This article examines the respective interpretations of the Arrernte tribe of central Australian Aborigines adopted by the English biologist Baldwin Spencer and the German missionary Carl Strehlow. These interpretations are explored in relation to the broader theoretical debates in the theory of myth that took place in England and Germany in the latter half of the 19th century. In Britain, these debates were initially shaped by the comparative philology of F. Max Müller, before being transformed by the evolutionism of (...) class='Hi'>Edward Burnett Tylor and James George Frazer. The article shows how the research of Spencer and Strehlow was both influenced by and exerted an influence upon these theoretical debates, before assessing their research findings in relation to the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and the theories of myth offered by Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Hans Blumenberg. (shrink)

Preface and Postscript Combining a Preface with a Postscript seems a particularly apposite way to introduce (and conclude) a collection of essays on ...

Perceptual experience is often said to be transparent; that is, when we have a perceptual experience we seem to be aware of properties of the objects around us, and never seem to be aware of properties of the experience itself. This is a introspective fact. It is also often said that we can infer a metaphysical fact from this introspective fact, e.g. a fact about the nature of perceptual experience. A transparency theory fills in the details for these two facts, (...) and bridges the gap between them. We have three aims: to scrutinize Michael Tye’s transparency theory :137–151, 2002; Consciousness revisited: materialism without phenomenal concepts, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2009; Philos Stud 170:39–57, 2014a), introduce a new transparency theory, and advance a meta-theoretical hypothesis about the interest, and import, of transparency theories. (shrink)

At this point I should say something about one of the frequent criticisms addressed to me, and to which I have always wanted to respond, that in the process of characterizing the production of Europe’s inferior Others, my work is only negative polemic which does not advance a new epistemological approach or method, and expresses only desperation at the possibility of ever dealing seriously with other cultures. These criticisms are related to the matters I’ve been discussing so far, and while (...) I have no desire to unleash a point-by-point refutation of my critics, I do want to respond in a way that is intellectually pertinent to the topic at hand.What I took myself to be undertaking in Orientalism was an adversarial critique not only of the field’s perspective and political economy, but also of the sociocultural situation that makes its discourse both so possible and so sustainable. Epistemologies, discourses, and methods like Orientalism are scarcely worth the name if they are reductively characterized as objects like shoes, patched when worn out, discarded and replaced with new objects when old and unfixable. The archival dignity, institutional authority, and patriarchal longevity of Orientalism should be taken seriously because in the aggregate these traits function as a worldview with considerable political force not easily brushed away as so much epistemology. Thus Orientalism in my view is a structure erected in the thick of an imperial contest whose dominant wing it represented and elaborated not only as scholarship but as a partisan ideology. Yet Orientalism hid the contest beneath its scholarly and aesthetic idioms. These things are what I was trying to show, in addition to arguing that there is no discipline, no structure of knowledge, no institution or epistemology that can or has ever stood free of the various sociocultural, historical, and political formations that give epochs their peculiar individuality. Edward W. Said is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is “An Ideology of Difference”. (shrink)

Derrida and Foucault are opposed to each other on a number of grounds, and perhaps the one specially singled out in Foucault's attack on Derrida—that Derrida is concerned only with "reading" a text and that a text is nothing more than the "traces" found there by the reader—would be the appropriate one to begin with here.1 According to Foucault, if the text is important for Derrida because its real situation is literally an abysmally textual element, l'écriture en abîme with which (...) criticism so far has been unable really to deal,2 then for Foucault the text is important because it inhabits an element of power with a decisive claim on actuality, even though that power is invisible or implied. Derrida's criticism therefore moves us into the text, Foucault's in and out of it. · 1. Michel Foucault's attack on Derrida is to be found in an appendix to the later version of Folie et déraison: Historie de la folie à l'âge classique , pp. 583-602; the earlier edition has been translated into English: Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard .· 2. Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination , p. 297. Edward W. Said, Parr Professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, is the author of Orientalism and The Question of Palestine, along with numerous publications on literature, politics, and culture; his Beginnings: Intention and Method received the first annual Lionel Trilling Memorial Award. "The Problem of Textuality" will appear in a slightly different form in his Criticism between Culture and System. (shrink)

