’s address tries to fill. Whether with a critical reexamination of the phenomenological mode of seeing distinctive of SPEP, of philosophical progress, or of the place of transcontinental philosophy, prior co-directors found ways to subtly chart the windings and turns (...) of the many streams that assemble to form this society.We seem to be, however, at a different juncture, so that another... (shrink)

This book offers a fresh look at Edmund Husserl’s philosophy as a nonfoundational approach to understanding the self as an embodied presence. Contrary to the conventional view of Husserl as carrying on the Cartesian tradition of seeking a trustworthy foundation for knowledge in the "pure" observations of a disembodied ego, James Mensch introduces us to the Husserl who, anticipating the later investigations of Merleau-Ponty, explored how the body functions to determine our self-presence, our freedom, and our sense of time. The (...) result is a concept of selfhood that allows us to see how consciousness’s arising from sensuous experiences follows from the temporal features of embodiment. From this understanding of what is crucial to Husserl’s phenomenology, the book draws the implications for language and ethics, comparing Husserl’s ideas with those of Derrida on language and with those of Heidegger and Levinas on responsibility. Paradoxically, it is these postmodernists who are shown to be extending the logic of foundationalism to its ultimate extreme, whereas Husserl can be seen as leading the way beyond modernity to a nonfoundational account of the self and its world. (shrink)

This essay lays out the historical case for a broader assessment of Kant’s relationship to Blumenbach by focusing first on Kant’s review of Herder in 1785 as the best lens through which to understand not only their respective theories of generation but indeed the specific motivation leading to Kant’s support for Blumenbach at all. The results of this inquiry will suggest that while Kant might have been interested in gaining the support of the rising star of the Göttingen medical faculty, (...) Blumenbach’s own theories did little to influence Kant’s approach to either generation-theory or race. (shrink)

It is a remarkable thing to find oneself suddenly surprised by an author after having spent years analysing, interpreting, and teaching their works. And yet, that is precisely the experience of many Kant specialists in recent times, as greater attention than ever has been placed on Kant’s discussions of gender and race. Part of the disorientation for Kantians surely comes from the way in which these investigations—oriented as they are by questions of empire as opposed to say, metaphysics—are able to (...) make a body of work that has been long-familiar seem strange and new. It is in this vein that I want to use my discussion here as an opportunity to reconsider one of Kant’s most familiar texts, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in order to focus on the case of moral failure presented by the person who has chosen an easy path in life: one who has ‘seine Talente verrosten ließ’ (4:423; let their talents rust, 75), to use Kant’s phrase.1 With this in focus, I will identify four subsequent counter examples offered up by Kant, each meant to offer specific cases of non-Europeans in a manner that can provide further moral instruction on this point. What this approach should reveal is not only Kant’s unsurprising consistency regarding the need for self-improvement, but also the compatibility he evidently saw between engaging his readers in moral guidance, on the one hand, and identifying non-European others as counterexamples of a morally worthless existence, on the other. (shrink)

This essay offers an interrogation of Leadership-as-Practice in the context of MacIntyre’s Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry. LAP is a constructionist leadership approach that rationalizes leadership as the co-creation of embodied leadership practices in organizations, and we argue that its theoretical and philosophical foundations are best aligned with a genealogist version of moral enquiry. We contend that LAP’s theoretical assumptions and implications place it in opposition to traditionalist and encyclopaedist moral philosophies and that application of LAP without an appreciation (...) for our argument poses challenges for practitioners as it diminishes their ability to learn from opposing perspectives. We argue for an appreciation of diverse moral viewpoints and discouragement of coercive moral practices from any competing perspective. While the philosophy undergirding LAP may encourage moral relativism and possible conflicts in principled beliefs, we offer LAP may strengthen organizational members cognitively and emotionally, bringing greater long-term benefit for the organization. (shrink)

