This is the first detailed assessment of the life and work of Felix Guattari--"Mr. Anti" as the French press labelled him--the friend of and collaborator with..

This book offers a detailed look at Guattari's working methods in transdisciplinary experimentation from the time of his youth to his final years.His youthful adventures in the post-war Youth Hostels movement, decisive contact with institutional pedgagogy and the mentor figures of Fernand Oury and his brother Jean, give rise to an extraordinary penchant for organizational innovation in his life at Clinique de La Borde in Cour-Cheverny, France, and collective forms of expression manifested in publishing ventures and diverse collaborative research formations.Guattari's (...) highly original and hitherto neglected theories of a-signifyng semiotics and minor cinema are explored in depth with reference to the political goals of the critique of infoculture and the molecular revolutionary tendencies that are released in the search for a people to come.Guttari's engagement with eco-politics and art practices displays his originality as a political thinker and is firmly grounded on his exporation of how subjectivity is produced inlate capitalism.Guattari's ground-breaking conception of transversal politics is fully explored in relation to Michel Foucault's sense of the concept and its role in global political theory. (shrink)

In a cluster of books published originally in 1977, the two editions of La Révolution moléculaire, and L’Inconscient machinique, Guattari elaborated a typology of semiotic systems framed in a Peirce-Hjelmslev hybrid conceptual vocabulary. Reading across these three books I want to flesh-out a-signifying semiotics in relation to an infotech strand on the machinic phylum inspired by one of Guattari’s favourite examples of the kind of semiosis put into play by a-signifying signs : credit and/or bank cards. Guattari’s innovation was to (...) develop a-signifying signs in a typology of sign types but with respect to the problem of the relationship between material and semiotic dimensions in the age of planetary computerization and globalization. (shrink)

In McLuhan and Baudrillard , Gary Genosko traces McLuhan's influence on the influential French postmodernist thinker, Jean Baudrillard. Gary Genosko argues that McLuhan's ideas have been far more influential than hitherto imagined in the development of postmodern theory. Tracing parallels between the so-called "McLuhan Cult" of the 1960's and the "Baudrillard Scene" of the 1980's, he explores how McLuhan's ideas persist and are distorted through Baudrillard's work, via concepts such as semiurgy, participation, reversibility, the primitive/tribal, and (...) implosion. He argues that it is through the filter of Baudrillard's writings that McLuhan has had the greatest impact on contemporary cultural thought and practice. (shrink)

What is the value of interdisciplinary theory? Are there any boundaries left which social theory must recognize? This book argues that the vital questions in theory are being posed and followed at the interdisciplinary level. Our awareness of this is curtailed by the institutional organization of social theory which still tends to assume a canon and clear boundaries. According to Gary Genosko, postmodernism has provided the main challenge to institutional myopia. Yet postmodernism is too often treated as an (...) aberration or a blind alley. The challenge for social theorists today is to develop and practice `undisciplined theories' which constantly question the limits of the canon and expose the porous character of boundaries. The book contains rigorous and original analyses of the writings of Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guattari, McLuhan, Freud and St Augustine. The author uses these materials to point the way to credible forms of undisciplined theory. Three tasks emerge as urgent issues for social theory: the need to think and feel ambivalence; to track the circulation of anomalies in theoretical texts; and to learn from the fascination with interpretative boundlessness. Undisciplined Theory will be of interest to academics of social and cultural theory. (shrink)

In this major new work, Gary Genosko, the world's leading English interpreter of Guattari, offers critical methodological reflections and applications that bring to life Guattari’s thought in contemporary social contexts. The volume explores his collaborations with Deleuze and Negri, and brings into focus his friendship with Franco Bifo Berardi.

