In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Jesus Becoming Jesus, Volume 2, A Theological Interpretation of the Gospel of John: Prologue and the Book of Signs by Thomas G. WeinandyDaniel A. KeatingJesus Becoming Jesus, Volume 2, A Theological Interpretation of the Gospel of John: Prologue and the Book of Signs by Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2021), xviii + 484 pp.This is an unusual biblical commentary. (...) By his own account, Fr. Weinandy had set out to write a fully orbed systematic theology. While in the process of giving a "respectful nod to Scripture" as a prelude to his systematic study, he found himself caught up and engrossed in the biblical text—and never managed to extricate himself. Changing course, he decided to write "a theological or doctrinal interpretation of the New Testament." Volume 1 of this effort covers the Synoptic Gospels (2018). In this second volume, Weinandy turns his attention to the Fourth Gospel, his aim being "to discern the theological and doctrinal content of John's Gospel" (x).Perhaps the most unusual quality of this study is the complete absence of any secondary literature. Though the author has read commentaries on the Gospels, both ancient and modern, he chose not to consult any other scholars (or ecclesiastical writers) in composing this doctrinal commentary. Given his focused aim—a theological and doctrinal study of the Gospels—he wanted to avoid getting caught up in contemporary scholarly exegetical debates. And so there are no footnotes to secondary sources (a thing probably welcome to many readers).Weinandy alerts the reader at the start concerning his particular approach to this study of the Gospels. Fascinated throughout his career as a systematic theologian with the notion of "act" (and especially with God as "pure act"), he approaches the Gospel narratives primarily from the perspective of Jesus's actions. Specifically, he intends to explore how Jesus "enacts" [End Page 738] his name, "YHWH-Saves," through the saving mysteries revealed in the narrative of the Gospels. Thus the title of his multi-volume work, "Jesus Becoming Jesus," serves as the overarching theological theme of the entire effort. This is how he explains his methodology of "act" and "enactment" in his first volume: "Jesus more and more becomes Jesus in act through his saving acts; he becomes more and more the Savior. He definitively becomes Jesus-in-act with the actions of his saving death and resurrection, which will find completion when Jesus comes in glory at the end of time" (xix). With such attention given to Jesus's actions, Weinandy admits that Jesus's teaching does not receive the same attention. It is not that he ignores Jesus's words, but they function primarily as pointers to Jesus's acts.And yet in another sense, the endpoint of this commentary is to show the Trinity-in-act. "The Father is fatherhood fully in act; the Son is sonship fully in act; and the Holy Spirit is love fully in act. This threefold perichoretic act is the one God fully in act" (xiv). As Jesus progressively enacts his name and identity, so too are the Father and the Spirit revealed according to the "acts" that reflect their hypostatic identities. A consistent feature of this commentary is the sustained attention given to how the Father and the Spirit are involved in the saving actions of Jesus, the Word made flesh. Congruent with this view of the Trinity's perichoretic act, Weinandy often adopts what might be called a "perichoretic syntax," whereby he presents a single reality from the distinct perspectives of the divine persons, restating the same truth in mutually enhancing ways. This grammatical-syntactical style of the commentary is admirably suited to its theme.If we are looking for parallels to this theological-doctrinal approach in the Christian tradition, the commentaries on the Gospel of John by Cyril of Alexandria and Thomas Aquinas come to mind. Like Weinandy, they each work through the Gospel text passage by passage, explaining the meaning of each section, but they are characterized by an overarching doctrinal concern: to present the entirety of the Christian faith through the words of John's Gospel and to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript by Merold WestphalM. Jamie FerreiraMerold Westphal. Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript.” West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii + 261. Cloth, $32.95. Paper, $16.95.The Purdue University Press Series in the History of Philosophy describes itself as attempting to provide insight into a philosopher by means of a focus on (...) a single major text. Such a focus is unusual for a series in the history of philosophy, and Westphal’s [End Page 144] accomplishment in this study is a fine example of how fruitfully this can be done. Commentary on over six hundred pages of Kierkegaard’s Postscript is presented in ten manageable chapters, which follow the order of the Postscript and deal with segments of it ranging from as few as twelve pages to as many as one hundred and seventy-five pages. The result is a commentary which can wonderfully guide students through the Postscript in its entirety, or through the assignment of individual chapters to accompany discrete reading selections. Westphal’s discussions are informed by an unusually wide-ranging knowledge of the history of philosophy—he considers the text not only in relation to Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, and Hegel, as others commentators have, but also brings to this work his clear strengths in phenomenological, existential, and postmodern thought (so we get useful comparisons with Gadamer, Derrida, Levinas, Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, among others). Lying behind Westphal’s entire approach to the book is his desire to address the two most common major criticisms of Kierkegaard’s thought, namely, that it is individualist and irrationalist. Thus, the major perspective from which everything is approached is the tension between the fallible yet responsible self—more precisely, the tension between individual and society, and the tension between irrationalist (voluntarist, blind) and rationalist. Westphal does a superb job of laying out the diversity of protests Climacus is registering in the Postscript—against Platonic intellectualism, against systematic philosophical speculation, and against the rhetorical compromising embodied in the “priest-orator.” There are, of course (as one would expect), sensible, suggestive, illuminating, and detailed exegeses of passages concerning all the significant themes associated with Climacus (approximation, appropriation, leap, direct communication, second reflection, dialectic, etc). Westphal examines the Postscript in the light of the distinction between Socratic religion and the non-Socratic (Christian) alternative found in the earlier Philosophical Fragments, to which this Postscript is an admittedly peculiar postscript, and employs material from much of Kierkegaard’s other work, including journal entries. With respect to the (in)famous category of leap, Westphal incorporates contemporary discussions of volitionalism and presents a fine summary of ways in which willing (decision) can be viewed as indirect, yet allowing the relevance of an ethics of belief. In fact, regarding even the commentary on “Truth Is Subjectivity,” where one might feel nothing new could be said, he manages to be innovative, by identifying “four moments” in the presentation of a theory of subjectivity (a satire, a parable, a definition, and a portrait) which make the chapter much more manageable for teaching. After considering Climacus’s presentation of the relation between Religiousness A and Religiousness B, Westphal appends a discussion of his own creation, Religiousness C (Chapter XIV). But all of this discussion would be unhelpful to a reader who does not fully appreciate the role of pseudonymity and indirect communication in Kierkegaard’s works; so Westphal prefaces his entire discussion with a fine chapter on pseudonymity which can be used even in courses where the entire book is not required reading. This chapter, relating pseudonymity to twentieth-century discussions of themes such as the effacement of the author of a text and the forfeiture of the privilege of authorship, is part of a three-chapter introduction setting the Postscript in relation to Kierkegaard’s biography, pseudonymity, and the familiar theory of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages. This entire introduction is written in a remarkably [End Page 145] engaging style which will surely seduce readers new to Kierkegaard and his creation, Johannes Climacus. For example, Westphal announces that “the flow of Regina’s... (shrink)

I appropriate Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the refrain for a feminist analysis of the girl because it offers more insight into the ways girls construct themselves as performative networks than the death-by-culture or at-risk model preferred by such feminists as Jean Kilbourne, Carol Gilligan, and even Susan Bordo. I proffer that it costs women everything to practise a politics of difference that is by definition reactionary, a reaction to the cultural refusal of leaky gendered bodies that must be overcome. (...) Girl is mapped through such alternations as powerful aggregates of the tremulous, roaming emissions of monstrous particles most desired and desirous. (shrink)

What makes people behave ethically continues to be at the forefront of business ethics research. The stylistic makeup of the decision-maker has been suspected to influence individual ethical behavior; however, this body of research accounts only for a handful of studies. This paper investigates the influence of decision-making styles as an individual difference on unethical behavior, independently from other personal characteristics. Covering a sample of 230 managers, we utilize the preeminent measures of these two constructs in a self-report survey. Our (...) results suggest that the decision-making styles of managers do influence their ethical behavior. Whereas managers with a dominant rational or spontaneous style behave ethically, having a more intuitive or avoidant makes them behave less ethically. The results also reveal that with higher levels of education, managers become more unethical. This research conveys important implications for management practice, education, and training. (shrink)

Background: Discussing treatment risks has become increasingly important in medical communication. Still, despite regulations, physicians must decide how much and what kind of information to present. Objective: To investigate patients’ preference for information about a small risk of a complication of colonoscopy, and whether medical and personal factors contribute to such preference. To propose a disclosure policy related to our results. Design: Vignettes study. Setting: Department of Gastroenterology, Academic Medical Centre, the Netherlands. Patients: 810 consecutive colonoscopy patients. Intervention: A home-sent (...) questionnaire containing three vignettes. Vignettes varied in the indication for colonoscopy, complication severity and level of risk. Patients were invited to indicate their wish to be informed and the importance of such information. In addition, sociodemograhic, illness-related and psychological characteristics were assessed. Main outcome measurements: Wish to be informed and importance of information. Results: Of 810 questionnaires, 68% were returned. Patients generally wished to be informed about low-risk complications, regardless of the indication for colonoscopy or the severity of the complication. The level of risk did matter, though (OR = 2.48, SE = 0.28, p = 0.001). The information was considered less important if done for population screening purposes or diagnosis of colon cancer, if the complication was less severe (bleeding) and if the risk was smaller (0.01% and 0.1%). Patients’ information preference was also related to age, mood and coping style. Limitations: Difficulty of vignettes. Conclusions: Patients generally wish to be informed about all possible risks. However, this might become uninformative. A stepwise approach is suggested. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:178 BOOK REVIEWS The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, II: Studies in Theological Style: Clerical Styles. By HANS URS VON BALTH.AS.AR. Translated by Andrew Louth, Francis McDonagh, and Brian McNeil, C.R.V. Edited by John Riches. San Francisco: Ignatius Press; New York: Crossroad, 1984. Pp. 362. This is the second volume of the translation of Hans Urs von Balthasar's H errlichkeit edited by Joseph Fessio and John (...) Riches, corresponding to the first part of the second volume of the original. The translation has been a joint project, and, if as a wsult it is more uneven than that of the first volume, with rare exceptions it is an accurate rendition into good English of the author's difficult German. The problems which the book presents to the reviewer do not stem from the translation, but from the subtlety of the theological viewpoint of the author himself-a viewpoint here manifest, if not in actu secundo, then in actu primo proximo, for this volume is given over to an examination of the thought of five " clerical " or "official " theologians (Irenaeus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Augustine, Anselm, and Bonaventure) whom von Balthasar has chosen because they exemplify that aesthetic integration of theological insight which the author considers to offer the sole means of avoiding the dead ends of systematization, these being those logical culs-de-sac into which the clerical theologians of the medieval schools, with the exception 'of a few such as Bonaventure, were carried by their mistaken devotion to a new project, typified by Thomism and dominant by the end of the thirteenth century, of enclosing the free unity and rational integrity of the truth revealed in Christ within the transcendentally necessary structures of the sterile immanentist rationalism which von Balthasar considers to be constitutive of all systematic thought. It would doubtless be possible to read this second volume with some profit, apart from any acquaintance with the first, but it would be to miss the context in which the theologies chosen for examination become luminous. In any event, this volume, like the first, is not to be read at a sitting, or merely once: the product of a lifetime's study, The Glory of the Lord must itself be studied, and the study should follow the sequence of the work itself. Von Balthasar's literary style is highly allusive, while his thought is at once subtle and dense; the combination imposes upon the reviewer a task of interpretation which can be undertaken only with some diffidence, yet the importance of. providing some sort of prolegomenon to the easily bewildering richness of this masterwork in order that it be made more ac- BOOK REVIEWS 179 cessible to the readership for whom its author and editors intend it must warrant the risk indissociable from such interpretation. At first hand, much of the reviewer's work is already done by the author in an introductory section, which in turn states the goal of the entire enterprise, that of providing concrete historical (" dramatic ") realizations of the " form" of Christ, " the glory of the Lord," which the first volume set forth as the norm of all valid theology. The theologies which do this are " beautiful," and by being so have a factual impact upon the history and culture of the faith. Von Balthasar then explains what is meant by theological "style:" the freedom of the theologian manifesting itself in giving a particular free but obedient form to the content of the revelation, whose Form is the glory of God. The author then recites the decline of "official " or " clerical " style of theology from the end of the thirteenth century, and points to the emergence of a new "lay " style in the later medieval period, a style which was to become normative in consequence of the effective abdication by the official scholastic theology from the properly theological task of seeking to understand ever more profoundly the ecclesial tradition of the revelation in Christ, in favor of the sterile academic commentary upon St. Thomas wherein scholasticism languished until the Enlightenment, and then from the neoThomist revival in the late nineteenth century until its final defeat by biblical scholarship in the recent past... (shrink)

Clinical ethics support mechanisms in healthcare are increasing but little is known about the specific developments in elderly care. The aim of this paper is to present a systematic literature review on the characteristics of existing ethics support mechanisms in institutional elderly care. A review was performed in three electronic databases . Sixty papers were included in the review. The ethics support mechanisms are classified in four categories: ‘institutional bodies’ ; ‘frameworks’ ; ‘educational programmes and moral case deliberation’; and ‘written (...) documents and policies’. For each category the goals, methods and ways of organising are described. Ethics support often serves several goals and can be targeted at various levels: case, professional or organisation. Over the past decades a number of changes have taken place in the development of ethics support in elderly care. Considering the goals, ethics support has become more outreaching and proactive, aiming to qualify professionals to integrate ethics in daily care processes. The approaches in clinical ethics support have become more diverse, more focused on everyday ethical issues and better adapted to the concrete learning style of the nursing staff. Ethics support has become less centrally organised and more connected to local contexts and primary process within the organisation. (shrink)

