During normal aging there is a decline in cognitive functions that includes deficits in oral discourse production. A higher level of education and more frequent reading and writing habits might delay the onset of the cognitive decline during aging. This study aimed at investigating the effect of education and RWH on oral discourse production in older adults. Picture-based narratives were collected from 117 healthy adults, aged between 51 and 82 years with 0–20 years of formal education. Measures (...) of macro, microlinguistic and modalizations were computed and entered as dependent variables in hierarchical regression analyses that included age, education and RWH as regressors. Results revealed that higher education explained a better performance at the macrostructure and microstructure dimensions. Higher frequency of RWH explained the production of fewer modalizations. These results demonstrate the positive effect of education and RWH in oral discourse production in older adults. Therefore, higher attention should be given to these social factors. (shrink)

This print edition of Read's account of logical thought includes the original publication's diagrams and tables. In this excellent book, Read commences by offering an overview of past attitudes and definitions of logic. Individual chapters consider the various means by which logical processes are conceived and developed in the mind. Philosophical arguments, spatial reasoning and mathematical forms of logic are discussed in great depth, with illustrations appended where deemed necessary. Read, an academic and philosopher, employs his decades long experience of (...) teaching students about the logical disciplines to write a detailed and comprehensive accounts of logic's aspects. Throughout this work, he attempts to retain a clarity of expression which makes the concepts discussed understandable for readers previously unversed in the types of logical expression. Read also sets out the principles behind setting up a hypothesis, and highlights the common logical fallacies which crop up in human reasoning. Extensive attention is given to the process of syllogism, by which sound conclusions are drawn from the premises offered. Throughout the book, Read is attentive in defining and explaining the esoteric terminology native to logic. As well as allowing the reader swift comprehension of the various subtopics, this explanatory style confers improved flow to the book. At the conclusion we are offered many questions corresponding to each chapter: these are intended to test the reader's understanding, and enforce the mental habits of utilising logical and critical thought. First published in 1898 and subject to several editions with revisions and refinements thereafter, Logic Deductive and Inductive retains a good reputation among academics and logicians. Its successful balance between striking a concise introductory tone with an embrace of the core elements of the subject has served to preserve its popularity into the modern day. (shrink)

The surge of interest in Jean-Francois Lyotard's writings has pushed him into the centre of debate on the postmodern.

The Oxford Calculator Roger Swyneshed put forward three provocative claims in his treatise on insolubles, written in the early 1330s, of which the second states that there is a formally valid inference with true premises and false conclusion. His example deployed the Liar paradox as the conclusion of the inference: ‘The conclusion of this inference is false, so this conclusion is false’. His account of insolubles supported his claim that the conclusion is false, and so the premise, referring to the (...) conclusion, would seem to be true. But what is his account of validity that can allow true premises to lead to a false conclusion? This article considers Roger’s own account, as well as that of Paul of Venice, writing some sixty years later, whose account of the truth and falsehood of insolubles followed Roger’s closely. Paul endorsed Roger’s three claims. But their accounts of validity were different. The question is whether these accounts are coherent and support Paul’s claim in his Logica Magna that he endorsed all the normal rules of inference. (shrink)

A series of essays on film and philosophy whose authors - philosophers or film studies experts - write on a wide variety of films: classic Hollywood comedies, war films, Eastern European art films, science fiction, showing how film and watching it can not only illuminate philosophy but, in an important sense, be doing philosophy. The book is crowned with an interview with Wittgensteinian philosopher Stanley Cavell, discussing his interests in philosophy and in film and how they can come together.

