A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy) by John Kennedy Toole portrays an interplay between competing definitions of humanism. The one school of humanism—called by some the Modernist Paradigm—saw the Italian Renaissance as the origin of nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernist views that celebrated science, technology, and individual human freedom. The other school, led by Paul Oskar Kristeller, sought to historicize humanism by establishing that Renaissance writers and thinkers were generally conservative and preserved the philosophical ideas of the medieval era. Kristeller was the (...) President of the Renaissance Society of America and was at the height of his influence at Columbia University during the late 1950s, when Toole studied for his Master’s degree there. The main character in Confederacy, Ignatius J. Reilly, presents a parody of Kristeller’s position, which he uses to critique modern society. Ignatius also plays the part of a child of the planetary god Saturn, both by acting out the ancient astrological tradition of associating Saturn with misfortune and disorder and by being a parody of the Renaissance concept of the Genius as a Child of Saturn begun by the Renaissance philosopher whom Kristeller studied most, Marsilio Ficino. Ignatius’s worldview is an antithesis of the Modernist Paradigm. Confederacy is critical of both Modernist humanism with its attendant materialism and its antithesis—Ignatius’s dysfunctional version of Kristeller’s Renaissance philosophy. When the community expels Ignatius as a scapegoat, Toole appears to gesture toward a dialectical synthesis of the two concepts of humanism in the novel’s happy ending. (shrink)

This article offers an innovative perspective on the literary landscapes of the 1960s in France, Ukraine, and the USA serving as exemplars of a global literary project that views literary works as heterotopias that, while being distinct, collectively constitute a cohesive whole. Using a comparative approach, complemented with distant reading techniques, the study examines how these literary realms are interconnected, revealing shared aesthetic foundations guided by an overarching law. This law, rooted in Theodor Adorno’s concept of negativity, becomes evident in (...) in countercultural movements and consequential shifts in literary form, content, and canon. While not the primary focus of analysis, other unifying elements in this global literary panorama include dissent as defined by Jaques Rancière, and a Sartrian-infused interpretation of existentialism. The article suggests that this global phenomenon may have emerged due to the confluence of two factors: the seismic global impact of events like WWII and the evolving postmodern trajectory of the era. (shrink)

The separation of church and state disguised the coordination of two very different conceptions of liberty at work in Revolutionary America, one with a religious basis in radical Protestant thought and the other with a legal basis in the secular Enlightenment. The essay combines the disciplines of law, literature, and intellectual history to investigate these contrasting formulations and their changing relationship. Cross-cultural analysis of the language of protest in both England and America gives the investigation a crucial focus. It also (...) explains a larger movement from direct influence to refraction in Anglo-American relations. (shrink)

As the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács noted, class has both an objective and a subjective quality: workers are reified as alienated commodities while at the same time they perceive their interests as qualitatively different from those of the capitalist who purchases their labour-power. This essay will argue that one of the most complex theorisations of the material production of working-class subjectivity emerges from Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, a second-person collective narrative of the African-American Great Migration. Wright locates (...) African-American subjectivity in the contradiction of its formation, at once trapped in the neo-feudal relations of the Jim Crow South, and brutally thrust into the matrix of Northern racialised and ghettoised industrial production. This produces for Wright acute misery, but also a proletarian revision of Du Bois’s Hegelian concept of ‘double consciousness’, as Black workers have a unique insight into the totality of the capitalist world-system. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fear of Formalism: Kant, Twain, and Cultural Studies in American LiteratureElizabeth Maddock Dillon (bio)I begin with what we might call a bipolar disturbance in literary criticism. Caught between the materialism of cultural studies and the formalism of philosophy, literary criticism is construed, on the one hand, as useless—struck dumb by its lack of purpose in the face of real politics and real bodies—and, on the other hand, as (...) singularly efficacious, the only tool through which to reveal the essentially discursive character of all forms of culture, including bodies and politics. While this rhetorical model of criticism is regularly posited as politically bankrupt, as having no purchase on the facticity of the world, the model of materialist cultural criticism is just as regularly unmasked as, at base, rhetorically constructed and thus guilty of concealing its own formalist dimensions. 1 This “disturbance,” as I’ve described it, tends to be acted out as a debilitating dialectic: caught between formalism and materialism, literary criticism is left without any ground to stand on. Yet this peculiar bipolarity within literary criticism is intimately linked to the strange status of literature itself. Language becomes recognizably literary at the moment it assumes a rhetorical or formal dimension rather than serving as the invisible conduit of mimetic representation. 2 Whence, evidently, the allure of formalism for literary criticism: form would seem to be exactly what demarcates the literary from the nonliterary, what defines the exclusive territory of literature. Yet formalism, as has been widely and persuasively argued, tends to turn literature into precisely the kind of artifact that means little in relation to the world and tends to obscure the worldly relations that inform the text and its production. Indeed, in the field of Cultural Studies—a field whose defining gesture is political engagement—“formalist” is a term whose meaning often comes to approximate “apolitical.” “Formalist,” fashioned as opprobium, speaks chidingly of hermeticism or more acerbically of the insidious erasures enacted by universalism.In contemporary criticism, formalism has thus come to occupy an important antipodal position which encompasses far more than the New Critical practices of the 1940s and ‘50s. In emphasizing the formal, intrinsic qualities of the literary work, New [End Page 46] Critics closeted the text away from the world and from the possibility of social action: their agenda has thus been construed as politically quietist and inherently conservative. 3 Yet the term “formalism,” used as a charge of conservatism, has been applied more broadly to poststructuralist criticism as well. Paul Lauter, for instance, uses the term “formalist” to describe deconstruction as an avatar of New Criticism: both emphasize textual relations to the exclusion of extratextual considerations. Poststructuralism, Lauter and others have argued, continues an aestheticization of literature which turns literary criticism over to an elitist and ultimately irrelevant “priesthood.” ‘“Formalist,’” writes Lauter, “suggests that the whole enterprise of literary theorizing subsists behind dense academic walls, where de Man speaks only to Heidegger, and Heidegger speaks only to God” [138]. While Lauter bases his analogy between poststructuralism and New Criticism on the charge of hermeticism as well as a lack of historical engagement, the notion of “form” as it appears in poststructuralism is nonetheless significantly different than the “form” that animated New Critical endeavors. Where New Critical “form” concerns specifically literary structures—irony, metaphor, tension, unity—the poststructural referent for these rhetorical terms is often the “form” of language or subjectivity itself. Accordingly, the meaning of “form” (and, indeed, “formalism”) undergoes a marked shift from specific rhetorical articulations to larger theoretical claims about language and identity.This second, broader articulation of form has been critiqued less for hermeticism or quietism than for its implied universalism—that is, for fashioning subjects and discursive forces in uniform shapes without regard for political and historical specificity. Stuart Hall, for example, whilst defining the practice of Cultural Studies, warns against theories of the subject (in this case psychoanalysis) that tend toward universalism: “The manner in which this ‘subject’ of culture is conceptualized is of a trans-historical and ‘universal’ character: it addresses the subject-in-general, not an historically-determinate social subject, or socially determinate particular language” [Hall 70]. On this reading, formalist theories of poststructuralism... (shrink)

Whatever the attitude one takes to the review in Physics Today , the fact remains that a prominent American journal in physics has voiced an opinion on a book devoted to philosophical problems of fundamental theory - at the front line of contemporary physics - written jointly by natural scientists and Marxist philosophers. The appearance of a review is a commonplace event in the life of science, but in the case before us the matter is not so simple. Suffice (...) it to remember the existence of a curtain in the scientific literature of the West, the function of which, some say, is to separate "pure" science from Marxism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:192. THE HUME LITERATURE FOR 1983 The Hume literature from 1925 to 1976 has been thoroughly covered in my book Fifty Years of Hume Scholarship: A Bibliographical Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 1978; £9.50), which also lists the main earlier writings on Hume. Publications of the years 1977 to 1982 were listed in Hume Studies in previous Novembers. What follows here will bring the record up to the end of (...) 1983. Readers are invited to inform me of any omissions, and to send me offprints of their own articles and reviews. The intention is to maintain a complete bibliographical record of critical work on Hume, by the regular publication in Hume Studies of an annual bibliography, with addenda consisting of items omitted through ignorance in previous years. References to recently-appearing reviews (of books from earlier lists) are given at the end. The following abbreviations of journal titles are used here: APQ American Philosohical Quarterly JHI Journal of the History of Ideas JHP Journal of the History of Philosophy JP Journal of Philosophy PAS Proceedings of the Arisotelian Society PB Philosophical Books PQ Philosophical Quarterly PR Philosophical Review RIP Revue Internationale de Philosophie RM Review of Metaphysics TLS Times Literary Supplement Other abbreviations should be obvious enough, and mainly follow the British standard (no. 4148). 193, ARNOLD, N. S. 'Hume's Skepticism about Inductive Inference', JHP 21, 31-55. BARKER, S. 'Hume on the Logic of Design', Hume Studies 9, 1-18. [19-24] BERMAN, D. 'David Hume and the Suppression of Atheism', JHP 21, 375-87. BOX, M.? Gloss on Goldsmith's Remark on Hume', Notes & Queries 30, 59-60. BRETT, N. 'Hume's Debt to Kant', Hume Studies 9, 5973. BROUGHTON, J. 'Hume's Skepticism about Causal Inference', Pacific phil. Q. 64, 3-18. CALVERT, B. 'Another Problem about Part IX of Hume's Dialogues', Int. J. Phil. Relig. 14, 65-70. COLWELL, G.G. 'Miracles and History', Sophia 22, 9-14. DARWALL, S. L. Impartial Reason, ch. 5 ('Hume's Internalism1 ). Ithaca, N. Y. DEL VECCHIO, M. 'Un Impotesi di Lettura Esegetlica del "Dubbio Scettico" Humeano', Riv. crit. Stor. FiI. 38, 457-64. FOGELIN, R. J. 'The Tendency of Hume's Skepticism', in M. Burnyeat, The Skeptical Tradition, 397-412. Berkeley, CaI. GASKIN, J. CA. 'Hume's Attenuated Deism', Arch. Gesch. Phil. 65, 160-73. GEMES, K.? Refutation of Inductive Scepticism', Australas. J. Phil. 61, 434-8. GUTTENPLAN, S. 'Hume and Contemporary Ethical Naturalism', Midwest Stud. Phil. 8, 309-20. HARRIS, H. S. 'Hume and Barker on the Logic of Design', Hume Studies 9, 19-24. HARTSHORNE, C 'Hume's Metaphysics and its Influence', in C Hartshorne, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers, 136-50. HIRSCH, E. 'Hume's Distinction between Genuine and Fictitious Identity', Midwest Stud. Phil. 8, 321-38. 194, IMMERWAHR, J. 'David Hume, Sexism, and Sociobiology ', Sth. J. Phil. 21, 359-70. KIVY, P. 'Hume's Neighbour's Wife: An Essay on the Evolution of Hume's Aesthetics', Br. J. Aesth. 23, 195-208. KUEHN, M. 'Kant's Conception of "Hume's Problem"', JHP 21, 175-93. KUEHN, M. 'Hume's Antinomies', Hume Studies 9, 25-45. McCRACKEN, CJ. Malebranche and British Philosophy, ch. 7. Oxford. McLYNN, F.J. 'Jacobitism and David Hume: The Ideological Backlash Foiled', Hume Studies 9, 171-99. MALHERBE, M. 'La notion de circonstance dans la philosophie de Hume', Hume Studies 9, 130-49. NATHAN, G. J.? Humean Pattern of Justification', Hume Studies 9, 150-70. NIELSEN, K. 'Hobbesist and Humean Alternatives to a Religious Morality', Int. J. Phil. Relig. 14, 33-47. PENELHUM, T. 'Natural Belief and Religious Belief in Hume's Philosophy', P£ 33, 166-81. [182-6] PONKO, T. A. 'Artificial Virtue, Self-interest, and Acquired Social Concern', Hume Studies 9, 4658. ROD, W. 'The Rationalist Theory of Double Causality as an Object of Hume's Criticism', Erkenntnis 19, 315-29. ROHATYN, D. 'Hume's Dialectical Conceits: The Case of Dialogue XII', Phil. & phenomenol. Res. 43, 519-32. RUSSELL, P. 'On the Naturalism of Hume's "Reconciling Project"', Mind 92, 593-600. SCARRE, G. 'What was Hume's worry about Personal Identity?', Analysis 43, 217-21. SCARRE, G. 'Was Mill Really Concerned with Hume's Problem of... (shrink)

Resumen: En el presente artículo se evidencia la vinculación que establece Rama entre lengua/literatura y espacio/poder en La ciudad letrada. Este nuevo paradigma ha permitido pensar y repensar la literatura latinoamericana y los estudios culturales, sin embargo, entraña contradicciones dentro del mismo pensamiento del uruguayo. La tajante división que el autor establece entre ciudad real y ciudad letrada hace imposible pensar el rol de la literatura fuera de la esfera del poder institucional, al mismo tiempo que relega ontológicamente la realidad (...) de esta última a una meramente instrumental. Nuestra propuesta es leer a la luz del concepto de transculturación esta oposición, para establecer una dialéctica que permita considerar la politicidad propia de la ciudad real y su rol activo en la expresión de una literatura de resistencia política. Abstract: In the present article we show the relationship that Rama establish between language/power and space/power in the Ciudad Letrada. This new paradigm has allowed us to think and rethink Latin American literature and cultural studies, non the less, it also brings out contradictions inside the own thinking of the Uruguayan author. The strong division that the author establishes between the real city and the literate city does not allow one to think of the role of literature outside the field of institutionalized power, at the same time that he relegates the ontological reality of the latter to a merely instrumental one. Our proposal is to read this opposition in the light of the notion of transculturation, establishing a dialectic that allows us to consider the very policy of the real city and its active role in the expression of a political resistance literature. (shrink)

This article examines the influence of the Persian mystic poet Hafi z on western poets. Interest in Hafiz started in England in the eighteenth century with the translations of Sir William Jones. In the nineteenth century, the German translation of Baron von HammerPurgstall inspired Goethe to create his masterpiece Westöstliche Divan (West-Eastern Divan). The poetry of Hafiz evoked such passion in Goethe that he referred to him as ‘Saint Hafiz’ and ‘Celestial Friend’. Inspired by Westöstliche Divan, a number of German (...) poets including Rückert and Platen composed volumes of poetry on the model of ghazal, the popular poetic form perfected by Hafi z in Persian literature. Prominent among the German thinkers influenced and fascinated by Hafiz was Friedrich Nietzsche who repeatedly mentioned him in his works. The influence of Hafiz stretched to America in 1838 when Ralph Waldo Emerson read Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan. In Hafiz, Emerson found a man who derived pleasure in the very elements which others found mean. Under the influence of Hafiz’s Saki-nameh or the Book of Wine, he created his finest poem Bacchus which, according to Harold Bloom, set the terms for the dialectic of American poetry. (shrink)