A well-known problem with Hintikka-style logics of knowledge is that of logical omniscience. One knows too much. This breaks down into two subproblems: one knows all tautologies, and one’s knowledge is closed under consequence. A way of addressing the second of these is to move from knowledge simpliciter, to knowledge for a reason. Then, as consequences become ‘further away’ from one’s basic knowledge, reasons for them become more complex, thus providing a kind of resource measurement. One kind of reason (...) is a formal proof. Sergei Artemov has introduced a logic of explicit proofs, LP. I present a semantics for this, based on the idea that it is a logic of knowledge with explicit reasons. A number of fundamental facts about LP can be established using this semantics. But it is equally important to realize that it provides a natural logic of more general applicability than its original provenance, arithmetic provability. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:570 BOOK REVIEWS like reasonable rule for economic life. This effort is worthy of more attention than is possible here, but let it be noted that it must inevitably suffer the same fate as any ethical calculus: someone must decide for others what is their due and what is not. How much wealth, for example, makes for a concentration [of wealth] that would be " demonstrably detrimental to some (...) people's exercise of their generic rights "? His is ultimately an entitlement or rights ethic, rather than an aitial ethic of goal-purposive fulfillment for the individual, projected outwards for a common good scenario. While his rejection of goal ethics's inability to detail principles for distribution of goods is noteworthy, it does not appear that a tightened version of generic rights theory will come closer to either of Phillips's desiderata: a justification of moral reasoning apart from any theory of nature or a calculus for its application. Desan and Phillips wish to think against the limits of the human situation. For Desan, rising above limitation is a moral task and obligation facing us each, if there is to be a common future. His call is to be World Citizen in a Polis of Nations. Phillips's vision is more concrete, a distribution of benefits to benefit all with well-being and freedom. But this mundane task is no less difficult than Desan's transcendent one. Indeed, according to Augustine, even the Divine Mind must utilize an artifice in dealing with human creation: "He loves each of us as though there were only one of us." Both ethicists have striven to show us how we might think this vision for ourselves, i.e., for each other of us. ]OIIN B. DAVIS, O.P. ' Detroit, Michigan Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans: Seventeenth-Century Essays. By HUGH TREVOR-ROPER. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. Pp. xiii + 317. $27.50 (hardbound). Even to list the changes and events which occurred in seventeenth century England is a difficult task: the century spans the period from the death of Queen Elizabeth to the Glorious Revolution and beyond, through the Civil War, the accession and exile (twice) of the Stuarts, the rise of science, the transformation of the theological and religious issues of the English Reformation, to name only the most obvious. To conceive a book, in the form of occasional essays, which not only addresses these changes and events but does so by establishing the connections which were present with European currents at the same time surely tempts fate, even when it does not tempt reviewers. BOOK REVIEWS 571 But Hugh Trevor-Roper is a master, both of the period under survey and of the form of the essay. With one exception, each of these essays began as a lecture or seminar paper, and the pleasantly legible style in which they are written must bear some trace of that origin. The occasional flashes of wit, mixed with rthe fairly non-technical style, make the book a joy to read and a welcome escape from the usually constipated style of scholarly prose. In his Introduction, the essayist clearly sets forth his thesis that English intellectual history does not exist apart from the currents of European intellectual history (a thesis for which Trevor-Roper has already staked a claim). That leads to what may very well be the major problem with these essays: its end is in its beginning. The list of names cited in these essays only partially coincides with the list of names in the index; the former is much longer than the latter. And while the style of the essay welcomes the reader to the period, it also throws up more names and places and events than can be explained or even annotated adequately. This occurs both on a large and on a small scale. The first essay, on "Nicholas Hill, the English Atomist" contains such a vast array of names that at times it becomes the prosopo· graphical equivalent of a telephone book. On a large scale, there is the problem with a definition of Arminianism. No definition, at least no formal definition, is attempted-and this is probably wise. But, particularly in... (shrink)

(1)In this necessarily condensed account there have been presented the personality systems of James, Freud, and McDougall, the first and the last of these exhibiting certain common factors, with certain extensions peculiar to each system. With the Freudian system these factors vaguely appear, but their form is badlydefined and their delineation incomplete. The criticism of the three systems may be summarised as follows:—that of James is lacking in content, i.e. of the sentiments, while that of McDougall is more in line (...) with a simple self concept than that of a complete personality system and hence is lacking in organisation. That of Freud, while possessing some features in common with that of McDougall appears naive and undeveloped. By combining the systems of the first-mentioned pair, a final system may be obtained, whichmore completely explains personality than any one of them. (2)According to this final system the main features of personality consist of:— (a)A basic system of instincts which tends to operate independently as personality phases; among these first fear, and later, submission and self assertion act as regulative factors. The former of this pair is inhibitive in its general effect on conduct, the latter accentuating it. (b)From a combination of instinctive tendencies focussed upon mental objects the sentiments develop. Like sentiments are grouped into a more or less defined entity styled a social self,this self being a product primarily of a particular environment. More than one social self tends to exist side by side in the same personality, each self retaining a specific set of moral sanctions of its own. Social selves may be independent and contradictory in their “mores” if there exist no overlap of common factors in apperception systems, sentiments and will attitudes. (c)At adolescence a rational process begins. Abstract sentiments and ideal personalities develope, and in place of social authority there is substituted the approbation or disfavour of anideal community existent in the mind of the subject; this forms the background of the promptings of conscience. An ethical code finally emerges whichis more or less universal in its applications. This development may be designated a rational, spiritual, or ethical self, and it acts as a unifying influence upon the social selves by legislating for opposed sanctions, and thus affording a final court of appeal in the case of conflict. Hence it becomes the crowning development of a unified personality. A clarification of the terms “self” and “personality” is thus afforded, whereby the term “self” is regarded as a phase of the latter. (shrink)

Modern medicine has done much in the fields of infectious diseases and emergencies to aid cure. In most other fields, it is mostly control that it aims for, which is another name for palliation. Pharmacology, psychopharmacology included, is mostly directed towards such control and palliation too. The thrust, both of clinicians and research, must now turn decisively towards prevention and cure. Also, longevity with well-being is modern medicine's other big challenge. Advances in vaccines for hypertension, diabetes, cancers etc, deserve (...) attention; as also, the role of meditation, yoga, spirituality etc in preventing disease at various levels. Studies on longevity, life style changes and healthy centenarians deserve special scrutiny to find what aids longevity with wellbeing. A close look at complementary and alternative medicine is needed to find any suitable models they may have, cutting aside their big talk and/or hostility towards mainstream medical care. Medicine is a manifestation of the human eros, and should not become a means of its thanatos. It must realise its true potential, so that eros prevails, and thanatos prevails only ultimately, not prematurely. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 111 A Critical History of Western Philosophy. Edited by D. J. O'Connor. (Giencoe: The Free Press, 1964. Pp. x + 604. $9.95.) Professor O'Connor and his collaborators have, in their Critical History of Western Philosophy, produced a novel and, to my mind, unusually good textbook. The volume, which is designed primarily as a text for undergraduate philosophy students, is made up of twentynine essays, each one devoted (...) to a major philosopher in the Western tradition--or, in a few instances, to a philosophical movement. The essays (29) have been written by 25 persons and each includes a sho[t biography of the philosopher under discussion followed by a fairly lengthy presentation and critical analysis of his philosophical views, with particular attention to metaphysics and epistemology. The contributors to the volume are mostly British, although they include a sprinkling of Americans and one Norwegian. This reviewer was pleased to note several representatives from the new British universities among them. The philosophers selected for study in the book have, I believe, been well chosen. The standard greats, from Plato through Hegel, are all included. In going beyond this repertory, the editor has used good judgment in his selections. It is always possible to question individual choices, but this proves only that different editors would produce different books. In the present ease, it might be argued that in making his selections from the seco~td rank the editor showed some partiality in favor of the insular over the continental tradition. There is, however, a quite reasonable reply to such an objection: that the selection of philosophers was determined by the purpose for which the book was designed--namely, to serve as a text for students in British and American universities. One of the problems in a book of this type, containing essays by more than two dozen writers, is to maintain a measure of uniformity--of style, of method, of complexity, and so on. Once again, the result seems to me to be on the whole successful. The essays in general are clearly written; they approach their subjects at a level that avoids oversimplification on the one hand, yet should almost always be intelligible to the average, studious undergraduate on the other. One notes an occasional idiosyneracy of interpretation; however, because the essays are written by different people, such peculiarities do not repeat themselves long enough to become an annoyance. Indeed, if I have any criticism to make on this point, it would be that the editor has been too successful in achieving uniformity in his essays. The result is writing that strikes me as being somewhat on the bland side, as though each of the contributors had made a conscious effort to produce an essay indistinguishable in anything but its content from all the others. I shall not attempt in this review to discuss critically the separate essays contained in the book. That would be an endless task, of dubious value. Instead I should like to raise two quite general issues that seem pertinent to the book as a whole. The first concerns the editor's statement, in the Preface, of the purposes of the book: In his words: "The writers have tried to do two things: (1) to explain the principal philosophical concepts and theories in the order in which they were developed; and (2) to evaluate and criticize them in the light of contemporary knowledge and to bring out whatever may be in them that is of permanent philosophical interest." The first of these two aims raises no questions; the second, however, is a different matter. I am puzzled, specifically, by its first clause, that the essays will evaluate and criticize past philosophical theories in the light of contemporary knowledge. Is this really a meaningful task? If the book were a history of science rather than of philosophy, I could understand how the writers might go about criticizing earlier theories in the light of contemporary knowledge. In philosophy, however, the situation is quite different. On what contemporary knowledge can one base his criticisms? Most of us recognize the prodigious advances that have been made during our century in the accumulation of empirical knowledge. If by contemporary... (shrink)

That i) there is a somehow determined chronology of Plato’s dialogues among all the chronologies of the last century and ii) this theory is subject to many objections, are points this article intends to discuss. Almost all the main suggested chronologies of the last century agree that Parmenides and Theaetetus should be located after dialogues like Meno, Phaedo and Republic and before Sophist, Politicus, Timaeus, Laws and Philebus. The eight objections we brought against this arrangement claim that to place the (...) dialogues like Meno, Phaedo and Republic both immediately after the early ones and before Parmenides and Theaetetus is epistemologically and ontologically problematic. -/- Key Words: Plato; chronology; knowledge; being; Parmenides -/- Introduction While the ancient philosophers, doxographers and commentators from Aristotle onward considered, more or less, the question of the date and arrangement of the dialogues (cf. Irwin 2008, 77 n. 69), they would not observe a firm necessity to consider the progress of Plato’s theories in dialogues, maybe because they did not think of any essential shift in there. We might be able to say, nevertheless, that the most prominent feature of the ancient attitude to Plato was its peculiar attention to the Republic and the Timaeus as the most mature works in his philosophy and also the consideration of Laws as a later work. This tendency can be discovered from the general viewpoint of the first chronologies of the early 19th century after starting to deal with the issue. That Schleiermacher observed Republic as the culmination of Plato’s philosophy and as one of the latest dialogues besides Laws and Timaeus could reflex the implicit chronology of the tradition in the first mirrors it found. Another tendency in Schleiermacher is taking the triology of Theaetetus, Sophist and Politicus as relatively early. From the last quarter of 19th century onward, stylometry helped scholars to establish a new framework to constructa new arrangement between the dialogues. Based on stylistic as well as literary findings, Campbell (1867, xxxff.) argued for the closeness of the style of Sophist and Politicus with Timaeus, Critias, Philebus and Lawsthat, especially because of the certain evidence about this last dialogue’s lateness, led to the consideration of all as late dialogues. Almost every other stylistic effort after Campbell approved the similarities between Sophist and Politicus with Timaeus, Critias, Philebus and Laws. The result of all such investigations led to a new chronology that, despite some differences, has a fixed structure in all its appearances. 1. The Standard Chronology of the Dialogues The chronologies that are now commonly accepted are mostly based on the arrangement of dialogues to three groups corresponding to three periods of Plato’s life, which became predominant after applying stylistic features in assessing the similarities between dialogues. The fact that all the stylometric considerations reached to the similar results about the date of dialogues while they were assessing different stylistic aspects helped the new chronology become prevailing not only among stylistic chronologies but also between those like Fine, Kahn and Vlastos who were inclined more to the content-based arrangements. Even this latter group could not neglect the apparently certain results of using the method of stylometry. This was the main reason, I think, that made what they called content-based chronology be under the domination of stylometry much more than they could expect. The division of the dialogues into three separate groups became something that most of the scholars took for granted so far as Kahn thinks this division 'can be regarded as a fixed point of departure in any speculation about the chronology of the dialogues' (1996, 44). Thereafter, all the chronologists are accustomed to divide the dialogues to three groups of early, middle and late corresponding to the three stages of Plato’s life. Nevertheless, some of them tried to make subdivisions among each group and introduce some of the dialogues as transitional between different periods and thus reached to a fourfold classification of the dialogues. Although theycould never achieve to a consensus about the place of some dialogues, about which we will discuss soon, the whole spirit of theirchronological arrangements is the same and thus compelling enough for us to unify all of them with the label of 'Standard Chronology of Dialogues' (SCD). We brought together some of the most famous chronologies in the table below to make a comparison easier and to show how all are approximately of the same opinion about the place of some dialogues. The following points must be noted about this table: 1. I divided the dialogues to eight groups of early, late early, transitional, early middle, late middle, post-middle, early late, and late. Although none of the chronologists applies this classification, it can be helpful to compare them. In this table, for example, if one of the chronologist’s beholds one of the dialogues as later than all the dialogues of middle group, it is considered here as late middle. Otherwise, if it is emphasized that it is after all of them, it is considered as post-middle. The same is true about the dialogues of the late group in which I regarded the first dialogues of that period as early late only in those who explicitly considered some dialogues as earlier than other ones in the late group. Though, therefore, some of the dialogues might have not been considered as forming a distinct class, they are distinguished here. A. SCD’s Early and Transitional Dialogues When we move from stylometric to content-based chronologies, the homogeneity between the dialogues of each group is more understandable. Guthrie (1975, v. 4, 50) distinguishes three groups, the first of them includes Apology, Crito, Laches, Lysis, Charmides, Euthyphro, Hippias Minor, Hippias Major, Protagoras, Gorgiasand Ion. In addition to Meno, Phaedo and Euthydems, his first group does not include Cratylus and Menexenus. Unlike Guthrie, almost all the other content-based chronologiesof our study desire to distinguish two categories inside the first group of which the latter must be considered as the transitional group leading to the dialogues of the middle period. Kahn distinguishes four groups of dialogues and arranges two of them before middle period dialogues. The first group including Apology, Crito, Ion, Hippias Minor, Gorgiasand Menexenus he calls 'early' or 'presystematic' dialogues (1998, 124). The second group he calls the 'threshold', 'pre-middle' or 'Socratic' dialogues including seven: Laches, Charmides, Lysis, Euthyphro, Protagoras, Euthydemus and Meno. Based on Vlastos’ arrangement we must distinguish Euthydemus, Hippias Major, Lysis, Menexenus and Meno as 'transitional' dialogues from the 'elenctic' dialogues that are the other dialogues of Kahn’smentioned first two groups plus the first book of theRepublic. Fine also distinguishes 'transitional' dialogues from early or 'Socratic' dialogues,but her transitional dialogues are Gorgias, Meno, Hippias Major, Euthydemus and Cratylus of which she thinks the last two dialogues are 'controversial' (2003, 1). Her Socratic dialogues are all the remaining dialogues of Kahn’s first two groups. In spite of all the differences between the mentioned chronologies, it can be seen that all of them are inclined to arrange the early dialogues in a way that: i) Besides the dialogues that are considered as late, it never includes Republic II-X, Theaetetus, Phaedrus and Parmenides. ii) It intends to consider the dialogues like Euthydemus and Hippias Majorthat look more critical as later among the earlier dialogues or as transitional group. iii) Those who do not consider Meno as a middle period dialogue place it in their second or transitional group. iv) None of the content-based chronologies considers Phaedo and Symposium as early. Stylometric chronologies also intend to put them either as last dialogues among their early ones or as middle. B. SCD’s Middle Period Dialogues Campbell listed Republic, Phaedrus, Parmenides and Theaetetus as his second group of dialogues, an idea thatwas accepted by Brandwood. Ledger’smiddle period dialogueshad Euthydemus, Symposium and Cratylus in addition to the dialogues that Campbell and Brandwood had mentioned as middle. Among content-based chronologies, Guthrie’s list of middle period dialogues did not include Parmenides but some dialogues which had been considered as early in stylometric ones: Meno, Phaedo, Republic, Symposium, Phaedrus, Euthydemus, Menexenus and Cratylus. In sofar as I know, Euthydemus and Menexenus have not been considered as middle by other content-based chronologists and Guthrie is an exception among them. That Phaedo, Phaedrus, Symposium and Republic were middle period dialogues almost all the philosophical chronologists like Kahn, Fine, Vlastos (except Rep.I), Irwin andKraut came along. The dialogues they do not string along about are Meno, Cratylus, Parmenides and Theaetetus. Those like Guthrie, Kraut and Irwin who did not consider Meno as early presumably posit it among middles. The same can be said about Cratylus in the suggested chronologies of Guthrie, Kahn, Vlastos and Kraut. Nonetheless, it is different in case of Parmenides and Theaetetus. Whereas all the mentioned stylometric chronologists like Campbell, Brandwood and Ledger set them among middle period dialogues,the philosophical chronologists, it might seem at first, did not arrive at a consensus about them. While Guthrie and Fine put them as the first dialogues of the late group, Vlastos and Kraut set them as the latest of the middle group, as well as Kahn who puts them as post-middle and amongst the late period dialogues. Regardless the way they classify their groups, their disagreement does not affect the arrangement of the dialogues: they all posit Parmenides and Theaetetus after the series of Meno, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Symposium and Republic and before Sophist, Politicus, Timaeus, Philebus and Laws. To sum up SCD’s arrangement of the middle period dialogues we can add: v) Republic and Phaedrus have been considered by all the mentioned chronologists as dialogues of the middle period. vi) All the philosophical chronologies have reached a consensus about setting Phaedo and Symposium alongside with Republic and Phaedrus as middle. vii) While Stylometric alongside some philosophic chronologists arrange Parmenides and Theaetetus among their middle period dialogues and mostly as the latest among them, other philosophical chronologists put them as the early among the late dialogues. We can conclude then that SCD intends to locate these two dialogues at the boundary between the middle and late period dialogues. -/- . (shrink)