Logical pluralism is the claim that different accounts of validity can be equally correct. Beall and Restall have recently defended this position. Validity is a matter of truth-preservation over cases, they say: the conclusion should be true in every case in which the premises are true. Each logic specifies a class of cases, but differs over which cases should be considered. I show that this account of logic is incoherent. Validity indeed is truth-preservation, provided this is properly understood. Once understood, (...) there is one true logic, relevance logic. The source of Beall and Restall’s error is a recent habit of using a classical metalanguage to analyse non-classical logics generally, including relevance logic. (shrink)

Frege’s project has been characterized as an attempt to formulate a complete system of logic adequate to characterize mathematical theories such as arithmetic and set theory. As such, it was seen to fail by Gödel’s incompleteness theorem of 1931. It is argued, however, that this is to impose a later interpretation on the word ‘complete’ it is clear from Dedekind’s writings that at least as good as interpretation of completeness is categoricity. Whereas few interesting first-order mathematical theories are categorical or (...) complete, there are logical extensions of these theories into second-order and by the addition of generalized quantifiers which are categorical. Frege’s project really found success through Gödel’s completeness theorem of 1930 and the subsequent development of first- and higher-order model theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reading and Writing PlatoCharles L. GriswoldThe Play of Character in Plato's Dialogues, by Ruby Blondell; 452 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, $55.00Plato's Dialectic at Play: Argument, Structure, and Myth in theSymposium, by Kevin Corrigan and Elena Glazov-Corrigan; 266 pp. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004, $25.00Questioning Platonism: Continental Interpretations of Plato, by Drew Hyland; ix & 202 pp. Albany: State University of New York Press, (...) 2004, $44.00The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics, by Debra Nails; 414 pp. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002, $75.00.Why did Plato write dialogues? How should his dialogues be read (does the literary form matter, for example, to our getting at the heart of what Plato is saying)? These questions are now familiar in contemporary Plato scholarship, and their answers—which undoubtedly are interconnected—are the subject of lively and fascinating exploration. Any doubt that Platonic studies flourishes would quickly be put to rest by the four books under review here.It was once thought that attention to the "dramatic dimension" of Plato's literary-philosophical productions was the province of two much despised schools of thought: "the Straussians," and "the Continentals." The first of these was viewed as advocating a dangerous combination of esotericism (the idea that somehow Plato's meaning is not on the surface of the dialogues, but concealed in them, as though they were a cryptogram), elitism (the idea that the true Plato is only available to [End Page 205] "the few"—such as the Straussians, according to themselves anyhow), and unphilosophical and dilettantish meanderings about this or that literarily cast "teaching." Straussian hermeneutics was thought to open the way to unprincipled appeals to irony whenever it suited the interpreter, so that any text could end up saying pretty much whatever the interpreter wished for it to say, including the opposite of what the surface of the dialogue appeared to say. And further, it was thought (perhaps in a manner at odds with the "unprincipled interpretation" charge) that the Straussians' mode of "taking into account" the dramatic context—and in particular their contextualization of claims made in the dialogues such that this or that claim gets "explained" as a rhetorical gesture addressed by character X to character Y in context Z, a gesture whose content and validity, so to speak, are limited to that exchange—robs the dialogue of its philosophical content. Hence the worry that Straussian hermeneutics leads to skepticism about the possibility of philosophy itself—philosophy understood precisely in the way that it is regularly spoken of in the Platonic dialogues, namely as the effort to transcend perspective and partiality and to grasp through argument the essence of the matter as such. To cap it off, there is the background suspicion that Straussians are politically conservative, in a way that is somehow connected with their interpretation of Plato.There is more than a kernel of truth in the view that Straussians have insisted on the hermeneutic importance of the dialogue form, taking their cue from Strauss's own remarks in such texts as The City and Man. He did argue that Plato's meaning is not on the surface (and thus in some sense is esoteric), that it was intended by Plato to be available to "the few" while not debunking the beliefs of "the many," and that Plato is an ironist. There is also warrant for the worries about unprincipled interpretation, as well as about the reduction of philosophy to a sort of literary sensibility substituting for genuine philosophical argument (where, after all, are Strauss's arguments for any philosophical position, whether or not about a Platonic "teaching"?). And it is by and large true, so far as I can tell, that his self-identified followers are politically conservative (in the contemporary American sense), and in a way somehow tied to their interpretation of Plato.I myself find Strauss's interpretation of Plato to be deeply problematic both in its substance and its method (I put aside the issue of the political conservatism of Strauss's followers, a "teaching" I also find objectionable). And while I join the authors of the four... (shrink)