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright. Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites us (...) to reconsider the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers. (shrink)

Originally published in 1982. Aside from Jacques Derrida's own references to the "possible articulation" between deconstruction and Marxism, the relationship between the two has remained largely unexplored. In Marxism and Deconstruction, Michael Ryan examines that multifaceted relationship but not through a mere comparison of two distinct and inviolable entities. Instead, he looks at both with an eye to identifying their common elements and reweaving them into a new theory of political practice. To accomplish his task, Ryan undertakes a detailed comparison (...) of deconstruction and Marxism, relating deconstruction to the dialectical tradition in philosophy and demonstrating how deconstruction can be used in the critique of ideology. He is a forceful critic of both the politics of deconstruction and the metaphysical aspect of Marxism (as seen from a deconstructionist perspective). Besides offering the first book-length study of Derrida in this context, Ryan makes the first methodic attempt by an American scholar to apply deconstruction to domains beyond literature. He proposes a deconstructive Marxism, one lacking the metaphysical underpinnings of conservative "scientific" Marxist theory and employing deconstructive analysis both for Marxist political criticism and to further current anti-metaphysical developments within Marxism. Marxism and Deconstruction is an innovative and controversial contribution to the fields of literary criticism, philosophy, and political science. (shrink)

A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy) by John Kennedy Toole portrays an interplay between competing definitions of humanism. The one school of humanism—called by some the Modernist Paradigm—saw the Italian Renaissance as the origin of nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernist views that celebrated science, technology, and individual human freedom. The other school, led by Paul Oskar Kristeller, sought to historicize humanism by establishing that Renaissance writers and thinkers were generally conservative and preserved the philosophical ideas of the medieval era. Kristeller was the (...) President of the Renaissance Society of America and was at the height of his influence at Columbia University during the late 1950s, when Toole studied for his Master’s degree there. The main character in Confederacy, Ignatius J. Reilly, presents a parody of Kristeller’s position, which he uses to critique modern society. Ignatius also plays the part of a child of the planetary god Saturn, both by acting out the ancient astrological tradition of associating Saturn with misfortune and disorder and by being a parody of the Renaissance concept of the Genius as a Child of Saturn begun by the Renaissance philosopher whom Kristeller studied most, Marsilio Ficino. Ignatius’s worldview is an antithesis of the Modernist Paradigm. Confederacy is critical of both Modernist humanism with its attendant materialism and its antithesis—Ignatius’s dysfunctional version of Kristeller’s Renaissance philosophy. When the community expels Ignatius as a scapegoat, Toole appears to gesture toward a dialectical synthesis of the two concepts of humanism in the novel’s happy ending. (shrink)

These essays deal with the scholarly study of the genesis, transmission, and editorial reconstitution of texts by exploring the connections between textual instability and textual theory, interpretation, and pedagogy. What makes this collection unique is that each essay brings a different theoretical orientation-New Historicism, Poststructuralism, or Feminism-to bear upon a different text, such as Whitman's Leaves of Grass , Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, or hypertext fiction, to explore the dialectical relationship between texts and textuality. The essays bring some (...) of the textual theories that compete with each other today into contact with a broad range of primarily literary textual histories. That texts are intrinsically unstable, frequently consisting of a series of determinate historical versions, has consequences for all students of literature, because different versions of a literary work frequently help shape different readings independently of the interpretations brought to bear upon them. Textual instability of the works is relevant to our understanding of how the meanings of texts are generated. The contributors build on the numerous challenges to the Anglo-American editorial tradition mounted during the past decade by scholars as diverse as Jerome McGann, D.F. McKenzie, Peter Shillingsburg, D.C. Greetham, Hershel Parker, and Hans Walter Gabler. The volume contributes to the paradigm shift in textual scholarship inaugurated by these scholars. Index. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Context in Jena around 1800 A Metaphysics of Freedom Analytic and Synthetic Philosophy Metaphysics of Humanity Socioeconomic Philosophy The Natural World Harmonious Freedom Krause's Philosophy in Spain Ideal de la humanidad (the ideal of humanity) Latin American Reception Conclusion References Further Reading.

This landmark book is now reissued in a new edition that has been vastly rewritten and updated to respond to recent Kantian literature. It includes a new discussion of the Third Analogy, a greatly expanded discussion of Kant’s _Paralogisms, _and entirely new chapters dealing with Kant’s theory of reason, his treatment of theology, and the important Appendix to the Dialectic. _Praise for the earlier edition: _ “Probably the most comprehensive and substantial study of the Critique of Pure Reason written by (...) any American philosopher.... This is a splendid book.”—Lewis White Beck “This masterful study... will most certainly join the canon of required reading for future interpreters of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Superbly organized and lucidly written.”—Garrett Green, _Journal of Religion_. (shrink)

This landmark book is now reissued in a new edition that has been vastly rewritten and updated to respond to recent Kantian literature. It includes a new discussion of the Third Analogy, a greatly expanded discussion of Kant’s _Paralogisms, _and entirely new chapters dealing with Kant’s theory of reason, his treatment of theology, and the important Appendix to the Dialectic. _Praise for the earlier edition: _ “Probably the most comprehensive and substantial study of the Critique of Pure Reason written by (...) any American philosopher.... This is a splendid book.”—Lewis White Beck “This masterful study... will most certainly join the canon of required reading for future interpreters of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Superbly organized and lucidly written.”—Garrett Green, _Journal of Religion_. (shrink)

Building on recent literature on the history of political economy and Spanish imperial history, the article reconstructs the ideas that supported the colonial development of the meat industry in the Río de la Plata. Archival and printed sources are employed to illustrate the different arguments revolving around colonial economic development and imperial rule, in the words and practices of merchants, explorers, administrators and ministers. This way, it is possible to disclose the multiple imperial visions circulating in the Spanish Atlantic. The (...) analysis suggests that economic reformism was not only a European intellectual and political movement but was shared and appropriated by Spanish Americans. They employed arguments in political economy to foster their agenda, namely the economic improvement of their territory in the broader context of the Spanish commercial empire. If a shared consensus around imperial political economy between Spanish and Spanish American vassals provided arguments supporting this colonial industry, the diverging economic interests, imperial rivalries, and the different geographical spaces of enunciation determined a variable dialectic between projects for the expansion of salted meat production and their realisation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 28.1 (2004) 220-223 [Access article in PDF] Doing Our Own Thing. The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like Care, by John McWhorter; xiv & 279 pp. New York: Gotham Books, 2003, $26.00. In 2002, the first anniversary of the September 11th attacks was marked in New York City by the reading of the Gettysburg Address. It was, as many commentators noted, an (...) odd choice of eulogy, comparing as it did the unwitting and innocent victims of a terrorist attack to the willing and active [End Page 220] participants in a bloody civil war. In Doing Our Own Thing, the Berkeley linguist John McWhorter asserts that this strange choice was the result of a decline in American public discourse. A "particular kind of artful English, formerly taken for granted as crucial to legitimate expression on the civic stage has" he argues, "virtually disappeared" (p. xiv). For McWhorter, this lack of contemporary public oratory is merely part of a broader linguistic decline that has affected all aspects of American life and culture.There has, he suggests, been a dumbing-down of the language. Whereas Americans once took care to craft their language, public and private, McWhorter argues, there is now a casualness to their speech and writing which affects all aspects of their existence. The nature of this decline is best captured by McWhorter's anecdote about his research into Gullah, an obscure Creole dialect. In response to his inquiries about local speech patterns, an elderly black woman in Greenwood, Mississippi responded: "Well, seems like most folks, they speak pretty good English, but some people, it seems like they just talk" (p. 2). Whereas Americans once spoke pretty good English, McWhorter believes, now, for the most part, they just talk. In Doing Our Own Thing, he seeks to identify not only evidence for his thesis, but also the causes and consequences of this decline.Evidence of linguistic decline is, McWhorter believes, to be found in our public discourse (as evidenced by the contemporary use of the Gettysburg Address), and in the rise of rap music and popular lyrics at the expense of poetry—he notes that as late as the 1960s, the poet Marianne Moore was a guest on The Tonight Show twice. Less intuitively perhaps, he identifies the same decline in the decreased popularity of piano bars, and the rising popularity of cell-phones. What all these examples of have in common, McWhorter suggests, is a turn towards an oral as opposed to a written culture. Speech has, he says, become something of a "dress-down affair" (p. 49), and this has infected both our written word and public oratory. The "modern American speech writer" he notes, "tends strongly to operate under a guiding imperative not to sound too high a note" (p. 47). McWhorter contrasts this with examples from the nineteenth-century—with letters from ordinary soldiers to their sweethearts, and with Edward Everett's two-hour plus address at Gettysburg—which show that "we live in an America with a distinctly different relationship to the English language than an America still within living memory" (p. 167).For McWhorter, the causes of this decline are clear. The 1960s counterculture, in its efforts to "Speak Truth to Power, abandoned the formal conventions of previous generations' speech, and adopted its own more casual approach to public discourse. Indeed, McWhorter feels confident enough to identify "a single year when America lost its love for its language": 1965 (p. 183). The consequences of this decline are, for McWhorter, similarly obvious. Among them, the shift to an oral culture is held to be responsible for: the election of George W. Bush—Al Gore's "studied articulateness is certainly one of the major [End Page 221] factors that blocked him from winning the presidency" (p. xxi); the decline of contemporary political debate—more formal written language is, says McWhorter, "a better vehicle for objective argument than speech" (p. 35); and the increasingly obtuse nature of academic language. Indeed, McWhorter asserts that Judith Butler... (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno was a major twentieth-century philosopher and social critic whose writings on oppositional culture in art, music, and literature increasingly stand at the center of contemporary intellectual debate. In this excellent collection, Robert Hullot-Kentor, widely regarded as the most distinguished American translator and commentator on Adorno, gathers together sixteen essays he has written about the philosopher over the past twenty years. The opening essay, "Origin Is the Goal," pursues Adorno's thesis of the dialectic of enlightenment to better (...) understand the urgent social and political situation of the United States. "Back to Adorno" examines Adorno's idea that sacrifice is the primordial form of human domination; "Second Salvage" reconstructs Adorno's unfinished study of the transformation of music in radio transmission; and "What Is Mechanical Reproduction" revisits Adorno's criticism of Walter Benjamin. Further essays cover a broad range of topics: Adorno's affinities with Wallace Stevens and Nabokov, his complex relationship with Kierkegaard and psychoanalysis, and his critical study of popular music. Many of these essays have been revised, with new material added that emphasizes the relevance of Adorno's thought to the United States today. _Things Beyond Resemblance_ is a timely and richly analytical collection crucial to the study of critical theory, aesthetics, continental philosophy, and Adorno. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Fragments WEISKEL'S SUBLIME AND THE IMPASSE OF KNOWLEDGE by Laura Quinney Since the publication of Thomas Weiskel's The Romantic Sublime in 1976, scholars of the sublime, in America at any rate, have taken their cue from the demystifying character ofWeiskel's analysis.1 Before Weiskel the most ambitious twentieth-century account of the sublime was Samuel Monk's largely descriptive work The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories inEighteenth-CenturyEngland.2 With the (...) advent ofsemiotic and psychoanalytic approaches in the late sixties and early seventies, studies of the sublime shifted into a more critical mode. Neil Hertz had taken a skeptical tack in his early essay "A Reading of Longinus," but it was with Weiskel's book that the possibilities of demystifying die sublime were first explored fully.3 Weiskel's treatment is comprehensive, covering all the English Romantic poets as well as Burke and Kant. His thinking is sophisticated, incisive, and often inspired; though The Romantic Sublime was published nearly twenty years ago, it remains an admirable and influential work. In some respects it has never been superseded. Most major American scholars of the sublime—de Man, Knapp, and de Bolla, among others—have adopted the skeptical mode of Weiskel and Hertz.4 But die demystifying approach Weiskel's book helped to pioneer, while it has led to powerful argument, has certain limitations. Weiskel's precocious effort to "desublimate" the sublime shows diese limitations clearly, and it is die purpose of this essay to explore them. In die course of exposing the sublime as a mystified notion, and separating the naive believers from the canny skeptics, Weiskel also Philosophy and Literature, © 1994, 18: 309-319 310Philosophy and Literature separates intellectual insight from aesthetic capacity, and thus he uncritically reiterates die old Romantic dialectic of knowledge and power. The figure of Wordsworth plays a central role in establishing these oppositions. Weiskel portrays Wordsworth as the most successful poet of the sublime—the most successful, and tiierefore the most beguiled. In his remarkable concluding chapter, Weiskel locates the source of Wordsworth's powerful "liminal sublime" in a kind of intellectual regression. Wordswortii refuses the whole Symbolic order, the ghastly product of the Oedipus complex, for that order spells die deatii or disappearance of the signified, and die end of an imaginatively fruitful narcissism. Wordswortii retreats from the Symbolic to the Imaginary radier than endure tiiis threat to poetic life. And he is well rewarded for his dodge, since as a consequence the images of his memory thrill with the fascination of the ineffable. The Prelude gains its momentum from the project of memory; but the rich opacity and mysterious beckoning of memory's images are in a sense contrived. They spring out of a sublimation, the images colored widi the intensity of the signification Wordswortii has repudiated. Wordswortii sacrifices insight and intellectual progress for imaginative power. This is a strictly ambivalent exchange, as Weiskel makes clear in his conclusion; Wordsworth's rejection of the Oedipus complex and of the descent into the Symbolic Order, is "purely illusory, a fiction," but "the fiction is a necessary and saving one; it founds die self and secures the possibility—the chance for a self-conviction—of originality" (p. 203). Wordswortii's poetic success arises from his acceptance of an illusion, a "saving fiction" both enviable and degraded. This selfdelusion is essential to the poetic flourishing of the sublime, and only Wordsworth had the odd insensitivity to maintain it. Weiskel contrasts faith in the efficacy and excellence of sublimation with skeptical insight into its origin and end—its origin in mystification, and its end in alienation from the phenomenal world. The faith of Wordswortii's egotistical sublime is that imaginative perception provides die highest and paradoxically truest form of perception. It is easy enough to see how such a faith could provide hope and energy, and tiius could be compromised by wish-fulfillment in its generation, and direatened by extinction in its analysis. But what lies behind Weiskel's opposition of faith and insight is the old dichotomy—or series of interrelated dichotomies—that date back at least to Romanticism. Weiskel admits that his opposition of fruitful illusion and dessicating realism... (shrink)