_Becoming Human_ argues that human identity was articulated and extended across a wide range of textual, visual, and artifactual assemblages from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. J. Allan Mitchell shows how the formation of the child expresses a manifold and mutable style of being. To be human is to learn to dwell among a welter of things. A searching and provocative historical inquiry into human becoming, the book presents a set of idiosyncratic essays on embryology and (...) infancy, play and games, and manners, meals, and other messes. While it makes significant contributions to medieval scholarship on the body, family, and material culture, _Becoming Human_ theorizes anew what might be called a medieval ecological imaginary. Mitchell examines a broad array of phenomenal objects—including medical diagrams, toy knights, tableware, conduct texts, dream visions, and scientific instruments—and in the process reanimates distinctly medieval ontologies. In addressing the emergence of the human in the later Middle Ages, Mitchell identifies areas where humanity remains at risk. In illuminating the past, he shines fresh light on our present. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. (...) It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

In the article, the organic principle of the Euroasian philosophy is studied. The organic principle acts as a basis of special style of thinking and a certain methodology of scientific knowledge here. The Euroasian methodology of studying of development of society allows establishing of the nature of communications between social processes and the phenomena of wildlife. In the article, the most important components of the Euroasian organic principle of thinking are shown: special terminology and possibilities of its application for (...) the description and forecasting of the social phenomena. Prerequisites of change of the style of thinking dominating in modern science are also noted. The author considers advantages of the organic principle of the Euroasian methodology in solution of national political, social-economic and cultural problems and in possible prospects of its use for formation of scientific methodology. The organic principle of thinking creates complex idea of reality, which can appear before us new, party unknown earlier. Lack of division of sensual experience and ‘pure reason‘, irrational and rational in organic thinking is unconditional advantage of organic approach. Organic principle presented by the Euroasian philosophical organization of the beginning of the twentieth century and continued by Lev Gumilev in the theory of ethnogenesis acts as alternative developed in the west of one-dimensional, mechanistic methodology. It can be told with confidence that owning all of variety of intellectual traditions is necessary for the modern humankind to become capable to realize global ecological threats and negative consequences of influence of culture in which ethics of individualism prevails. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers—analytic as well as continental—tend to feel uneasy about Ernst Tugendhat, who, though he positions himself in the analytic field, poses questions in the Heideggerian style. Tugendhat was one of Martin Heidegger's last pupils and his least obedient, pursuing a new and controversial critical technique. Tugendhat took Heidegger's destruction of Being as presence and developed it in analytic philosophy, more specifically in semantics. Only formal semantics, according to Tugendhat, could answer the questions left open by Heidegger. Yet (...) in doing this, Tugendhat discovered the latent "hermeneutic nature of analytic philosophy"—its post-metaphysical dimension—in which "there are no facts, but only true propositions." What Tugendhat seeks to answer is this: What is the meaning of thought following the linguistic turn? Because of the rift between analytic and continental philosophers, very few studies have been written on Tugendhat, and he has been omitted altogether from several histories of philosophy. Now that these two schools have begun to reconcile, Tugendhat has become an example of a philosopher who, in the words of Richard Rorty, "built bridges between continents and between centuries." Tugendhat is known more for his philosophical turn than for his phenomenological studies or for his position within analytic philosophy, and this creates some confusion regarding his philosophical propensities. Is Tugendhat analytic or continental? Is he a follower of Wittgenstein or Heidegger? Does he belong in the culture of analysis or in that of tradition? Santiago Zabala presents Tugendhat as an example of merged horizons, promoting a philosophical historiography that is concerned more with dialogue and less with classification. In doing so, he places us squarely within a dialogic culture of the future and proves that any such labels impoverish philosophical research. (shrink)

In much of the contemporary situation for trans* persons, authority over identity has been given to, or perhaps taken by, arbiters of the medico-legal discourse. These identity “experts” have become the gatekeepers for sex reassignment and gender designation. Alternatively, many theorists argue that identity is exclusively about first-person appeals to one’s own sense of oneself. I show here that neither of these accounts does justice to our experience. Instead, drawing upon Hans Georg Gadamer’s notion of horizons, I outline a position (...) where first-person and third-person accounts of the meaning of the body can meet somewhere in the middle. Such a position, characterized by a hermeneutics of the body, mediates between the phenomenological first-person while still recognizing the third-person view of the body as relevant. Approaching the body through a hermeneutic process allows us to find a place where we can all be open to different performances of gender and different particular bodily actions that recognize the bodies of us all as a combination of sedimented styles of action within social discourses. (shrink)

"A close analysis of the Republic's diverse literary styles shows how the peculiarities of verbal texture in Platonic discourse can be explained by Plato's remolding of tropes and techniques from poetry and the Presocratics. This book argues that Plato smuggles poetic language into the Republic's prose in order to characterize the deceitful coloration and polymorphy that accompanies the world of Becoming as opposed to the Real. Plato's distinctive discourse thus can transmit, even to those figures focused on the visual (...) within his Republic, the shiftiness of the base and the unjust."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

I would like to stress Vadim Mikhailovich's [Mezhuev's] position and clarify our conversation about culturology. It is constantly repeated that culturology is a science. It is my profound conviction that culturology is not a science. Culturology is a distinctive phenomenon of Russian culture and represents a certain intellectual movement. If one briefly surveys the history of its emergence, its philosophical origin becomes obvious. This intellectual movement consists of three levels, if one takes into account the "-logy" ending. First, the philosophical (...) level, from which in the 1970s culture began to be conceived as a special field of knowledge in our country. Then, humanistic knowledge: a great many representatives of the humanities in Russia-historians, art specialists, art critics, essayists-studied culture. Finally, there is the socioscientific tendency, which is just beginning to form in Russia and carries the internationally accepted name of social and cultural anthropology. All of us are synergistically attracted to these three tendencies, which comprise what is called culturology. The question of how these three tendencies of knowledge are correlated in the framework of the given intellectual movement is, in my view, extremely important. For quite some time now, there has been no reflection in Russia on the foundations of scientific and philosophical knowledge, but such reflection is necessary. To advance along the road of rational knowledge it is important to reflect in what cognitive space we find ourselves, what we are doing within its boundaries, and for what reason. From this point of view, neither philosophers nor representatives of the humanities or the social sciences will renounce their positions of observer. Moreover, I agree with Mezhuev that there is no single philosophy, humanistic conception, or theory of culture. Anyone who is engaged professionally in the study of cultural phenomena can choose his initial foundations. As Vadim Mezhuev correctly notes, the significance of philosophy for other types of knowledge lies in the fact that there are borderline areas of man's existence in the world. However, they are identified in different ways by different philosophies: positivism, phenomenology, classical Platonism, Aristotelianism, Kantianism, and so forth. Representatives of humanistic and socioscientific knowledge are free to choose any metaphysics. Philosophers will continue to attend to their business in their subject area, and scientists in theirs. But it is important periodically to determine rationally when there must be close and complementary relations between the three components of this intellectual movement and when they must exist in parallel. Then questions such as who has priority and who is the guardian of truth will not arise. If the tendencies have diverged in parallel, then the representatives of each of them are occupied within their domains with questions which are irrelevant in other fields of knowledge or for other theoretical models. At the end of the twentieth century, to pose the question of scientism or antiscientism is senseless because today we know that there are different forms of rationality and that science is not the only, and is quite a narrow, form of rationality. Myth too is rational. It is expressed in categories and has a particular inner logic. We recognize myth as a rational cultural entity, because it is represented in symbolic form as an ordered sequence of judgments, as an artifact. But it differs from scientific theory. That is why it is fruitful to reflect on what forms of rationality are relevant to what levels of knowledge. I agree with Ogurtsov, who says that these forms penetrate in one way or another into every culturally institutionalized form of knowledge. Indeed, in philosophical knowledge there are elements of everyday, mythological, and scientific knowledge, but this does not negate the distinctive nature of the philosophical form of knowledge. In science there are elements of metaphysics, mythology, and everyday knowledge, but this does not cancel the particularities of the scientific form of knowledge. The same is true of the humanistic form, which is in principle irremovable from the framework of institutionalized knowledge, at least for now. I do not agree with Ogurtsov that I give the humanistic form of knowledge a negative evaluation. Humanistic knowledge begins to be significant in a period of a cognitive paradigm shift. This, we can say, is apparent today, at a time of transition from the grand style of modernism in its postmodern mode to the building of the foundations for a new whole. The point is that the humanistic form of knowledge enables us to isolate at the outset those areas of the unknown at which we arrive because of the limitations inherent in other forms of rationality. It is closest to everyday and empirical categories of knowledge and forms of ideas; hence, particularism, image syncretism, and mobility are its distinctive features. But without this humanistic level no further step is possible in either scientific or philosophical knowledge. The breakdown into these forms of knowledge- philosophical, humanistic, and scientific-may be primitive, but we have to start our reflection on the foundations of our cognitive relationship to our surroundings somewhere. The identification of the forms of knowledge makes it possible to draw the conclusion that, unlike philosophical and humanistic knowledge, socioscientific knowledge is modeled on the natural sciences. From this it becomes obvious that the distinctive features of the object of social sciences determine also the special nature of the categorial apparatus, operationalization, selection method, and information analysis. I do not insist that the model I suggest must be accepted. Other models can be constructed. But let us start with a simpler comparison of types of knowledge and later we shall differentiate them. I started from this level because in our culture such a division is apparent and generally accepted. There are the philosophical, humanistic, and scientific forms of knowledge. They are irreducible to one another, they perform entirely different functions in the knowledge of man's relationship to the environment, and express different views about how man lives in culture. I agree that philosophy is exactly existence in culture with a singling out of the limits of this existence. But representatives of humanistic and socioscientific knowledge also deal with existence in culture. What is important for the philosopher is the direction of knowledge from within to the outside; for the representative of humanistic knowledge it is the description of how he exists among a multitude of seemingly diverse and divergent artifacts and processes; and for the scientist it is the order of the philosophically and humanistically defined reality in order to control it the better. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Eclecticism or Skepticism? A Problem of the Early EnlightenmentMartin MulsowEclecticism has its own logic.1 According to this logic, eclecticism is an attitude which seeks to free itself from sectarian doctrines and to achieve a more objective position above all such groups. However, many revolutions end by catching their own tails, and this attitude quickly deteriorates into the definition of just another sect, taking the original argument for eclecticism with (...) it. Germany’s self-styled “eclectic” philosophy found itself in just such a self-destructive phase at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the very point at which the concept was beginning to be used much more widely, as a recent comprehensive study by Michael Albrecht has demonstrated.2 Taking Albrecht’s observations as my basis, I wish to draw upon the example provided by two thinkers and some previously neglected material to consider in greater depth a problem which characterizes a part of the eclectic movement of the early German Enlightenment: the tense relationship between eclecticism and radical skepticism.3 [End Page 465]Jakob Friedrich Reimmann, SkepticAs a young man, Jakob Friedrich Reimmann, the great scholar and historian of philosophy and scholarship, was one of the most resolutely skeptical philosophers of the early Enlightenment.4 In an anonymous contribution to the eighth volume of the Observationes selectae, which appeared in 1704, Reimmann raises the question: was Solomon a skeptic?5 The anonymity which protected this article, as it did all others which appeared in Halle’s periodical,6 made it possible for Reimmann to experiment with unorthodox ideas, including some which had to do with the then-fashionable eclecticism. He could thus include such criticism of eclecticism as:[I]t is not so, as you say, that a distinction must be made between sectarians and eclectics. For it is possible to prove from induction that eclectics also disagree among themselves about knowledge of fundamentals, and that they do not agree among themselves any better than the clocks of a large town. What could be found wiser, what more pious, what better than the hypotheses of the Pyrrhonists?7Contemporary eclecticism, he asserted, was nothing other than a reproduction of the various individual sects because its own arguments mirrored their fundamental differences. Reimmann’s risky suggestion was that this eclecticism should be replaced by a pyrrhonism which would be better able to fulfil the original intentions of the “eclectic” philosophers. [End Page 466]Reimmann’s article has a somewhat cryptic relationship to Joachim Lange’s Medicina Mentis of 1704.8 Reimmann replies to this work without referring to it explicitly. Lange had written a history of philosophy as a history of corruption (a historia philomoriae, of the love of madness), according to which philosophy could only become blinder when, after the fall of Adam and the loss of Old Testament wisdom, it moved away from its origin. This argument was combined with an eclectic psychological logic in the style of Buddeus and Poiret. Reimmann is revenging himself for the “collubus,” that is, for Lange’s twisting of the ideas which Reimmann had discussed with him in confidence to portray them falsely as godless. The tensions between Thomasius and Lange, which increased after 1702, may also have played a role in the background. It is possible here to see the close contact and discussions which preceded the publication of books in Halle. From the safety of his anonymity Reimmann responds that it is ridiculous to try to sell the patriarchs as philosophers, but that, if one must do so, then Solomon can only be seen as a skeptic, if not a pyrrhonist. French libertines had already shocked the church with this assertion at the beginning of the seventeenth century,9 and it is significant that this tendency [End Page 467] reappears in the midst of the eclecticism of the early Enlightenment. Reimmann cites La Mothe le Vayer extensively.It seems logical, then, that Reimmann should have taken a critical position against Thomasian eclecticism as early as 1697 in his Schediasma philosophicum de Logices Aristotelicae, Rameae, Cartesianae & Electivae insufficientia.10 With Johann Jakob von Ryssel, a student of Thomasius, Reimmann develops the concept of “eclectic doubt”; his growing experience... (shrink)

