We argue that two main accounts of hypocrisy— the deception-based and the moral-non-seriousness-based account—fail to capture a specific kind of hypocrite who is morally serious and sincere "all the way down." The kind of hypocrisy exemplified by this hypocrite is irreducible to deception, self-deception or a lack of moral seriousness. We call this elusive and peculiar kind of hypocrisy, pure hypocrisy. We articulate the characteristics of pure hypocrisy and describe the moral psychology of two kinds of pure hypocrites.

One unresolved dispute within Heidegger scholarship concerns the question of whether Dasein should be conceived in terms of narrative self-constitution. A survey of the current literature suggests two standard responses. The first correlates Heidegger’s talk of authentic historicality with that of self-authorship. To the alternative perspective, however, Heidegger’s talk of Dasein’s existentiality, with its emphasis on nullity and unattainability, is taken as evidence that Dasein is structurally and ontologically incapable of being completed via any life-project. Narrativity imports into Being and (...) Time commitments concerning temporality, selfhood, and ethics, which Heidegger rejects. Although both positions find good exegetic support for their conclusions, they can’t both be right. In this article, I navigate a path between these two irreconcilable positions by applying insights derived from recent debates within Anglo-American literature on personal identity. I develop an alternative thesis to Narrativism, without rejecting it outright, by arguing that Dasein can be analysed in terms of what I call narratability conditions. These allow us to make sense of the prima facie paradoxical notion of historicality without narrativity. Indeed, rather than reconciling the two standard positions, I hold that the tension between them says something important about Dasein’s kind of existence. Thus I conclude that while the narrativist question Who ought I to be? is perfectly legitimate within limits, what the existential analysis of the limits on narratability reveals is that no answer to this question can ever be definitive. (shrink)

Abstract: For William Blattner, Heidegger's phenomenology fails to demonstrate how a nonsuccessive temporal manifold can ‘generate’ the appropriate sequence of world-time Nows. Without this he cannot explain the ‘derivative’ status of ordinary time. In this article I show that it is only Blattner's reconstruction that makes failure inevitable. Specifically, Blattner is wrong in the way he sets out the explanatory burden, arguing that the structure of world-time must meet the traditional requirements of ordinary time logic if the derivation is to (...) succeed. He takes this to mean: mundane ‘tasks’, the contents of world-time nows, must form a transitive series, importing back into world-time the very structure that Heidegger says is derived by its levelling-off. I argue, instead, that world-time nows, seen at the level of lived content, can be quite ‘irrational’ but this is perfectly consistent with the generative thesis. Adapting Blattner's useful suggestion that temporality is sequence building or ‘iterative’ I show that iteration does not manifest itself at the level of tasks but at the ‘existential’ level of my involvement in a task. Depriving that involvement of its expressive content is what accounts for the levelling-off of the world-time now and thus the derivation of the ordinary concept of time. (shrink)

Performance philosophy commences with an impertinent gesture when it describes itself as inaugurating a ‘new field’ of study. Accompanying that claim is a radical proposition that ‘performance thinks’; that it should be counted as a form of philosophising in its own right. But in what sense can performance be construed as ‘genuinely’ philosophical thought? Taking my cue from Laura Cull’s alignment of performance philosophy with Laruelle’s practice of ‘non philosophy’ – and specifically, with its introduction of ‘democracy’ into the dispositives (...) of ‘standard’ philosophy in order to challenge its transcendental authority over the Real – I argue that performance philosophy might be seen to enact a similar disruption of the ‘dispositives’ of performance theory. This, however, is only partly what is at stake in the fundamental proposition of performance philosophy, and I conclude by suggesting that a more radical proposal lies behind its assertion of a new ‘field’ – one that does not reduce it to an empirical fact, but grasps it as a radical ‘utopian’ hypothesis designed to ‘open up’ the philosophical dimension of performance itself; utopian because what performance offers – seen in this way - is not simply another system of representation but a possible democratic thought of the Real itself. (shrink)

The aesthetic exception theorises anew the relation between art and politics. It challenges critical trends that discount the role of aesthetic autonomy, to impulsively reassert art as an effective form of social engagement. But it equally challenges those on the flipside of the efficacy debate, who insist that art's politics is limited to a recondite space of 'autonomous resistance'. The book shows how each side of the efficacy debate overlooks art's exceptional status and its social mediations. Mobilising philosophy and cultural (...) theory, and employing examples from visual art, performance, and theatre, it proposes four alternative tests to 'effect' to offer a nuanced account of art's political character. Those tests examine how art relates to politics as a practice that articulates its historical conjuncture, and how it prefigures the 'new' through simulations capable of activating the political life of the spectator. (shrink)