Hartry Field's revised logic for the theory of truth in his new book, Saving Truth from Paradox , seeking to preserve Tarski's T-scheme, does not admit a full theory of negation. In response, Crispin Wright proposed that the negation of a proposition is the proposition saying that some proposition inconsistent with the first is true. For this to work, we have to show that this proposition is entailed by any proposition incompatible with the first, that is, that it is the (...) weakest proposition incompatible with the proposition whose negation it should be. To show that his proposal gave a full intuitionist theory of negation, Wright appealed to two principles, about incompatibility and entailment, and using them Field formulated a paradox of validity (or more precisely, of inconsistency). The medieval mathematician, theologian and logician, Thomas Bradwardine, writing in the fourteenth century, proposed a solution to the paradoxes of truth which does not require any revision of logic. The key principle behind Bradwardine's solution is a pluralist doctrine of meaning, or signification, that propositions can mean more than they explicitly say. In particular, he proposed that signification is closed under entailment. In light of this, Bradwardine revised the truth-rules, in particular, refining the T-scheme, so that a proposition is true only if everything that it signifies obtains. Thereby, he was able to show that any proposition which signifies that it itself is false, also signifies that it is true, and consequently is false and not true. I show that Bradwardine's solution is also able to deal with Field's paradox and others of a similar nature. Hence Field's logical revisions are unnecessary to save truth from paradox. (shrink)

" In 'Vagueness and Alternative Logic' (Realism and Reason, Cambridge 1983, pp. 271-86, especially 285-6), Hilary Putnam puts forward a suggestion for a formal treatment of the logic of vagueness. … Putnam admits that, at the time of writing, he had not thought this idea through. What will already be apparent to the alert reader is that, in order to disclose serious difficulties for the proposal, Putnam would not have had to think far.".

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.2 (2003) 135-141 [Access article in PDF] On Delusions of Sense:A Response to Coetzee and Sass Rupert Read Keywords schizophrenia, Wittgenstein, Schreber, Faulkner, Benjy, grammar, madness, Cogito The great writings on and of severe mental affliction—those for instance of Schreber, 'Renee', Donna Williams, Artaud, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country, Kafka's "Description of a struggle," and even (I (...) would add) key parts of The Lord of the Rings—present us with something deeply enigmatic. They have, we might say, a strong grammar, a grammar—a mode of hanging together, and (in this case) of linguistically seeming to make a sense that is not our sense and that we cannot make sense of—... they have a grammar all of their own, and all of its own, a grammar that resists and rejects interpretation even as it sometimes seems to offer interpretations. 1It was Wittgenstein's view that to make mental illness unpuzzling was a mistake, or (better, perhaps) a mythologically problematic move. Wittgenstein's aim in his philosophizing was to understand what was enigmatic when it could be understood without unwisely turning it into something altogether unpuzzling... and then to acknowledge that there are some things that may remain forever puzzling, without committing oneself to the metaphysically disastrous claim that the reason they are endlessly puzzling is that they lie outside the boundaries of human life, language, or reason, as though we could peek outside those alleged boundaries to see what was there, but never truly say anything about it.There simply may be places where our understanding—phenomenological understanding, understanding of what it is like—gives out, and not because it is (or we are) merely human. For instance, perhaps one cannot capture some mental illness by intellection alone, or even perhaps at all. Perhaps the best understanding one can have of mental illness is purely negative (in a sense at least as strong as that involved in negative theology, wherein God is only defined by what it is not).Louis Sass (2003) writes I am not sure whether or not Read would accept that a philosophical position can be understandable despite its containing deep, internal logical tensions (perhaps he would not). If such understanding is possible, however, it does seem to open the way for a similar understanding of conditions like that of Schreber. (p. 127) Unfortunately, however, it is indeed not possible—that is, this notion is merely a fantasy—by my lights. Philosophical positions, all of which turn out to contain such inexorable tensions, cannot be understood: they are mirages. Solipsism, as a position, is not any better (or worse) off [End Page 135] than (say) (Metaphysical) Realism. They are both mirages, just different aspects of the same nothing. 2 Considered as positions, they are in the end literally—when one understands their logic—one and the same nothing. Wittgenstein already made this quite clear in his Tractatus. Perhaps in contrast to Sass, there is then nothing special about solipsism: it is just one mode of presentation rather than another of the illusion that there can be philosophical positions.Sass claims that in saying this kind of thing I am committed to ruling out that some mental illness can be understood or can even exist, on abstract intellectual grounds. I am not. I am simply wishing to leave open the possibility that there may be things that some people utter or seem to experience which intellection gives us little or no assistance with. If Sass wishes to deny this, then I suggest that it is he and not I who is the absolutist intellectualist here, in insisting that rewriting something deeply strange in a weaker grammar is furthering our grasp of it.My suggestion concerning Faulkner's presentation of Benjy, in my original paper, was that it is a mythological mistake to think that Faulkner provides us with the tools for giving an unpuzzling rendition of what had perhaps appeared to be "another country," inaccessible to us. Rather, Faulkner's representation... (shrink)