As one of the tools used to express feelings and thoughts, music has been utilised by people in many fields throughout history. Music is seen as a means of expressing religious feelings, being used as an educational tool, as a way for military bands to invoke heroic feelings in soldiers, and as way of expressing emotions in joyful and melancholic days. Music was especially born and shaped by rituals of religious origin. With the spread of the religion of Islam, (...) music became an issue that paved the way for many religious discussions. It should be clearly noted that while many verses in the Qur'an are cited as a source for these discussions, it is very difficult to deduce from these verses whether music is halal (permissible) or haram (prohibited). Additionally, many permissible matters in Islam become prohibited when used maliciously or out of their intended purpose, however, if everything that has a possibility of being used maliciously or outside of its intended purpose is considered haram, this will lead to a path of denying many blessings that Allah has bestowed upon people in this world. Restricting issues out of the possibility of their wrongful misuse and depriving others of this blessings cannot be just. Nevertheless, although the discussion of music as permissible or prohibited has largely existed within the religion of Islam, those involved with Tasawwuf (Islamic Mysticism), also known as Sufis, have generally perceived music as nutrient for the soul. Consequently, Sufis have incorporated music into their worship in order to invoke religious feelings over the centuries. Religious music is divided into two; the first is Mosque Recitations, and the second is Tekke music (also known as Tasawwuf Music). Mosque Recitation is that which is performed without instrumentals using only vocals and an improvised approach. On the other hand, Tekke music is performed with an instrument and a composed written piece. Within the Mosque Recitation is the Qur’an recitation, which when read in accordance with its rules has a natural phonetic style, meaning that when the Qur’an is recited according to the Maqam (Melodic modes of recitation) requirements, it evokes spiritual feelings to the listeners. Accordingly, there is a connection between the recitation of the Qur'an and the scientific understanding of music. When a connection between the Qur’an and disciplined recitation is established, this causes an artistic sensation to the listener, which experts in the field have name “Fem-i Muhsin”.Hafız (a title used for a person who has memorised the Qur’an in its entirety) Bekir Sıdkı Sezgin is one of the important musicians to have left his mark on Turkish music, where a discipline was formed after him. He has a very high status due to the value he gave to Turkish music as he became one of the leading names in Turkish music, especially considering the large yet unknown number of students that he personally trained. Hafız Bekir states in interviews that he especially owed his success in the science of music to the Qur'an education he received at a young age, and he emphasises that those who are on the way to becoming good musicians must receive a Qur'an education; additionally, because classical Turkish music lyrics are Arabic and Persian, he argues that the way to correctly pronounce these lyrics is to also know Ottoman Turkish to a high degree. Hafız Bekir was also able to recite the Qur'an to a degree of perfection and was proud of being a Hafız, where he believed that the Qur'an harmonised between his memory and excellent musical knowledge. Hafız Bekir recited the Qur’an according to the suitable Istanbul Maqam of reading, and by using the Maqam befitting the Qur’an recitation, Hafız Bekir was able to take the listeners on a spiritual journey.A survey of the works produced about Hafız Bekir shows that although there have been many theses, articles, and interviews published about him, there is no specific study on his Qur’an recitation according to the Istanbul Maqam style. In this study, Hafız Bekir’s dual identity as both a musician and Qur’an Hafız is underlined as a way to contribute to the field by revealing this side of Hafız Bekir, and also examining the Qur'an education that he recommends to his students. The recitation of verses 189-194 of the chapter Âli İmrân, which Hafız Bekir recited in the Istanbul Maqam style, is notated with the Mus notation system, and analysed according to the Maqam reading style. The notation is formed based on a sensory evaluation with assistance from experts in the field. This study, as a musical analysis, was produced to reveal the importance of this subject to interested parties. (shrink)

Architectural style is a medium for the promotion of cultural identities and cohesion. South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation nations provide a prism through which all forms of vernacular architecture can be viewed. This study is presented through the lens of the soul of the eye coupled with the power of technological probing. This synthesis affords a most appealing and lyrical exploration of the course of the development of cities within the SAARC nations. It showcases research results combining the (...) above stated synergy—starting from some of SAARC’s sophisticated historic cultures, cultures that ebbed and flowed along its shores and valleys. This paper shall touch upon unique cultural roots stretching back to the Dravidian civilization that flourished over 3500 years ago and also look at the grouping of houses within the Indus Valley Civilization in Lothal and the Sarasvati Valley Civilization in Kalibangan. The sensitivity underlying SAARC architecture and its traditions are seen in many communal settlements, profoundly so in the Indian subcontinent and in Sri Lanka. The paper shall showcase two specific, but nevertheless, distinct styles of communal functioning within unique architectural strongholds in the ancient Ratnagiri University in Odisha, India, and also touch upon a unique blend of styles of landscape architecture in Sri Lanka. The overarching emphasis of this study is that throughout SAARC’s history, architecture has been creatively adopted to the need of its users and the characteristics of its climate and location. It has always fulfilled the needs and nourished the spirit of its people, promoting cultural cohesion even today. In this context, it is interesting to explore traditional techniques of vernacular architecture in houses in Andhra, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The common thread linking mass housing in Lothal, Kalibangan, Anuradhapura and Ratnagiri about 2 millennia ago, with present day housing patterns, is in the application of sustainable building practices using intelligent building forms, fabric and orientation. This paper explores this commonality from a modern perspective using CFD. As the SAARC countries still struggle to get a fuller understanding of their unique ecology and the complexity of their diverse cultures, revisiting the architectural legacy of their indigenous societies might prove insightful. The need for this revisit becomes even more relevant in the wake of the Paris Agreement and more recently the Kigali Agreement. The discourse on providing indoor thermal comfort to the SAARC people cannot be decoupled from the climate change story—heating, ventilation and cooling consume a large amount of energy and have a deep underlying link with the targets set at Paris and Kigali. The onus will be on a large number of stakeholders to meet these targets—engineers, architects, manufacturers, policy-makers, researchers and consumers. This paper aims at reminding the stakeholders of the richness and the usefulness of their vernacular architecture in upholding the ideal of sustainability. (shrink)

Presently we are experiencing a world where distributed information reshapes human modes of expression and being. The avalanche of images presented to us daily shifts our attention between numerous contexts and systems of meaning. Faced with the intensity of this broadcast, one tends to turn to abbreviations and flattening of the message. Jacques Rancier talks about aesthetics as a form of disconnected experience, which operates as a disinterested gaze. The disconnection serves as a coping mechanism allowing one to function (...) within the informational deluge. On the other hand, this flattening of an image does not represent the whole truth. Behind every image one senses a depth of meanings, which gives rise to a particular manifestation. In this article, I propose that image hides a being, which through that image individuates itself. While the acquisition of specific qualities constitutes this process of individuation, the being is the motion and agency enabling the process. Culture can be seen as technology and prosthesis, which facilitates memory of our mortality and forces us to individuate. Following this logic, image as part of culture is a technology of being. (shrink)

This article has three objectives: First, it revises the history of the reception of Ludwik Fleck’s monograph Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache (1935, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact). Contrary to the established picture, Fleck’s book was largely discussed in the years before the outbreak of World War II. What becomes clear when reading these early reviews and especially Fleck’s comments to those written by representatives of Nazi Germany is, second, the political dimension of his epistemology. In this (...) respect, Fleck’s emphasis on the genuinely democratic character of science will be discussed in some detail. And third, Fleck’s notion of “ Denkstil ”—thought-style—shall be examined more closely since, as we will claim, it can be understood as a notion indicating where the democratic dimension of science encounters its limits. (shrink)

This study investigates the relationship among ethical philosophy, thinking style, and managerial ethical decision-making. Based on the premise that business ethics is a function of culture and time, we attempt to explore two important questions as to whether the national differences in managerial ethical philosophies remain over time and whether the relationship between thinking style and ethical decision-making is consistent across different national contexts. We conducted a survey on Korean managers’ ethical decision-making and thinking style and made (...) a cross-cultural, cross-temporal comparison with the results presented by previous studies that surveyed Korean and US managers with the same questionnaire at different points in time. Our analysis revealed that Korean managers have become more reliant on rule utilitarianism for ethical decision-making over the last two decades, which is dominantly used by US managers, corroborating our convergence hypothesis built on social contracts theory. However, as opposed to previous research, we found that managers with a balanced linear and nonlinear thinking style do not necessarily make more ethical decisions compared to those with a predominantly linear or nonlinear thinking style. This study contributes to international business ethics literature by presenting a theoretical framework that may explain the convergence of ethical philosophies employed by managers in different national contexts over time, and that the relationship between thinking style and managerial ethical decision-making may not be universal, but contingent on contextual factors. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Men Becoming Gods in "Style"Gioia and Girard on Divinized DesireJoshua Hren (bio)In our secular age we hear seekers of the sacred and religious devotees alike decry the soul-deadening, spirit-dumbing consequences of materialism. René Girard contends that—on the contrary—in the "leveled," horizontal world of a purportedly materialistic modernity this transcendent authority is deviated and distorted but it does not disappear. In his first major work, Deceit, Desire, and (...) the Novel, he argues that "the passion that drives men to seize or gain more possessions is not materialistic; it is the triumph of the mediator, the god with the human face."1 In a materialistic age, the gods are "pulled down from the heaven, the sacred flows over the earth" and men become "gods for each other."2Dana Gioia, former businessman and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, is no stranger to the economy of divinized desire. The stakes of our passions—whether we are wrecked by dubious wants or able to shed our infernal imitations—pierce his poetry. Gioia cites Girard as a significant influence alongside St. Augustine and Kierkegaard, though he does not indicate whether his own poetic investigations of mimesis are a direct yield of [End Page 149] his encounter with Girard or the independent discovery of attentive artistic intuition.3The refuge of lies so central to Girard is particularly palpable in Gioia's long narrative poem "Style."4 Charlie, the self-deprecating narrator, divinizes his college friend Tom, a business mogul who "prospered like one chosen by the gods."5 Tom uses his easy money to purchase gaudy metamorphoses, hosting magnificent events with his "flawless" wife Eden. An antihero of the unremarkable variety, Charlie attends all Tom's parties until he stops receiving invitations. When he discovers his deity's disappearance is tied to a terminal illness, he descends into the infernal "slums" of Tom's new hideout, and he finds his former hero hell-bent, ready to commit an arson that will erase his own existence in style. Charlie is confronted with a difficult decision that any coward would waver before. He has the chance to become an atheist—at least with respect to his dying god. After painting a portrait of man-made gods, the poem probes the question of whether and how we can cut short our penchant for great deceits.Charlie opens this narrative poem with an invective directed against himself.Just look at me. Isn't it obvious?I have no style. I'm just a human blur.On me expensive clothes look second-hand.They droop or sag. The color's never right.I wear the wrong apparel to the party.I pick the dullest item on the menu.Each haircut brings some new humiliation.6Crucially, we never receive an audit of this dour self-consciousness. By poem's end, no one has corrected or confirmed Charlie's condemnations. He may be right; his might be the antinomy of Midas's modus operandi. His hyperbolic portrait of Tom's greatness suggests that he is less than just to himself. His preoccupation with something as small as a menu item betrays a brutal obsessiveness. He employs the ascetical word "humiliation" in conjunction with a "haircut"—further revealing his unforgiving inner harshness. Charlie "always loved to visit Tom" precisely because he himself is Pathetic, Inc.7Were René Girard Charlie's older brother, he might sit the sad sap down on a comfortable couch and spell out the difficult truth as follows: The anti-hero "dreams of absorbing and assimilating his mediator's being."8 This highfalutin description of "the Other implies an insuperable revulsion for one's own substance."9 We ought not to take seriously the excuses these types give for their [End Page 150] failings and their fawning, for they "hate themselves on a more essential level than that of 'qualities.'"10 When Charlie disparages his badly cut bangs or his mismatched outfits, he's really incriminating his very being."The desire," Girard argues, "is aimed at the mediator's being."11 Charlie evinces this dynamic when he insists that Tom's "success was existential: / It wasn't what... (shrink)

Teacher-student discourse is increasingly mediated through, by and with information and communication technologies: in-class discussions have found new, textually-rich venues online; chalk and whiteboard lectures are rapidly giving way to PowerPoint presentations. Yet, what does this mean experientially for teachers? This paper reports on a phenomenological study investigating teachers’ lived experiences of PowerPoint in post-secondary classrooms. As teachers become more informed about the affordances of information and communication technology like PowerPoint and consequently take up and use these tools in their (...) classrooms, their teaching practices, relations with students, and ways of interpreting the world are simultaneously in-formed – conformed, deformed and reformed – by the given technology-in-use. The paper is framed in light of Martin Heidegger’s “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1951) and “The Thing” (1949). In these writings, Heidegger shows how a thing opens a new world to us, revealing novel structures of experience and meaning, and inviting us to a different style of being, thinking and doing. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , May 2010, Volume 10, Edition 1. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When Little Girls Become Junior Connoisseurs:A Cautionary Tale of Art Museum Education in the HyperrealMelinda M. Mayer (bio)Introducing the TaleA young girl about eleven years old appeared on the TV screen. She stood in an art museum expounding upon the painting hanging behind her. She talked about the artist and what the image portrayed. With an air of elitist prissiness that suited the museum environment, the girl delivered her (...) presentation to a group of schoolmates. As I and the other art museum educators assembled in the conference room where the video was shown learned, the girl had participated in a program at a prominent art museum in which students from her school came to the museum many times during the school year. This repeat-visit program culminated with these youngsters demonstrating what they learned about art by giving a talk on a single artwork to friends, family, or other classmates. The girl's recitation of art historically correct information was impressive. She sounded just like a junior art historian. Yet, something was missing. The little girl appeared to copy the style of art historical talk more than its content. I turned to the colleague sitting next to me and wondered, "Did that girl learn how to make meaning or how to talk like a curator?"Despite the several years that have passed since the conference, the image of that little girl lingers in my mind. A repeat-visit school program is what an art museum educator working with school tours desires.1 All an art museum educator can hope to impart on a one-shot tour is a simple exposure to art and the museum. Hopefully, that one encounter will result in a lifelong appreciation of art and art museums, but that is a tall order for one field trip. Repeat-visit programs, by contrast, allow knowledge and skills related to art to be presented in the school and museum and reinforced in subsequent sessions. Students can learn to meaningfully interpret the content [End Page 48] of works of art as well as make personal connections with them.The girl in the video, however, did not appear to be engaged in meaning-making. No hint that the painting had metaphorically come off of the museum wall and moved into her life experience appeared in the girl's presentation. Instead, she successfully imitated the manner of an art historian.In the essay "The Precession of Simulacra," the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard theorizes that reality or meaning no longer exist.2 Like the Moebus strip, which when split generates a duplicate of itself, what we experience as reality in this increasingly mediated age in which we live is no more than the repeated circulation of models or simulacra. Rather than models emerging out of real phenomena or originals, they beget themselves—models precede models. Any notion of reality implodes in the circulation of these simulations. Reality becomes what Baudrillard calls the hyperreal—simulation generating simulation. What does this imply for visual art? Interpretation of meaning in artworks would not reveal some represented truth of human experience; instead it would be the repetition of interpretive forms masking that there is no reality to represent. The talk by the little girl in the video indicated that art museum education, at least in that program, had become the perpetuation of a model of inquiry. Rather than making meaning, the girl reproduced the aesthetics of art history interpretation. Even under the ideal circumstances of a repeat-visit school program, the girl became the perfect model of a petite connoisseur.Although the video depicts one little girl in one art museum program, is there not a cautionary tale here for the field of art museum education?3 When visitors to art museums, including children on school field trips, participate in educational programs, are they engaging in meaning-making or an experience in the hyperreal? In theory art museum educators espouse facilitating meaning-making as their mission; however, in practice are they falling into a vortex of recycling the models of art historical interpretation they assimilated during their own education? Do they replicate the form of the model rather than the substance of interpretation... (shrink)