Guattari looked for crossovers between film and television in a posthumously published ‘Project for a Film By Kafka’. His critical comments on television and the mixed reception of television within the Deleuzo-Guattarian literature provide the occasion for an investigation of what Guattari thought television could do for his project. The auteur model best suits his needs in this regard, with the proviso that it is animated by a modernist aesthetic oriented towards the conjuring of a people to come who would (...) join the Kafka assemblage as part of their viewing experience. (shrink)

The ideas of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and activist analyst Felix Guattari are transforming disciplinary practices across the humanities and social sciences. These three volumes gather together classic essays that demonstrate the richness of these fascinating and important thinkers influence. The set incorporates: * key essays by an international selection of theorists and practitioners * the development of implications for the built environment * the first ever collection of critical material on Guattari * long out-of-print and hard to find materials.

This article examines Guattari’s broad political investment with regard to a molecular revolution of institutions through his reflection on one complex event, the 22nd of March Movement at Nanterre. I want to consider this example for two reasons. First, it is general enough to provide a non-clinical foundation for specific kinds of innovations that preoccupy many of his readers who comment on these issues and centre their work on historical clinical examples within the trajectory of institutional psychotherapy from Saint-Alban to (...) La Borde. And second, it is not so far divorced from the orbit of cure where institutional analysts cut their teeth, as it were, in the early 1960s left-wing student groups devoted to health issues. The question of cure, here, remains tied to the recognition of the influence of an institution and how it may be changed, but shifts in my example from clinic to campus and factory and, ultimately, to all of French society. (shrink)

The task of this paper is to gather together Guattari’s scattered references to magic, from Chaosmosis and Schizoanalytic Cartographies, and to reconstitute his position, using animism as a guide. For magic is a bulwark against positioning schizoanalysis as another specialism, and in maintaining what Guattari called its ‘eccentric’ relation to professional psychotherapeutic practices. Magic serves Guattari as an antidote to the scientific schemas that dominate psychoanalysis and psychology. Guattari’s effort to reanimate magic as a viable reference within schizoanalysis flies in (...) the face of the ‘ideal of scientificity’. Whereas animism served Guattari’s decentring of subjectivity from the human individual, and his critique of the prevailing dichotomies of subject/object, human/nature, sign/real, to bring magic into play in schizoanalysis is to open it to ethno-psychiatric investigations of sorcery, as well as neo-pagan ecosophy. Magic is indispensable for understanding contemporary assemblages of enunciation, as it exists concurrently with the very forces that would try to banish it, as well as those which would attempt to exploit it for fascistic purposes. (shrink)

Gary Ebbs shows that this appearance is illusory.

I argue for an alternative to Quine’s conception of observation sentences, one that better satisfies the roles Quine envisages for them, and that otherwise respects Quinean constraints. After reviewing a certain predicament Quine got into in balancing the needs of the intersubjectivity of observation sentences with his notion of the stimulus meaning of an observation sentence, I push for replacing the latter with what I call the ‘stimulus field’ of an observation sentence, a notion that remains ‘proximate’ but is shared (...) between different language users. Throughout, I emphasize the epistemological role of observation sentences. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre is an undisputed giant of twentieth-century philosophy. His intellectual writings popularizing existentialism combined with his creative and artistic flair have made him a legend of French thought. His tumultuous personal life - so inextricably bound up with his philosophical thinking - is a fascinating tale of love and lust, drug abuse, high profile fallings-out and political and cultural rebellion. This substantial and meticulously researched biography is accessible, fast-paced, often amusing and at times deeply moving. Existentialism and Excess covers (...) all the main events of Sartre's remarkable seventy-five-year life from his early years as a precocious brat devouring his grandfather's library, through his time as a brilliant student in Paris, his wilderness years as a provincial teacher-writer experimenting with mescaline, his World War II adventures as a POW and member of the resistance, his post-war politicization, his immense amphetamine fueled feats of writing productivity, his harem of women, his many travels and his final decline into blindness and old age. Along the way there are countless intriguing anecdotes, some amusing, some tragic, some controversial: his loathing of crustaceans and his belief that he was being pursued by a giant lobster, his escape from a POW camp, the bombing of his apartment, his influence on the May 1968 uprising and his many love affairs. Cox deftly moves from these episodes to discussing his intellectual development, his famous feuds with Aron, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty, his encounters with other giant figures of his day: Roosevelt, Hemingway, Heidegger, John Huston, Mao, Castro, Che Guevara, Khrushchev and Tito, and, above all, his long, complex and creative relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. Existentialism and Excess also gives serious consideration to Sartre's ideas and many philosophical works, novels, stories, plays and biographies, revealing their intimate connection with his personal life. Cox has written an entertaining, thought-provoking and compulsive book, much like the man himself. (shrink)