This article goes behind stereotypes of Muslim veiling to ask after the representational structure underlying these images. I examine the public debate leading to the 2004 French law banning conspicuous religious signs in schools and French colonial attitudes to veiling in Algeria, in conjunction with discourses on the veil that have arisen in other western contexts. My argument is that western perceptions and representations of veiled Muslim women are not simply about Muslim women themselves. Rather than representing Muslim women, these (...) images fulfill a different function: they provide the negative mirror in which western constructions of identity and gender can be positively reflected. It is by means of the projection of gender oppression onto Islam, and its naturalization to the bodies of veiled women, that such mirroring takes place. This constitutes, I argue, a form of racialization. Drawing on the work of Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and Alcoff, I offer a phenomenological analysis of this racializing vision. What is at stake is a form of cultural racism that functions in the guise of anti-sexist and feminist liberatory discourse, at once posing a dilemma to feminists and concealing its racializing logic. (shrink)

Offers an alternative to the modern foundationalist paradigm, based in Husserl's analysis of temporality, that shows how the passing of modernity provides an opening for doing metaphysics in a new nonfoundationalist manner.

This study proposes a double thesis. The first concerns the Logische Untersuchungen itself. We will attempt to show that its statements about the nature of being are inconsistent and that this inconsis tency is responsible for the failure of this work. The second con cerns the Logische Untersuchungen's relation to the Ideen. The latter, we propose, is a response to the failure of the Logische Untersuchungen's ontology. It can thus be understood in terms of a shift in the ontology of (...) the Logische Untersuchungen, a shift motivated by the attempt to overcome the contradictory assertions of the Logische Untersuchungen. In this sense our thesis is that, in the technical meaning that Husserl gives the term, the Logische Untersuchungen and the Ideen can be linked via a "motivated path. " We can, by way of an introduction, clarify our theses by regard ing three elements. The first is the relation of epistemology to ontology. The second is the notion of motivation as Husserl conceives the term. The third is the fundamental distinctions that are to be explained via the notion of motivation. 1. We should begin by remarking that the goal of the Logische Untersuchungen is explicitly epistemological; it is that of answer ing "the cardinal question of epistemology, the question concerning the objectivity of knowledge" (LU, Tub. ed. , I, 8; F. , p. 56V For Husserl, his other questions - i. e. (shrink)

The belief that damaging an object may harm the individual to which the object relates is common among adults. We explored whether arousal following the destruction of a photograph of a loved partner is greater than that following the destruction of a photograph of a stranger, and whether this response is greater than when a photograph representing a non-person sentimental attachment is destroyed, using a measure of skin conductance response. Long-term supporters of a football team, who were also in a (...) long-term relationship, showed increased arousal when asked to destroy a photograph of their partner, but not a photograph of their team, even though both elicited equivalent ratings of emotional attachment. This may be because football teams are conceptualized differently from individuals. Future studies should address whether destruction of symbols that represent the enduring nature of the team elicit more emotional distress than photograph. (shrink)

The recent coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic pushed almost all institutions to adopt online and virtual education. The uncertainty of this situation produced various questions that perplexed educationists regarding what implications the pandemic would have on educational institutions, especially regarding how the switch to online education would impact the behavior and performance of students. The vast importance of this matter attracted the attention of researchers and served as the motivation for this research, which aims to resolve this confusion by studying the (...) use of mobile learning among students for educational purposes during the COVID-19 period. This study also examines how this situation has affected student learning behavior and performance in the higher education setting. This research is based on collaborative learning theory, sociocultural learning theory, and ML theory. This quantitative research employed the convenient sampling technique to collect data through structured questionnaires distributed to 396 students of higher education institutions who carry a mobile device. This study used descriptive and inferential statistics to make the data more meaningful. Structural equation modeling with AMOS software was used for hypothesis testing. The results showed that ML was a significant and positive predictor of SP and LB. Moreover, student LB partially mediated the relationship between ML and SP. The findings suggest that the academic performance of students can be enhanced by building a ML environment that aligns with the LB of students. Nevertheless, content suitable for ML must be developed, and future research should be conducted on this topic. (shrink)