The history of Japanese Zen 禪 Buddhism has been the object of research for several decades. HAKUIN Ekaku 白隠慧鶴, IKKYŪ Sōjun 一休宗純, and Dōgen 道元 are names that by now are well known within this history, and indeed, theirs are undoubtedly important biographies. At the same time, however, we may critically remark on a certain scholarly preoccupation with these figures, and this attitude owes much to hagiographies, especially those produced by SUZUKI Daisetsu. In order to attain at least a certain (...) degree of historical accuracy, Dōgen, Ikkyū, and Hakuin must necessarily be interpreted within their respective historical contexts. Hakuin’s intentions, for example, only become fully understandable against the backdrop of Zen’s stale and petrified institutionalism in the Edo period that was called into question by the Ōbaku 黄檗 school of YINYUAN Longqi 隠元隆琦, who had recently arrived from the Chinese mainland. Ikkyū, on his part, was the harshest critic of what he saw as an overly cultured, elitist, and therefore degraded, form of Zen that was, however, all-pervasive during the Muromachi 室町 era. Finally, when Dōgen came back from China, he claimed to have received the “pure, Song-style Chan” and made all efforts to implant it into Japanese soil. However, if near-contemporary sources such as the Buddhist Scripture of the Genkō Era are consulted, it becomes clear that Dōgen had almost no impact at all on his contemporaries. It is therefore appropriate to point out that while his writings have enjoyed a rediscovery and revival of stunning proportions, they seem to have remained unread and marginal throughout much of the Japanese history of thought. However, it is in that time, during the Kamakura period, that the biography of CHŪGAN Engetsu 中巖圓月 has its place. His career, as can be seen, is characterized by a prolonged period of studying with various Chan masters on the Chinese mainland and, in consequence, factional open-mindedness. His thought draws on a variety of religious and philosophical systems, such as the Classic of Changes, Daoism, Confucianism, canonical Buddhism, and Chan Buddhist iconoclastic rhetoric. In Chūgan, the upheavals that delineate Zen’s early phase in Japan from its later “Japanization” are personified. (shrink)

Contemporary art is a global success story. It is regularly lauded for its formal experimentation, its diversity, and its interrogation of pressing issues. However, it is also a category of art that creates deep confusion, seemingly floating free of any attempts to clarify its historical determination, conceptual definition, or criteria for critical judgement. The aim of this thesis is to move against this confusion by attempting to answer a central question: what makes art contemporary? In response, I develop three main (...) lines of argument. -/- I begin by arguing that contemporary art has two key features. First, it is made in contexts of absolute heterogeneity, in which artists are free to use any material, art form, genre, or style they please. Second, it attempts to engage with the crises of contemporaneity. This thesis focuses on understanding the second feature which has not been subject to extended philosophical reflection. -/- Next, I argue that one of the main ways contemporary art attempts to grapple with contemporaneity is by getting its audience to improve their cognitive standing on crises. I argue that contemporary art aims not just to provide its audiences with knowledge, but also to make them active co-producers of understanding. In doing so, contemporary artists attempt to help their audiences become participants in shaping the present. -/- Finally, I explore the ways in which the preceding arguments can help us to understand what it means to appreciate an artwork as contemporary art. I endorse a functionalist approach to artistic value. But I also argue that realising the artistic value of contemporary art is often a risky endeavour. I claim that, when dealing with experimental and challenging art, we have to be closely attentive to the way artists exempt themselves from various norms and the impact this has on the activity of audiences and mediators. (shrink)

Ḥadīths have been preserved and recorded in various ways since the Companions. These activities continued dur-ing the Tābiīn (the successors of the Companions) Period. So much so that these methods have formed the infra-structure of other methods that will emerge later. In this context, before the 70's (A.H.), works named al-Aṭrāf appeared. However, these first works consisted of the notes that they wrote some of the ḥadīths before coming to the science assemblies to help students remember in ḥadīth learning. Ḥadīth (...) scholars have adopted and applied this method in a very short time. Thus, this method also provided the opportunity for the formation of the first written ḥadīth documents. In addition, with the writing of ḥadīth works, it has turned into a system of al-Taṣnīf and al-Takhrīj in order to make maximum use of these books and to reach the source of a narration that is tried to be found. As a result, al-Aṭrāf literature, which can be evaluated as index, has emerged. As a matter of fact, the first examples of this literature, arranged alphabetically according to the names of the Companions or ḥadīth texts, started to be given since the 4th (A.H.) century. In this way, the way to quickly benefit from the accumulation of the ḥadīth area has been opened. This article focuses on the historical adventure of al-Aṭrāf and their contributions to the ḥadīth field, as well as literature knowledge of the works of al-Aṭrāf which are of great importance for both al-Kitābah, al-Taṣnīf and al-Takhrīj.Summary: In order to understand and practice the religion of Islām, great efforts have been made both in the past and later periods in order to convey the words, verbs, interpretations and qualifications of the Prophet to the next genera-tions as they are protected from all kinds of falsification and changes. This process, which started with memoriza-tion and partly writing at the beginning, has gained momentum with the use of other methods since the period of Tābiīn. In this context, the method of aṭrāf was started to be used to facilitate memorization, to be a reminder, and to transmit the ḥadīth through the hearing of the ḥadīth sheikh. The first examples of this method were seen by Muḥammad b. Sīrīn during his participation of his teacher Abīde/Ubayda Salmān in the scholarly assembly. At this stage, the relevant method was manifested as writing a passage from the beginning of the ḥadīth. Thus, the aforementioned method, which had great contributions in recording and memorizing ḥadīths in accordance with the original, has gained widespreadness and application among the ḥadīth scholars like Ubeydullaḥ b. Omar, Shu’bah b. al-Ḥajjāj, Sufyān as-Sawrī, Mālik b. Anas, Ismāīl b. Ayyāş and Vakī b. Jarrāḥ in a very short time. In this context, Yazīd b. Zuray’ stated that he went to his teacher without his aṭrāf work of ḥadīths which he transmitted from Shu’bah and listened to ḥadīth in this way. Therefore, this mentioned event is important in terms of putting forth that Shu’bah allowed the aṭrāf method in his assemblies. The method was used by Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, who traveled to Madīnah to convey the reports recorded with the mentioned method of his teacher Abū Alḳama al-Farawī and at the same time listen to the related transfers from him, but who could not reach his goal. Therefore, the related narrations show that aṭrāf method was used effectively by ḥadīth scholars to remember the ḥadīths in the 1st and 2nd centuries, so sections from the narrations were written during the preparatory stage before coming to the scholarly assembly. Ultimately, the importance of these works, which manifest in different ways and offer great contributions to writing, is an undeniable reality for the history of ḥadīth.Aṭrāf, the plural form of taraf that literally means the side and edge of something, mean a section, phrase or first part that indicates the whole of the ḥadīth. This method, along with the formation of ḥadīth literature, has been started to be given as a name to the works organized alphabetically according to the name of the Companions or ḥadīth texts by mentioning some of the ḥadīths with the 4th century. In this sense, aṭrāf has started to become a unique literature in a sort of taṣnīf and takhrīj method in order to make use of the ḥadīth writing easier.Aṭrāf studies may aim to bring together the isnāḍs (chains of transmitters) in all books, or they can be limited to the chains in certain books. Aṭrāf books contain the ḥadīths in the Ṣaḥīḥān or Kutub al-Sittah and are written in alphabetical form based on the name of the companions or according to the texts of ḥadīth. The first of these, which has the attribute of the musnad in a sense, is arranged in alphabetical order according to the name of the Companion, and if there are many people who narrate from him, according to the names of the tābiīn and taba-i tābiīn (successors of the tābiīn). Accordingly, the narrations of each companion were determined and listed in al-phabetical order in aṭrāfs in musnad-type, and a passage was written from the ḥadīths and marked as books/chapters in the places of relevant narration. On the other hand, the second type of aṭrāf books were ar-ranged by giving a few words from a section that allows remembering the head or all of the ḥadīths without in-cluding chains, and then placing these texts in alphabetical order.The type of aṭrāf offers the opportunity to see different chains of narrations together and provides many facilities for the ḥadīth researchers. Therefore, ḥadīth researchers show great interest in this genre. Aṭrāfs provide many benefits for both ḥadīth chain and text. In this respect, it is possible to talk about many advantages of the ḥadīth to its transmister such as the determination of mutawātīr, garīb, azīz, mashhūr, mutābī or the testimony of ḥadīth; to provide facility to make a reputation research of a riwāyah (narration), to provide an opportunity to determine the location of the narrations in the primary sources; to detect the link or any blackout in the chain, to reach the nu-merical knowledge of ḥadīth narrated by a companion or other narrators, to obtain information about narrators whose identity is not explicitly stated, to know the first narrator, to provide the protection of the ḥadīths from taḥrīf or alteration, to give the opportunity to identify the subject they contain, to be able to obtain text integrity by getting various chains, the detection of the sabab al-wurūd (the context of ḥadīth).Due to the contributions we have mentioned above, many books on aṭrāf literature that started with Abu’l-Ḥasen Ali b. Omar ad-Dārakutnī have been published. Among them Aṭrāfu’s-ṣaḥīḥayn/el-Jem`u bayna’s-ṣaḥīḥayn by Abū Mas`ūd Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad b. Ubayd ad-Dimashkī, Aṭrāfu’s-ṣaḥīḥayn by Abū Muḥammad Ḥalaf b. Muḥammad b. Ali al-Vasiṭī, Zaḫāiru’l-mavārīs fi’d-dalālati alā mavāzi`i’l-hadīs by Abdülganī b. İsmāīl en-Nāblūsī and Tuḥfatu’l-ashrāf bi ma`rifati’l-aṭrāf by Abu’l-Ḥajjāj Yūsuf b. Abdurrahman el-Mizzī can be mentioned. Some of the related works are arranged in musnad style while others are arranged according to the first word of ḥadīth texts. As a result, the method of aṭrāf has become a kind of indexer in order to facilitate reaching the source of the re-ports and make the highest level of use required by the classification and bookings of the ḥadīths in the 3rd centu-ry. These works, arranged alphabetically in the name of the Companions or according to the texts of the ḥadīth, have taken their place in the history of the ḥadīth with their many examples, both in the form of taṣnīf and the method of takhrīj by mentioning a part of the ḥadīth by the head. (shrink)

The study of film adaptations, particularly those coming from literature, has been growing at a rapid rate during the last years due to the amount of adaptations coming from both mainstream and independent film industries. The focus of these studies though is generally addressed to best sellers where the literary style is clearly adaptable to the screen; however, there are cases where the adaptive process has resulted in an entirely different outcome. Naked Lunch, written by William Burroughs and adapted (...) to screen by David Cronenberg, represents a bold change if compared with other novels turned into films. The purpose of this article is to descriptively analyse the literary style in order to understand how it has been represented and adapted into Cronenberg’s film. The analysis will be performed helped with computer-based tools to support statements, using the novel itself as corpus and adding theoretical ideas from Leech and Short’s perspectives. The results suggest that the author’s corrosive, sexually-fuelled claustrophobic style has been translated following three patterns in terms of adaptation theory, although Burroughs, in the hands of Cronenberg, becomes an almost new classification of adaptation, not only adding literary features to the film, but also distinguishable core moments of the writer’s life to the final product. The analysis conducted encourages the study of other uncommon adaptations from literary authors in order to understand the adaptive process followed by filmmakers. (shrink)

A musical phrase, or, for that matter, a musical unit of any size or shape, becomes an image whenever we imagine it to be invested with a content whose origins lie outside music. Such a content, according to the theory developed here, constitutes the image's conventional significance; it accounts for whatever strikes us about the image as having a common and familiar ring. That being so, the origins in question must be coincident with the fundamental ideas--the archetypes--that have been (...) traditionally represented as underlying and unifying Western culture. As the theoretical constructs they are, arehctypes are never encountered directly. It is in the form of their local variants that we make contact with the archetypes, and it is at this local level that the present book sets its sights: style, the typical or shared element in the musical imagery of a time and place, is studies as a function of Zeitgeist, the complex of beliefs, values, and ideals of a community. The approach is both thematic and historical, in keeping with a key objective of archetypal criticism. Far from repudiating the popular notion that music expresses the human emotions, this study attempts to recast emotion theory by examining musical images for kinds of behavior from which we may infer not only emotion (pathos, effectus) but also personality (ethos). Ethical and affective distinctions are very sharply drawn, in an effort to clarify and widen the vocabulary of musical commentary, as well as to provide cultural and historical backing for contents long considered the cliches of musical expression. (shrink)