This book is about a twenty- to forty- year life journey. It recounts ten randomly selected personal quotes, saved in a cookie jar, and creates a life-learning narrative using the origin of the quote. Each story evolves by looking back at the signposts and hints of wisdom sprinkled along the author's life path. Many of these evens whispered subtle quotes of wisdom to his conscience. It was up to the author to make sense of them or proceed on life's path, (...) having missed an opportunity to obtain wisdom. All of us are on a similar journey cluttered with obstacles of the human condition. It is the author's desire that this little book of hope and inspiration will serve as a torchlight to illuminate the way on the reader's journey toward a more joyful life -- one filled with knowledge, truth, and wisdom. (shrink)

Moral emotions are evolved mechanisms that function in part to optimize social relationships. We discuss two moral emotions— disgust and the “cuteness response”—which modulate social-engagement motives in opposite directions, changing the degree to which the eliciting entity is imbued with mental states (i.e., mentalized). Disgust-inducing entities are hypo-mentalized (i.e., dehumanized); cute entities are hyper-mentalized (i.e., “humanized”). This view of cuteness—which challenges the prevailing view that cuteness is a releaser of parental instincts (Lorenz, 1950/1971)—explains (a) the broad range of affiliative behaviors (...) elicited by cuteness, (b) the marketing of cuteness to children (by toy makers and animators) to elicit play, and (c) the apparent ease and frequency with which cute things are anthropomorphized. (shrink)

I argue for the moral relevance of a category of individuals I characterize as far-persons. Following Gary Varner, I distinguish near-persons, animals with a " robust autonoetic consciousness " but lacking an adult human's " biographical sense of self, " from the merely sentient, those animals living "entirely in the present." I note the possibility of a third class. Far-persons lack a biographical sense of self, possess a weak autonoetic consciousness, and are able to travel mentally through time a (...) distance that exceeds the capacities of the merely sentient. Far-persons are conscious of and exercise control over short-term cognitive states, states limited by their temporal duration. The animals in question, human and nonhuman, consciously choose among various strategies available to them to achieve their ends, making them subjects of what I call "lyrical experience:" brief and potentially intense pleasures and pains. But their ends expire minute-by-minute, not stretching beyond, I say metaphorically, the present hour. I conclude by discussing the moral status of far-persons. (shrink)

Three correctives can get researchers out of the trap of constructing unitary theories of “thinking”: (1) Strong inference methods largely avoid problems associated with universal prescriptive normativism; (2) theories must recognize that significant modularity of cognitive processes is antithetical to general accounts of thinking; and (3) consideration of the domain-specificity of rationality render many of the present article's issues moot.

There is no doubt science is currently suffering from a credibility crisis. This thought-provoking book argues that, ironically, science's credibility is being undermined by tools created by scientists themselves. Scientific disinformation and damaging conspiracy theories are rife because of the internet that science created, the scientific demand for empirical evidence and statistical significance leads to data torturing and confirmation bias, and data mining is fuelled by the technological advances in Big Data and the development of ever-increasingly powerfulcomputers. Using a wide (...) range of entertaining examples, this fascinating book examines the impacts of society's growing distrust of science, and ultimately provides constructive suggestions for restoring the credibility of the scientific community. (shrink)

The view, in Quine, that all there are are pure sets is presented and endorsed.

