This classic work by one of the most important philosophers and critics of our time charts the genesis and trajectory of the desiring subject from Hegel's formulation in Phenomenology of Spirit to its appropriation by Kojève, Hyppolite, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault. Judith Butler plots the French reception of Hegel and the successive challenges waged against his metaphysics and view of the subject, all while revealing ambiguities within his position. The result is a sophisticated reconsideration of the post-Hegelian tradition that (...) has predominated in modern French thought, and her study remains a provocative and timely intervention in contemporary debates over the unconscious, the powers of subjection, and the subject. (shrink)

The Metaphysical Club, a gathering of intellectuals in the 1870s associated with Harvard, is widely recognized as the crucible where pragmatism, America's distinctively original philosophy, was refined and proclaimed. Louis Menand's bestseller about the group was a dramatic publishing success. However, only three actual members - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles S. Peirce, and William James - appear in this book, alongside other thinkers such as John Dewey who were never in the Club. The Real Metaphysical Club tells the full (...) story of how this influential group shifted the course of philosophy in America. In addition to pioneering pragmatism, the group explored radical empiricism and idealism, and formulated personalism and process philosophy, equally important developments. This volume contains thirty-seven important writings dating from 1870 to 1885 by the real members of the Metaphysical Club. The first section centers on pragmatism and science; the second part collects writings of the lawyers; and the third part covers idealist and personalist philosophers. Many of these writings have never been reprinted before, and nothing like this impressive collection has ever been attempted. A general introduction provides a narrative history, and the editors' three introductions to the volume's sections vividly bring to life the intense meetings, sustained debates, and pioneering thought from the Metaphysical Club. (shrink)

This book is an extended discussion of individualism in the philosophy of mind.

Inattentional blindness is described as the failure to perceive a supra-threshold stimulus when attention is directed away from that stimulus. Based on performance on an explicit recognition memory test and concurrent functional imaging data Rees, Russell, Frith, and Driver [Rees, G., Russell, C., Frith, C. D., & Driver, J. . Inattentional blindness versus inattentional amnesia for fixated but ignored words. Science, 286, 2504–2507] reported inattentional blindness for word stimuli that were fixated but ignored. The present study examined both explicit and (...) implicit memory for fixated but ignored words using a selective-attention task in which overlapping picture/word stimuli were presented at fixation. No explicit awareness of the unattended words was apparent on a recognition memory test. Analysis of an implicit memory task, however, indicated that unattended words were perceived at a perceptual level. Thus, the selective-attention task did not result in perfect filtering as suggested by Rees et al. While there was no evidence of conscious perception, subjects were not blind to the implicit perceptual properties of fixated but ignored words. (shrink)

Popular images of rights almost always emphasize their protective qualities. But who is really protected? In this paper it is argued that contemporary rights talk, because of faulty underlying assumptions, systematically favors prejudice and big property interests. Further, once the mistaken assumptions are surrendered, and it is realized that all rights are affirmative, a less systematically misleading debate can be created within the realm of rights discourse.

This volume, modeled after those published in The Library of Living Philosophers, attempts to provide a coherent statement of the work of Abraham Edel in moral and political theory, and on the impact of his work on such diverse areas as education, law, and social science. The methodological element of Edel's work is to see ethical and social theory in the full context of human life; specifically how twentieth-century modes of analysis impact classical concerns about right and wrong, good and (...) evil. The volume is tightly integrated from start to finish, and has the benefit of Edel's thoughtful and thoroughgoing response to critics. In short, while this work is a tribute to the work of a scholar, it aims to serve as a basic guide through the labyrinthian world of contemporary ethical theory and social practice. Contents: Beryl Harold Levy, "Reflective Culture as Philosophy of Law"; Betty A. Sichel, "Abraham Edel's Contribution to Philosophy of Education"; Gerald E. Myers, "Person and Personality--and Respect for Both"; Mihailo Markovic, "Abraham Edel on the Method of Ethical Theory"; Helen Block Lewis, "Consequences for Ethical Theory of a Focus on the Psychology of Shame and Guilt"; Edmund L. Pincoffs, "Ethics as an Explanatory Undertaking"; Standish Thayer, "The Network of Concepts: A New View of Aristotle"; Mortimer R. Kadish, "Abraham Edel and the Dream of Science"; Michael Levin, "Reflections on Non-Cognitivism"; Ralph W. Sleeper, "Naturalizing Legal Positivism"; Irving Louis Horowitz, "The Political Philosophy of Abraham Edel"; Finbarr W. O'Connor, "Network Analysis in Ethics"; Elizabeth Flower, "A Moral Agenda for Ethical Theory"; Abraham Edel, "Responses to Critics"; "An Edel Bibliography.". (shrink)