Feminist Auto/biography as a Means of Empowering Women: A Case Study of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Janet Frame's Faces in the Water Feminism, as a political, social and cultural movement, pays much attention to the importance of text. Text is the carrier of important thoughts, truths, ideas. It becomes a means of empowering women, a support in their fight for free expression, equality, intellectual emancipation. By "text" one should understand not only official documents, manifestos or articles. The term (...) also refers to a wide range of literary products—poetry, novels, diaries. The language of literature enables female authors to omit obstacles and constraints imposed by the phallogocentric world, a world dominated by masculine propaganda. Through writing, female authors have an opportunity to liberate their creative potential and regain the territory for unlimited expression. In order to produce a truly powerful text, they resort to a variety of writing styles and techniques. Here the notions of a situated knowledge and context sensitivity prove useful. There are three methodologies working within situated knowledge, namely, the politics of location, self-reflexivity and feminist auto/biography. All of them regard text as a fundamental tool to signify one's authority, yet feminist auto/biography, a concept widely discussed by the British theorist Liz Stanley, appears to be the most empowering mode of writing. It challenges the overused genre of auto/biography and reconstructs its role within feminist epistemologies, thus creating a favourable environment for text production. The works by Sylvia Plath and Janet Frame can be analyzed from the point of view of auto/biographical empowerment, even though their auto/biographical potential is mainly instinctive. Nevertheless, they help to comprehend the strength of the auto/biographical.The aim of this article is to "investigate" two novels by these authors, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and Faces in the Water by Janet Frame, and their compatibility with Stanley's concept. The paper attempts to answer several questions. Are these novels actual feminist auto/biographies or rather fictional auto/biographies with feminist undertones? What kind of narrative strategy is used to achieve the effect of authority over the text? Last but not least, what is the function of auto/biographical narration in the case of these two novels? The article also explores the idea of writing as a means of regaining control over one's life. (shrink)