In the early modern period, many authors held that sensation or sensory reception is in some way passive and that perception is in some way active. The notion of a more passive and a more active aspect of perception is already present in Aristotle: the senses receive forms without matter more or less passively, but the “primary sense” also recognizes the salience of present objects. Ibn al-Haytham distinguished “pure sensation” from other aspects of sense perception, achieved by “discernment, inference and (...) recognition,” which included perception of properties such as size and distance as well as similarity, difference, and beauty. Descartes regarded light and color as experiences passively caused in the mind by bodily processes, but he also included distance, perceived through accommodation and convergence, as an immediately caused sensory idea. On the perception side, most theorists held that size and distance perception occurs through unnoticed psychological operations, whether mediated by judgment or associative processes. Association is, in a sense, passive, as it occurs through nonreflective habit formation. But such habits mark a contribution of the subject to perception and are in that way active. The decision of whether sensation and perception are active or passive is highly sensitive to what counts as activity and to what is included as sensation or perception. There is no simple formula, but the generalization that sensation is for the most part passive and perception for the most part active may stand as an imprecise summary of early modern thought on the topic. (shrink)

Dallas Willard was a personal mentor and inspiration to hundreds of pastors, philosophers, and average churchgoers. In Gary W. Moon’s candid and inspiring biography, we read about the development of Willard's personal character, philosophical writing, and spiritual teaching, and how he has inspired some of the most influential books on spirituality of the last generation.

For courses in Transition to Advanced Mathematics or Introduction to Proof. Meticulously crafted, student-friendly text that helps build mathematical maturity Mathematical Proofs: A Transition to Advanced Mathematics, 4th Edition introduces students to proof techniques, analyzing proofs, and writing proofs of their own that are not only mathematically correct but clearly written. Written in a student-friendly manner, it provides a solid introduction to such topics as relations, functions, and cardinalities of sets, as well as optional excursions into fields such as number (...) theory, combinatorics, and calculus. The exercises receive consistent praise from users for their thoughtfulness and creativity. They help students progress from understanding and analyzing proofs and techniques to producing well-constructed proofs independently. This book is also an excellent reference for students to use in future courses when writing or reading proofs. 0134746759 / 9780134746753 Chartrand/Polimeni/Zhang, Mathematical Proofs: A Transition to Advanced Mathematics, 4/e. (shrink)

Volume XXIX contains papers and commentaries presented to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy during academic year 2012-13. The papers feature Plato's Republic and Timaeus, examine Aristotle on generation, analogy and method, and analyze Proclus on first principles.

What is cognition? What makes a process cognitive? These questions have been answered differently by various investigators and theoretical traditions. Even so, there are some commonalities, allowing us to specify a few contrasting answers to these questions. The main commonalities involve the notion that cognition is information processing that explains intelligent behavior. The differences concern whether early perceptual processes are cognitive, whether representations are needed to explain cognition, what makes something a representation, and whether cognitive processes are limited to the (...) nervous system and brain or include other bodily structures or the environment itself. After unearthing some root notions of cognition in the development of cognitive psychology and cognitive science, this chapter considers the commonalities and differences just scouted, examines Wheeler’s (2005) reference to Descartes’ works in describing “Cartesian” cognitive theory, finds the real target of situated approaches in classical symbolic cognitive science, and suggests that instead of revisiting that target attention should turn to the varieties of intelligent (adaptive, appropriate, flexible) behavior. (shrink)

Einstein's General Theory of Relativity links the metrical structure of the cosmic order (or "cosmology") to the contingent distributions of matter and energy throughout the universe, one of the chief areas of investigation in astrophysics. However, presently we have neither devised nor discovered system of uniform relations whereby we can make our cosmological measurements intelligible. This is "the measurement problem of cosmology." Using both historical ideas (such as A.N. Whitehead's work in the 1920s) and contemporary evidence and theories, argue that (...) the measurement problem has neither been fully understood nor rightly interpreted. With better grasp of this problem, such as am attempting to provide, the prospects for solution look brighter. (shrink)