E-patients are increasingly using the Internet to gain knowledge about medical conditions, thereby problematizing the biomedical assumption that patients are ‘lay’. The present paper addresses this development by investigating the epistemic identities of patients participating on an online health forum. Using poststructuralist discourse analysis to analyze a corpus of cardiology-related threads on an ‘Ask a Doctor’ forum, we compare how patients are discursively constructed by online professionals as ‘knowing’ or ‘not knowing’ with the online knowledge identities patients choose for themselves. (...) Analysis reveals a complex picture, with patients positioning themselves and being constructed as biomedical novices, as well as claiming the subject positions of experts challenging medical expertise. This paper provides a snapshot of an important social identity in transition, illustrates a procedure for comparing language use around imposed and self-appropriated identities, and considers discursive choice in relation to the metapragmatic matter of “sayability”. (shrink)

In part 1 of Enquiry 12, Hume presents a skeptical argument against belief in external existence. The argument involves a perceptual relativity argument that seems to conclude straightaway the double existence of objects and perceptions, where objects cause and resemble perceptions. In Treatise 1.4.2, Hume claimed that the belief in double existence arises from imaginative invention, not reasoning about perceptual relativity. I dissolve this tension by distinguishing the effects of natural instinct and showing that some ofthese effects supplement the Enquiry’s (...) perceptual relativity argument. The Enquiry’s skeptical argument thus reveals the fundamental involvement of natural instinct in any belief in external existence. (shrink)

L’écoute d’un couple en crise qui demande à être aidé montre fréquemment que la dégradation de leur communication affective et sexuelle a débuté à la naissance d’un enfant, pas nécessairement le premier. Quelques exemples témoignent à quel point de multiples remaniements psychiques s’opèrent au sein du couple, lorsqu’une femme devient mère : retour de l’enfant en soi, réactivation des conflits œdipiens. Et, comme le souligne Winnicott, n’y aurait-il pas en chaque homme et en chaque femme la représentation d’une femme/mère toute-puissante (...) et dominatrice, source d’angoisses multiples? Cette peur de la femme, qu’il faut donc à tout prix dominer, semble évidente lorsqu’on écoute les représentations que les adolescents se font de l’autre sexe. Les auteurs proposent quelques repères théoriques afin de comprendre ces angoisses et aider les couples à les reconnaître pour mieux les gérer. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of heritage pharmacology as an encompassing critical framework in order to radically recast the interactions and efficacies of heritage as a particularly potent pharmacology of care. I critically engage with Stiegler's philosophic reflections On Pharmacology, which builds on Derrida's work and recasts pharmacology – a term usually reserved for that branch of the biomedical sciences dealing with drugs and their interactions and efficacies – in order to draw out the ‘curative-toxic’ dimensions at play in wider (...) care tropes. By placing core concepts and practices of heritage and pharmacology in critical dialogue, my aim as heritage critic is to gain mutual insights into ‘care’, as that which links together the two domains of heritage and health, as otherwise distinct discourses, concepts, technics, and practices. My specific intervention rethinks the crucial role of ‘heritage pathologies’ and the underpinning memory-work at play within these tropes while grounding these in a case study of Jerusalem Syndrome (JS). I argue that it is the dynamic of heritage pathologies, best crystallized in JS debates, that invests us in the wider Stieglerian quest/ion of ‘pharmacology’, as a concern with ‘what makes life worth living’. Such quests ultimately take this article into the realpolitik of Palestine. (shrink)

Tradução do artigo "What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault's Virtue.".

While critics have relied upon bibliographical data and his translation of Thucydides to establish the early Thomas Hobbes as a humanist, this essay argues that substantive evidence to support this conclusion can be found in the comparatively neglected discourses of the Horae Subsecivae. Reading Hobbe's contribution to the Horae alongside his translation of Thucydides reveals a consistent concern with the political potential of both verbal and visual images and with the dangers rhetorical manipulation could pose to individual and sovereign authority. (...) Together these texts demonstrate an early Hobbes already deeply invested in the political debates and crises of his era. (shrink)

The origination of General Systems Theory is credited to Ludwig von Bertalanffy who, two years after receiving his doctorate from the University of Vienna, published a work in 1932 entitled Theorie der Formbildung. Despite, by his own account, an exposure to and familiarity with the positivism of the Vienna circle, von Bertalanffy was dissatisfied with the reductionist and atomistic forms of explanation which this group asserted is characteristic of scientific explanation. He was particularly unhappy with attempts to pattern explanations of (...) biological phenomena after the model of classical Newtonian physics. In this early work, Models Theories of Development, von Bertalanffy maintained both that the main problem for biology is to discover patterns (laws) which are typical of biological systems and that the discovery of such patterns would produce a major change in the way the world is viewed in general. Von Bertalanffy worked out his proposed model for biological explanation in such subsequent books as Theoretische Biologie and Problems of Life and then in his later years in such works as Robots, Man and Minds and Organismic Psychology and Systems Theory, went on to apply his concepts in a cross-disciplinary way to psychology. Again, by his own account, at a somewhat later period, others, for example the economist Kenneth Boulding and the bio-mathematician A. Rapport, had arrived at, for parallel reasons, certain similar ideas relative to their own disciplines. These individuals together with others formed a joint enterprise which was to result in the interdisciplinary systems movement. Von Bertalanffy stressed the multi-dimension possibilities for fruitful research in a large number of conceptual areas, including the humanities, in his final major work, General Systems Theory Foundation, Development and Applications. (shrink)