continent. 2.3 (2012): 218–223 Vijay Prashad. Arab Spring, Libyan Winter . Oakland: AK Press. 2012. 271pp, pbk. $14.95 ISBN-13: 978-1849351126. Nearly a decade ago, I sat in a class entitled, quite simply, “Corporations,” taught by Vijay Prashad at Trinity College. Over the course of the semester, I was amazed at the extent of Prashad’s knowledge, and the complexity and erudition of his style. He has since authored a number of classic books that have gained recognition throughout the world. The (...) Darker Nations , a peoples’ history of the Third World, sent defibrillating shockwaves through an academic world that had almost forgotten the epic scope and historic dignity of the non-aligned movement and post-colonial struggles. In his recent, award-winning work, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter , Prashad delves into his capacious knowledge of the Third World to excavate the discourses and narratives surrounding the upheavals of 2011. “Revolutions have no specific timetable,” states Prashad in the opening line of this exciting and provocative look at contemporary events. Instantly, an atmosphere of suspense emerges. The reader is alerted to the problem of history. Does the making of history then involve a suspension of historical time, or is it a continuous narrative structure into which events must eventually be integrated? Arab Spring, Libyan Winter shows that the answer to the question, “How is history made?” lies just as easily in the asking. The first half of the book works through the events that transpired to bring about the explosive popular uprisings of Arab Spring: Tunisia and Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain. But the events are not put together in a cohesive, chronological fashion. Using an uncommonly gripping style more akin to the folk-story motif of the djeli than to traditionally Orientalist academia, Prashad suspends a given situation, points out its components, and traces back the characters and genealogies that define each link before resuming a narrative. Every moment is an end to itself, and an origin of something different. Thus, the making of history becomes the suspension of its own progress, it’s catastrophic 'stability,' in a process of differentiation through inclusion. Empirically, one might suggest that history is a condition of time, and by extension, of the subject, but history is also an eminent producer of the Subject and her concept of time through memory and narrative. Hence, history is often overdetermined by a dominant narrative of the sovereign. The apparently chaotic composition of Prashad’s historicity is, then, an interstitial morphology of resistance. It illustrates that the time to act for the revolutionary lies in the gaps within the dominant historical realities. It points out the sorties of signifiers constituting nothing in the obliterated ruins of history. Through such illuminations, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter breaks through “the surface of history” to elaborate revolution’s snapping synapses, exploding interruptions and breaches, connecting flows. Messianic Politics It is tempting to think, 'History is either singular, or it is diffuse. It is either one coherent factual narrative, or it is comprised of the aletheia of the multitude.' Yet the reader finds Prashad examining the structure of history on multiple levels. For Prashad, world history is shaped by geographically defined political movements, such as communism or national liberation, with historical agents like the working class for the former and the nationalist militant for the latter. Religion, however, is another matter: “Religion has an unshakable eschatology which a post-utopian secular politics lacks.” Within the telos of religion, there appears on the horizon the image of Benjamin’s thoughts on messianic time—time as “a small fissure in the continuous catastrophe,” a break with history, may contain an ultimate redemption of the human beyond the political power struggle. Succoring the split between geo-political and utopian-religious (messianic) time in the context of Arab Spring, Prashad indicates that the base of “the deep desire and commitment to some form of democracy” is forged by the affinity between eschatological Islamist politics with the People. To think about the Subject of messianic time in the context of the lack of a “coherent timetable” for emancipatory politics, it is perhaps best to return to the modern tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose prefigurative blending of liberation theology and emancipatory politics became most important during his works of 1963, the climactic year of “The Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the March on Washington, and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. In “The Letter,” King states the point bluntly: Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” The timing of rebellious action must not be a part of history. It must change history. The kairos appears spontaneous and untimely in its convulsive, shocking presence, yet it is, deeper still, a path, a longue durée , forged through diligent and rigorous praxis. King put a finer point on the path of historic liberation in his declaration in his 1963 speech at Western Michigan University: “[T]ime is neutral.... Somewhere along the way we must see that time will never solve the problem alone but that we must help time. Somewhere we must see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels on inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. Without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social stagnation. We must always help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.” Time, then, exists in “the neutral,” while action must turn to the kairos , not only of taking time, but taking the right time. By turning our relation to time into kairos , we move time from its context within history to a duration between histories—the longue dure?e of Messianic time. The implementation of neutrality in this context suggests a broad space of time to extend through the valley of positive and negative. In Roland Barthes’s lectures from 1978, the neutral takes place in this minimal distance of non-conflict that exists outside of two extremes. It is, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, “the non-general, the non-generic, as well as the non-specific.” For Blanchot, the neutrality of time permeates life as death, impassive and beyond control; such is the neutrality of messianic time, which permeates the charge of history, changing the "I" into the "one." The neutrality of time therefore implicates history in a case against extremism, showing that the work of the radical is not to tend to any particular side, but to have the time to navigate through the terrible terrain of history by altering its course, its patterns and rhythms of movement, connection, sociality. Hence, one does not simply “make history,” one alters the course of history in accordance to “the right time.” The historical path toward emerging power is transmitted as a gesture to the outside of history, against history; a gesture as simple as reaching out. Thus a counterhistory, to use Foucault’s term, is brought forward as the guide of time past a point of no return, a Rubicon, the point where the normal path of history falls to the past. The subject, who must be the only true agent of history, facilitates time through helpfulness, and both the Subject and her history become decentered in relation to one another. Yet history negates the neutrality of time. As Barthes discloses, although the neutral is the “thought and practice of the nonconflictual, it is nevertheless bound to assertion, to conflict, in order to make itself heard.” Engaged with history, time is charged with a destiny, and becomes an opposition. As Prashad insists, “For Arab lands, the events of early 2011 were not the inauguration of a new history, but the continuation of an unfinished struggle that is a hundred years old.” The emergence of the Subject during Arab Spring did not conceive of a new history, but changed the path of history toward a different destiny. “Historical grievances combined with inflationary pressures now met with the subjective sense that victory might be at hand—this was not simply a protest to scream into the wind, but a protest to actually remove autocrats from their positions of authority. The facts of resistance had given way to the expectation of revolutionary change.” The negativity of this charge toward “revolutionary destiny” rendered control, as a positive force, seriously lacking. The lack of control lies in the problem that the Subject is not totally detemporalized or timeless, but untimely in her presence. The Subject is untimely, because her work is visionary, and it is only through such visionary work that the Rubicon can be crossed. Still, the crossing of this border is haunted by anxiety over an impending disaster that lays in wait. It is only through the form of what Benjamin calls divine violence, captivated not with the justice of the means, but the ends—the transformation of history—that a revelation of history’s traumatic foundations can be liberated, and patterns and rhythms of time developed throughout obscured traditions awakened. In this situation, the Subject appears to be outside of right, but setting the state to rights. Because her position is correct, in-so-far as the rebelling subject rebels due to a lack of recognition, her representation appears outside of the norm, which is mistaken as right. Therefore, such visionary work must be carried out through obscured traditions, underground, away from the surveillance of empire. Explaining his method from the start along the lines of Marx’s metaphor of the mole, Prashad insists, “It is the burrowing that is essential, not simply the emergence onto the surface of history.” Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a book on uncharted networks of time, spread out over the 252 pages like an elaborate spider’s web of passages intertwining with and overwhelming the machinery of the state. Although untimely, Arab Spring was not a flash in the pan, or a Facebook or Twitter revolution. Prashad notes that the government’s suspension of these tools led to further radicalism by furthering communications through face-to-face encounters. In existential terms, Arab Spring might be thought of as a revolution of Being over techne , an uprising of the unchartable, infinite potential of the Other. The name of this Other is found in Chance. The faith of the revolution lies in the proper decentering of the subject, its giving to the Other of time, for only with respect to time does history actually appear on the horizon of the subject, rather than as an imposition. This time of historical agency appears as a moment when anything can happen—a revolutionary truth event where everything comes into question while being realized in its Otherness as a community of the people begins anew in the streets amidst discourse, friendship, reconfigurations of hegemony, and a becoming of a constituent power. Throwing a wrench into the gears of the “cobwebbed tradition” of Orientalism, the decentering of history in Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a defining quality of its impassioned revolutionary cry. But perhaps the most paradigmatic points of the book emerge from the unexpected voices. To make the connection between the particular manifestations of revolutionary demands to the general historic terms of revolution, Prashad quotes an anonymous young Egyptian in Tahrir Square, who reminds us, “[T]he French Revolution took a very long time so the people could eventually get their rights.” Far from timelessness, the historicization of Arab Spring must exist precisely within the most uncanny appearance of time, as something that does not appear to come from the natural state of time as we know it, but in arriving has completely transformed the way that we understand time. Strange Monsters Revolution is never as simple as a revolt from below against a rusting structure of elites trying to remain in power. As with the French Revolution, Arab Spring consisted of complex familial ties, outside interests, and religious factions fighting alongside, often in awkward juxtaposition to, liberals, working class parties, farmers, and students. It is perhaps because of this historically difficult and incongruous composition that the Arabic word for revolution is thawra , referring to the image of the bull, or thawr , which has religious significance as a pagan deity for the Ancient Semitic tribes and Cartheginians. If Daniel Guérin was correct in saying, “Anarchism and Marxism drink from the same spring,” then it is quite a different oasis that drove the thirsty beast of revolution through what Prashad calls, “the Libyan labyrinth.” Recalling Bataille’s Acéphale, the intestinal labyrinth gains significance as the mode of metabolism and rumination in which, “(the Acephale) has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words, as a monster.” Unraveling the discourse of the revolution, the flows of power and hegemony—from Qaddafi’s nationalist coup in 1969 to the wars with Chad from 1978 to 1987, the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s to, finally, the War on Terror—we find that the metabolic process of Libyan Winter ends in the production of oil. In a process of what Prashad calls “involution,” Qaddafi’s bellicose policies, along with his attempts to nationalize Islam together with oil, mutated the source of his power, turning his house against itself. Already a divided nation, with its two major cities on opposite geographic sides of the country, Libya became split between two opposed political powers—liberal reformists and staunch nationalists—as Qaddafi’s political disengagement manifested through what can only be described in psychoanalytic terms as a recursive passage a l’act (mysteriously calling Wikipedia “Kleenex,” declaring that opponents drank hallucinogens with their instant coffee, and so on). Prashad declares, “The mercurial style that Qaddafi adopted was not about his personality alone, but also a leader’s natural response to a system that relied upon power brokers whose own loyalty… did not have any ideological commitment to the system.” As in the case of other nations during Arab Spring, the true expression of revolt was an outward exposition of what had inwardly been happening in microcosmic societies throughout the realm—from indigenous tribes to political parties, for a century, the people, partly motivated by (and in resistance to) economic impositions of development, had been changing the traditional social compositions and participating in what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls, “the relative autonomy of the movement from the leaders.” It was this empowerment of political reconfigurations taking place under the context of new democratic assemblages that shocked the elites and evoked such a powerful response. Unlike Qaddafi’s awkward policy choices and rants, real acts of power from the West were clear and decisive. Prashad sets the stages of war and diplomacy, far removed from the deserts, mountains, and cities that forged the backdrop of popular politics. Taking place under the now-classic architecture of the “four pillars” of US interests—oil, the War on Terror, Israel, and the circumvention of Iranian hegemony—we find elites rubbing elbows in “Heliopolist cocktail parties and hushed conferences in Kasr al-Ittihadiya” as well as the Concorde-Lafayette hotel in Paris, which provides the setting for a meeting of anti-Qaddafi figures consolidating their power. These scenes are buttressed with the careful portraiture of key historical actors. As Prashad brings the stage of history to life, we find the diplomats and liberals like Frank Wisner, whose career has brought him from Enron in the late 1990s to the Obama Administration, under the aegis of which he was meeting with Mubarak about military support during Arab Spring. We spy the provocateurs, for instance, gauche cavalier , Bernard Henri-Levy, who telephones Sarkozy from Benghazi about the need for more NATO air strikes. We follow the rebel military establishment as it suffers mysterious deaths and even more mysterious assents (like that of apparent CIA cohort, Khalifa Hifter). In each of these intriguing characters, we find different representations of the security state biopolitique: an oil-injected reification that drives Arab Spring from the resentment of rising food prices to the brink of implosion in Libyan Winter. Reminiscent of the scenes of Cold War soirées represented in old Bond films, the aristocratic fight for oil against democracy that was Libyan Winter presents a harsh truth that the new global crisis is simply the continuation of the old history: the global exploitation of capitalism waged against the imagination of the people. As Benjamin laments, “The labyrinth is the right path for the person who always arrives early enough at his destination. This destination is the marketplace.” Yet, “(t)he labyrinth is the habitat of… a humanity (a class) which does not want to know where its destiny is taking it.” Thus, the labyrinth leads, like the desert, only further into itself. As Blanchot explains, “The desert is even less certain than the world; it is never anything but the approach to the desert.” Only the visionary can take time out of the involution toward oblivion. It is here, in this approach to and escape from history, that we find ourselves within Benjamin’s Golgotha, Blanchot’s desert: A space of indeterminate uncertainty where we become familiar only with our own exile. Blanchot writes, “For the moderated and moderate man, the room, the desert, and the world are strictly determined places. For the man of the desert and the labyrinth, devoted to the error of a journey necessarily a little longer than his life, the same space will be truly infinite, even if he knows that it is not, all the more so since he knows it.” The desert, as allegory, provides an eschatology, a mortality in the destiny of Arab Spring. But any allegory of nature might lead to a labyrinthine eschatology (for example, in Bachelard, the forest presents "a limitless world"); the prescience of the untimely is always an uncanny acceptance of the infinite within the finite—the outside of what is understood. Transgenerational and occupied with the image of the future, the untimely makes otherness its home as it proceeds toward liberation. In the work of helping time navigate this dangerous passage of history, Prashad illustrates that the more violent break with history may have occurred in the peaceable struggles of Tahrir Square, and not in the military clashes of Qaddafi with his former Generals who defected to the CIA and NATO countries. It might be possible to suggest, then, that in the case of Tunisia and Egypt, the historical subject of the people was drawn together in a Dionysian dance of different rhythms in the marvelous realm of the ancients, while we fear that the case of Libya suggests an Apollonian future where time, itself, may lay dying under the machinic hand of history. The properly Nietzschean inversion would follow: time is dead, for history has killed it. Yet, if time is dead, struck down in Golgotha, exposed in the desert, mauled by the thawra , it is only in the present sense that it is rendered impossible outside of the context into which the untimely has thrown us. Thus, if history becomes an art of revolution, life as being-towards-death (death as the provocation of the neutrality of time) becomes what Benjamin calls “the allegory of resurrection” through the glorious ruins of history. Prashad ends his work with a rousing finale: “The time of the impossible has presented itself. In Egypt, where the appetite for the possibilities of the future are greatest, the people continue to assert themselves into Tahrir Square and other places, pushing to reinvigorate a Revolution that must not die… For them the slogan is simple: Down with the Present. Long live the Future. May it be so.&rdquo. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editorial – A Word of ThanksDavid B. Couturier, OFM. Cap.When Prof. Jean-François Godet-Calogeras took the helm of Franciscan Studies as General Editor eighteen years ago, he brought together a new team of editors and worked out the goals they would try to meet as they ushered in a new era in this prestigious journal's history. In their first issue, they wrote the following:In the past, Franciscan Studies has served (...) a specific platform of scholars interested in the history and development of the order in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with special attention to matters pertaining to Franciscan scholastic thought and spirituality. While this rich tradition will always stay with us, it appears that the moment is ripe to enhance the impact of Franciscan Studies on other aspects of Franciscan scholarship and on the wider fields of medieval ecclesiastical, cultural and intellectual history. Ideally speaking, we would like Franciscan Studies to become a thermometer for signaling interesting new trends, to such an extent that scholars from very different backgrounds will come to regard Franciscan Studies as an important instrument to keep abreast of new developments.1Thus began the prodigious expansion of Franciscan Studies at the beginning of the new century. For the past two decades our dear colleague and friend Jean-François has not only met these lofty goals, he has exceeded them. He has done so with a superb combination of editorial acuity, diplomacy and sensitivity to our distinguished authors and audiences around the world.The fact is that Jean-François knew how to read the signs of the times. With his distinctive Franciscan tenderness, he calmed the "prophets of gloom" who forecasted demise when he "opened the windows" and let in the fresh breezes of thought and insight from other generations, styles, and cultural forms of the Franciscan intellectual tradition. The skeptics are silent now, for the quality and range of the articles he has supervised over these years remain a testament to his prophetic insight that it was time for a major change of emphasis. [End Page 5]Furthermore, as General Editor he encouraged the voices of new and emerging scholars to be heard, especially those of under-represented women and minorities. The roster of today's authors testifies that the Franciscan intellectual tradition is safely, securely and wonderfully in the hands of a new generation of lay scholars. Jean-François has been a proud advocate for that transition. We thank him for steering in that direction.For all of this, it is our good fortune to thank Prof. Jean-François Godet-Calogeras for his many years of service as the General Editor of this academic journal. To Jean-François, on behalf of all the authors you have encouraged, all the editors you have guided, all the scholars and students you have taught, and all the directors and staff with whom you have worked over these many years, I offer you our gratitude, love and best wishes as you enter this next phase of your life. Thank you for your kindness, expertise and generosity. You have blessed us and we are grateful. [End Page 6]David B. Couturier, OFM. Cap.General Editor, Franciscan StudiesFootnotes1. The Editors, Franciscan Studies 62 (2004), 1.Copyright © 2022 The Franciscan Institute, St. Bonaventure University... (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 253—278. A Sense of French Politics Politics itself is not the exercise of power or struggle for power. Politics is first of all the configuration of a space as political, the framing of a specific sphere of experience, the setting of objects posed as "common" and of subjects to whom the capacity is recognized to designate these objects and discuss about them.(1) On April 14, 2011, France implemented its controversial ban of the niqab and burqa , commonly (...) referred to as the Islamic veil, in public places. On the coattails of the 2004 prohibition of religious artifacts, including the less concealing hijab or Islamic headscarves, in schools, the veil ban sparked equal outrage across both political and theological spectra, and many on both sides of the debate were quick to inquire about enforcement. As Steven Erlanger reports, “The police do not have the authority under the law to remove full veils, only to fine or require citizenship lessons for those who violate the new law.”(2) While the legal and social implications of this interdiction are ripe for study, the reprisals for breaking the law, notably compulsory citizenship classes, illuminate the strategic governmentality underlying the French government's targeting of the Muslim community, particularly those elements it considers affiliated with fundamentalist factions and/or terrorist organizations, if only through fashion—an integral component of French citizenship. Indeed, in allowing the (fashion) police to mandate instructional courses in citizenship for offenders, France implies that any Muslim choosing to wear the niqab or burqa , perhaps even for those who are already citizens, must not be aware of the subtle nuances of dress indicative of the French citizenry within public space. Furthermore, the degree of instruction requisite to citizenship, which clearly can and must be updated as the state sees fit, cements the imagined relation between citizens and states within the discourses on the veil ban. As Sharma contends, “Concepts of citizenship are the ideological glue that bonds the nation to the state. Citizenship provides the legal framework through which the state performs its role as ruler for the nation.”(3) Speaking for/as the state, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in a 2009 presentation before members of the government and other citizens that the burqa “is not welcome on the territory of France.”(4) Although there is nothing unique, especially recently, about a nation-state taking extreme measures to guard itself against what it deems to be threats to its sovereignty, the way in which the ongoing discourses on hijab have (d)evolved, which coincide with recent pronouncements by governmental leaders in Germany, Britain, and France that policies of multiculturalism have “failed,”(5) points toward nationalist reterritorializations, which is also to say physical and ideological re-appropriations, of public space within democratic milieux, which remain predicated upon the mediation of spaces. As Panagia deduces from Rancière, “Democracy […] is not an institutional form of government […], but an appearance whose visibilities and audibilites arise out of the dissonant blur of the everyday.”(6) Ultimately, the veil ban represents a calculated move to regulate the every day, which is to say the micropolitics of, that which is visible and invisible within French society, which makes it nothing short of a struggle to manage (the sensation of) bodies. Re-situating the political within the context of sense, Rancière argues that the fundamental essence of politics lies within the distinction between consensus and dissensus , and whereas most consider politics proper as fundamentally concerned with the fluid operations of the state— consensus , Rancière actually locates the political within events that disrupt the normative sensory order of things— dissensus . He explains, “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”(7) This reformulation of politics centers on agency and, albeit perhaps unintended, representationality and offers a useful formulation for spatializing the discourses surrounding the Islamic veil, which are mired within seemingly senseless policies and practices of objectification. Instituting a normative “regime of visibility,” the French veil ban encapsulates the political economy of agency, now both mediated and representational, under the rule of nationalist governmentalities in increasingly transnational contexts.(8) Adjudicating presence within public space signals a concern with the sensory aspects of agency itself—what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible,” which is “a matrix that defines a set of relations between sense and sense: that is, between a form of sensory experience and an interpretation which makes sense of it.”(9) To be concerned with sense is to focus upon the body, and this somatic repositioning of the (fashionable) citizen within the territory of the state augurs the resurgence of nationalist bio-politics within Europe, since, as Hage explicates, “Nationalism, before being an explicit practice or a mode of classification, is a state of the body. It is a way of imagining one's position within the nation and what one can aspire to as a national.”(10) The French government's attempt to make (bodily) sense of public space for its citizens by and through policies aimed against a burqa-clad Muslim minority, which might only apply to “less then 400 to fewer than 2,000” women(11), reveals the necessary, yet mercurial, transmutation of public space into national space through bio-political strategies of sense-making, which, as Hage observes, denotes that “nationalists perceive themselves as spatial managers.”(12) At the center of this concern over public space is the equally contentious dimension of governing female Islamic identity, which has become one of the main critiques levied against Islam from outsiders who view the veil in its various forms as a clear sign of the religion's actual and symbolic violence against women, even if such critiques remain ensconced within nationalist discourses. As Halim and Meyers argue, “Although Western news media may focus their coverage of Muslim women on the debate over whether and the extent to which the veil may by oppressive to the women who wear it, they have exhibited little interest in the physical oppression of violence against women in Islamic countries.”(13) While it falls outside of the scope of this analysis to arbitrate all of the dimensions of this debate, understanding some of the issues related to female identity and hijab within public space are crucial to this study. As these topics are extraordinarily complex, even and perhaps especially within the Muslim community, it is necessary to provide some context concerning the value, purpose, and meaning of the Islamic veil, which has a rich and arduous history. The Art of the Veil At present, there are only two countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that require women to wear hijab , which is a decidedly problematic term and concept whose locus is itself caught within a struggle of sensation. Noting the strategic reterritorialization of the term, Berger explains: The choice of the name, hijab , now widely adopted to designate the “Islamic veil,” it itself interesting, although the semantic shift it operates is not directly commented upon by its users. Although the design (both the cut and the symbolic function) of the hijab and the Iranian chador are indeed the same, as opposed, for instance, to the traditional Algerian haik , the word hijab has come to replace the term chador popularized by the Iranian revolution, as a properly Arabic (hence Koranic) designation. This discursive shift points to the successful reclaiming of the national revolution in Iran by a transnational pan-Islamic movement, whose language of reference can only be Koranic Arabic.(14) While the hijab is certainly a point of contention within various countries dealing with immigrant Islamic populations (of which France has the largest in Europe as part of its colonial legacy in Algeria), it is clear that the veil is a historically contextualized artifact of Muslim identity with a variety of manifestations, even as forces outside of and within Islam seek to codify its actual and symbolic value. Ultimately, the varieties of hijab , including the full-faced burqa and niqab , are complex assemblages of meaning that speak to the multitudinous flows of Islamic identities over time and space. As Gökariksel and McLarney observe, “Wearing a certain style of veil may simultaneously be a disciplinary practice crucial to the cultivation of piety (Mahmood 2005; Gokariksel 2009) and a gendered performance of social distinction in terms of class, taste, and urbanity (White 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Gokariksel and Secor 2009) or of ethnicity and race (Dwyer 1999).”(15) The ideological marketplace from which the varieties of hijab ebb and flow serves both as a reflection of the ever-present materiality and dynamic functionality of spiritual economies, which are derivative of the equally ubiquitous flows of transnational capital driving agency and representationality within our historical moment. Keeping these dual, yet deeply interconnected, capital ecologies as the site of exploration for how the veil is represented within public space, one might begin to sense what lurks behind such veiled agendas. Examining the symbolic and representational nature of the Islamic “veil” in its various forms, this project situates the decidedly political contestations of public space at stake in the French ban alongside recent condemnations of multiculturalism as calculated efforts to re-distribute the sensible so as to valorize national identity within increasingly transnational and globalized socio-economic spaces, which collapse exchange values between distinct, yet interwoven, economies of (cultural/material/spiritual) capital. As the discourses on the veil rely upon representational imag(in)ings, it seems fitting to explore the political economy and art of the veil through the phenomenon of street art, which, much like hijab , is a complex assemblage of meaning of sensation mired in representationality and capital exchange. As street artists have taken up hijab in various forms, the movement offers a lens with which to situate critical responses to the veil debate across both spiritual and material economies. Situating this street art both aesthetically and historically, Lewisohn explains, “'Street art' is a sub-genre of graffiti writing and owes much to its predecessor. Though there is a good deal of crossover between the genres, they are distinct and separate in their own right.”(16) Evolving out of the graffiti explosion of the late 1970's and 1980's, street art broke the unspoken rules of the artistic underground by challenging and re-examining one's sensory experience of art in public space by experimenting with both content and form in ways that harken back to the Situationist International, which as a collective challenged one's experience of urban space through various media and experiential phenomena. Again, Lewisohn observes, “It's important to note street art's break with the tradition of the tag, and its focus on visual symbols that embrace a much wider range of media than graffiti writers would use.”(17) From stencils to prints and murals to one-liners, street artists developed a reputation for critical social and political commentary, and while it is certainly the case that not all street art is intentionally political, in challenging the normative “regime of visibility,” as Rancière puts it, of public space, street artists—even if unconsciously—call into question the common sensory experience of the politics underlying the formation of (nationalist) space.(18) Indeed, Rancière refers to the partisan sensory managers as “police,” who ultimately forge “the rules governing the circulation of appearances, of their visibility and audibility, and the proper distribution of bodies therein.”(19) As such, one can sense that street art's relationship with the police is tenous for a variety of reasons. Writing about his own experience as a street artist, Shepard Fairey observes, “With street art, there's no committee deciding whether I can put my work up on the street, there's no censorship, and I have total freedom of expression, and that concept of freedom is expressed just by using the street as a medium.”(20) As Fairey and other street artists demonstrate, the medium, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, is the most glaring aspect of street art's message, and even as it now finds itself in galleries and usurped by private collectors, the ethos of the movement remains relavent to politics as it is, first and foremost, concerned with the configuration and experience of space. Just as examining the punishments for breaking the veil ban can map the terrain of French politics, a representational genealogy of street artist's deployment of hijab and female Muslim identity can assist in mining the depths of public space as a site of bio-political control and contestation in light of recent events in France and the rising tide of anti-multiculturalist rhetoric across Europe, even though the Islamic presence there is radically heterogenous. Using the work of Shepard Fairey, Princess Hijab, br1, and Banksy, this paper sets out to answer a number of key questions concerning the deployment of hijab, and female Islamic identity in particular, within street art as a movement now integral to and critical of the economies of exchange underlying global capitalism, which as a force of influence cannot be underestimated as a driver in the resurgence of nationalist biopolitical governmentalities. Although there exists a litany of artists to choose from, the aforementioned quartet of designers integrate hijab into their work in a seminal and critical fashion, and all have been working with the veil in some way prior to the French ban, which grants some additional context to their usage of it as a symbol in regards to the breakdown of multiculturalism across Europe, even if unconsciously. Although each artist depicts various amalgamations of hijab in their respective corpus, they share common tropes that raise significant questions concerning the veil debate, namely: what are the conditions of possibility for hijab to become a marker of Islamic identity within public space? How can we make sense of the representational topologies within street art's utilization of the hijab and female Islamic identity in light of the French ban? How might these aesthetic imag(in)ings simultaneously inhabit and combat normative discourses concerning hijab , multiculturalism, female Islamic identity, and public space? With these considerations as a backdrop, it is first necessary to outline more fully the hijab as a representative marker of female Islamic identity. The (Veiled) Writing on the Wall