Since neither of these two inordinately long responses deals seriously with what I said in “An Ideology of Difference” , both the Boyarins and Griffin are made even more absurd by actual events occurring as they wrote. The Israeli army has by now been in direct and brutal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza for twenty-one years; the intifadah, surely the most impressive and disciplined anticolonial insurrection in this century, is now in its eleventh month. The daily killings (...) of unarmed Palestinians by armed Israelis, soldiers and settlers, numbers several hundred; yesterday two more Palestinians were killed, the day before four were killed. The beatings, expulsions, wholesale collective punishments, the closure of schools and universities, as well as the imprisonment of dozens of thousands in places like Ansar III, a concentration camp, continue. A V sign flashed by a young Palestinian carries with six months in jail; a Palestinian flag can get you up to ten years; you risk burial alive by zealous Israel Defense Forces soldiers; if you are a member of a popular committee you are liable to arrest, and all professional, syndical, or community associations are now illegal. Any Palestinian can be put in jail without charge or trial for up to six months, renewable, for any offense, which needn’t be revealed to him or her. For non-Jews, approximately 1.5 million people on the West Bank and Gaza, there are thus no rights whatever. On the other hand, Jews are protected by Israeli law on the Occupied Territories. In such a state of apartheid—so named by most honest Israelis—the intifadah continues, as does the ideology of difference vainly attempting to repress and willfully misinterpret its significance. Edward W. Said is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors”. (shrink)

We address how listeners perceive temporal regularity in music performances, which are rich in temporal irregularities. A computational model is described in which a small system of internal self‐sustained oscillations, operating at different periods with specific phase and period relations, entrains to the rhythms of music performances. Based on temporal expectancies embodied by the oscillations, the model predicts the categorization of temporally changing event intervals into discrete metrical categories, as well as the perceptual salience of deviations from these categories. The (...) model's predictions are tested in two experiments using piano performances of the same music with different phrase structure interpretations (Experiment 1) or different melodic interpretations (Experiment 2). The model successfully tracked temporal regularity amidst the temporal fluctuations found in the performances. The model's sensitivity to performed deviations from its temporal expectations compared favorably with the performers' structural (phrasal and melodic) intentions. Furthermore, the model tracked normal performances (with increased temporal variability) better than performances in which temporal fluctuations associated with individual voices were removed (with decreased variability). The small, systematic temporal irregularities characteristic of human performances (chord asynchronies) improved tracking, but randomly generated temporal irregularities did not. These findings suggest that perception of temporal regularity in complex musical sequences is based on temporal expectancies that adapt in response to temporally fluctuating input. (shrink)

I do not want to be misunderstood as saying that the cultural situation I describe here caused Reagan, or that it typifies Reaganism, or that everything about it can be ascribed or referred back to the personality of Ronald Reagan. What I argue is that a particular situation within the field we call "criticism" is not merely related to but is an integral part of the currents of thought and practice that play a role within the Reagan era. Moreover, I (...) think, "criticism" and the traditional academic humanities have gone through a series of developments over time whose beneficiary and culmination is Reaganism. Those are the gross claims that I make for my argument.A number of miscellaneous points need to be made here. I am fully aware that any effort to characterize the present cultural moment is very likely to seem quixotic at best, unprofessional at worst. But that, I submit, is an aspect of the present cultural moment, in which the social and historical setting of critical activity is a totality felt to be benign , uncharacterizable as a whole and somehow outside history. Thus it seems to me that one thing to be tried–out of sheer critical obstinacy–is precisely that kind of generalization, that kind of political portrayal, that kind of overview condemned by the present dominant culture to appear inappropriate and doomed from the start.It is my conviction that culture works very effectively to make invisible and even "impossible" the actual affiliations that exist between the world of ideas and scholarship on the one hand, and the world of brute politics, corporate and state power, and military force, on the other. The cult of expertise and professionalism, for example, has so restricted our scope of vision that a positive doctrine of noninterference among fields has set in. This doctrine has it that the general public is best left ignorant, and the most crucial policy questions affecting human existence are best left to "experts," specialists who talk about their specialty only, and–to use the word first given wide social approbation by Walter Lippman in Public Opinion and The Phantom Public–"insiders," people who are endowed with the special privilege of knowing how things really work and, more important, of being close to power1.1. See Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century , pp. 180-85 and 212-6. (shrink)