Take part... and you will bear witness to the semiotic nature of human animals. This event, commented by Charbel Niño El-Hani (Federal University of Bahia) and chaired by Elma Berisha (Lyceum Institute), is part of the activities of the 2022 International Open Seminar on Semiotics: a Tribute to John Deely on the Fifth Anniversary of His Passing, cooperatively organized by the Institute for Philosophical Studies of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, the Lyceum Institute, the (...) Deely Project, Saint Vincent College, the Iranian Society for Phenomenology at the Iranian Political Science Association, the International Association for Semiotics of Space and Time, the Institute for Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Semiotic Society of America, the American Maritain Association, the International Association for Semiotic Studies, the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies, the International Center for Semiotics and Intercultural Dialogue, Moscow State Academic University for the Humanities and the Mansarda Acesa with the support of the FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education of the Government of Portugal under the UID/FIL/00010/2020 project. *** Jamin Pelkey is Associate Professor and Program Director in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Ryerson University, Toronto, where he is also an active faculty member in the Ryerson-York graduate program in Communication & Culture. He serves as Co-Editor of Semiotica, Vice President of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics, and executive board member for the International Cognitive Linguistics Association, the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies, and the Semiotic Society of America. Jamin’s research explores semiotic dimensions of language evolution and embodied cognition. He is the recipient of the 2017 Mouton d’Or Award for best article in Semiotica and has edited or co-edited twelve collections in linguistics, anthropology, and semiotics, including Tropological Thought and Action (2022), Cognitive Semiotics (2019), Applied Brand Semiotics (2018), Archaeology of Concepts (2018), Sociohistorical Linguistics in Southeast Asia (2017), Virtual Identities (2016), and The Semiotics of Paradox (2015). His authored books include Dialectology as Dialectic (2011) and The Semiotics of X (2017). He is currently editing Bloomsbury Semiotics, a major reference work in four volumes. *** Charbel N. El-Hani is full professor in the Institute of Biology, Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. Coordinator of the LEFHBio - History, Philosophy, and Biology Teaching Lab and the INCT IN-TREE - National Institute of Science and Technology in Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Studies in Ecology and Evolution. Between January 2020 and July 2021, he was visiting researcher at the CES - Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, Portugal. He works in the areas of philosophy of biology, ecology, ethnobiology and science education research. *** Homepage: https://www.uc.pt/fluc/uidief/io2s Auditorium: https://www.uc.pt/fluc/uidief/io2s/auditorium *** Technical support assured by Robert Junqueira. The cover image for the video was designed by Zahra Soltani. (shrink)

"Ever Since This World Began" from Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013) by Masha Tupitsyn continent. The audio-essay you've recorded yourself reading for continent. , “Ever Since the World Began,” is a compelling entrance into your new multi-media book, Love Dog (Success and Failure) , because it speaks to the very form of the book itself: vacillating and finding the long way around the question of love by using different genres and media. In your discussion of the face, one of the (...) themes of Love Dog , I think there is something to be said about the surfaces media create and how you constantly manipulate them in your work. This seems important for thinking also about your book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film ; a book on film written in tweets, interposing already three sets of expectations and pushing the boundaries of each medium's faciality, it's surface tension. In Love Dog , is there another kind of facial interaction? Perhaps the discursive faces of approaching love as topic and love as method? If so, how did/do these intersect for you, do/did they drive the creation of this book? MASHA TUPITSYN With LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to pay homage to the work modernism has done on subjective time and chronological time by carrying that experiment over into the digital economy. Because LACONIA is a time-based work of cultural criticism that employs the aphorism to look at 21 st century American culture, it is also an archival work of cultural mourning and memory. And in Love Dog , which is also a work about mourning as it relates to love, I wanted to think with all my senses, and to reflect that in the writing itself by using a multi-media form. LACONIA tackled the sound bite and the promotional image--the everyday language of consumer culture--which often wants to communicate ideological agendas through the repetition of a single image or reductive phrase. I had always been interested in the approaches of artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and essayistic, typographical filmmakers, like Chris Marker and Godard. In both cases, I felt it was important to try to compose a book in which deep—critical—thinking happens in so-called immediate, informal, and disposable contexts. That is, in places where you are either not supposed to be serious or are not required to take things seriously. To me the most intervention is needed in every day instances of culture and representation. In order to do that, I had to utilize and interrogate the very structures I was critiquing. In other words, the writing had to materialize in that live, digital, public space. It couldn’t simply happen at home on a piece of paper or in a word document on my computer that no one could see until it was finished. It had to unfold in real time, amidst everything else. And it had to literally be surrounded by the cultural landscape I wanted to assess. In both LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to know how and if we can get away from what we cannot get away from? From which there is no respite. Given this, I don’t think hypertexts can really be called hypertexts anymore. Hypertexts are simply the world today. This is not only the way we read the world now. It is the way the world reads. Likewise, interfaciality, as you put it, works on a number of levels for me, both on and off the page. There is my relation to epistemological and phenomenological surfaces—the screen, the body, the face, the voice, gender; the official story. Then there is the way this dovetails formally, and to which the digital adds yet another dimension. It’s also where sound comes into Love Dog (giving the book a sound; giving tonality to the book’s ideas and feelings). As Anne Carson pointed out in her essay “The Gender of Sound,” the two are connected, and of course so are love and gender. In “Ever Since This World Began,” I wanted to think about the phenomenology of the voice, which is why I visualize the sonic in the book and why in my writing about faces, I look at the tonal aspects (the things a face voices and a voice faces) of a face. This was standard to do when images and faces were “silent” in the silent era. Those images/faces were extraordinarily audible. The greatest screen face, to me, is still Falconetti’s in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc . We can hear her face—even though there is no actual sound on screen of her speaking. The internet is a similarly “silent” space where actual voices are lacking. So intertextuality goes with interfaciality. I’ve also talked a lot about how categorization worked when it came to the reception of my first book, Beauty Talk & Monsters . How despite the fact that Beauty Talk is a text that crisscrosses form and content in a variety of ways, not pinpointing its exact genre—choosing one genre over another—only made things worse. Fiction was the category people were most adverse to me using, even though of course there is a lot of fiction in the book. Part of how fiction works in Beauty Talk is in the reader not knowing exactly where the fiction resides. In Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend , for example, everything matters. Everything is political, whether it’s real or imaginary, film or reality. In Weekend , life is not a game and neither is the game a game. The game is really life. Either everything is important or nothing is. But many people want clear answers and demarcations so that they can decide what is important and what is not important. My use of the “I,” subjective criticism, made everything “real” in Beauty Talk . But fiction is in the construction. It is in the blending. This is why I perforate the movie screen and connect the onscreen and the offscreen; the official story and the backstory. Although I don’t think there is a difference between onscreen and offscreen anymore. Nor is there a dialectic. It’s all screen all the time now. Non-fiction, on the other hand, was more tolerated as a moniker. Unlike Love Dog , Beauty Talk wasn’t explicitly or tangibly (what is tangible is a question in all these books) working with digital forms or within this digital economy, so some people resisted the book’s hypertextuality or intertextuality because they couldn’t see its other forms, if that makes sense. It was a problem of invisibility; of how to make something appear (this is where Nietzsche, big presence in Love Dog , comes in—the nature of appearances). Something people don’t necessarily want to see. Some readers couldn’t see the way forms were interfacing in that book. On the surface, Beauty Talk was simply a text about media culture—the domination of entertainment as a mode of being and knowing—and most readers could only see that one side of the book. But as Godard puts it in Wim Wenders’ documentary about the future of cinema, Room 666 , “Films are made, images are made, when there’s no one looking. That’s what the invisible is, that which we don’t see. That’s what the incredible is, that which we don’t see. And cinema shows you that which we don’t see, the incredible.” We are living in the aftermath of narrative and temporal collapse, which means we don’t read or feel in the same way. I began to use digital forms in my writing because I don’t see us as traditional book people anymore. I would add that power also resides in the invisible, in the things we make invisible by making them visible. Or it did for a long time. The new face of power is quickly becoming so-called transparency, which is even more corrupt because even though we now live in a behind-the-scenes culture, and see and know how the mechanisms of power and corruption operate, we still don't change. The world still doesn't change. Finally, another important thing that Godard says in Room 666 that relates to Love Dog is: “I’m here in front of the camera, and yet in my body and in my head, I’m behind it. My world is the imaginary and the imaginary is a journey between forwards and backwards.” This idea of visible/invisible, foresight and hindsight , backwards and forwards is an important dialectic in relation to time and the idea of the destinal. This is why I wanted Love Dog to travel, literally, figuratively, and discursively. You have to be open to not knowing. To epistemological, geographical, chronological, and emotional aporias. In Love Dog my story is both visible and invisible to me. Sometimes I could see where I was going. Other times I was completely in the dark existentially. Truth procedure, which love is, as bell hooks and Badiou tell us, requires expedition and openness to possibility. Unless you want a story you already know, but that is not truth procedure. So I tried to create this backwards and forwards journey in the book—this sense of travel and motion, hope and doubt—by jumping between forms, media, time; traveling to different places, texts, and emotional registers. The book’s “Time-Jump series,” which mostly takes the form of music—songs—but also a series of “green” videos that I shot, is the most obvious tribute to this idea of subjective and chronological time. continent. Your work aligns with writers that play with the form of their language, or have assumed the role of performance artist at some point: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson to name a few representing varied approaches that show up in Love Dog . At the risk of ossifying the work, or missing the point—as these experimental modes of writing stack-up in piles of published works, do they approach a genre? MASHA As I noted in my book Life As We Show It , in Chelsea Girls the poet Eileen Myles points out, “You can’t get money without a category.” More importantly, you can’t get a category—or respect, rank—without a clear genre. This makes genre and gender an obvious pair. The two words are even linked etymologically and both genre and gender concern taxonomies of legitimacy—of sorting through what and who is valuable. So the words share common prejudices. The things one does not want to read is often synonymous with who one doesn't want to read about. Therefore a break-up of or with genre is maybe the genre or anti-genre that could be said to link these writers. Avital Ronell breaks up with philosophical tradition and modes of inquiry. Like Nietzsche, she revaluates methods of evaluation, testing out things you are not supposed to use philosophy to test (and, by the same token, testing philosophy in ways it’s not supposed to be tested), like drugs and stupidity—where philosophy fails and we fail philosophy. And Chris Kraus does something similar in her experimental fiction, using different forms to put female subjectivity “to the test,” so to speak. All these female writers and thinkers have tried to destabilize the systems that have been set up in (and against) writing. Thus missing the mark with genre, even intentionally, means that we have missed the point in some sense as writers and thinkers. And that to me is a good thing, however difficult. We’ve started at the wrong point and gone somewhere else instead. We’ve acknowledged that writing and thinking are also about failure, and that failure is always embedded in the act of writing and in our reasons for writing. So that missing the point is also the point. Derrida insisted: “We must invent a name for those ‘critical’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.” But how can you give something that resists and deforms, a name? Wouldn’t the name also be deformed? Isn't this why the aforementioned writers get hyphenated descriptors like ficto-criticism? Do we need a proper name to be able to read something carefully? I don’t think so. I don’t need it as a reader. I’ve always taken a work on its own terms. But for most people, if you don’t have an address, people don’t know how to find you. A lot of time, they won’t even know how to look. And in some cases, they’ll think you’re not even worth finding. You are not on the map because you have to literally make the map in order to exist. In her essay, “The Gender of Sound” Carson asks, “Why is female sound bad to hear?” I think for the same reason something uncategorizable (pedagogically, creatively, racially, and sexually)—Other—is hard to read. *For an audio recording of Florida , read by Masha Tupitsyn click here . continent. : We're also curious to hear know how you see the significance of 'performance' (and why the label sticks to the shoes of these authors like toilet paper) in describing this kind of writing work? MASHA I think I responded to the parenthetical portion of this question in my previous answer. As far as how performance relates to Love Dog , in Acker’s Don Quixote , which is another big presence in the book, she writes, “there is no other reality than anthropomorphism.” In Don Quixote , the dog is human and the human is dog. Which brings us to the title of Love Dog and the totemic function of the dog in the book: giving human things animal characteristics and animal things human characteristics. Rather than investing all our human love ideals into dogs, which we do constantly as a culture of dog lovers, I wanted to put the dog into love. It is the difference between the consumption of love as a patriarchal institution or status position and the essence of a type of radical and liberatory relation that would benefit humans in their bonds with other humans. So the dog in Love Dog is not simply the book’s cover or performative affect, so to speak. Love has always needed the dog, which is why the dog is the very embodiment of belief in love . Recall Argos The Great Dog and Odysseus. Argos is the only one who remembers and recognizes the ragged and old Odysseus even after his 20-year absence. So love is the high ideal and the dog, both common and dependable, is the bridge between the sacred and the profane. The dog is the house of love. And because Love Dog is a digital project, it seemed impossible to think about the post-human, technology, the virtual, or difference (which Badiou says is essential to love in In Praise of Love ) without thinking about animal-being and being-animal. Instead of simply “performing” these ideas and characteristics as literary affects, I’m interested in being-becoming. Which means the book’s tropes, leitmotifs, series, and even its titles are in service of that truth procedure. In other words, I actually want to live this way, not just write this way. And, more importantly, I want to live this way not just think this way. So Love Dog became both my totem animal and my autobiographical animal. This made the book organic, anthropomorphic—beyond literary. See the trailer to Masha Tupitsyn's new book available now from Penny Ante Editions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE PLACE OF RENE GIRARD IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY Guy Vanheeswijck University ofAntwerp and ofLeuven Iwould like to start by quoting a text which is likely to be recognized by everyone, who is even on a superficial level familiar with the work of René Girard: Desire that bears on a natural object is only human to the extent that it is mediated by the desire of another bearing on the (...) same object: it is human to desire what others desire, because they desire it. Thus an object that is perfectly useless from a biological point of view (such as a medal, or the enemy's flag) can be desired because it is the object of other desires. Such a human desire, and human reality as it differs from animal reality, is only created by the action that satisfies such desires. Human history is the history of desires that are desired [Désirs désirés]. Undoubtedly, these could be words written by Girard. However, they are not. These words are quoted from the famous lectures given by Alexandre Kojève on Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes at the Ecole pratique des hautes études between 1933 and 1939. They were followed by what would become the crème ofpost-war French philosophy: Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, Alexandre Koyré, Pierre Klossowski, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre.' Kojève's interpretation ofHegel has, as generally known, become the point ofreference to the post-war twentieth ' Although Sartre himselfcould not attend the lectures (at that time he taught philosophy in Le Havre en Laon), he must have heard from it by way of Aron or Merleau-Ponty. 96Guy Vanheeswijck century philosophy in France. Before 1930 the word "dialectic" was burdened with an odium of sin, after 1930 it became a word—thanks to Kojève —radiant with prestige. Before 1930 there had been no talk of an Hegelian school whatsoever in France, after 1930 the situation changed so drastically that Merleau-Ponty was able to write these often quoted lines in 1946: Hegel is at the origin of everything that has been great in philosophy for over a century; for example Marxism, Nietzsche, phenomenology and German existentialism, psychoanalysis. He inaugurates the attempt to explore the irrational and to integrate it within a wider rationality that remains the philosophical task of our century. (Sens et non-sens 109-110) Half a century later, these words have lost their self-evident character. While the generation of French thinkers between 1930 and 1960 stresses its dependence on Hegel, the generation after 1960 heavily reacts against him. In 1970 Michel Foucault gave his inaugural speech at the Collège de France. On behalf of his generation he testified to a generalized antiHegelianism at that moment: "Our entire epoch, whether through logic or epistemology, whether through Marx or Nietzsche, seeks to evade Hegel's Imperium [échapper à Hegel] (L'Ordre du discours 74). Obviously, René Girard belongs to the second generation, which, on the one hand, embroiders on the theme ofdesire, borrowed from Kojève's interpretation ofHegel, but, on the other, in its search for answers precisely wishes to get rid of Hegel. But, is it correct to call René Girard a philosopher? His schooling was that of an historian. In 1947 he graduated in Paris as an archivistepal éographe at the Ecole de Chartres: his thesis was "La vie privée à Avignon dans la seconde moitié du XVe siècle." Three years later—in the meantime he had emigrated to the United States—he received his Ph.D. at the faculty of history of the University of Indiana. The topic of his dissertation was "American opinion ofFrance, 1940-1943." However, he has never worked as a professional historian. He owes his reputation first and foremost to his literary analyses, subsequently to his research in anthropology, finally to his exegesis ofthe Bible. Time and again, Girard has expressed his preference for literature to both humanities and philosophy. Human behavior is, in his view, much less elucidated by the conceptual structures of discursive philosophy than by the evocative force of a Greek tragedy, the Biblical passion story or a modern novel. One might retort that René Girard... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ON LEO STRAUSS'S UNDERSTANDING OF THE NATURAL LAW THEORY OF THOMAS AQUINAS * DOUGLAS KRIES Gonzaga University Spokane, Washington IN COMPOSING the introduction to Natural Right and History in the early 1950's, Leo Strauss described the situation in American social science as a division between two parties : the modern liberals of one persuasion or another, who had largely abandoned natural right altogether, and the students of Thomas (...) Aquinas.1 Since the fundamental goal of that book was a recovery of the classical or pre-modern theory of natural right, one might have anticipated that Strauss's work would have been received enthusiastically by the latter group. If nothing else, Strauss and the Thomists were natural allies because they shared the same modern enemies: namely, historicism (the view that all human thought is confined to the immediate historical horizon of the thinker) and positivism (the view that human thought cannot make value judgments, but only judgments about observable matters of fact). Beyond that, Strauss explored very seriously the issues of reason and revelation.and of religion and politics-both of which are crucial for Thomistic political thought. Yet, despite such favorable auguries, a congenial affiliation of *The author wishes to acknowledge the helpful criticisms he received in the preparation of this manuscript from David Calhoun of the Philosophy Department at Gonzaga University. 1 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 2, 7. 215 216 DOUGLAS KRIES Straussians and Thomists was never formed.2 Many factors probably contributed to the losing of the opportunity,8 but presumably chief among them was the fact that, even though Strauss's view of Thomas was genuinely respectful, it was not unequivocally sympathetic. Strauss preferred classical natural right theory to modern natural right theory, and he came to the conclusion that Thomas's teaching on natural right-while certainly ' pre-modern ' 4-introduced novelties into the classical position which weakened it rather than improved it. The goal of this essay is to analyze Strauss's reservations about Thomas's statement of the problem of natural right. Such an analysis will, I hope, contribute to a more fruitful exchange between the students of Leo Strauss and those of Thomas Aquinas. I Perhaps the best way to initiate an explanation of Strauss's view of the differences between classical and Thomistic natural right is to contrast the starting points of the two theories. The classical approach begins with what is said about right, with the everyday opinions that are held about what is just. From such an immediate starting point the classical approach ascends toward true knowledge through the process of dialectics. Although all people have views about what is just, in fact such opinions, when examined through friendly disputation with a philosopher, are almost always found to be self-contradictory; however, the 2 This is not to suggest that Strauss was completely ignored and rejected by the Thomists. For an overview of the Thomistic literature which has considered Strauss, see James V. Schall, "Revelation, Reason and Politics: Catholic Reflexions on Strauss," Gregorianum 62 (1981), 349-365, 467-497. s See Ernest L. Fortin, "Rational Theologians and Irrational Philosophers: A Straussian Perspective," Interpretation 12 (1984), 349-350. 4 For Strauss, the fundamental division within the history of political philosophy was between the ancients and the moderns. He understood Thomas to be in the former camp and was critical of contemporary Thomists who, under pressure from the success of modern physics, had attempted to ' modernize ' Thomas by jettisoning his teleological view of nature. See Natural Right and History, pp. 7-8; What is Political Philosophy? (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1959), pp. 285-6. NATURAL LAW THEORY OF THOMAS AQUINAS 217 very fact that one comes to realize that contradiction and seeks to rectify it points to the fact that human beings realize that a more comprehensive, non-contradictory view might be possible. The contradictions thus force one to ascend beyond the opinions that are at best only partially true toward an ever more consistent view, a view based on nature; if such a process could reach culmination, the culmination would constitute a statement of what is right by nature.5 The starting... (shrink)