The article develops Sartre's remarks on the paradox of the actor in two ways. Firstly, it derives from them an 'existential ontology' of mimetic performance - an 'onto-mimetology'. Secondly, it uses this reconstruction in order to put pressure on Sartre's analogy of the actor with bad faith. In grasping the problem of acting from a Sartrean perspective, I show that this analogy is not as clear cut as he assumes and that a crucial difference exists between the situation of the (...) theatre and that of bad faith. To master the paradox of his own being I argue the actor's technique indeed utilizes the same 'non-persuasiveness-of-belief ' thesis identified by Sartre as the condition of possibility for bad faith, yet in the actor's case it need not necessitate the condition of bad faith. In conclusion, I propose that through the notion of play, the actor sheds intriguing light on Sartre's notion of freedom. (shrink)

The article develops Sartre's remarks on the paradox of the actor in two ways. Firstly, it derives from them an 'existential ontology' of mimetic performance - an 'onto-mimetology'. Secondly, it uses this reconstruction in order to put pressure on Sartre's analogy of the actor with bad faith. In grasping the problem of acting from a Sartrean perspective, I show that this analogy is not as clear cut as he assumes and that a crucial difference exists between the situation of the (...) theatre and that of bad faith. To master the paradox of his own being I argue the actor's technique indeed utilizes the same 'non-persuasiveness-of-belief ' thesis identified by Sartre as the condition of possibility for bad faith, yet in the actor's case it need not necessitate the condition of bad faith. In conclusion, I propose that through the notion of play, the actor sheds intriguing light on Sartre's notion of freedom. (shrink)

This chapter offers an analysis of the speech conditions constitutive for the staging of political disagreement. Rather than seeking to offer an explanation for various situations of protest, however, it aims to identify what, if anything, is unique or peculiar to such modes of address. Drawing on the resources of speech act theory, the chapter suggests a reading of ‘dissensual speech’ as a form of ‘unauthorised’ speech through which the ‘people’ appear, however, evanescently. It analyses the peculiarities of dissensual speech (...) in the following ways: first, in terms of specifying its modes of utterance, which are identified with phatic and agonic modes of address and, second, in terms of its performative attitudes. In analysing the latter, I turn to Foucault’s notion of parrēsiastic speech in order to confront a paradox that arises with my reading of dissensual speech viewed in terms of ‘performatives’, since parrēsia—‘speaking truth to power’—is radically opposed to two fundamental rules that govern performatives and illocutionary forces: that they are conventional and that their enunciator must be authorised to use them. The chapter proposes a resolution to this contradiction by showing that an affinity exists between parrēsiastic speech and dissensual speech insofar as both entail ‘risk’ to the speaker in uttering a truth. The question then is whether it is possible to collectivise that risk, or whether parrēsia necessarily remains the speech of the individual martyr. (shrink)

This chapter offers an analysis of the speech conditions constitutive for the staging of political disagreement. Rather than seeking to offer an explanation for various situations of protest, however, it aims to identify what, if anything, is unique or peculiar to such modes of address. Drawing on the resources of speech act theory, the chapter suggests a reading of ‘dissensual speech’ as a form of ‘unauthorised’ speech through which the ‘people’ appear, however, evanescently. It analyses the peculiarities of dissensual speech (...) in the following ways: first, in terms of specifying its modes of utterance, which are identified with phatic and agonic modes of address and, second, in terms of its performative attitudes. In analysing the latter, I turn to Foucault’s notion of parrēsiastic speech in order to confront a paradox that arises with my reading of dissensual speech viewed in terms of ‘performatives’, since parrēsia—‘speaking truth to power’—is radically opposed to two fundamental rules that govern performatives and illocutionary forces: that they are conventional and that their enunciator must be authorised to use them. The chapter proposes a resolution to this contradiction by showing that an affinity exists between parrēsiastic speech and dissensual speech insofar as both entail ‘risk’ to the speaker in uttering a truth. The question then is whether it is possible to collectivise that risk, or whether parrēsia necessarily remains the speech of the individual martyr. (shrink)