By virtue of the originality and depth of its thought, Emmanuel Levinas’s masterpiece, _Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, _is destined to endure as one of the great works of philosophy. It is an essential text for understanding Levinas’s discussion of “the Other,” yet it is known as a “difficult” book. Modeled after Norman Kemp Smith’s commentary on _Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Levinas’s Existential Analytic _guides both new and experienced readers through Levinas’s text. James R. Mensch explicates Levinas’s (...) arguments and shows their historical referents, particularly with regard to Heidegger, Husserl, and Derrida. Students using this book alongside _Totality and Infinity _will be able to follow its arguments and grasp the subtle phenomenological analyses that fill it. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s notion of public space is one of her most fruitful, yet frustrating concepts. Having employed it to analyze political freedom, she claims that such space has largely disappeared in the modern world. In what follows, I am going to argue that this pessimistic assessment follows from Arendt’s exclusion of labor and work from the public realm. Against Arendt’s claim that such activities are essentially private, I shall argue that they, like action, manifest our embodied being-in-the-world. When we think (...) of public space in terms of our embodied presence, it becomes a concept applicable to modern democratic politics. (shrink)

Eighteenth-century German writers with broad interests in natural history, and in particular, in the kind of ethnographic reports typically included in travel and expedition narratives, had to be able to access and read the original reports or they had to work with translations. The translators of these reports were, moreover, typically forced more than usual into the role of interpreter. This was especially the case when it came to accounts wherein vocabulary did not exist or was at least not settled, (...) and more importantly where scientific understanding was uncertain or altogether lacking, a situation that could only make the creation of semantic categories all the more significant. With this state of affairs in mind, this essay concentrates on Immanuel Kant’s work to develop a specialised racial vocabulary, and does so in a manner that reveals the importance of Buffon’s account of variation as a resource for Kant, even as Kant sought to position the new vocabulary as an improved template for transforming taxonomy or Naturbeschreibung into a genuine historical science or Naturgeschichte. (shrink)

What does Husserlian phenomenology have to offer feminist theory? More specifically, can we find resources within Husserl’s account of the living body ( Leib ) for the critical feminist project of rethinking embodiment beyond the dichotomies not only of mind/body but also of subject/object and activity/passivity? This essay begins by explicating the reasons for feminist hesitation with respect to Husserlian phenomenology. I then explore the resources that Husserl’s phenomenology of touch and his account of sensings hold for feminist theory. My (...) reading of Husserl proceeds by means of a comparison between his description of touch in Ideas II and Merleau-Ponty’s early appropriation of this account in the Phenomenology of Perception, as well as through an unlikely rapprochement between Husserl and Irigaray on the question of touch. Moreover, by revisiting the limitations in Husserl’s approach to the body—limitations of which any feminist appropriation must remain cognizant—I attempt to take Husserl’s phenomenology of touch beyond its initial methodologically solipsistic frame and to ask whether and how it can contribute to thinking gendered and racialized bodies. The phenomenology of touch, I argue, can allow us to understand the interplay between subjective, felt embodiment and social-historical context. In opening up Husserl’s account of touch to other dimensions—intersubjective and affective—sociality is revealed as residing within, and structuring of, touch. Such touch can allow us to think embodiment anew. (shrink)

This article examines the concept of existence underlying Carl Schmitt’s political philosophy—a concept is that Heidegger largely shares. Can such a conception do justice to our political life? Or is it, in fact, inimical to it? The crucial issue here is that of political identity and the role that violence plays in its formation. The article concludes by examining Jan Patočka’s account of existence as motion and applying it to our political commitments.

The intertwining: the recursion of the seer and the seen -- Artificial intelligence and the phenomenology of flesh -- Aesthetic education and the project of being human -- The intertwining of incommensurables: Yann Martel's life of Pi -- Flesh and the limits of self-making -- Violence and embodiment -- Excessive presence and the image -- Politics and freedom -- Sovereignty and alterity -- Political violence -- Public space -- Sustaining the other: tolerance as a positive ideal -- Forgiveness and incarnation.