To compare a novel to a work of philosophy is, admittedly, a risky exercise in analogy. When the novelist is Lawrence and the philosophical text is the ponderous and dialectical Being and Nothingness, such a comparison may seem willfully perverse and peculiarly open, insofar as it deals with Lawrence's great theme of sexuality, to his anathema of "sex in the head." Furthermore, modern criticism, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, has tended to be wary of critical approaches that lean on notions (...) that are not derived from literature itself - a tendency that is being reinforced these days by the structuralist insistence on the "literariness" of the Text. Now, despite its metaphorical statement as a form of dramatic "gesture," Sartre's book is very definitely not a work of literature. T.H. Adamowski, associate professor of English at Erindale College, the University of Toronto, has written articles on English, American, and French literature. This essay is part of a larger study on progress on Lawrence's "sexual poetics.". (shrink)

During World War II, the Institute for Social Research conducted an innovative study of American working-class antisemitism. This article goes beyond existing literature by reconstructing the project’s evolving understanding of labor antisemitism—from ideology to psychopathology. This change, it argues, arose from the project’s methods, findings, and analytical concepts—especially the long-overlooked concept of the stereotype. The article documents this concept’s role in two better-known Institute works from the period: Dialectic of Enlightenment and Authoritarian Personality. Throughout, it traces continuities in the (...) Institute’s research program and reconsiders the balance between its empirical studies and its critical theory in the 1940s. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Richard Rorty Lays Down the LawLeon SuretteRichard Rorty has found a large cross-disciplinary academic audience for his argument that philosophy ought to abandon its self-appointed role as a foundational discipline and adopt the “ironic” and “conversational” practices of literary criticism. Explicitly invoking early pragmatism—which argued that philosophy should join the natural sciences and regard itself as “the workshop of being, where we catch fact in the making” 1 —Rorty (...) argues that philosophers should now abandon the natural sciences, and become “edifiers” and “ironist theorists” on the model of literary criticism. 2Rorty’s pragmatism amounts to the claim that philosophy ought to wind up and put away its long preoccupation with metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology and abandon the pretense of deductive rigor to become “dialectical.” This newly reformed philosophy would, as Rorty puts it, “play off vocabularies against one another, rather than merely... infer propositions from one another” (CIS, p. 78). Rorty’s belief in philosophy as a form of conversation may owe less to American pragmatism, however, than to Continental hermeneutics (particularly Hans Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method). Nevertheless, I intend to take him at his word, and apply the fundamental tenet of pragmatism to his own theorizing. I take the following remark by William James as definitional of American pragmatism: “What practical difference would it make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show that some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right” (PR, p. 26).In the light of this pragmatic principal, most philosophical and [End Page 261] literary theories make little if any practical difference to the practice of literary criticism, although philosophy and theory can displace, occlude, or banish it. The whole issue turns on what is meant by the term, literary criticism. Rorty assumes that criticism is an interpretive activity, and that nothing further need be said. Yet interpretation is not the sole activity of literary criticism, nor is the practice of literary interpretation sufficiently well formulated to serve as a model upon which philosophy could reform itself.Although Rorty’s proposed reformation of philosophy on the model of literary criticism is seen by many literary critics as a friendly takeover, it can just as easily be seen as hostile, as an updating and domestication of Hans Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, which would make interpretation foundational for all of the knowledge industries. With respect to his paternalistic attitude toward literary criticism, Rorty is very much within a philosophical tradition of foundationalism that begins, as far as literary criticism is concerned, with Plato’s Ion. Whereas Plato argued that literary criticism is a misguided or unworthy form of discourse, Rorty turns it into an approved variety of philosophical discourse. But he can achieve this end only by occluding (through misrepresentation) the praxis of literary criticism as it has been constituted both within and without the academy.Rorty’s project of “edification” through the reform of philosophy as “conversation” was first proposed in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (pp. 360, 371) and has subsequently been refined in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, where it becomes the Nietzschean project of “making the best selves for ourselves that we can” (p. 80). This goal is said to be achieved through “literary criticism,” which he describes as “the attempt to play off vocabularies against one another” (pp. 78–79). Such an idea is enormously flattering to literary critics, and, not surprisingly, has garnered Rorty many admirers in literature departments. But it rests upon a highly selective characterization of literary criticism—a characterization which conforms roughly to New Critical and Deconstructive practice, though not to longer-standing critical practices.Rorty ignores literary criticism’s long standing self-definition as the reinterpretation or redescription of object texts. Instead, he assumes that the practice of Harold Bloom, in which both “creative” and critical discourse are regarded as varieties of usurpation or “misprision,” is standard. Rorty speaks of “literary discourse” as a... (shrink)