This book combines performance analysis with contemporary political philosophy to advance new ways of understanding both political performance and the performativity of the politics of the street. Our times are pre-eminently political times and have drawn radical responses from many theatre and performance practitioners. However, a decade of conflict in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the eruption of new social movements around the world, the growth of anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation struggles, the upsurge of protests against the blockades of neoliberalism, and (...) the rising tide of dissent and anger against corporate power, with its exorbitant social costs, have left theatre and performance scholarship confronting something of a dilemma: how to theorize the political antagonisms of our day? Drawing on the resources of ‘post-Marxist’ political thinkers such as Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière, the book explores how new theoretical horizons have been made available for performance analysis. (shrink)

This essay explores the discursive invocation of ‘civil war’ to describe the polarization of the political terrain in post-Referendum Britain in order to contextualize the National Theatre’s production of Carol Ann Duffy and Rufus Norris’s ‘verbatim’ play My Country and its representation of Brexit. It shows how the political reality of Brexit, understood as a crisis of ‘general enculturation’, undermined the NT’s attempt to transcend the impasse of the political context. It argues that in identifying the NT with the play’s (...) central figure of Britannia, an image of reconciliation, the theatre failed to account for its own implication in the wider crisis of enculturation. (shrink)

This essay describes a performance by the Greek theatre collective, Blitz Theatre – Late Night – as constituting a theatrical response to current political crises in Europe. What I call a ‘theatre of the impasse’ seeks to bear witness to the experience of impasse, where impasse and crisis must be fundamentally distinguished. Impasse is revealed where crisis admits of no decision adequate to the situation; and, correspondingly, where theatre loses faith in the power of decision to resolve its conflicts. I (...) situate these claims with reference to Carl Schmitt’s and Walter Benjamin’s dispute over political theology, arguing that a theatre of the impasse might be thought as an ‘allegorical’ theatre in Benjamin’s terms. Blitz Theatre’s Late Night reveals, thereby, the concealed truth of the impasse: a founding human sociality experienced as world immanence. In doing so doing, I argue, this theatre frustrates every hope for the kind of political theology of the stage envisaged by Schmitt. I read the performance, instead, as an elegy to Nancy’s inoperative community, at the centre of which are the figure of lovers, bound to, yet unable to take possession of, one another. Staging impasse, Late Night allegorises the fragile human community, exposed in its fundamental precarity. (shrink)

Performance philosophy commences with an impertinent gesture when it describes itself as inaugurating a ‘new field’ of study. Accompanying that claim is a radical proposition that ‘performance thinks’; that it should be counted as a form of philosophising in its own right. But in what sense can performance be construed as ‘genuinely’ philosophical thought? Taking my cue from Laura Cull’s alignment of performance philosophy with Laruelle’s practice of ‘non philosophy’ – and specifically, with its introduction of ‘democracy’ into the dispositives (...) of ‘standard’ philosophy in order to challenge its transcendental authority over the Real – I argue that performance philosophy might be seen to enact a similar disruption of the ‘dispositives’ of performance theory. This, however, is only partly what is at stake in the fundamental proposition of performance philosophy, and I conclude by suggesting that a more radical proposal lies behind its assertion of a new ‘field’ – one that does not reduce it to an empirical fact, but grasps it as a radical ‘utopian’ hypothesis designed to ‘open up’ the philosophical dimension of performance itself; utopian because what performance offers – seen in this way - is not simply another system of representation but a possible democratic thought of the Real itself. (shrink)

John Kinsella’s poetry returns again and again to the landscape of the Western Australian wheatbelt. The wheatbelt is a region that was suddenly and violently re-made by capital in the service of cereal and fibre production during the course of the twentieth century. Despite this radical repurposing of land and the wholesale eradication of an ancient biome, the new farming zone quickly took on the halo of a natural landscape within state and nationalist ideologies. Against the backdrop of this event, (...) Kinsella’s wheatbelt can be viewed as a comprehensive deconstruction of the forces that have led the wheatbelt to where it is now and which still provide the material conditions of its existence. In this essay, Kinsella’s Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography is considered as exemplary of his wheatbelt poetry. The essay explores the basic conceits that animate Kinsella’s poetics of critique. It argues that Kinsella’s poetry offers a strategic intervention into the claims of “capitalist realism,” which is Mark Fisher’s term for the foreclosure of alternatives to profit-driven patterns of production and consumption. Capitalist realism, in the context of the wheatbelt, asserts that whether we like it or not, one cannot argue against the basic entitlement that productive imperatives have to use land as they see fit. This essay attempts to detail the kinds of ways that Kinsella’s poetry tries to fracture this claim to common sense that capitalist production monopolises. What it finds, somewhat counter-intuitively, is that Kinsella’s poetry draws together two things which are traditionally regarded as antinomies – the machine and the organism. In this respect, Kinsella’s poetry is distinctly different from conventional ecopoetry, which tends to uphold the distinction between an authentic nature and a corrupting technology. Kinsella’s Divine Comedy makes use of the tripartite layering of Dante’s eschatology to evolve new topologies of being in the wheatbelt, and indeed, being in the world. Further still, the essay makes the claim that Kinsella delivers us a “cybernetic wheatbelt,” which refigures nature as a communicative machine. (shrink)