My purpose in this paper is to present a non-Marxist conception of exploitation. While this analysis of exploitation may share features with a Marxist conception, its acceptability is not dependent upon a prior agreement with that world view.

In ____Bodies That Matter,__ Judith Butler further develops her distinctive theory of gender by examining the workings of power at the most "material" dimensions of sex and sexuality. Deepening the inquiries she began in _Gender_ _Trouble,_ Butler offers an original reformulation of the materiality of bodies, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the "matter" of bodies, sex, and gender. Butler argues that power operates to constrain "sex" from the start, delimiting what counts as a viable sex. She offers (...) a clarification of the notion of "performativity" introduced in _Gender Trouble_ and explores the meaning of a citational politics. The text includes readings of Plato, Irigaray, Lacan, and Freud on the formation of materiality and bodily boundaries; "Paris is Burning," Nella Larsen's "Passing," and short stories by Willa Cather; along with a reconsideration of "performativity" and politics in feminist, queer, and radical democratic theory. (shrink)

There is a growing literature which examines the ways in which individualised responsibilisation of ' risky behaviours' also entails moralisation. In UK discourses about climate change, certain individualised behaviours are designated as responsible and/or good and correspondingly as irresponsible and/or bad. In this context, the decision to engage or not engage in these types of behaviour can be seen as becoming increasingly moralised. Drawing on focus group discussions with members of the British lay public, this paper brings together public production (...) of and negotiated responses to the moral undertones of this aspect of climate change discourse with theories of risk, morality and responsibility to develop important insights for conceptualising climate change mitigation. (shrink)

Contemporary feminist debates over the meanings of gender lead time and again to a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism. Perhaps trouble need not carry such a..

One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s _Gender Trouble_ is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated (...) social _performance _rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent. (shrink)

La supervision individuelle ou en groupe permet à tout thérapeute formé selon les concepts théoriques et l’approche clinique de la psychanalyse de forger ses propres outils. Dans un groupe de supervision, chacun apporte les difficultés sur lesquelles il bute dans la mise en place et le déroulement d’une thérapie. Le groupe réfléchit, dans tous les sens du terme, ce qui permet au thérapeute de percevoir ce qui jusque là lui échappait – qu’il s’agisse du fonctionnement symptomatique des patients entre eux (...) ou de ce qui se passe entre eux et lui lorsque s’éclairent les mouvements du transfert. Le groupe est à la fois environnement sécurisant, structure et appareil de liaison, la groupalité étant une dimension du sujet. Tout se passe comme si l’appareil psychique groupal reprenait à son compte le travail d’élaboration psychique du thérapeute, qui, pour le moment, se plaint de ne plus avoir la capacité de penser. Le superviseur est garant du cadre. De lui dépend également la spontanéité et la qualité des échanges ainsi que le climat de confiance indispensable au plaisir de travailler ensemble dans un rapport de parité. (shrink)

One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s _Gender Trouble_ is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated (...) social _performance _rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent. (shrink)

Comment départager ce qui est à travailler au sein du groupe thérapeutique et ce qui ne nous regarde pas, nous thérapeutes? Autant de frontières entre l’autre et soi, entre les motivations conscientes et les désirs inconscients, qui sont à la fois signifiantes et difficilement repérables. Le travail du thérapeute sur son contre-transfert lui permet de faire la différence entre ce qui ne le regarde pas et ce dont il préfère ne rien savoir.

À partir d’une situation de couple dans lequel la communication semble bloquée par un trop plein de souffrance, due en partie à des traumatismes dans les liens de filiation de part et d’autre, l’auteure, grâce à un groupe de recherche, expérimente la nécessité d’un nouvel espace pour réguler un transfert massif. Le groupe de recherche prend en quelque sorte le relais de l’appareil psychique du thérapeute et met en scène les émotions et les représentations qui sont à l’œuvre au sein (...) du groupe thérapeutique. Il devient un lieu de dépôt et de mentalisation des émotions qui circulent dans le transfert, et se fait le porte-voix des souffrances traumatiques enfermées dans les incorporats, ces ratés de l’introjection. (shrink)

La demande en thérapie de couple revêt souvent la forme d’une plainte. Lorsque l’on s’attache à travailler les éléments conscients et inconscients qui structurent le transfert, on mesure à quel point cette plainte est séductrice. Elle exerce sur le thérapeute une emprise directe qui peut modifier son écoute et paralyser le processus thérapeutique, car elle a le pouvoir de s’introduire au cœur de son monde interne.