Traditionally, analytic philosophers writing on aesthetics have given short shrift to nature. The last thirty years, however, have seen a steady growth of interest in this area. The essays and books now available cover central philosophical issues concerning the nature of the aesthetic and the existence of norms for aesthetic judgement. They also intersect with important issues in environmental philosophy. More recent contributions have opened up new topics, such as the relationship between natural sound and music, the beauty of animals, (...) and the aesthetics of gardens. Using these materials, it is now easy to include a module on the aesthetics of nature as one part of an introductory course on aesthetics, or even to design an entire upper-level undergraduate or graduate seminar around the topic. Author Recommends: Don Mannison, 'Comments Stimulated by Reinhardt's Remarks: A Prolegomenon to a Human Chauvinistic Aesthetic'. Environmental Philosophy. Eds. Don Mannison, Michael McRobbie, and Richard Routley (Canberra: Australian National University, 1980), 212–16. Readers coming fresh to contemporary debates may find the lack of attention to natural beauty in twentieth-century philosophy somewhat puzzling. This paper, which defends the view that nature cannot be aesthetically appreciated as such, presents this attitude in a particularly pure form. Ronald Hepburn, 'Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty'. British Analytical Philosophy. Eds. Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 285–310. Reprinted in The Aesthetics of Natural Environments. Eds. Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004). This seminal essay marks the beginning of contemporary discussion of the aesthetics of nature. Many of its ideas and themes continue to reverberate in contemporary debates. Allen Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2000). This volume is a collection of Carlson's influential essays on environmental aesthetics. Chapters 4 and 5, 'Appreciation and the Natural Environment' and 'Nature, Aesthetic Judgment, and Objectivity', set the agenda for much subsequent discussion in the aesthetics of nature. Chapter 6, 'Nature and Positive Aesthetics', develops and defends the controversial idea that nature, unlike art, is always aesthetically good. Arnold Berleant, 'The Aesthetics of Art and Nature'. Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 228–43. Reprinted in The Aesthetics of Natural Environments. Eds. Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004). In this paper, Berleant presents his influential idea of an 'engaged aesthetics' for nature. Yuriko Saito, 'The Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature'. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1998): 101–11. This article develops Saito's idea that ethical considerations play a critical role in the aesthetics of nature, and presents a novel argument for Positive Aesthetics for nature. Malcolm Budd, The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature: Essays on the Aesthetics of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). This book collects Budd's papers on the aesthetics of nature, which contain important criticisms of Carlson's natural environmental model and the notion of Positive Aesthetics for nature. Noël Carroll, 'On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History'. Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 244–66. Reprinted in The Aesthetics of Natural Environments. Eds. Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004). This paper argues for the importance of aesthetic appreciation that emphasizes emotional responses to nature. A philosophically sophisticated and influential treatment by a leading aesthetician. Ned Hettinger, 'Allen Carlson's Environmental Aesthetics and Protection of the Environment'. Environmental Ethics 27 (2005): 57–76. In this essay, an environmental philosopher gives careful and thorough consideration to the place of aesthetic considerations in environmental protection, focusing on Carlson's work. John Andrew Fisher, 'What the Hills are Alive With: In Defense of the Sounds of Nature'. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1998): 167–79. Reprinted in The Aesthetics of Natural Environments. Eds. Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004). Most discussions of nature aesthetics focus on visual experiences; this essay is the first philosophical study of the aesthetics of natural sounds. A nuanced and original paper. Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant. 'Introduction: The Aesthetics of Nature'. The Aesthetics of Natural Environments. Eds. Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004), 11–42. A comprehensive review of the literature, this essay contains the best available bibliography on the subject. Online Materials: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/environmental-aesthetics/ Environmental Aesthetics: Allen Carlson's entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.aesthetics-online.org/articles/index.php?articles_id=17 Teaching Environmental Aesthetics: Allen Carlson's article on the American Society for Aesthetics Web site. http://www.uqtr.uquebec.ca/AE/Vol_6/ Volume 6 of AE: Canadian Aesthetics Journal /Revue canadienne d'esthetique: Papers by Thomas Heyd and Ira Newman on Allen Carlson's book Aesthetics and the Environment, along with a response from Carlson. http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=400 Paradoxes and Puzzles: Appreciating Gardens and Urban Nature: An essay by Stephanie Ross in the online journal Contemporary Aesthetics. Sample Syllabus for a three-week module in an undergraduate aesthetics course: This three week module can easily be adapted to fit shorter available class time or reduced reading expectations for students. A lighter two-week module, for instance, would drop the Hepburn reading and do either the Carroll essay or the Saito essay, but not both. Note that all readings for this module are reprinted in Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (eds.), The Aesthetics of Natural Environments (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004). Week 1: Introduction Reading: Ronald Hepburn, 'Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty'. British Analytical Philosophy. Eds. Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 285–310. Discussion of Hepburn's essay will allow the instructor to bring out the distinctive issues and themes of the aesthetics of nature. Week 2: Objectivity or Subjectivity? Readings: Allen Carlson, 'Appreciation and the Natural Environment'. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37 (1979): 267–76. Arnold Berleant, 'The Aesthetics of Art and Nature'. Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 228–43. This section covers two very different approaches to thinking about the aesthetic appreciation of nature. Consideration of these provides an opportunity for students to reflect on nature's relationship to art, and on the character of aesthetic experience itself. Week 3: Pluralistic Approaches Readings: Yuriko Saito, 'Appreciating Nature on its Own Terms'. Environmental Ethics 20 (1998): 135–49. Noël Carroll, 'On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History'. Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 244–66. This section considers approaches that are motivated by perceived limitations of the two approaches mentioned above. In discussing these, students will focus on the significance, for the aesthetics of nature, of emotion and also of broader ethical considerations. Sample Syllabus for an upper-level undergraduate or graduate seminar: Books on Syllabus: Glenn Parsons, Aesthetics and Nature [AN] (London: Continuum Press, forthcoming November 2008). Allen Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture [AE] (London: Routledge, 2000). Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (eds.), The Aesthetics of Natural Environments [ANE] (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004). Week 1: Introduction Parsons, AN, ch. 1. Allen Carlson, 'Environmental Aesthetics'. The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. Eds. Berys Gaut and Dominic Lopes (London: Routledge, 2001), 423–36. Don Mannison, 'Comments Stimulated by Reinhardt's Remarks: A Prolegomenon to a Human Chauvinistic Aesthetic'. Environmental Philosophy. Eds. Don Mannison, Michael McRobbie, and Richard Routley (Canberra: Australian National University, 1980), 212–16. Ronald Hepburn, 'Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty'. British Analytical Philosophy. Eds. Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 285–310. Reprinted in ANE. Week 2: Imagination Parsons, AN, ch. 2. Thomas Heyd, 'Aesthetic Appreciation and the Many Stories About Nature'. British Journal of Aesthetics 41 (2001): 125–37. Reprinted in ANE. Emily Brady, 'Imagination and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature'. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1998): 139–47. Reprinted in ANE. Marcia Eaton, 'Fact and Fiction in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature'. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1998): 149–56. Reprinted in ANE. Week 3: Formalism Parsons, AN, ch. 3. Carlson, 'Formal Qualities and the Natural Environment', AE, ch. 3. Allen Carlson, 'On the Possibility of Quantifying Scenic Beauty'. Landscape Planning 4 (1977): 131–72. Ira Newman, 'Reflections on Allen Carlson's Aesthetics and the Environment'. AE: Canadian Aesthetics Journal /Revue canadienne d'esthetique 6 (2001) http://www.uqtr.uquebec.ca/AE/Vol_6/Carlson/newman.html>. Nick Zangwill, 'Formal Natural Beauty'. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 21 (2001): 209–24. Week 4: Science and Nature Aesthetics Parsons, AN, ch. 4. Aldo Leopold, 'Country'. A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1966), 177–80. Carlson, 'Appreciation and the Natural Environment', AE, ch. 4. Carlson, 'Nature, Aesthetic Judgment, and Objectivity', AE, ch. 5. Glenn Parsons, 'The Aesthetics of Nature'. Philosophy Compass 2 (2007): 358–72. Week 5: Positive Aesthetics Carlson, 'Nature and Positive Aesthetics', AE, ch. 6. Eugene Hargrove, Foundations of Environmental Ethics (Denton, TX: Environmental Ethics Books, 1996), ch. 6. Yuriko Saito, 'The Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature'. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1998): 101–11. Malcolm Budd, 'The Aesthetics of Nature'. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2000): 137–57. Glenn Parsons, 'Nature Appreciation, Science and Positive Aesthetics'. British Journal of Aesthetics 42 (2002): 279–95. Week 6: Animals Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968 [1757]), Pt. III, sec. VI. Holmes Rolston III, 'Beauty and the Beast: Aesthetic Experience of Wildlife'. Valuing Wildlife: Economic and Social Perspectives. Eds. Daniel J. Decker and Gary R. Goff (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), 187–96. Glenn Parsons, 'The Aesthetic Value of Animals'. Environmental Ethics 27 (2007): 151–69. Week 7: Pluralism Parsons, AN, ch. 5. Noël Carroll, 'On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History'. Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 244–66. Reprinted in ANE. Yuriko Saito, 'Appreciating Nature on its Own Terms'. Environmental Ethics 20 (1998): 135–49. Reprinted in ANE. Ronald Hepburn, 'Nature Humanized: Nature Respected'. Environmental Values 7 (1998): 267–79. Ronald Hepburn, 'Trivial and Serious in Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature'. Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 65–80. Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson, 'New Formalism and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature'. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 (2004): 363–76. Week 8: Engagement Parsons, AN, ch. 6. Arnold Berleant, 'The Aesthetics of Art and Nature'. Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 228–43. Reprinted in ANE. Cheryl Foster, 'The Narrative and the Ambient in Environmental Aesthetics'. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1998): 127–37. Reprinted in ANE. Allen Carlson, 'Aesthetics and Engagement'. British Journal of Aesthetics 33 (1993): 220–27. Week 9: The Sublime Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment. Trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge University Press, 2000 [1790]). Excerpts from sections 23–9. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968 [1757]). Excerpts from Pt. II, sections 1–8. Ronald Hepburn, 'The Concept of the Sublime: Has it any Relevance for Philosophy Today?'. Dialectics and Humanism 15 (1988): 137–55. Stan Godlovitch, 'Icebreakers: Environmentalism and Natural Aesthetics'. Journal of Applied Philosophy 11 (1994): 15–30. Reprinted in ANE. Malcolm Budd, 'Delight in the Natural World: Kant on the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature. Part I: The Sublime in Nature'. British Journal of Aesthetics 38 (1998): 233–50. Week 10: Aesthetic Preservation Parsons, AN, ch. 7. Janna Thompson, 'Aesthetics and the Value of Nature'. Environmental Ethics 17 (1995): 291–305. Holmes Rolston III, 'From Beauty to Duty: Aesthetics of Nature and Environmental Ethics'. Environment and the Arts: Perspectives on Environmental Aesthetics. Ed. Arnold Berleant (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 127–41. Ned Hettinger, 'Allen Carlson's Environmental Aesthetics and Protection of the Environment'. Environmental Ethics 27 (2005): 57–76. Keekok Lee, 'Beauty for Ever?'. Environmental Values 4 (1995): 213–25. Week 11: Gardens Parsons, AN, ch. 8. Mara Miller, The Garden as an Art (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), ch. 1. Mara Miller, 'Gardens as Works of Art: The Problem of Uniqueness'. British Journal of Aesthetics 26 (1986): 252–6. Stephanie Ross, What Gardens Mean (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), chs. 1, 7. Tom Leddy, 'Gardens in an Expanded Field'. British Journal of Aesthetics 28 (1988): 327–40. David Cooper, 'In Praise of Gardens'. British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (2003): 101–13. Week 12: Art in Nature Parsons, AN, ch. 9. Carlson, 'Is Environmental Art an Aesthetic Affront to Nature?', AE, ch. 10. Sheila Lintott, 'Ethically Evaluating Land Art: Is It Worth It?'. Ethics, Place & Environment 10 (2007): 263–77. Emily Brady, 'Aesthetic Regard for Nature in Environmental and Land Art'. Ethics, Place & Environment 10 (2007): 287–300. Focus Questions1. Are there any important differences between the aesthetic appreciation of art and the aesthetic appreciation of nature? If so, what are they?2. Is preserving nature for its aesthetic value a coherent idea?3. What is the ugliest natural thing or place you can think of? How might proponents of Positive Aesthetics for nature deal with your example?4. Does the concept of the sublime have any significance for our contemporary experience of nature? If it does, what relation does it bear to our aesthetic appreciation of nature?5. Watch Rivers and Tides (2001), the documentary film about the British environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy. Ethically speaking, how do you think we ought to regard his art-making? (shrink)

This overview of the "sister arts" of the nineteenth century by younger scholars in art history, literature, and American studies presents a startling array of perspectives on the fundamental role played by images in culture and society. Drawing on the latest thinking about vision and visuality as well as on recent developments in literary theory and cultural studies, the contributors situate paintings, sculpture, monument art, and literary images within a variety of cultural contexts. The volume offers fresh and sometimes (...) extended discussions of single works as well as reevaluations of artistic and literary conventions and analyses of the economic, social, and technological forces that gave them shape and were influenced by them in turn. A wide range of figures are significantly reassessed, including the painters Charles Willson Peale, Washington Allston, Thomas Cole, George Caleb Bingham, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Mary Cassatt, and such writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and William Dean Howells. One overarching theme to emerge is the development of an American national subjectivity as it interacted with the transformation of a culture dominated by religious values to one increasingly influenced by commercial imperatives. The essays probe the ways in which artists and writers responded to the changing conditions of the cultural milieu as it was mediated by such factors as class and gender, modes of perception and representation, and conflicting ideals and realities. (shrink)

In a 1986 article, "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism," Fredric Jameson concludes his study by contrasting the "situational consciousness" of first and third worlds in terms of Hegel's master/slave dialectic. On Hegel's theory, the slave "whats what reality and the resistance of matter really are" while the master "is condemned to idealism. Elaborating on this analysis, Jameson writes: "It strikes me that we Americans, we masters of the world, are in something of that very same position. (...) The view from the top is epistemologically crippling, and reduces its subjects to the illusions of a host of fragmented subjectivities ... This placeless individuality, this structural idealism which affords us the luxury of the Sartrean blink, offers a welcome escape from the 'nightmare of history,' but at the same time it condemns our culture to psychologism and the 'projections' of private subjectivity. all of this is denied to third world culture, which must be situational and materialist" (Jameson 1986, p. 85). This passage strikes me as providing a useful opening to discuss the relationship between modern Western philosophy and the new Philosophy of Liberation which has emerged above all from Latin America. One of the insights of the Philosophy of Liberation is that Western Philosophy is the philosophy of the center, of the metropoles, of white European males. Its concepts, problems, and problematics are identified with philosophy itself and other perspectives, other positions, are condemned to the margins (Dussel, pp. ). On this view, Western Philosophy is the philosophy of the masters of the world, of the dominant countries, cultures, and class. Is the Philosophy of Liberation, then, -- pursuing Hegel's master-slave metaphor --the philosophy of slaves, of the dominated, of the oppressed and if so what particular insights does this perspective reveal that is lost to western philosophy.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 43-56 [Access article in PDF] Jack London's Medusa of Truth Per Serritslev Petersen FROM THE VERY START of his literary career, Jack London believed that a good fiction writer must also be a good thinker—that fictional authenticity and integrity must somehow be imbedded in philosophical authenticity and integrity. In his early essay "On the Writer's Philosophy of Life," and in his early letters to (...) Cloudsley Johns, his intellectually "slovenly" friend (who also happened to share his literary ambitions and interests), London insists, again and again, on the proper philosophical foundation of the successful writer. This is how poor Cloudsley, who had previously been told to "get in and systematically ground [himself] in history, economics, biology and the kindred branches" 1 gets browbeaten by his self-appointed mentor and master, a veritable Jack of all trades, in a letter dated March 15, 1900: "To be well fitted for the tragedy of existence (intellectual existence), one must have a working philosophy, a synthesis of things. Have you a synthesis of things? Do you write, and talk, and build upon a foundation which you know is securely laid? Or do you not rather build with a hazy idea of 'to hell with the foundation.'" London then proceeds to catechize his friend on scientific principles such as the indestructibility of Matter, the persistence of Force, and the overall "dynamic principle, true of the metamorphosis of the universe"—principles that Cloudsley is urged to study "carefully and painstakingly" before he can ever claim to have "a firm foundation for [his] philosophy of life" (Letters, pp. 170-71).In London's admittedly heavy-handed ad hominem argument, one recognizes the philosophical sledgehammer of Ernest Everhard, the revolutionary hero of The Iron Heel and one of the fictional exponents of "that cold forbidding philosophy, materialistic monism," 2 which also [End Page 43] served as the scientific foundation of London's own philosophy of life. There are, however, not one, but two components to London's philosophy, which, as I shall argue in this essay, together constitute an essentially dialectical construction, a dynamic juxtaposition of and negotiation with, on the one hand, the "cold forbidding" Medusa of Truth and, on the other hand, the life-enhancing Aphrodite of Romance, the second of which is one of several versions of the vital Maia-Lie (Maia being the Buddhist term for the power that creates or re-creates the world as cosmic illusion).Two points need to be stressed from the outset. First, London's work is implicitly aligned with literary naturalism—the "Zolaistic Movement" of modern American fiction that the genteel writer and editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich famously condemned for its "miasmatic breath" 3 —even though London himself would always qualify his own naturalism by insisting that, artistically, he was "an emotional materialist" (Letters, p. 329), and that his realism was, in the words of Martin Eden, one of his fictional alter egos, "an impassioned realism, shot through with human aspiration and faith." 4 Second, London's work is explicitly aligned with philosophical naturalism (as distinct from supernaturalism)—that is, naturalism as the philosophical or epistemological view that, to quote The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995), "everything is natural, i.e. that everything there is belongs to the world of nature, and so can be studied by the methods appropriate for studying that world." In philosophical practice, naturalism and materialism have tended to coalesce, materialism being basically understood as the view that everything is made of matter, which can be studied by the methods of natural science. Like London's philosophical alter ego Ernest Everhard (and also like fictional protagonists such as Wolf Larsen and Martin Eden), London declared himself "a materialistic monist," although, as he admitted to Cloudsley Johns, "there is dam little satisfaction in it." Rhetorically impersonating, as it were, Wolf Larsen, London, in the same letter, asks himself and his correspondent, "what squirming anywhere, damned or otherwise, means anything? That's the question I am always prone to put: What's this chemical ferment called life about? Small wonder that small men... (shrink)