Fisher, Anthony Thank you to Lyle Shelton, Tony McLellan, and the Australian Christian Lobby for the invitation to address you tonight. Thanks also to Fr Brian Lucas, General Secretary of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, for his kind introduction. Let me take this opportunity to applaud the work of the ACL, its volunteers and friends, for ensuring Christian voices are heard in debates of political and cultural significance. As a Catholic bishop I am very grateful for your capacity (...) and determination to be there in the thick of things. (shrink)

Re-reading Derrida: Perspectives on Mourning and its Hospitalities, edited by Tony Thwaites and Judith Seaboyer, is a uniquely collaborative exploration of the legacies of Jacques Derrida. Scholars from a wide variety of fields respond to his work by addressing such issues as the politics of the memorial, poetry, trauma, film, neoliberalism, the novel, and psychoanalysis--and then, in the processes of revision, they respond to each other.

This book explores the resonances between Deleuze’s philosophy and a range of philosophical concepts in Buddhism. Focusing on this rarely examined relationship, this book gathers perspectives from scholars around the globe to explore the continuities and discontinuities between Deleuze’s and Buddhist thought. They examine immanence, intensity, assemblages and desire, and the concepts of ethics and meditation. This volume will prove to be an important resource for readers and scholars interested in philosophy, critical theory and comparative studies. They will find this (...) an engaging and invaluable examination of two different yet similar modes of thought. (shrink)

In Part 1 of this wide-ranging interview, Tony Lawson discussed his role in, and relationship to, Critical Realism as well as various defences of mathematical modelling in economics. In Part 2 he t...

In Part 1 of this wide-ranging interview Tony Lawson first discusses his role in the formation of IACR and how he relates to the generalized use of the term ‘Critical Realism’. He then provides com...

There is an increasingly widespread belief, both within and outside the discipline, that modern economics is irrelevant to the understanding of the real world. Economics and Reality traces this irrelevance to the failure of economists to match their methods with their subject, showing that formal, mathematical models are unsuitable to the social realities economists purport to address. Tony Lawson examines the various ways in which mainstream economics is rooted in positivist philosophy and examines the problems this causes. It focuses (...) on human agency, social structure and their interaction and explores how the understanding of this social phenomena can be used to transform the nature of economic practice. Economics and Reality concludes by showing how this newly transformed economics might set about shaping economic policy. (shrink)

This is a direct challenge to the notion of library neutrality, especially in the present context of war, revolution, and social change. This book locates library and information workers as participants and interventionists in social conflicts. The strategies for social action worldwide were chosen because of their connection to elements of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) that relate particularly to core library values, information ethics, and global information justice. This book also encourages readers to pay attention to links (...) between library and information work and the following solidarity rights not currently incorporated into any legally-binding human rights framework. The aim is primarily at librarians, archivists, educators and students. Content consists of essential concepts presented in accessible terms (e.g., critical librarianship, information ethics, global information justice, human rights), along with a practical orientation to action on contemporary issues (e.g., intellectual freedom, intellectual property, preservation, cultural destruction, censorship, public access to government information, commercialization, academic freedom, workplace speech, international relations, anonymity, privacy, confidentiality, human security, national security policies, transborder data flow, and information poverty). (shrink)

Including international contributors from a variety of disciplines - History, English, Information Studies and Archivists – this book does not seek either to applaud or condemn digital technologies, but takes a more conceptual view of how ...

