With contributions from a galaxy of economists -€including David Colander, Robin Hahnel, Yanis Varioufakis and Fred Lee - this book is an important read and an€attempt to break down the varied barriers that have been erected to economic pluralism.

Camus's apparent flirtation with Catholicism is rooted in his notion of absurdity. Paradoxically, an absurdity of existence both unites us to the world and alienates us from it. Whereas the alienation was avoided by a traditional philosophy that improperly imposed reason on reality, ultimate reality was construed by religion as a God who passes understanding. And though limitations on understanding are embodied by such things as a paradox of Christ who is both man and not man, Camus's profound insights on (...) man's absurd condition may have been remiss because he imposed an understanding of rational philosophy on religion. (shrink)

Wittgenstein and Heidegger were not merely pioneering leaders of different philosophical schools. They both disavowed a Judeo-Christian God and influenced trends opposed to traditional metaphysical arguments. Therefore, we may suppose that they had a major role in relegating medieval arguments for God to archaic syllogistic pedantries. But I will argue that a conditional premise in Thomas’ Second-Way argument not only finds expression in modal logic, since it specifies necessarily if there is no God, there is no world, but involves a (...) natural sort of reasoning. Its ordinariness bears on Wittgenstein and Heidegger because they had extraordinary moods induced by considering the world’s possible nonexistence. Taken with their expressed disbelief in God when they consider the nonexistence, these things suggest a surreptitious embracement of Thomas’ reasoning. This fact both strengthens and makes it relevant to a pervasive twentieth-century “angst.”. (shrink)

Tally reviews Loren Goldner's Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic King, which posits that Melville was the American Marx, exposing the crisis of bourgeois ideology in the revolutionary period around 1848. In this, Goldner follows a tradition of Marxian scholarship of Melville, notably including C.L.R. James, Michael Paul Rogin, and Cesare Casarino. Tally concludes that Goldner's argument, while interesting, is limited by its focus on American exceptionalism and by ignoring the postnational force of Melville's novels.

Deleuze’s career is frequently divided between his “early” monographs devoted to the history of philosophy and his more mature work, including the collaborations with Félix Guattari, written “in his own voice.” Yet Deleuze’s early work is integral to the later writings; far from merely summarizing Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, or Spinoza, Deleuze transforms their thought in such a way that they become new, fresh, and strange. Deleuze’s distaste for the Hegelian institution of the history of philosophy is overcome by his peculiar (...) approach to it, by which he transforms the project into something else, a nomadography that projects an alternative line of flight, not only allowing Deleuze to “get out” of the institution, but allowing us to re-imagine it in productive new ways. Deleuze’s nomad thinkers are like sudden, bewildering eruptions of “joyful wisdom” in an apparent continuum of stable meanings, standard commentaries, settled thought. The early Deleuze, by engaging these thinkers, discovered a new way of doing philosophy. (shrink)

Deleuze’s career is frequently divided between his “early” monographs devoted to the history of philosophy and his more mature work, including the collaborations with Félix Guattari, written “in his own voice.” Yet Deleuze’s early work is integral to the later writings; far from merely summarizing Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, or Spinoza, Deleuze transforms their thought in such a way that they become new, fresh, and strange. Deleuze’s distaste for the Hegelian institution of the history of philosophy is overcome by his peculiar (...) approach to it, by which he transforms the project into something else, a nomadography that projects an alternative line of flight, not only allowing Deleuze to “get out” of the institution, but allowing us to re-imagine it in productive new ways. Deleuze’s nomad thinkers are like sudden, bewildering eruptions of “joyful wisdom” in an apparent continuum of stable meanings, standard commentaries, settled thought. The early Deleuze, by engaging these thinkers, discovered a new way of doing philosophy. (shrink)

"Uprightness" was termed the "leitmotiv in the formation of the human organism" by Erwin Straus (1966, p. 139). He felt that without it the human being was certainly doomed to die. Yet, what happens with those who are deprived of their "uprightness" in either the literal or moral sense (as in "not to stoop to anything"), through becoming Dis-abled? Getting up, rising in opposition to the "other" (Allon) implies a moral dimension in the case of human Dis-ability which is tied (...) to the leitmotiv established by the upright posture of anthropos . The suggestion that there is a moral dimension to Disability is a radical notion in a culture whose health professionals have become very sensitive to any idea that suggests we are blaming those who through no fault of their own have become in some way disadvantaged as compared to the mainstream of society. Although the importance of rising in opposition to the world (Allon) was perhaps originally established upon the upright posture quite literally, because man is a sense-making and sense-giving creature, this primordial act which establishes our full humanity may itself be represented and re-enacted in a variety of ways which can and should become the central project of rehabilitation of the body, as opposed to the current emphasis on technique and technological innovation. It is in the changing physiognomy of the Dis-abled person's ruptured world that we may discover the phenomenological sense of Dis-ability. Keywords: Dis-Ability, Uprightness, Rehabilitation CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

This article explores the philosophies of Heidegger and Wittgenstein to illustrate the thesis that philosophy is a human activity exhibiting a unity of investigative and therapeutic aims. For both philosophers, the purpose of philosophical concepts is to point toward a path of transformation rather than to explain. For both, a first step on this path is the recognition of constraining illusions, whether conventional or metaphysical. For both, such illusions are sedimented in linguistic practices, and for both, philosophical investigation is a (...) way of emancipating thought and life from illusion by bringing what is already prereflectively understood into the light of thematic explicitness. And what both philosophers bring into thematic explicitness are aspects of the context-embeddedness and finitude of human existence. It is hoped that comparing the works of these two philosophers will unveil features of each that are more difficult to discern in the works of either considered in isolation. (shrink)