This collection of essays intends to challenge conventional notions of what constitutes an American national literature. The new reading of Hegel in recent philosophy and critical theory subjects history and language to a thorough critique. Yet the connection of Hegel to American discourse has largely gone unexplored, and literary theorists have scarcely begun to interrogate the priorities of Hegelianism implicit in American literary history. The essays collected in Theorizing American Literature thus organize their arguments around the (...) necessity to rethink the process of historicizing American literature and to redefine the terms of discussion of some of its most familiar authors. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:460 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY accurate understanding of the mind of Aristotle. Nifo's shift on the question of Aristotle and immortality thus represents a noteworthy chapter in the history of Renaissance Aristotelianism.6x EDWAKDP. MAHONEY Duke University 6x I should like to thank the United States Government for a Fulbright fellowship during 1962-1963; the National Foundation for the Humanities for a fellowship during 1968-1969; and the Duke UniversityResearch Council for grants (...) for microfilms. BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE WRITINGS OF JACOB LOEWENBERG Compiled by Edwin S. Budge It is hoped that all of Professor Loewenberg's published writings, exclusive of his many book reviews, are listed herein. His unpublished doctoral dissertation, "The Genesis of Hegel's Dialectical Method" (1911), is available on loan from Harvard University, although the "gist" of this, as Dr. Loewenberg has indicated, may be found in the introduction to the first item cited in the bibliography. Dr. Loewenberg, it might be added, also translated a short work by Gilbert Chinard, France for the Soldier (Berkeley: University of California, 1918), and quite likely was consulted by his wife Kate in the course of her translation of Emile Meyerson's Identity and Reality (New York: Macmillan Company, 1930; reprinted by Dover, 1962, and Peter Smith, 1963). Jacob Loewenberg's personal papers are in the possession of his daughter, Mrs. Jeannot Nyles, of Berkeley, California. 1912 1916 BIBLIOGRAPHYOF THE WRITINGSOF JACOBLOEWENBERG "Vorwort," pp. v-vi; "Einleitung: 'Die jugendlichen Denkversuche Hegels'," pp. vii-xxii; in Hegels Entwiir/e zur Enzyklopiidie und Propiideutik nach den Handschri/ten der Harvard-Universitiit. Mit einer Handschri[tprobe. By Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Herausgegeben yon Dr. J. Ltwenberg. Leipzig: Verlag von Felix Meiner, I912. xxiv, 59 pp. (Hegel-Archiv. Herausgegeben von Georg Lasson. Band I, Heft 1.) "Interpretation as a Self-Representative Process," The Philosophical Review, Vol. XXV, No. 3 (May, 1916), 420-423. "Mysticism and Idealism," University o/ California Chronicle, Vol. XVIII, No. 1 (January, 1916), 72-91. "An address before the Philosophical Union of the University of California, December 10, 1915." 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 461 "The Spirit of Hegel's Philosophy," University of California Chronicle, Vol. XVIII, No. 3 (July, 1916), 373-393. "The Teachings of Royce," The California Alumni Fortnightly, Vol. IX, No. 14 (September 30, 1916), 216-217. "Classic and Romantic Trends in Plato," The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. X, No. 3 (July, 1917), 215-236. "An address before the Philosophical Union of the University of California, February 23, 1917." "Josiah Royce: Interpreter of American Problems," University of California Chronicle, Vol. XIX, No. 1 (January, 1917), 39-47. "The Prophetic Songs of Swinburne," University of California Chronicle, Vol. XX, No. 10anuary, 1918), 106-115. "Preface," pp. vii-xii in Lectures on Modern Idealism. By Josiah Royce. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919. Pp. 259. (Semicentennial Publications of the University of California, 1868-1918.) "Ethics and the War," Mills Quarterly, Vol. I, No. 4 0anuary, 1919), 6-9. "An address delivered at Mills College, October 18, 1918." "Multiplicity and the Social Order," The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. XII, No. 2 (April, 1919), 137-164. "President Wilson's Americanism," University of California Chronicle, Vol. XXI, No. 1 (January, 1919), 1-15. "Introduction," pp. 3-37 in Fugitive Essays; with an Introduction by Dr. J. Loewenberg. By Josiah Royce. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920. Pp. 429. (Semicentennial Publications of the University of California, 1868-1918.) "Philosophy and Humanism," University of California Chronicle, Vol. XXIH, No. 3 (July, 1921), 298-318. "Read before the Kosmos Club of the University of California, April 4, 1921." "The Apotheosis of Mind in Modern Idealism," The Philosophical Reviewj Vol. XXXI, No. 3 (May, 1922), 215-236. "A fragment of a larger essay." "The Idea of Mutability in Literature," University of California Chronicle, Vol. XXIV, No. 2 (April, 1922), 129-151. "The Metaphysics of Critical Realism," pp. 167-194 in Issues and Tendencies in Contemporary Philosophy. Edited by George P. Adams and J. Loewenberg. 462 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Berkeley: University of California, 1923, Pp. 224. (University of California Publieations in Philosophy, VoL IV.) Read before the Philosophical Union of the University of California, March 30, 1923. "'The Metaphysics of Modern Scepticism," The Philosophical... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural MarxismPaul Allen Miller (bio)Jameson, Fredric. Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism. Ed. Ian Buchanan. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007. 296 pp.Fredric Jameson may well be the greatest intellectual produced by the United States in the last half century. It is difficult to think of anyone else who has made as many, as lasting, and as wide-ranging contributions as Jameson. From his (...) early work on Sartre’s style, passing through the twin opera on dialectical theory (Marxism and Form) and formalism and structuralism (Prisonhouse of Language), and the idiosyncratic appreciation of Wyndham Lewis (Fables of Aggression) to that summa of Marxist hermeneutics, The Political Unconscious, and from his major collection of essays, The Ideologies of Theory, through his books on Adorno (Late Marxism) and film (Signatures of the Visible), to that foundational text on postmodern literature, theory, art, and architecture, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, and the late work on world cinema (The Geopolitical Aesthetic), utopianism (The Seeds of Time), Brecht (Brecht and Method), modernity (A Singular Modernity), and science fiction (Archaeologies of the Future), Jameson’s career is unparalleled in the American letters. It is perhaps not coincidental, either, that this larger-than-life figure on the intellectual stage ranging easily from Russian formalism to Deleuzean antihumanism, from Balzac to Frank Gehry, and from Hegel to Derrida, is an intellectual dissident. Contemporary American life’s alternation between uncritical consumerism (Marcuse’s one-dimensional man) and nonothing anti-intellectualism (Christian fundamentalism and corporate-fueled jingoism) could only produce such a body of work as an alien presence: its own systemic negation and thus the fullest expression of its deepest internal contradictions. The present collection of interviews from 1981 to the present, then, stands as a welcome commentary on Jameson’s vast work and an important reflection of the changes in American intellectual life in the period from the last days of the Cold War to the end of the second Bush administration.Naturally, as with any collection of interviews, not every thing is new here. Indeed, to the seasoned reader of Jameson, much of this is familiar territory, and there is a fair amount of repetition from one interview to the next (Goethe’s concept of “world literature,” for example, is a recurring motif). Nonetheless, there are many moments of real insight and bold commentary that remind us why Marxism is far from dead and how Jameson has achieved an iconic status rivaling that of Lukacs, Althusser, or Eagleton, as one of the preeminent Marxist thinkers of the last century. Many of these come in the form of vignettes, little snippets of cultural analysis. One such comes in Jameson’s interview with Columbia University Professor of History Anders Stephanson. Here Stephanson asks Jameson to comment on the recent architectural and cultural phenomenon of creating ersatz public spaces. These come in the form of commercial areas that present themselves in guise of “squares,” “plazas,” or “villages.” They make reference to and pastiche traditional forms of life and then re-represent them in the form of a hypercapitalist consumerism. These simulacra of less alienated, precapitalist forms of [End Page 65] life are then presented as depthless surfaces, parodies of authenticity. The archetype of such ersatz public spaces is Disney’s EPCOT:Stephanson: In other words, you are referring to his compressed version of the world; little toy countries where you can orient yourself in no time at all.Jameson: I suppose you can orient yourself because walking paths are available. But where you actually are is a real problem, for you may in fact be in the Florida Everglades, and in this case you are not only in a swamp but also in a simulacrum of a different geographical complex altogether. Disneyland is, on the whole, supremely prophetic and paradigmatic of these multiple shifting and dissolving spatial levels. (49)This is both an insightful observation and a wonderful example of Jameson’s dialectic at work. One moment we’re walking hand in hand with Goofy round the little, fake Eiffel Tower of EPCOT and the next we sink into the morass that paved the Everglades, acquired control... (shrink)

This is the first full-length, systematic study of Ernst Cassirer's fourth volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, which was published in the German edition in 1995 and in the American edition in 1996 from Cassirer's Nachlass. Prior to the appearance of this volume it was generally held that Cassirer had little interest in a metaphysics of symbolic forms and had not formulated such. ;This study considers the nature of the basic elements of Cassirer's (...) metaphysics as they appear in this fourth volume and as they are connected to comments in other of his works. It also considers to what extent Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms requires a metaphysical grounding in a traditional sense. ;Part I is an analysis of Cassirer's writings of the 1920s concerning his distinction between life and spirit , their dialectical relationship and their connection to the conception of symbolic form. Highly significant is Cassirer's assertion in a fragment from this period that philosophy is not itself a symbolic form. ;Part II is an analysis of Cassirer's writings of the 1940s concerning his conception of three "basis phenomena" --the life-process and the I, action and the Other, and the sphere of work . Of particular importance is Cassirer's final description of the philosophy of symbolic forms as a Socratic philosophy grounded in the basis phenomenon of work. ;The study contains an appendix showing an analytic scheme of the volume and a comprehensive bibliography of Cassirer's works and critical literature relevant to the interpretation of his systematic philosophy. (shrink)

Like Henry Harris, I began doing intensive research on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in the mid-sixties. I recall going through all the chapters as a graduate student during one academic year, and looking around for commentaries. The only English-language commentary available was Loewenberg's Hegel's Phenomenology: Dialogues in the Life of Mind, which was suggestive of the dialectic taking place in the book, but not much help in getting over the “rough spots”. This gave me an incentive to work through Jean (...) Hyppolite's commentary, not yet translated into English, with my basic reading-knowledge of French. My 1976 Hegel's Phenomenology, Part I: Analysis and Commentary was one of the first in a long line of Anglophone commentaries. Harris in his introduction to Vol. I. mentions this effort at “analysis”, along with Findlay's “analysis” accompanying the 1977 Miller translation of the Phenomenology, as incentives for the inclusion of his own improved running analysis in the present commentary. I have included discussions of numerous partial or complete commentaries on Hegel's Phenomenology in review articles published in 1971 in the American Philosophical Quarterly and Teorema, in 1979 in the American Philosophical Quarterly, and in 1981 in Hegel-Studien. Harris has the advantage of producing the most recent of all these commentaries, and in a way offers us a compendium of everything that has been done on the Phenomenology. His analysis and commentary includes a survey of the literature, in which almost all previous laborers in the field can find themselves commended or criticized in the endnotes. Thus I find comments like “Kainz has completely misunderstood the argument here”, “This is a point which Kainz has grasped more definitely than most commentators”, “[Kainz] does not deserve the brickbat Flay hurls at him”, and so forth. Other commentators, living and dead – Flay, Pöggeler, Navickas, Kenneth and Merold Westphal, Heidegger, Lauer, Werner Becker, Kojève, Wahl, Hyppolite, Labarrière, Bonsiepen, Forster, Shklar, Solomon, Werner Marx, and Robert Williams — are similarly discussed and critiqued. For some of us Anglophone commentators, such remarks may seem like red marks on essays from a patient professor. But certainly no one will mind, since Harris has spent more time and energy on this very specialized project than any of us. In fact, some former commentators almost have a “conflict of interest” in reviewing Harris' work, since so many of us have benefited at various points in our research from Harris' personal support and criticism. But in academics, as in life, mentors cannot always be assured of loyalty. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ON LEO STRAUSS'S UNDERSTANDING OF THE NATURAL LAW THEORY OF THOMAS AQUINAS * DOUGLAS KRIES Gonzaga University Spokane, Washington IN COMPOSING the introduction to Natural Right and History in the early 1950's, Leo Strauss described the situation in American social science as a division between two parties : the modern liberals of one persuasion or another, who had largely abandoned natural right altogether, and the students of Thomas (...) Aquinas.1 Since the fundamental goal of that book was a recovery of the classical or pre-modern theory of natural right, one might have anticipated that Strauss's work would have been received enthusiastically by the latter group. If nothing else, Strauss and the Thomists were natural allies because they shared the same modern enemies: namely, historicism (the view that all human thought is confined to the immediate historical horizon of the thinker) and positivism (the view that human thought cannot make value judgments, but only judgments about observable matters of fact). Beyond that, Strauss explored very seriously the issues of reason and revelation.and of religion and politics-both of which are crucial for Thomistic political thought. Yet, despite such favorable auguries, a congenial affiliation of *The author wishes to acknowledge the helpful criticisms he received in the preparation of this manuscript from David Calhoun of the Philosophy Department at Gonzaga University. 1 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 2, 7. 215 216 DOUGLAS KRIES Straussians and Thomists was never formed.2 Many factors probably contributed to the losing of the opportunity,8 but presumably chief among them was the fact that, even though Strauss's view of Thomas was genuinely respectful, it was not unequivocally sympathetic. Strauss preferred classical natural right theory to modern natural right theory, and he came to the conclusion that Thomas's teaching on natural right-while certainly ' pre-modern ' 4-introduced novelties into the classical position which weakened it rather than improved it. The goal of this essay is to analyze Strauss's reservations about Thomas's statement of the problem of natural right. Such an analysis will, I hope, contribute to a more fruitful exchange between the students of Leo Strauss and those of Thomas Aquinas. I Perhaps the best way to initiate an explanation of Strauss's view of the differences between classical and Thomistic natural right is to contrast the starting points of the two theories. The classical approach begins with what is said about right, with the everyday opinions that are held about what is just. From such an immediate starting point the classical approach ascends toward true knowledge through the process of dialectics. Although all people have views about what is just, in fact such opinions, when examined through friendly disputation with a philosopher, are almost always found to be self-contradictory; however, the 2 This is not to suggest that Strauss was completely ignored and rejected by the Thomists. For an overview of the Thomistic literature which has considered Strauss, see James V. Schall, "Revelation, Reason and Politics: Catholic Reflexions on Strauss," Gregorianum 62 (1981), 349-365, 467-497. s See Ernest L. Fortin, "Rational Theologians and Irrational Philosophers: A Straussian Perspective," Interpretation 12 (1984), 349-350. 4 For Strauss, the fundamental division within the history of political philosophy was between the ancients and the moderns. He understood Thomas to be in the former camp and was critical of contemporary Thomists who, under pressure from the success of modern physics, had attempted to ' modernize ' Thomas by jettisoning his teleological view of nature. See Natural Right and History, pp. 7-8; What is Political Philosophy? (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1959), pp. 285-6. NATURAL LAW THEORY OF THOMAS AQUINAS 217 very fact that one comes to realize that contradiction and seeks to rectify it points to the fact that human beings realize that a more comprehensive, non-contradictory view might be possible. The contradictions thus force one to ascend beyond the opinions that are at best only partially true toward an ever more consistent view, a view based on nature; if such a process could reach culmination, the culmination would constitute a statement of what is right by nature.5 The starting... (shrink)