This thesis argues that Dame Iris Murdoch’s writings portray a dialectical picture of morality that invites the reader to acknowledge the presence of evil and reflect upon the necessarily ‘opposing forces’ of good and evil. Murdoch’s engagement with both historical and contemporary discussions of evil is traced through close reading of both her published texts, including fiction and philosophy, and her unpublished and recently published texts and resources, including annotations, interviews and letters. These close readings are focused on the (...) theological, psychological and literary aspects of the contemporary problem of evil. The perspectives offered within this study all transcend the focus on goodness invited by Murdoch’s fiction and philosophy, thus challenging the biased perspective of scholars of the late-twentieth century who sought to elevate Murdoch’s good characters by drawing equations between her moral philosophy and her fiction. This study begins, first, by demonstrating how Murdoch’s writings engage with the problem of evil, with the theological attempt to reconcile goodness with the presence of evil and suffering in the world, by drawing on her allusions to the Book of Job and to the writings of Simone Weil and Dame Julian of Norwich, all of which assert the necessary presence of evil and suffering in the moral life. Second, I interrogate the inconsistencies between Murdoch’s fictional and philosophical pictures of evil to illustrate how her fictional and philosophical engagement with Saint Paul’s writings reveals that she adopted the same dialectical picture of morality for which she critiqued Jung in her moral philosophy. For her, Jung’s picture of morality merges aspects of dualism and monism, both of which, traditionally speaking, offer two countervailing ways in which to picture the moral life, where evil represents, respectively, either an independent moral force separate from the good or a failure to carry out the moral iii ideals of goodness. Third, I identify and develop a link between contemporary moral, psychological and sociological discourses on psychopathy and the evil characters, both male and female, within Murdoch’s novels: not only do her antagonists and demons, often called ‘enchanter’ figures by scholars, echo the psychopath’s moral psychology, but so too do her saintly figures. Such an ambiguous picture resonates with contemporary interpretations of psychopathy, such as those offered by Robert D. Hare, Kevin Dutton, or Simon Baron- Cohen, which highlight the complex role of compassion, empathy and emotion on the individual’s moral awareness, whether they are saintly or psychopathic. In the final chapter, I argue that Murdoch’s dialectical picture of morality is indebted to Blake, whose The Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell illustrates the necessity of the ‘contrary’ pairs of innocence and experience, reason and passion, and good and evil. While Murdoch may praise goodness, her complex engagement with evil reveals a dialectical task for the moral agent in which they have to appreciate the complexity of the moral life, with its inherently ambiguous mixtures of emotion and rationality, the saintly and the psychopathic, and goodness and evil. (shrink)

The political writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard, the prophet of the postmodern, are presented here as both the missing dimension of his work and the key to understanding his position within contemporary debate.