To address the underrepresentation of women in philosophy effectively, we must understand the causes of the early loss of women. In this paper we challenge one of the few explanations that has focused on why women might leave philosophy at early stages. Wesley Buckwalter and Stephen Stich offer some evidence that women have different intuitions than men about philosophical thought experiments. We present some concerns about their evidence and we discuss our own study, in which we attempted to replicate their (...) results for 23 different responses to 14 scenarios . We also conducted a literature search to see if other philosophers or psychologists have tested for gender differences in philosophical intuitions. Based on our findings, we argue that that it is unlikely that gender differences in intuitions play a significant role in driving women from philosophy. (shrink)

This eagerly anticipated new book from Tony Lawson contends that economics can profit from a more explicit concern with ontology than has been its custom. By admitting that economics is not exactly a picture of health at the moment, Lawson hopes that we can move away from the bafflingly intransigent belief that economics is at its core reliant upon mathematical modelling. This maths-envy is the reason why economics is in a state of such disarray. Far from being a polemic (...) against the mainstream, this excellent new book is concerned that if economics is to be saved from itself then there must be a realistic dialogue between the classical heterodox fields. Of interest to philosophers, sociologists and social scientists as well as economists, this comprehensive, logical book is a vital contribution to an important debate. (shrink)

The social sciences often fail to examine in any systematic way the nature of their subject matter. Demonstrating that this is a central explanation of the widely acknowledged failings of the social sciences, not least of modern economics, this book sets about rectifying matters. Providing an account of the nature of social material in general, as well as of the specific natures of central components of the modern world, such as money and the corporation, Lawson also considers the implications of (...) this theory regarding possibilities for social change. Readers will gain an understanding of how social phenomena, from tables and chairs, to money and firms, and nurses and Presidents are constituted. Fundamental to Lawson's conception is a theory of community-based social positioning, whereby people and things within a community become constituted as components of emergent totalities, with actions governed by the rights and obligations of relevant members of the community. This theory isolates a set of basic principles that will offer the reader an understanding of the natures of all social phenomena. The Nature of Social Realityis for all those, academics and non-academics alike, who wish to gain a grasp on the nature of social phenomena that goes beyond the superficial. isolates a set of basic principles that will offer the reader an understanding of the natures of all social phenomena. The Nature of Social Realityis for all those, academics and non-academics alike, who wish to gain a grasp on the nature of social phenomena that goes beyond the superficial. (shrink)

Dagfinn Føllesdal: “Developments in Quine's Behaviorism”: Quine insisted throughout his life that he was a behaviorist. He began briefly as an “ontological behaviorist,” that is, he held that there is nothing mental. However, very early he switched to evidential behaviorism: the view that behavior provides the only evidence we have for the mental and its properties. Ultimately, Quine's behaviorism springs from his empiricism. All knowledge about the world around us and about other people reaches us through our senses: “Behaviorism, as (...) far as I'm concerned, is only an intersubjective empiricism.” Quine applied this to language and communication. His acute problem awareness led him from the discussion of stimuli in Word and Object to a much more refined behaviorism in his latest works, in which full‐fledged perception and the individuation of the world into objects play a crucial role. (shrink)

When we design information technology we risk building specific metaphors and models of human activities into the technology itself and into the embodied activities, work practices, organisational cultures and social identities of those who use it. This paper is motivated by the recognition that the assumptions about human activity used to guide the design of particular technology are made active, in use, by the interaction design of that technology. A fragment of shared design work is used to ground an exploration (...) of different solutions to one of the technical problems that arise when technology is used to support similar work over distance. The argument is made that some solutions to design problems are better than others because they enable human interaction in different ways. Some solutions enhance the possibilities for human agency, others diminish it. This means that there can be a moral basis for choosing between alternative interaction design decisions that might otherwise be considered equivalent in terms of the functionality and usability of the technology. (shrink)

Background: Recent research demonstrates that people sometimes make different medical decisions for others than they would make for themselves. This finding is particularly relevant to end-of-life decisions, which are often made by surrogates and require a trade-off between prolonging life and maintaining quality of life. We examine the impact of decision role, patient age, decision maker age and multiple individual differences on these treatment decisions. Methods: Participants read a scenario about a terminally ill cancer patient faced with a choice between (...) an aggressive chemotherapy regimen that will extend life by two years and palliative treatments to control discomfort for one remaining month. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three decision roles (patient, physician, or an abstract other) and the scenario randomly varied whether the patient was described as 25 or 65-years old. Results: When deciding for a 65-year old patient, approximately 60% of participants selected aggressive chemotherapy regardless of decision role. When deciding for a 25-year old patient, however, participants were more likely to select chemotherapy for a patient (physician role) or another person (abstract other) than for themselves (70%, 67%, and 59%, respectively). In addition, confidence that powerful others (eg, physicians) control one’s health, as well as respondents’ age and race, consistently predicted treatment choices. Conclusions: Patient age appears to influence medical decisions made for others but not those that we make for ourselves. These findings may help to explain the discord that often occurs when younger cancer patients refuse life-extending treatments. (shrink)