The academic community in the West tends to be suspicious of Russian philosophy, often relegating it to another category, such as “ideology” or “social thought.” But what is philosophy? There is no simple universal definition, and many thinkers consider it impossible to formulate one. The most credible attempt is nominalistic: philosophy is the practice in which Plato and Aristotle were involved. As Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a (...) series of footnotes to Plato.”If so, then Russian thought needs to be understood as an important part of the Western philosophical heritage, given that it offers perhaps the most elaborate set of footnotes to Plato's most mature and comprehensive dialogues: the Republic and the Laws. The status of ideas in Russian philosophy mirrors Plato's vision of them as ontological and political entities, “laws,” or ideal principles—as distinct from mere epistemic units or tools of cognition. The Platonic tendency to integrate and implement religious, philosophical, and political teachings culminated in twentieth-century Russia. In the Soviet state, perhaps more than anywhere else in history, philosophy became a supreme legal and political institution, acquiring the power of a suprapersonal, universal reason. Hence thought itself, in the moment of its triumph, became a prisoner in the social structures that Soviet ideocracy erected on a philosophical foundation. In discussing Russian philosophy, we inevitably consider the practical application of Platonic conceptions by the Soviet ideocracy to a state in which philosophy was called upon to rule.According to Sergei Averintsev, the emphasis on Platonism in the Russian intellectual tradition is nothing to be proud of; it should rather be lamented and repented. Despite the obvious Platonic preferences of Russian thinkers (from Ivan Kireyevsky to Aleksei Losev), Averintsev asks whether even now we might be able to reorient the tradition toward Aristotle instead—toward a more secular, tolerant, and analytic philosophy of human nature. “If Plato is the first utopian,” Averintsev writes, “Aristotle is the first thinker to look the spirit of utopia right in the eye and overcome it.... Aristotle's technique of thought is more neutral toward religion than is Plato's ecstasy.” Characteristically, the name index to the Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought contains almost twice as many mentions of Plato as of Aristotle.Each national tradition has its own “strange attractor,” as they say now in complexity theory. English empiricism, French rationalism, German Idealism, American pragmatism... However stereotypical these generalizations are, they help to clarify the nations’ distinctive contributions to philosophy. Where does Russia stand in this row? I think that Caryl Emerson is correct to pinpoint, among the most distinctive features of the Russian intellectual tradition, the striving for “wholeness” (tselostnost’). Many Russian thinkers seem to evade definitive and particular “isms,” preferring to find ways of complementing (and thus diluting) those that are on offer. Faced with the claims for rationalism, for example, the Russian response tends to be that true rationality is or should be coupled with fullness of feeling. The characteristic Russian “ism” is at best “holism,” at worst “totalitarianism,” and is usually directed against Western thought. Kireyevsky declares: There [in the West] is a bifurcation [razdvoenie] of the spirit, a bifurcation of thoughts, a bifurcation of the sciences, a bifurcation of the state, a bifurcation of estates, a bifurcation of society, a bifurcation of family rights and duties, a bifurcation of morality and the heart.... In Russia, on the contrary, there is a predominant tendency toward the wholeness of the inner and the outer, of public and moral being.Vladimir Solovyov held that the goal of all knowledge was to comprehend “total unity” and to overcome all kinds of unilateralism, which he referred to as “abstract elements” (otvlechennye nachala). These one-sided elements included Realism, rationalism, empiricism, and positivism, all of which had been advanced by Western philosophical movements.Reading the Handbook, I was struck by how steadily, from one thinker to another, the concept of “unity” is reiterated in various synonyms and contexts: “all-unity,” “wholeness,” “totality,” “integrity,” “edinstvo,” “tsel'nost,’” “tselostnost,” “sobornost,” and so forth. Russian thinkers endeavor not to create something original and special but to unify everything that has already been done and known. Consider opponents, like the Slavophiles and Westernizers; take Petr Chaadaev and Vissarion Belinsky, Kireyevsky and Alexander Herzen, Dostoevsky and Solovyov—all are united by this “super-idea,” proclaiming its embodiment to be the all-embracing vocation of the Russian people. At the same time, they sharply reject all “private principles” and “trashy certainty” (Belinsky's driannaia opredelennost’)—anything that restricts and divides individuals or nations. All these forms of privacy and particularity must be overcome on the way to a universal whole that is even greater in scale than Western Catholicism. According to this logic of totality, we would be better off left with nothing than to be content with the particular and the limited. The first original Russian thinker, Chaadaev (1794–1856), makes the salto mortale of declaring Russia a country that has given nothing to the world, then proclaiming that Russia's destiny is to rise above the rest of the world and resolve all its contradictions. From nothing to everything: such are the philosophical foundations for the totalitarian aspiration of Russian thought, which eventually expressed itself in the revolutionary movements and communist experiments of the twentieth century.As is well known, Russian literature is considered in the West a far more powerful and original expression of philosophical ideas than Russian philosophy as such. Characteristically, then, almost half of the Handbook, its entire second part, is devoted to the dialogue of Russian philosophy with literature and art. As M. N. Forster remarks in the Handbook's concluding essay: “It is natural to wonder why this striking asymmetry between relatively modest achievements in pure philosophy and spectacularly high achievements in literature came about.” To the literary focus of Russian philosophy, we can add a political focus. At least a third of part one of the Handbook is devoted to Russian political and revolutionary philosophy, to Lenin and other Marxists, to Ivan Ilyin, and so on. In this context, both literature and politics assumed philosophical dimensions, often overshadowing philosophy itself.Bertrand Russell lamented that the system of philosophical categories in the West featured mostly nouns (being, consciousness, idea, matter, substance, and so forth), omitting adjectives, verbs, prefixes, and other parts of speech. This criticism should be applied to the category philosophy itself. Why the noun philosophy rather than the adjective philosophical, which can be applied to many areas of activity and creativity, including literature and politics?In Russian intellectual history, the philosophical, rather than philosophy, is the predominant category. The state, ideology, economics, politics and geopolitics, literature, art, warfare, space exploration—all these spheres in Russia and the USSR have been and remain abundantly philosophical, subordinated to certain philosophical tasks, though philosophy as such has never been as developed and sophisticated as in the West. As a discipline, Western philosophy “outsourced” itself to Russian disciples, leaving it to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Lenin and Trotsky, to test in literary and political practices a host of Western philosophical ideas, from those of Plato, Rousseau, and Hegel to those of Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche.Likewise, the verb to philosophize is used in ways unusual and awkward in the West. “It is characteristic of the Russian people to philosophize [filosofstvovat'],” as Nikolai Berdyaev observed: “An illiterate Russian peasant likes to pose questions of a philosophical nature—about the meaning of life, about God, about eternal life, about evil and untruth, about how to realize the Kingdom of God.” The philosophical and philosophizing, as attributes and actions of the state and society, overpowered philosophy as a noun—as an academic discipline, if you will. Russian philosophy has had a very modest impact on the West, but the impact of the philosophical has been immense. Nineteenth-century Russian literature influenced Western culture with its philosophical interrogations and existential dilemmas, just as, in the twentieth century, the USSR influenced the West with the philosophical ideas (Marxism, materialism, dialectics, collectivism, socialism, communism) that determined Soviet ideology, politics, and economics.In the USSR of the 1920 and 1930s, for instance, philosophy as an independent academic subject was in a subdued position, as a servant of party ideology. But, meanwhile, the sphere of the philosophical spread to such distant domains as theater (Stanislavsky), physiology (Pavlov), and agriculture (Michurin), with all such activities glorified and sponsored by the state as “philosophically correct”—as faithful to “materialism” and “Realism.” Paradoxically, in the quintessentially philosophical state that was the USSR, the state of philosophy, with the repression of all independent thought and thinkers, was miserable. The fateful and often disastrous originality of Russian philosophy consisted precisely in its dissemination to other areas, in an act of kenosis or self-transcendence that can be viewed both as an aggressive philosophical appropriation of politics, economics, ideology, and literature—and as philosophy's sacrificial devotion to the world beyond its professional boundaries.So there are three features that make Russian thought relevant and dangerous: its Platonic utopian aspiration; its spirit of totality; and its tendency to transcend the boundaries of academic philosophy and to philosophize society, politics, and life in general. Russian philosophy has not been as good at explaining the world as at changing it, sometimes ethically and poetically, sometimes violently and aggressively. Teachers and students of Russian culture should be deeply motivated to draw more attention to the philosophical in Russia and to raise its status in the Western academy. In my view, we would do better service to Russian philosophy if we are frank enough to qualify it as dangerous, sometimes very toxic and addictive, fraught with totalistic tendencies. This philosophy is the voice of the “underground,” both in the Dostoevskian and Leninist senses.At the same time, however, the antidotes concocted in the Russian metaphysical laboratory are of enormous value: the Russian versions of personalism, existentialism, secular and religious liberalism, neorationalism, culturology, conceptualism, and postmodernism. These movements, which counteract totalization, need to be studied precisely because they were cooked up and tested under the same extreme conditions in which the most dangerous intellectual poisons have been produced. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 279—285. Concerning its Transitive Nature, the Conversion of Native Americans of Spanish Colonial California, Indoctrinated Catholicism, & the Creation There’s no direct archaeological evidence that Jesus ever existed. 1 I memorized the Act of Contrition. I don’t remember it now, except the beginning: Forgive me Father for I have sinned . . . This was in preparation for the Sacrament of Holy Reconciliation, where in a confessional I confessed my sins to Father Scott, who looked like Jesus, (...) at least in Western cultural representations of Jesus since the middle ages, and if Jesus put on a few pounds. Father Scott was long-haired, redheaded, bearded, chubby, and tall. When he left church with the procession of altar servers and Eucharistic ministers, yelling, “Sing a Good Song Unto the Lord,” he smiled, hands folded, and he gazed over his parishioners, and bounced along. For four months every year he lived among the Crow Nation in Montana, where towards the end of his tenure at Our Lady of Refuge, they adopted him as an honorary member of their tribe. * This is the prayer we chanted, holding hands, every night before dinner: Bless us oh Lord, for these our gifts, which we are about to receive, our bounty through Christ, our Lord, Amen. Then we all said, God bless the cook! When we were with my grandparents, Grandpa said, God bless Chicky, and Holly, and Harvey, and Boots—all the dead dogs. * My sister tells me that she sits next to a handsome man on a flight across the country. After chitchat, she withdraws her book. She’s reading Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography . After a few moments, the handsome man also reads from his book—his leather-bound Bible. Sister thinks, Oh, Jesus—too bad. She falls asleep. Later, settled in Nashville, she opens her volume and out falls a Jesus-covered card that reads, You can still find God and Salvation! Because that handsome God-fearing young man saw that word— pornography . * I suppose Father Jim’s dark hair, beard, and glasses made me think doctoral-ly of him. He called while I was in the midst of a breakup, after I’d twice attempted suicide, and my mother was desperate for help. She somehow found and phoned him. And Jim, now years out of Our Lady of Refuge’s parish, twenty years since my baptism, years even since he’d left the priesthood and the Catholic faith, still made the effort to bring me back into the fold. He said, “Have you seen a priest?” I did not respond, as I was more shocked to hear his voice than anything, so I said, “How are you, Father Jim? Sorry, I guess I shouldn’t call you ‘Father.’” And I said, “Why did you leave the priesthood? Do you have a girlfriend?” He said that I should call him just “Jim.” He said, “Do you need someone to talk to?” I said, “Not really.” He said, “Call your mother; she’s worried about you.” That was the last time I talked to Father Jim. * Mother let me know just how disappointed Jesus was. I cried and cried, and said I was sorry. Into my hands she placed my missal, ordered forty Rosaries. She said next Saturday I would go to confession. I hated confession. Who wouldn’t? * I realize, of course, that this page is a kind of confessional. * The Kumeyaay, Ipai, Tipai, Chumash, Esselen, Rumsen—all Native Americans of Alta California—shared similarities in their religions. Southern Californian tribes made use of Datura, or jimpson weed, a hallucinogen, for religious rituals. In the creation, God made brother sky and sister earth. Brother and sister mated, and sister gave birth to all things on Earth, including people, but it was difficult to distinguish people from all other aspects of Earth because everything was alive: granite and obsidian, the Pacific and its waves, the San Diego and Los Angeles Rivers. Wiyot—a hero—was very powerful, born from lightning, the son of the Creator and a virgin. When Wiyot thought that human women’s legs were more beautiful than Frog’s, Frog became jealous and poisoned Wiyot. The dying Wiyot went to all the people’s villages, and he distributed his power among them. He said, “When I die, I should be cremated.” The people built the fire and funeral pyre. When the fire was ready, and the people about to place Wiyot’s body upon it, Coyote came and snatched away Wiyot’s heart. * My friend Nick told me once how he ate some jimpson weed and that he hallucinated for three days. His family took a road trip and, while driving over the Sierra Nevada mountains, he kept seeing dinosaurs roaming the open meadows and charging down snowy slopes. So it’s no wonder that Native Americans who ingested this plant would have developed religion. * Walking Castroville’s streets after school I got into fights but mostly watched other boys scrabbling on the asphalt. I went to Burger King for Whoppers. Me and my friends cussed. Antonio admonished me when I said, “damn,” while strutting a sidewalk alongside the church. He said, “Jaime”—pronounced Hi-May, which was what all the Mexicans called me—“you’re crazy, eh. Don’t cuss at the church.” He meant while at church, as in, within its vicinity. I said, “We’re not in church.” Once we’d crossed the street, Tony said, “Damn dude, you’re fuckin crazy!” * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra raised the Eucharistic goblet to his lips, and candlelight danced on the blood’s tiny waves. Incense clouded the church so completely that some of the Pame natives grew nauseous. So, too, felt Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra later that night, as he bent over a ceramic bowl and vomited blood, not only the Lord’s, but his own, for poison had laced the sacred vessel into which he poured the sacrament. The physician tending to the sick prelate urged him to take the remedy he’d prepared. But Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra refused, said that he would pray, for he had never taken any medicine in his life, and he never would. * The Chumash of El Valle de Los Osos called themselves the Stishni, separating themselves from Chumash of other regions, those varying tribes of the central California coast that spoke mutually unintelligible dialects of their Hokan language. This made learning their languages impossible for the Spanish friars, to say nothing of translating the Doctrina. Thus the priests baptized few natives, despite the help that the tribes offered the fledgling settlements in the form of meat and acorn meal, which the Spaniards found repugnant. Some from these cultures, feeling threatened by the newcomers, shot flaming arrows into the thatched roofs of the mission structures. And why wouldn’t they feel threatened when priests chastised them for performing, for example, their Coyote Dance, wherein a man donning a coyote-skin-and-skull costume dances while a singer sings his tale, which laments the human feces strewn imaginatively about the Earth? Coyote, meantime, tries to get an onlooker to lick his genitals, and finally engages in public sexual intercourse with a female tribe member or two, then ends the dance by defecating. Though the Franciscans called such forbidden acts devilry , the Chumash maintained their Datura cult religion, along with the enforced Christianity. For the Chumash, the Earth was made of two enormous snakes that caused earthquakes when they slithered past one another—a vast reptilian tectonics. In the 20th century, long after Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra and his cohorts had died, when asked by an anthropologist about religious contradictions, conflating the Datura and Christian cults, a Chumash man replied, incredulous: “But these are two different religions.” * When Portolá ordered that if by March 19th, the feast day of St. Joseph, the San Antonio had not arrived in San Diego Bay to relieve them, the Sacred Expedition to Nueva California would be abandoned, Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra prayed a novena for San José’s intercession. And lo, a lookout sighted the San Antonio ’s sails—what seemed to the priest a miracle—that very Saint’s feast day. Europeans would stay in California, and Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra would continue to reap a great harvest of souls for the Lord. By the end of mission secularization in 1836—sixty-six years after the San Antonio rescued the Spaniards—Native American populations in California had declined by seventy-three percent. * When Peter the Aleut would not renounce his Eastern Orthodox faith the padre of San Francisco had a toe severed from each foot with each refusal, totaling ten. The native Ohlones employed in this gruesome task—their obsidian chiseled knives tearing through skin and grinding bone—continued as per their orders, and cut off also each of Peter’s fingers (equals a total of twenty refusals). They quartered the martyr, spilled his bowels, as if from bear attack, attack by a bear in the shape of a Catholic. * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra absolutely believed that the slow rate of conversion for the native people was due to the influence of the Devil, who had been outraged by the coming of the Catholics to California, this region that he had long held in his dominion. * In his reception speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, John Steinbeck said, “Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the Apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man—and the Word is with Men.” * In 1602, when Sebastián Vizcaíno and his friars sang mass on Catalina Island, as many as a hundred Pimungans witnessed the rite, asking by signs what it was about. According to Vizcaíno’s records, the Californians marveled not a little at the idea of Heaven and at the image of Jesus crucified. * Vizcaíno was brought to a prairie on Santa Catalina Island where the Pimungans worshipped their sun god. Upon the prairie they had placed an icon, a headless figure with horns protruding from the body, a figure that Vizcaíno predictably described as a demon. The Pimungans urged Vizcaíno not to approach the image of their deity, but he ignored them. He placed his crucifix against the wooden figurine and prayed the Our Father. Vizcaíno told the natives that his prayer was from Heaven, and that their god was the Devil. Vizcaíno held out his crucifix, encouraging the Pimungans to touch it and receive Jesus. He pointed at the sky and indicated Heaven. The Pimungans worshipped a sun deity, so they were impressed with this white man and his description of his god, for their gods seemed to be one and the same. It’s no wonder then that Vizcaíno’s diary reports the natives being pleased with this exchange. “Surely,” the diary says, “they will be converted to our Holy Faith.” * The Miwok women wailed and scratched at their faces when their men consorted with Sir Francis Drake and the other Englishmen who had landed on California’s coast in the summer of 1579. “The blood streaming downe along their brests, besides despoiling the upper parts of their bodies of those single coverings . . .they would with furie cast themselves upon the ground . . . on hard stones, knobby hillocks, stocks of wood, and pricking bushes.” Drake and his men fell themselves to their knees in prayer, their eyes Heavenward, so that the natives might see they prayed to God and they too might worship God then their eyes that had been so blinded by the deceiver might be opened. * Father Fray Antonio de la Ascención—Carmelite friar in Vizcaíno’s party—writes that the Indians of California can “easily and with very little labor be taught our Holy Catholic faith, and that they would receive it well and lovingly.” He calls for two hundred older and honorable soldiers to ensure brotherhood during the conquest, so that peace and love—the best tools to pacify pagans—should reign. The religious, the friar says, should likewise be wise and loving to easily quell animosities between Spaniards and the heathen, and therefore avoid war. The Spaniards should bring with them trinkets—beads, mirrors, knives—to distribute amongst the gentiles, so that they might come to love the Christians, and see “that they are coming to their lands to give them that of which they bring, and not to take away the Indians’ possessions, and may understand that they are seeking the good of their souls.” No women are to accompany the conquest, says Father Fray Antonio, “to avoid offenses to God.” * In 1955 Wallace Stevens admitted himself to St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. There, it’s rumored he converted to Catholicism before dying of stomach cancer, exclaiming to his priest after the baptism, “Now I am in the fold.” Stevens’s late-career poems seem less cynical, more in awe of being and death (read “Metaphor as Degeneration” from The Auroras of Autumn ). He could have chosen from at least three secular hospitals in Hartford at the time. * I was reading Stevens’s Collected Poems when I joined eHarmony and listed that as my “currently reading” book among the “more than twelve” books a year that I would read. I fell in love with my wife when she said, “Are you sending your work out to literary journals?” Prior to this, the first girl I talked to on the phone, when I explained my doctoral exams, said, “So, you’re like, reading Stephen King and stuff?” When I said not exactly she responded defensively: “He must be doing something right, since he makes all that money.” * Mom walked me, my brother, and sister, through the Stations of the Cross. We did this on Ash Wednesdays, or whenever she thought we needed extra God after church. It might’ve happened before church, though that’s unlikely because we were always late. Anyway, it’s easiest to walk the Stations of the Cross when there’s no one else around. To walk the actual Stations means one goes to Jerusalem and walks the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. So the Stations elsewhere—usually paintings, or low-relief sculptures upon church walls—serve as a kind of virtual Dolorosa. Mom held our hands and started from the rear of Our Lady of Refuge: the First Station. Mom said we should say a prayer at each Station and to think of all the pain Jesus went through so that we could go to Heaven. It was hard to keep thinking about that one thing for so long. My mind went to that Saturday’s little league game, to the donut and chocolate milk (our after-church reward from Castroville Bakery), and as I grew older I thought about girls. When you’re thirteen you can’t not think about the girl’s butt in the pew in front of yours as she kneels and stands to pray throughout mass. * It grew increasingly juvenile to lie awake at night daring myself to utter a simple sentence. Even if I said I didn’t believe in God, wouldn’t He know the truth? He was omniscient, like a narrator. Even the idea of Him as a him ceased making sense. Not only did this come with a budding realization of my paternalistic culture, but due to the simple question of why? If God was everything, everywhere, all knowing, then why would he be a man? There’s that question: If God is a man then God must have a penis, and if so, what for? * The Catholic Church incorporates some modern scientific research into its dogma concerning the formation of the Universe, Solar System, and Earth, as well as evolution. According to Catholic doctrine, in approximately the fifth millennia BCE, humans began to worship the one true God. Those humans were Adam and Eve, though the Church says humans had been around for thousands of years prior to Adam and Eve. The Church claims to be infallible. Every time the Church changes its doctrine it remains infallible. * One Catholic writer, Tom Meagher, writes that “Modernism[—]the idea that we come to our beliefs individually through emotional or personal experiences[—]has crept into our Catholic schools.” * Catholics believe that evil spirits, given power through Original Sin, can imbue ordinary inanimate objects of everyday use. Thus, such objects should be blessed in order to induce in them the desire to serve the good. Such objects are not limited to, but include, “new ships and boats, railways and trains, bridges, fountains, wells, cornmills, limekilns, smelting furnaces, telegrams, steam engines, and machines for providing electricity.” * In The Sound of Music Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer sing together: “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could...” * To explain competing theories on the very early universe, and pre-verse would be another book. What was the inflaton? Did (mem)branes collide, initiating the Big Bang, as opposed to Lemaître’s primordial atom, a singularity? Without a unified theory there’s gravity hanging out there, fucking everything up. We cannot make sense of the mechanics of the Planck Epoch—0-10-34 seconds into the Universe’s creation—named for Max Planck, who stumbled into the discovery of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century. * My students often ask if I believe in God, since I espouse evolution, the Big Bang, Science, reject a strictly biblical or creationist theory of the Universe. I tell them that yes, I believe in God, though not the God that they imagine one must believe in. * When questioned regarding the rumor that, before his death, founder of quantum mechanics Max Planck had converted to Catholicism, he replied that he did not believe “in a personal God, let alone a Christian God.” * Physicist and Catholic priest George Lemaître, who formulated the theory and wrote the 1946 book The Primeval Atom Hypothesis , was made a household name by then-detractor Fred Hoyle, who pejoratively referred to the idea as a “Big Bang.” * Suicide is a mortal sin. To end one’s own life one must have despair, which is to lose hope, which is to lose faith, and to disbelieve in God. * Archaeology has uncovered graffiti in all of California’s missions—Indian pictographs inscribed into the adobe, covered with layers of whitewash. Native deities and depictions of cultural practices show that tribespeople never fully gave up their native traditions even after baptism and coming to the missions. There was something inside Native Californians that would never die. (shrink)