This project is an attempt to frame and develop the questions: What is the relation between the economy, what Marx called the mode of production, and transformations of subjectivity and social relations? How is it possible to think these relations without reducing one to the other, or effacing one for the sake of the other? In short, how can we think the materiality of subjectivity? Several different discourses and lines of research provoke these questions. First, recent and not so recent (...) work within continental philosophy in relation to the "critique of the subject," argues for an investigation of the practices of knowledge, power, and desire productive of historically determinate forms of subjectivity. The second line of research includes a history of heterogeneous Marxist thinkers all of whom attempt to locate in Marx's texts a series of questions, largely unresolved, regarding the relations between production and power, politics and the economy, culture and materiality. To identify these two discourses as provocations, however, is not to suggest that what is at stake in this project is the simple adjudication, or settling of accounts, between Marxism and post-structuralism---a question which would only be of interest to a handful of academics. Rather the investigation into these two lines of research has as its framework a larger and somewhat inchoate series of questions regarding the contemporary socio-historical condition. These questions all begin from the intuition that contemporary society, what is called "post-industrial," "postmodern," or "information society," entails a fundamental transformation of the relations, or an accelerated breakdown of the divisions, between the spheres of the economy, culture, politics, and subjectivity. I argue that these questions, and the current juncture which they attempt to grasp, can be clarified through an articulation of the complex relation between the mode of production and the production of subjectivity; such an articulation takes the form of a genealogy of various critical junctures in the writing of Marx, the debates within western Marxism and critical theory, and contemporary continental philosophy. (shrink)

The death of Peter Winch in 1997 sparked a revived interest in his work with this book arguing his work suffered misrepresentation in both recent literature and in contemporary critiques of his writing. Debates in philosophy and sociology about foundational questions of social ontology and methodology often claim to have adequately incorporated and moved beyond Winch's concerns. Re-establishing a Winchian voice, the authors examine how such contentions involve a failure to understand central themes in Winch's writings and that the (...) issues which occupied him in his Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy and later papers remain central to social studies. The volume offers a careful reading of the text in alliance with Wittgensteinian insights and alongside a focus on the nature and results of social thought and inquiry. It draws parallels with other movements in the social studies, notably ethnomethodology, to demonstrate how Winch's central claim is both more significant and more difficult to transcend than sociologists and philosophers have hitherto imagined. (shrink)

Paul of Venice joined the Austin Friars at an early age and was sent by them from Padua to study at Oxford in 1390. When he returned, full of ideas and laden with books, he began his prodigious writing career with several books on logic, including the Logica Magna, which runs to some half a million words. The current volume contains the final treatise, on insolubles - that is, logical paradoxes. After surveying fifteen previous solutions, Paul develops his own, (...) based on the idea that such propositions falsify themselves. Besides a critical edition of the Latin text, the volume also contains an English translation, a detailed commentary, excerpts from two other logical works of Paul, and a substantial introduction. The introduction describes the fourteenth-century background to Paul's treatise; it also gives a detailed rebuttal of a recent claim that the Logica Magna is not by Paul because its content clashes with genuine works of his. All in all, the volume greatly enhances our understanding of the development of logic, in particular of the semantics of propositions, during a crucial century in its history. (shrink)