At one point Fish says that a profession produces no “real” commodity but offers only a service. But surely the increasing reification of services and even of knowledge has made them a commodity as well. And indeed the logical extension of Fish’s position on professionalism is not that it is something done or lived but something produced and reproduced, albeit with redistributed and redeployed values. What those are, Fish doesn’t say. Then again he makes the rather telling remarks that he (...) is “turning everything into professionalism” —an instance of overstating and overinsisting at a moment when what he is really arguing for can neither be formulated nor defended clearly. To turn “everything” into professionalism is to strip professionalism of any meaning at all. For until one can define professionalism—and the particular values associated with it—there is very little value in going on about the incoherencies of antiprofessionalism. Fish resorts to the reductionist attitude of telling us that professionalism is what is, and whatever is, is more or less therefore right, which by only the slightest extension of its logic is a view no less applicable to antiprofessionalism.On the other hand, Fish does say that the profession has changed, that new ways of doing things have emerged, that values are contested within and without the profession. Those kinds of observations, however, have to be pursued, made me more concrete, put in specific historical contexts, one of which is the fact that professions are not natural objects but concrete, political, economic, and social formations playing very defined, although sometimes barely visible, roles. Unfortunately, Fish commits the lobbyist-s error by obscuring and being blind to the sociopolitical actualities of what he lobbies for even as he defends its existence. Thus when Fish alleges that the reason most literary professionals “exist in a shamefaced relationship with the machinery that enables their labors” is because of their damaging antiprofessionalism , he is making an observation whose form is assertive but whose sense is tautological since he neither defines the professional and professionalism nor specifies “machinery” and “labors” with any precision at all. For if you take the extraordinary step of reducing everything to professionalism and institutionalism as Fish does, then the very possibility of talking about the profession with any intelligibility is negated. Few would dispute Fish’s important point, that all interpretive and social situations are in fact already grounded in a context, in institutions, communities, and so forth. But there is a very great difference between making that claim and going on to say that so far as the literary profession is concerned, “the profession” is the context to which “everything” can be related. Edward W. Said’s most recent work is The World, the Text, and the Critic. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions” and “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community”. (shrink)

We address the problem of musical variation (identification of different musical sequences as variations) and its implications for mental representations of music. According to reductionist theories, listeners judge the structural importance of musical events while forming mental representations. These judgments may result from the production of reduced memory representations that retain only the musical gist. In a study of improvised music performance, pianists produced variations on melodies. Analyses of the musical events retained across variations provided support for the reductionist account (...) of structural importance. A neural network trained to produce reduced memory representations for the same melodies represented structurally important events more efficiently than others. Agreement among the musicians' improvisations, the network model, and music‐theoretic predictions suggest that perceived constancy across musical variation is a natural result of a reductionist mechanism for producing memory representations. (shrink)

When we watch movies, or are tricked by a trompe-l'oeil painting, we seem to be visually representing possible worlds; often non-actual possible worlds. This suggests that we really can visually represent possible worlds. The suggested claim is refined and developed here into a theory of visual experience that holds that all visual experiences, both veridical and non-veridical, represent possible worlds, many of which are non-actual.

Scholars have known for some time that Plotinus' treatment of memory forms an important part of his philosophy; and while there are various points of view from which his doctrine can be approached, one seems singularly important. His analysis of memory boldly contrasts conscious and unconscious behaviour in human beings and so materially advances our knowledge of his concept of conscious experience.

This essay will postulate that Adam Smith's view of society was formulated out of historical influences far broader than generally conceded by many commentators in economic thought. Smith's basic behavioral concepts of sympathy and self-interest are significant contributions to economic thought as are his philosophy of human nature being based on liberty and freedom and not simply the creation of wealth. The vectors of influence that converged on Adam Smith were of varied and even contradictory natures. Yet the result of (...) this collision of philosophical forces was clearly an event of significance in the history of philosophical and economic thought. (shrink)

When we watch movies, or are tricked by a trompe-l'oeil painting, we seem to be visually representing possible worlds; often non-actual possible worlds. This suggests that we really can visually represent possible worlds. The suggested claim is refined and developed here into a theory of visual experience that holds that all visual experiences, both veridical and non-veridical, represent possible worlds, many of which are non-actual.

Scholars have known for some time that Plotinus' treatment of memory forms an important part of his philosophy; and while there are various points of view from which his doctrine can be approached, one seems singularly important. His analysis of memory boldly contrasts conscious and unconscious behaviour in human beings and so materially advances our knowledge of his concept of conscious experience.