Like Henry Harris, I began doing intensive research on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in the mid-sixties. I recall going through all the chapters as a graduate student during one academic year, and looking around for commentaries. The only English-language commentary available was Loewenberg's Hegel's Phenomenology: Dialogues in the Life of Mind, which was suggestive of the dialectic taking place in the book, but not much help in getting over the “rough spots”. This gave me an incentive to work through Jean (...) Hyppolite's commentary, not yet translated into English, with my basic reading-knowledge of French. My 1976 Hegel's Phenomenology, Part I: Analysis and Commentary was one of the first in a long line of Anglophone commentaries. Harris in his introduction to Vol. I. mentions this effort at “analysis”, along with Findlay's “analysis” accompanying the 1977 Miller translation of the Phenomenology, as incentives for the inclusion of his own improved running analysis in the present commentary. I have included discussions of numerous partial or complete commentaries on Hegel's Phenomenology in review articles published in 1971 in the American Philosophical Quarterly and Teorema, in 1979 in the American Philosophical Quarterly, and in 1981 in Hegel-Studien. Harris has the advantage of producing the most recent of all these commentaries, and in a way offers us a compendium of everything that has been done on the Phenomenology. His analysis and commentary includes a survey of the literature, in which almost all previous laborers in the field can find themselves commended or criticized in the endnotes. Thus I find comments like “Kainz has completely misunderstood the argument here”, “This is a point which Kainz has grasped more definitely than most commentators”, “[Kainz] does not deserve the brickbat Flay hurls at him”, and so forth. Other commentators, living and dead – Flay, Pöggeler, Navickas, Kenneth and Merold Westphal, Heidegger, Lauer, Werner Becker, Kojève, Wahl, Hyppolite, Labarrière, Bonsiepen, Forster, Shklar, Solomon, Werner Marx, and Robert Williams — are similarly discussed and critiqued. For some of us Anglophone commentators, such remarks may seem like red marks on essays from a patient professor. But certainly no one will mind, since Harris has spent more time and energy on this very specialized project than any of us. In fact, some former commentators almost have a “conflict of interest” in reviewing Harris' work, since so many of us have benefited at various points in our research from Harris' personal support and criticism. But in academics, as in life, mentors cannot always be assured of loyalty. (shrink)

Many African American children make use of African American English in their everyday lives, and face academic barriers when introduced to Standard American English in the classroom. Research has shown that students who can adapt and use SAE for academic purposes demonstrate significantly better test scores than their less adaptable peers. Accordingly, AAE use and its confirmed inverse relationship to reading achievement have been implicated in the Black-White Test Score Gap, thus becoming the focus of intense research (...) and practical interest. This volume discusses dialectal code-switching from AAE to SAE and stresses the benefits and importance of African American students becoming bi-dialectal. It provides background theory and science supporting the most promising educational approach to date, Contrastive Analysis, a set of longstanding methods drawn from Second Language research and used effectively with students ranging from kindergarten through college. It offers a deeper knowledge of AAE use by students, the critical features of Contrastive Analysis, and detailed information about successful applications which teachers can apply in their own pedagogy. (shrink)

This book contains thirteen original essays about Puritan culture in colonial New England. Prompted by the growing interest in secular studies, as well as postnational, transnational, and postcolonial critique in the humanities, American Literature and the New Puritan Studies seeks to represent and advance contemporary interest in a field long recognized, however problematically, as foundational to the study of American literature. It invites readers of American literature and culture to reconsider the role of seventeenth-century Puritanism in the (...) creation of the United States of America and its consequent cultural and literary histories. It also records the significant transformation in the field of Puritan studies that has taken place in the last quarter century. In addition to re-reading well known texts of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, the volume contains essays focused on unknown or lesser studied events and texts, as well as new scholarship on post-Puritan archives, monuments, and historiography. (shrink)

Davies presents the reader with a sterling review of the literature--the recent history of the interest in defining "art" through the writings of Anglo-American philosophers that follow Morris Weitz' well-known 1956 essay, "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics"--and a stimulating discussion of the role of conventions in the making and appreciating of contemporary art. His emphasis on the social nature of art leads one to wonder how other recent inquiries into the multilayered contextually of the artistic enterprise might fare (...) under his perusal, for example, feminist critiques of traditional definitions of "art," challenges to the elitist makeup of the Artworld, . . . and opposition to his very choice of paradigms: in addition to Duchamp, the "hard cases" include works by John Cage, Andy Warhol, Olivier Messiaen, Jorge Luis Borges, and Gerald Hoffnung. Definitions of Art is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of aesthetics and as it informs the current dialectic on art. (shrink)