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In February 2010, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) launched their DSM-5 website with details about the development of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). The APA invited “the general public” to review the draft diagnostic criteria and provide written comments and suggestions. This revision marks the first time the APA has solicited public review of their diagnostic manual. This article analyzes reported speech on the DSM-5 draft diagnostic criteria for the classification Posttraumatic Stress (...) Disorder. It demonstrates how textual standardization facilitates the cultural portability of the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria such that a community of speakers beyond the borders of the APA come to be seen as exemplary speakers, writers, and revisers of the professional style. Furthermore, analysis shows how co-authoring practices recontextualize the “voice” and persona of putative patient reported speech on Criterion D2. As a consequence of textual standardization, spoken discourse becomes recontextualized as the product of scientific inquiry and the organization of psychiatric knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile and BrutalRobert N. MatuozziA Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile and Brutal, edited by Christa Davis Acampora and Ralph R. Acampora ; xxxii & 371 pp. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. $75.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.What if instead of re-reading Nietzsche's corpus, one imagines what it would be like to view his works on the "Nietzsche Network." Imagine a (...) spectator situated in the middle of a vast amphitheatre preparing to watch these simulacra. Gazing up and around a series of giant, flat-screen video monitors arrayed in layers around the interior wall of an amphitheatre, the spectator views and listens to Nietzsche's multi-media texts as, simultaneously, they seductively flash their provocative narratives in flickering streams of high-resolution sounds, words, and images.The Nietzsche Network is a roaring carnival. It consists of colorful, speculative historical dramatizations and equally enticing philosophical tableaux. Dark ambient musical motifs, laced with interludes of explosive, uncontrollable laughter, are a subliminal presence. Lurid detective stories and somber cultural narratives and slashing polemics implicate cultures and ideologies in festivals of cruelty and soul-murder. Poignant genealogical and aphoristic asides on joy [End Page 443] and work and suffering, weird psychological skits starring well-known ensemble casts are accompanied by hoarse oratory, soaring denunciations, and sober etymological digressions. Intermittently, the spectator is startled by abrupt, sometimes strident proclamations, like confessional bulletins shot from nowhere.Nietzsche's siren-like prose exhibits an extraordinary rhetorical range. This is particularly true of the polychromatic works originally published in the gloaming of his career in the period after 1886. Nietzsche's compelling, fluvial style is accounted for in this volume by the kinetic movements of lizards and the halcyon tones of birds, to his study of the ancient Greek and Roman classics (and to the lost musicality of Greek tragedy in particular), and to his emphatic embrace of a kind of plosive, Dionysian philosophical technics.The content of the Nietzsche Network spans thousands of years of human experience and thought. A prequel features a substantial bestiary of traditional animals and emergent biomorphic forms set in a variety of carefully animated zoological dioramas. Among the modernists, has there been another thinker as strangely original and subversive? Allowing for fundamental differences, only Valéry comes to mind. Like the silent, ruminating cow in his "untimely" essay on history, Nietzsche prevents the past from injecting noise into present and future philosophizing. He will be the exemplary philosopher of the other-than-human as he campaigns to re-inscribe human animality into the zoological text of nature. Through explicit pronouncements and in scattered philosophical sorties involving human animality and his (desperate) utopist vision of human perfectibility, Nietzsche attempted to attain—at least conceptually—what Richard Rorty aptly calls the "historical sublime, a future which has broken all relations with the past."This excellent collection of essays on Nietzsche's bestiary demonstrates the surprising persistence of the animal imaginary in his thought. The various pieces also illuminate the multiple thematic and linguistic transformations Nietzsche develops as he enlists animals in his feral, anti-essentialist dialectic on the obscure continuum between "humans," "animals," and "nature." It turns out that a degraded version of Nietzsche's strangest thought experiment on animalism, the übermensch, is perhaps only a few years away from being produced through emerging boutique bioengineering, a prospect that has some commentators on both the left and the right blinking with apprehension. These essays amply demonstrate that Nietzsche's bestial philosophy of human and animal alterity subverts, among other paradigms, the strange Cartesian notion that animals are mechanical automata while humans are transcendental rationalists. As one commentator in this book broadly puts it, Nietzsche shows that the various schemes concocted to put an illusory distance between humans and animals have ended up being an immensely corrupting "pretense" (p. 224).Precursor bestiaries are indicated in this volume, though the medieval tradition originating in the Physiologus is here mostly displaced by a different [End Page 444] menagerie of cultural affiliations. The fabulist Aesop is present, along with Aristotle and Montaigne, though La Fontaine is not, and Pico Mirandola's famous remarks in his Oration on... (shrink)

Since literary historian Robert Bone published his seminal essay ‘Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance’ in 1986, scholars have created new cartographies of previously unexplored terrain in American cultural history. The earliest studies focused on literature, but more recently attention has turned to other disciplines, including visual arts. Recent publication of The Muse in Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932–1950 (2011) by Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage promises to decisively broaden scholarly understandings of the scope and significance (...) of Chicago-centred cultural production during the Great Depression and post-war years. Of particular relevance to contemporary studies of new media art is the manner in which then-emergent ideas and practices – centring on racialized subject matter, elite and mass audiences, traditional and new mediums of expression, private vs public sponsorship, and passive vs active reception of art objects – converged to create new paradigms and possibilities for visual artists to reshape consciousness in a period of institutional collapse and change. Chicago’s New Negro artists of the 1930s and 1940s, like their counterparts in 1920s Harlem, sought to reframe perceptions of African American life, to re-present the black subject as something other than an object of contempt or amusement beneath the privileged gaze of the white viewer. Just as these artists sought to revise perceptions of racial reality, examination of the wide range of actual images they created and the mediums and styles they explored revises reductive notions about creative expression in this period, which often portray a mere subordination of art to propaganda and an embrace of representational aesthetics and simplistic narratives in a fruitless detour in the evolution from modernism to postmodernism. On the contrary, Andrew Hemingway notes the range of stylistic experiment and characterizes so-called ‘social art’ as ‘a hybrid and unstable mode [which] had to carry the imperative to be an art equal in formal achievement to both the great art of the past and the modern tradition … [and] to suggest a political orientation without becoming overt revolutionary propaganda’ (2002).New media theorist Oliver Grau observes thatIn many quarters, virtual reality is viewed as a totally new phenomenon… but it did not make its first appearance with the technical invention of computer-aided virtual realities. On the contrary, virtual reality forms part of the core of the relationship of humans to images… grounded in art traditions that have receivedscant attention up to now.(2004)In the midst of another period of change, of transformed and transforming ideas and practices in the arts, we have much to learn from the attempts of Chicago’s New (Media) Negro artists to create ‘art for the people’, to immerse broad audiences in such accessible media as mural painting, photography and graphic arts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.4 (2000) 83-101 [Access article in PDF] Martin Heidegger and his Japanese InterlocutorsAbout A Limit of Western Metaphysics Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht 1 Quite obviously, the central position that Western philosophical discourses have assigned, over the past two centuries, to the concept of "sense" hinges upon the epistemological dominance of the Subject/Object paradigm. In whichever specific ways this concept has been defined (and we all know how confusing the (...) range of those proposals has become), 1 it always ends up referring to the modalities in which an "Observer-Subject" can refer to what (s)he is observing as the "World of Objects." "Making sense," then, may be described as the selection, performed by an observer, of a specific object of reference among all the objects of which the world is believed to consist; or as the drawing of a line by which (s)he makes a distinction, at every given moment, between those parts of the world that (s)he is observing and those that (s)he is not observing; or as the positioning of a chosen topic within a preexisting context of possible associations. All these different descriptions can be turned into definitions of "sense making" as long as they point to the awareness that whatever has been chosen, divided, or contextualized could have been chosen, divided, or contextualized differently. Another way of evoking the same type of relation between what remains "potential" and what becomes "actual" would be to say that the concept of "sense" always refers to cases of entropy transformed into structure—under the condition that alternative patterns of transforming entropy into structure remain available. What we call the Subject's consciousness (Bewusstsein) is the place where these selections take place and where their alternatives are held available.If we consider the Subject/Object paradigm as the core element of that style of philosophizing which has been called (sometimes from a purely descriptive and sometimes from a critical angle) "Western metaphysics," then it is a both true and trivial conclusion to say that, within Western metaphysics, sense making is inevitable (that is, that Subjects cannot help producing sense and, also, that there can be no effects of sense without pointing to a Subject). An interesting case that proves the point of this implicational relationship is Niklas Luhmann's systems theory. Despite Luhmann's sustained effort to be epistemologically eccentric, despite all his great conceptual ambition to bypass the instance of the Subject, 2 his books (and, above all, their reception) make it [End Page 83] very clear how a philosophical discourse that gives as central a position to the concept of "sense" as Luhmann's cannot help producing Subject-effects. The frequently used everyday expression, on the other hand, that "something makes no sense" is not in conflict with our point about the inevitability of sense making within the metaphysical—and also within our Western everyday—framework of discursive presuppositions.For if we say that "something makes no sense," we are not using the word "sense" in accordance with the conventional philosophical meaning of "sense making," and we are thus not referring to individual phenomena that would "resist" individual acts of sense attribution. 3 Rather, when we say that "something makes no sense," we react to situations where a (shorter or longer) sequence of those elementary and inevitable acts of sense attribution does not produce an impression of "coherence" or "consistency"; we refer to situations where we lack a larger perspective from which we could subsume the results of different individual acts of sense making [see Hahn]. Astonishingly enough (or not astonishingly at all), all those loud intellectual slogans from a decade or two ago about the "death of the Subject" never reached this—altogether unsurprising—point: that any attempt at (or the mere historical process of) overcoming a Subject-centered epistemological tradition (or, with the more Heideggerian concept, of overcoming "metaphysics") would have to ask how one could—begin to—avoid sense making. On the contrary, that "weak subject" and that so-called "weak thinking" as which the Subject/Object paradigm seems to... (shrink)

The twenty-two essays collected for this book range widely in theme, style, and quality. The essays, a majority of which were previously unpublished, are arranged in three sections: 1) Early Essays, containing one particularly fine essay, "The Soul at Play," originally intended as part of Santayana's Soliloquies in England; 2) Later Essays, in which the title essay and "Friendship" are outstanding; and 3) Philosophical Essays, offering commentaries on Russell, Dewey, and James, on his own philosophy, and "On the False (...) Steps of Philosophy." The book's last article, "What is the Ego?", is an elaboration of his criticism of those "German Prophets" who return from self-contemplation "as greedy as children and as stubborn as Inquisitors." Santayana's manner of exposition often involves the elaboration of a single image or metaphor. When an image or metaphor is employed which can bear the weight of subtle distinctions, he is brilliant; but when the metaphor is too weak to encompass his thinking, then his writing becomes flowery and decadent. The essays, unfinished and fragmentary for the most part, are frequently little more than a single extended metaphor--sometimes over-extended. The fragmentary, possibly only experimental, ideas in these essays invite comparison with their use in his completed works. The book will be of special interest to someone already familiar with Santayana.--A. K. T. (shrink)

Black women do not want to become white women because they know that this is impossible. Yet, some black women straighten and curl their naturally kinky hair, or wear hair extensions, weaves and wigs that resemble Caucasian hair. Still, they recognize that hair is only one attribute of their Being and that even if they choose to wear non-African hairstyles, they can concurrently embrace other aspects of their black identity. So, is this a matter of cultural assimilation or integration, (...) or is there a deeper ontological problematic underlying these cross-racial hair styling choices? I interrogate three arguments that black women usually advance for their hairstyling choices – the survival strategy argument, the protective styling argument, and the options-choice argument. I use Mabogo Percy More’s interpretation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s concepts of “the Look,” “facticity,” and “bad faith” to analyze Black women’s hair consciousness through the lens of his “Politics of Being” concept. (shrink)

Beards are a sort of dwelling. Much like Heidegger's linguistic play with related etymologies of building and dwelling, beards are in a constant state of becoming, forever changing length, shape, and color. To the person—usually, but not always, a man—who grows a beard, the end product is always projected out into the future, like Heidegger’s concept of being. The beard is trimmed and groomed constantly; it is cultivated in a way that feels authentic to its wearer. But the (...) same ontological problems that Heidegger applies to dwelling in a home also apply to beards. Long facial hair symbolizes wisdom in many cultures, but anyone who has grown a beard can attest to the existential dilemma of long facial hair. I didn’t recognize you with the beard, someone will say. Beards can serve as symbols of erudition, yes, but they are also masks for our social selves. The beard is, after all, is a curious appendage, as it is an extension of the self, but not the self per se. Herman Melville called beards “suburbs of the chin.” If, like Heidegger, we are to see being as not a fixed entity divorced from other beings, but a being-in-the-world, a set of relations among other beings, then beards are not simply static accessories or styles, but an example of the slippery nature of being itself. (shrink)

This article considers the state of human beings in a post-postmodern conditions and focuses on obversion as one version of posthuman reality in polyversion, which is lusciousness. Obversion is regarded as a logical and at the same time dynamic figure of dis-identity and non-presence. Trying to find out if a real human being is written leads one to consider the relationship of real and written reality and the possibility of posthuman writing. Posthuman writing becomes apparent in tracks, traces, scars (...) and vestiges such an @ as a signifier of becoming t@iled. The vestiges of a human being are being investigated through the appeal to an actual post-postmodern conceptions such as speculative realism, speculative posthumanism, dark ecology, etc. In the post-postmodern context concepts such as trut/h, faith and kindness as a counterweight to the excessive postmodern quotation and theorization are being examined. Thus, a human being as a post-postscript is becoming a preface at the same time. This article explores such crucial postmodern issues as iterability, signature and others in a contingent context, in which an immanence of living itself becomes a writing in the postdigitality, post-Internet and post-media extent in relation to the realization of the disaster of technical or even mechanical as human. This research realizes on a showcase of post-postmodern architecture as an immanent spatiotemporal contingency, en-vironment of a human being. It shows how a minimalistic style in post-postmodern ethics and aesthetics correlates with obversive rocking in contrast to binary opposition logic. Thus, it realizes a movement from human to posthuman as scriptor, writing a postscript, and beyond to post-posthuman as postscriptor, writing a post-postscript as a human being, writing itself in its contingent immanence. (shrink)

This article is written in the style and method of an autoethnography that focuses on the author's spiritual journey with God while living with chronic pain. The labyrinth is used as a metaphor and spiritual tool to describe this journey. The author's personal experience with religion and spirituality is described as well as the choice of moving from thinking about God being 'out there', far away and looking upon God's creation to discovering God within - God 'right here'. (...) The affects and effects of living with chronic pain are discussed in reference to the process of walking the circuits of a labyrinth. The role of different people who played a part in this journey is highlighted. This way of writing corresponds with a narrative way of living which concentrates on deconstruction of dominant discourses and looking for outcomes that may lead to hope and transformation. The difference between rainbow hope and reasonable hope is explained and the consequence of choosing reasonable hope is discussed. Transformation of the person through the journey becomes apparent in the article. (shrink)