Examining the famous section 133 of the Philosophical Investigations, I seek to elucidate Wittgenstein’s extraordinary writing-stratagem. His writing has often been criticised as ‘obscure’—this evinces a fundamental failure to understand the way Wittgenstein writes, especially in those works where he laboured for years over how to present them. In his two masterworks, Wittgenstein operates as, in broadly Modernist terms, as an unreliable narrator. Wittgenstein seems to offer a theory to end all philosophical theories, in his early work. In (...) his later work, he seems to offer a discovery to end all philosophical discoveries. Both appearances are subtly, deliberately, seriously delusive. And necessarily so: any stratagem that does not involve such ‘indirection’ will tend to fall back into the very thing it criticises. I examine the well-known invocation of therapies and the discussion of ‘the real discovery’—the one that allegedly enables one to stop philosophising, in §133. The translation of 133 is pondered, and a reading proposed wherein this passage certainly does not amount to any crude ‘end of philosophy’ thesis, but is rather profoundly manifestative of the kind of aspect to Wittgenstein’s writing that Cavell has taught: i.e. 133 too turns out not to be a ‘statement’ of Wittgenstein’s ‘position’, but a set of temptations that need careful work by one to avoid entrapment by. (shrink)

James Klagge aims to shed light on Wittgenstein’s philosophy by situating it in its biographical–cultural context. While Klagge is not alone in pursuing this aim, his claim to originality lies in his thematic focus on Wittgenstein’s relationship to his time and culture as one of “alienation” (3), expressed by the metaphor of being “in exile” (61). A central concern of Klagge’s is how we, as modern readers living in a “civilized” culture not dissimilar to the one from which Wittgenstein felt (...) himself estranged, can hope to understand the philosophical writings of such a radically distant “other.” Klagge’s suggestion is that through acknowledging and engaging with just how different Wittgenstein was, we can .. (shrink)

Yves Citton’sRenverser l’insoutenableis both a thorough critique of the current conjuncture and an attempt to construct a politics to reverse it. With respect to the former, Citton outlines the various ways in which the present should be considered unsustainable, ecologically, economically, politically, psychically, and through its various technological mediations. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Citton proposes a politics that can overcome the untenable conditions of the present. Politics takes two figures here, a politics of pressures, of the loves (...) and hates that drive and determine individual and collective life, and a politics of gestures, of habits and comportments that are both immediate and disseminated through various media. Citton’s political proposals suggest a new political approach, one that focuses on the transindividual, on the affects, imaginations and ideas that form the basis for collective and individual existence. It is on this basis that its merits and limitations should be measured. (shrink)

_The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche_ first appeared in the _Collected Works_ in 1960. In this new edition bibliographical citations and entries have been revised in the light of subsequent publications in the _Collected Works_, and essential corrections have been made. The book traces an important line of development in Jung's thought from 1912 onwards. The earliest of the papers elaborates Freud's concept of sexual libido into that of psychic energy. In those that follow we see how, Jung, discarding (...) one by one the traditional 'philosophical' hypotheses, gradually arrived at a concept which is even more controversial than psychic energy was in its day ^DDL namely, psychic reality. The book contains the first mention of the archetype in Jung's writings as well as his later views on its nature. There is also a valuable account of the therapeutic uses of 'active imagination' first described in an essay written in 1916. (shrink)

The author argues that Fuller’s book, with the single exception of its correct reinterpretation of Kuhn as no apostle of postmodernism—such that his “fans” and “foes” alike are boxing with (or cheering on) only a shadow Kuhn—is worse than worthless. For, in a disreputable and outright propagandistic fashion, it consists in a series of serious distortions of and outright falsehoods about Kuhn and recent philosophy of science, distortions and falsehoods which may well mislead the unwary reader. Nickles’ s collection by (...) contrast is a competent, useful, and workmanlike performance, although the author argues that the editor’s focus on cognitive science uses of Kuhn (and of Wittgenstein) is unhelpful, in that these uses again distort the philosophy of Kuhn (as of Wittgenstein), who was on balance no apostle of cognitive science either. (shrink)

The author argues that Fuller’s book, with the single exception of its correct reinterpretation of Kuhn as no apostle of postmodernism—such that his “fans” and “foes” alike are boxing with (or cheering on) only a shadow Kuhn—is worse than worthless. For, in a disreputable and outright propagandistic fashion, it consists in a series of serious distortions of and outright falsehoods about Kuhn and recent philosophy of science, distortions and falsehoods which may well mislead the unwary reader. Nickles’ s collection by (...) contrast is a competent, useful, and workmanlike performance, although the author argues that the editor’s focus on cognitive science uses of Kuhn (and of Wittgenstein) is unhelpful, in that these uses again distort the philosophy of Kuhn (as of Wittgenstein), who was on balance no apostle of cognitive science either. (shrink)

Contains revised versions of works previously published, works not previously translated, and new translations of virtually all of Jung's writings. Prior to his death he supervised the textual revision. Several of the volumes are extensively illustrated; each contains an index and most a bibliography.