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 seems to have broken, for the first time, the immunity from sustained criticism previously enjoyed by Israel and its American supporters. For a variety of reasons, Israel’s status in European and American public life and discourse has always been special, just as the position of Jews in the West has always been special, sometimes for its tragedy and horrendous suffering, at other times for its uniquely impressive intellectual and aesthetic triumphs. On behalf of (...) Israel, anomalous norms, exceptional arguments, eccentric claims were made, all of them forcibly conveying the notion that Israel does not entirely belong to the world of normal politics. Nevertheless, Israel—and with it, Zionism—had gained this unusual status politically, not miraculously: it merged with a variety of currents in the West whose power and attractiveness for supporters of Israel effaced anything as concrete as, for example, an Israeli policy of rigid separation between Jew and non-Jew, or a military rule over hundreds of thousands of Arabs that was as repressive as any tyranny in Latin America or Eastern Europe. There are any number of credible accounts of this, from daily fare in the Israeli press to studies by Amnesty International, to reports by various U.N. bodies, Western journalists, church groups, and, not least, dissenting supporters of Israel. In other words, even though Israel was a Jewish state established by force on territory already inhabited by a native population largely of Muslim Arabs, in a part of the world overwhelmingly Muslim and Arab, it appeared to most of Israel’s supporters in the West that the Palestinian Arabs who paid a large part of the price for Israel’s establishment were neither relevant nor necessarily even real. What changed in 1982 was that the distance between Arab and Jew was for the first time perceived more or less universally as not so great and, indeed, that any consideration of Israel, and any perception of Israel at all, would have to include some consideration of the Palestinian Arabs, their travail, their claims, their humanity.Changes of this sort seem to occur dramatically, although it is more accurate to comprehend them as complex, cumulative, often contradictory processes occurring over a long period of time. Above all else, however, no such process can be viewed neutrally, since for better or for worse there are many interests at work in it and, therefore, many interests also at work whenever it is interpreted or reported. Moreover, while it is worthwhile and even possible to reduce and curtail the gross pressure of those interests for the purpose of analysis or reflection, it is useless to deny that any such analysis is inevitably grounded in, or inevitably affiliated to, a particular historical moment and a specific political situation. Edward Said, Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, is the author of, among other works, The Question of Palestine , The World, the Text, and the Critic , and After the Last Sky . He will give the 1985 T. S. Eliot Lectures, on Culture and Imperialism, at the University of Kent later this year. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry include “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community” and “On Professionalism: Response to Stanley Fish”. (shrink)

Media coverage of the recent explosion of violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is so thoroughly biased in favor of Israel, argues Edward Said, that Israel itself is made to appear as the victim, despite the fact that it is using missiles, tanks, and helicopter gunships against stone-throwing civilians rebelling, in their own towns, against their continued oppression. American Zionism is so successful, Said adds, that it has rendered impermissible any public discussion of Israeli policy, making this the last (...) taboo in American discourse, which allows for the burning of the American flag, but not for criticism of Israel. (shrink)

The book addresses George Santayana’s philosophy of religion and its basis in his overall philosophical project with an exploration of some phenomenological aspects of his approach and his potential influence on contemporary religious thought. Emphasis is placed upon his Roman Catholic and Greek influences and his constructionist viewpoint toward Catholic symbols and dogma.

Butler refused to be satisfied with just one leading principle, or rational basis for human action, but in the end settled for three: self-love, to provide for our ‘own private good’; benevolence, to consider ‘the good of our fellow creatures’ ; and conscience, ‘to preside and govern’ over our lives as a whole. By so doing he hoped to ensure a completeness to our ethical scheme, so that nothing would be omitted from our moral deliberations. Yet by so doing he (...) also exposed himself to severe criticism. For any such appeal to a plurality of principles, as Green remarked, is ‘repugnant both to the philosophic craving for unity, and to that ideal of “singleness of heart” which we have been accustomed to associate with the highest virtue’. More specifically, by appealing to a plurality of principles Butler faced the charges of circularity, where the principles come to define and defend each other; inconsistency, where the principles ‘take turns’ at being primary and hence render each other superfluous; and incompleteness, where the ‘primary principle’ is itself undefined or undefended. As the tale has been told Butler stands accused of all three of these errors. (shrink)

This book examines the criticism that modern business schools face and how these obstacles have evolved throughout history. Through historical, resource, and professional school contexts, it sheds light on the operating environment of the business school and the challenges endemic to various university-based professional schools, exploring the likelihood that potential interventions will result in success or failure. Business schools are often accused of inhibiting the practice of business by producing research that is irrelevant and does not address real concerns facing (...) managers. This book investigates these accusations by outlining the historical values on which academic institutions are based, the resources and funding available today, and comparisons to other professional schools which undergo a similar level of scrutiny. This extensive coverage will help academics, administrators, faculty, and policy makers with the tools to understand better the ill-will towards business schools in today's university structure, and ultimately to deliver on the benefits they provide to stakeholders. (shrink)

Het in 1978 gepubliceerde boek Orientalism heeft zeer veel reacties losgemaakt. In het westen werd de analyse van de constructies van een stereotiep beeld van dee "Oriënt" overwegend gunstig ontvangen, maar in de Arabische wereld is men nog aan intellectuele nuancering van een beeldvorming toe.