Ever since feminist theory introduced the distinction between sex and gender, the question of what it means to be a woman has preoccupied feminist thought. In ____Gender__ ____Trouble ____ Judith Butler questions whether it is possible to "be" a woman at all or, for that matter, any gender.

In ____Bodies That Matter,__ Judith Butler further develops her distinctive theory of gender by examining the workings of power at the most "material" dimensions of sex and sexuality. Deepening the inquiries she began in _Gender_ _Trouble,_ Butler offers an original reformulation of the materiality of bodies, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the "matter" of bodies, sex, and gender. Butler argues that power operates to constrain "sex" from the start, delimiting what counts as a viable sex. She offers (...) a clarification of the notion of "performativity" introduced in _Gender Trouble_ and explores the meaning of a citational politics. The text includes readings of Plato, Irigaray, Lacan, and Freud on the formation of materiality and bodily boundaries; "Paris is Burning," Nella Larsen's "Passing," and short stories by Willa Cather; along with a reconsideration of "performativity" and politics in feminist, queer, and radical democratic theory. (shrink)

In ____Bodies That Matter,__ Judith Butler further develops her distinctive theory of gender by examining the workings of power at the most "material" dimensions of sex and sexuality. Deepening the inquiries she began in _Gender_ _Trouble,_ Butler offers an original reformulation of the materiality of bodies, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the "matter" of bodies, sex, and gender. Butler argues that power operates to constrain "sex" from the start, delimiting what counts as a viable sex. She offers (...) a clarification of the notion of "performativity" introduced in _Gender Trouble_ and explores the meaning of a citational politics. The text includes readings of Plato, Irigaray, Lacan, and Freud on the formation of materiality and bodily boundaries; "Paris is Burning," Nella Larsen's "Passing," and short stories by Willa Cather; along with a reconsideration of "performativity" and politics in feminist, queer, and radical democratic theory. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to identify the relative contribution of individual and contextual predictors to students’ attitudes toward the acceptability of cheating and plagiarism. A group of 324 students from a tertiary institution in New Zealand completed an online survey. The findings indicate that gender, justice sensitivity, and understanding of university policies regarding academic dishonesty were the key predictors of the students’ attitudes toward the acceptability of cheating and plagiarism, both as agents of dishonest conduct and as witnesses (...) of misconduct among their peers. The implications of these findings for the development of policies and initiatives in tertiary institutions are discussed. (shrink)

György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, writer, and literary critic who shaped mainstream European Communist thought. Soul and Form was his first book, published in 1910, and it established his reputation, treating questions of linguistic expressivity and literary style in the works of Plato, Kierkegaard, Novalis, Sterne, and others. By isolating the formal techniques these thinkers developed, Lukács laid the groundwork for his later work in Marxist aesthetics, a field that introduced the historical and political implications of text. For (...) this centennial edition, John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis add a dialogue entitled "On Poverty of Spirit," which Lukács wrote at the time of Soul and Form, and an introduction by Judith Butler, which compares Lukács's key claims to his later work and subsequent movements in literary theory and criticism. In an afterword, Terezakis continues to trace the Lukácsian system within his writing and other fields. These essays explore problems of alienation and isolation and the curative quality of aesthetic form, which communicates both individuality and a shared human condition. They investigate the elements that give rise to form, the history that form implies, and the historicity that form embodies. Taken together, they showcase the breakdown, in modern times, of an objective aesthetics, and the rise of a new art born from lived experience. (shrink)

The book constitutes a reconsideration of her earlier view on gender performativity from Gender Trouble. In this work, the critique of gender norms is clearly situated within the framework of human persistence and survival.

The author considers the way in which psychic life is generated by the social operation of power, and how that social operation of power is concealed and fortified by the psyche that it produces. Power is no longer understood to be 'internalized' by an existing subject, but the subject is spawned as an ambivalent effect of power, one that is staged through the operation of conscience. To claim that power fabricates the psyche is also to claim that there is a (...) fictional and fabricated quality to the psyche. The figure of a psyche that 'turns against itself' is crucial to this study, and offers an alternative to describing power as 'internalized'. Although most readers of Foucault eschew psychoanalytic theory, and most thinkers of the psyche eschew Foucault, the author seeks to theorize this ambivalent relation between the social and the psychic as one of the most dynamic and difficult effects of power. (shrink)