This collection of essays offers twelve innovative approaches to contemporary literary criticism. The contributors, women scholars who range from undergraduate students to contingent faculty to endowed chairs, stage a critical dialogue that raises vital questions about the aims and forms of criticism- its discourses and politics, as well as the personal, institutional, and economic conditions of its production. Offering compelling feminist and queer readings of avant-garde twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts, the essays included here are playful, performative, and theoretically savvy. Written (...) for students, scholars, and professors in literature and creative writing, Reading and Writing Experimental Texts provides examples for doing literary scholarship in innovative ways. These provocative readings invite conversation and community, reminding us that if the stakes of critical innovation are high, so are the pleasures. (shrink)

In this article I argue that an adequate response to climate change requires an overcoming of the metaphysics of presence that is structuring our relationship with the weather. I trace the links between this metaphysics and the dominant way that the topic of climate change is being narrated, which is structured around the transition from diagnosis to cure, from the scientific reading to the technological writing of the weather. Against this narrative I develop a rather different account of (...) the current ecopolitical moment. I first argue that an understanding of anthropogenic climate change must be grounded in a biosemiotic analysis of the evolving metabolism between society and nature, one that is alert to the way that metabolism involves a folded relation between inside and outside, and that recognizes the constant deferral of biosemiotic meaning in ecological systems. I then use a deconstructive reading of climate technics to problematize the distinction between the diagnosis and solution of climate change, and expose modern scientific practices of reading the climate as already containing within themselves a notion of weather’s technological writability. Exploring the notion that previous transformations of the metabolic regime of society have always involved transformations of notions of the human, I conclude by sketching out a different way of reading and writing the weather, one that takes place in the ‘opening’ of climate change, that problematizes the idea of the human as the end of nature, and that thereby implies a more radical version of climate responsibility. (shrink)

An unpublished satirical work, writtenc.1848–1854, provides fresh insight into the most famous scientific voyage of the nineteenth century. John Clunies Ross, settler of Cocos-Keeling – which HMSBeaglevisited in April 1836 – felt that Robert FitzRoy and Charles Darwin had ‘depreciated’ the atoll on which he and his family had settled a decade earlier. Producing a mock ‘supplement’ to a new edition of FitzRoy'sNarrative, Ross criticized their science and their casual appropriation of local knowledge. Ross's virtually unknown work is intriguing not (...) only for its glimpse of theBeaglevoyage, but also as a self-portrait of an imperial scientific reader. An experienced merchant seaman and trader–entrepreneur with decades of experience in the region, Ross had a very different perspective from that of FitzRoy or Darwin. Yet he shared many of their assumptions about the importance of natural knowledge, embracing it as part of his own imperial projects. Showing the global reach of print culture, he used editing and revision as satirical weapons, insisting on his right to participate as both reader and author in scientific debate. (shrink)

Reading and Writing in Babylon. By Dominique Charpin. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010. Pp. xv + 315, illus. $29.95.

"Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing" is a compact but thorough guide to critical thinking and argumentation. Comprising the text portion of the widely adopted "Current Issues and Enduring Questions," it draws on the authors' dual expertise in effective persuasive writing and rigorous critical thinking. It helps students move from critical thinking to argumentative and researched writing. With comprehensive coverage of classic and contemporary approaches to argument, including Aristotle, Toulmin, and a range of alternative views, it is (...) an extraordinarily versatile text. This affordable guide can stand alone or supplement a larger anthology of readings. "Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing" has been revised to address current student interests and trends in argument, research, and writing. (shrink)

Summary The 1993 Education Act introduced changes that encouraged the supply?side of the quasi?market of schools. As a result of that Act, since April 1994 it has been possible for groups of parents or independent sponsors to apply to the Secretary of State for Education and Employment in England or the Secretary of State for Wales to establish their own grant?maintained schools. This article traces the attempts of various potential sponsors to establish new schools within the state system. It is (...) argued that the Funding Agency for Schools and the Department for Education and Employment have developed the detail of the new scheme in such a way as to make it almost impossible for potential sponsors to meet their requirements. The implications of the policy and its implementation are discussed. (shrink)

In the context of recent attempts to more adequately engage with Adorno’s approach to sociology and social theory, this article argues that such a project requires a more complete understanding of the philosophical basis of Adorno’s critical material perspective on knowledge and language. In particular, the interpretation of Adorno within sociology has been hampered by a fundamental misunderstanding regarding his methodology of critique and composition, which prioritizes the content of Adorno’s claims regarding sociology and social theory, over their rhetorical and (...) performative character. This character is identifiable in Adorno’s prose, and grasped through a close attention to his account of the negative dialectic. Using Bernstein’s articulation of the ‘complex concept’ as an analytical framework, and Adorno’s introduction to Durkheim as its material, the article argues that the inability to grasp the rhetorical character of Adorno’s critical interpretive approach prevents an understanding of his potential relevance for sociology and social theory. (shrink)

In Literature and Truth Richard Lansdown continues a discussion concerning the truth-bearing status of imaginative literature that pre-dates Plato. The book opens with a general survey of contemporary approaches in philosophical aesthetics, and a discussion of the contribution to the question made by British philosopher R. G. Collingwood in particular, in his Speculum Mentis. It then offers six case-studies from the Romantic era to the contemporary one as to how imaginative authors have variously dealt with bodies of discursive thought such (...) as Stoicism, Christianity, evolution, humanism, and socialism. It concludes with a reading going in the other direction, in which the diary of Bronislaw Malinowski is seen in terms of the anthropologist's reading habits during his legendary Trobriander fieldwork. (shrink)

In this article Joris Vlieghe defends the view that technologies of reading and writing are more than merely instruments that support education, arguing that these technologies themselves decide what education is all about and that they form subjectivity in substantial ways. Expanding on insights taken from media theory, Vlieghe uses the work of Bernard Stiegler in order to develop a “technosomatic” account of literacy initiation, that is, a perspective that zooms in on the physical dimensions of how to (...) operate writing and reading technologies. He argues that that the bodily gestures and disciplines that constitute literacy give rise to a particular space of experience, which comes down to a heavily embodied, first-hand sense of what it means to be able to produce script. Vlieghe contends that the advent of digital writing and reading technologies implies a fundamental shift in this sense of ability, and that in order to understand digital literacy we need to take into account the technosomatic aspects of learning to read and write with digital media. (shrink)

A familiar image from the Roman world is a Pompeian portrait of a man and woman sometimes identified as Terentius Neo and his wife. He has a papyrus roll under his chin, while she looks out with a writing tablet in one hand, a stylus held to her lips in the other. The message of the attributes presented would seem to be: ‘ We can and do read and write’. But how should the message be interpreted? To judge from (...) the houses in which this and similar portraits were found, the couple was not of the elite decurion class, but belonged to that difficult to define group of varying social, economic and cultural statuses recently described by Keith Hopkins as ‘sub-elites’. Does the display of book and pen then reflect the social reality of the sub-elite orders of Pompeian society, or is the self-representation rather an expression of social pretension, with the couple attempting to emulate the Roman elite? If the latter is the case, what does the image say about the habits of the Roman ruling class? This question has been raised in relation to the issue of literacy, particularly women's literacy, but the image invites another question. (shrink)