This review-essay explores the theoretical and methodological innovations of Richard Godden’s William Faulkner, arguing that it makes a signal contribution to historical materialism in literary studies. The article focuses on Godden’s concept of ‘generative structure’, and relates the term to earlier usages by Aglietta and Jameson. After summarising the close readings of Faulkner’s texts performed by Godden, the article suggests an expanded rôle for biography in making the linkages between economy, psyche and text which form the basis of Godden’s analysis.

Zunächst wird dargelegt, wie Heidegger bei seinem Anschluß an Husserls Projekt einer radikalen Phänomenologie ein deutlicheres Verständnis für die methodologische Rolle von Voraussetzungen entwickelt. Die Idee der formalen Anzeige, die Heideggers Schriften um 1920 durchzieht, wird als ein nichtsetzender, schematischer Modus des Zeichengebrauchs expliziert, der auf wiederholte phänomenologische Auslegung abgestimmt ist. Abschließend wird dargelegt, wie diese Idee auf eine Umdeutung des Wesens von „Voraussetzungen“ hinausläuft, und erwogen, was dies für das ambivalente Verhältnis von Heidegger zu Husserl zeigt. / -/- It (...) is first argued that, impressed by Husserl’s project of radical phenomenology, Heidegger is more aware of the methodological significance of presupposition to that project. The idea of formal indication, prominent in Heidegger’s writings around 1920, is then expounded as a nonpositing, schematic mode of sign use attuned to ongoing phenomenological interpretation. Finally, I set out how this idea implies a reinterpretation of the nature of „presuppositions“ and consider what this reveals about Heidegger’s ambivalent relationship to Husserl. (shrink)

It is an exciting time to pursue philosophy of religion, not least because of an earnest and widening conversation about what philosophers of religion should be doing in the future. This conversation is driven by factors including the growing presence of philosophers who do not presume as normative the subject position of so-called western traditions of thought, the relentless historicization—especially along Foucaultian lines—of the modern study of religion by critics working across the range of implicated disciplines, and by newly energized (...) emphases in existing methods of the study of religion upon embodiment and upon materiality more generally.Kevin Schilbrack’s Philosophy and the Study of Religions: a Manifesto enters the conversation with an exhibition of clarity and wit, logical strength, and breadth of ambition. Schilbrack argues for expanding the work of philosophy of religion from its traditional task—the examination of theism—to a more inclusive self-understan .. (shrink)

Is it possible to distinguish communities of arguers by tracking the argumentation schemes they employ? There are many ways of relating schemes to communities, but not all are productive. Attention must be paid not only to the admissibility of schemes within a community of argumentational practice, but also to their comparative frequency. Two examples are discussed: informal mathematics, a convenient source of well-documented argumentational practice, and anthropological evidence of nonstandard reasoning.

Decomposition is a bracing, revisionary, and provocative inquiry into music—from Beethoven to Duke Ellington, from Conlon Nancarrow to Evelyn Glennie—as a personal and cultural experience: how it is composed, how it is idiosyncratically perceived by critics and reviewers, and why we listen to it the way we do. Andrew Durkin, best known as the leader of the West Coast–based Industrial Jazz Group, is singular for his insistence on asking tough questions about the complexity of our presumptions about music and (...) about listening, especially in the digital age. In this winning and lucid study he explodes the age-old concept of musical composition as the work of individual genius, arguing instead that in both its composition and reception music is fundamentally a collaborative enterprise that comes into being only through mediation. Drawing on a rich variety of examples—Big Jay McNeely’s “Deacon’s Hop,” Biz Markie’s “Alone Again,” George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique, Frank Zappa’s “While You Were Art,” and Pauline Oliveros’s “Tuning Meditation,” to name only a few—Durkin makes clear that our appreciation of any piece of music is always informed by neuroscientific, psychological, technological, and cultural factors. How we listen to music, he maintains, might have as much power to change it as music might have to change how we listen. (shrink)

A Physicalist Manifesto is a full treatment of the comprehensive physicalist view that, in some important sense, everything is physical. Andrew Melnyk argues that the view is best formulated by appeal to a carefully worked-out notion of realization, rather than supervenience; that, so formulated, physicalism must be importantly reductionist; that it need not repudiate causal and explanatory claims framed in non-physical language; and that it has the a posteriori epistemic status of a broad-scope scientific hypothesis. Two concluding chapters argue (...) in detail that contemporary science provides no significant empirical evidence against physicalism and some considerable evidence for it. Written in a brisk, candid and exceptionally clear style, this 2003 book should appeal to professionals and students in philosophy of mind, metaphysics and philosophy of science. (shrink)

ABSTRACT According to Lyman Tower Sargent, utopias are repositories for individual and collective hopes and fears, which sometimes unleash energies that can achieve at least part of what is hoped for. The Australian green bans movement of 1971–75 can be understood as a utopian project in this sense. During this period, the construction workers organized in the New South Wales branch of a labor union, known as the Builders Labourers' Federation, refused to work on ecologically or socially harmful projects and (...) publicly argued for their collective right to socially responsible labor. Coining the term “green bans” to describe environmentally motivated withdrawals of labor, they halted projects worth five billion Australian dollars at 1970s prices. When enthusiastic resident action groups mobilized in support of these bans, the union grew into the core of a more general social movement. The success of the green bans movement suggests that the power of subversive imagining can be especially effective if coupled with the power of workers at the point of production. The movement's basic premise—that workers, acting in the general public interest, should decide what can be built and where—represented a direct challenge to the dominant power relations. Ultimately, such impossible demands could not be conceded either by the employers or by the state. But the practical effects of this utopianism nonetheless secured substantial environmental improvements, which brought the green bans activists significantly closer to their dreams. (shrink)

The twenty-third volume of RSSSR includes a landmark collection of papers on Theism and Non-Theism in Psychological Science, as well as papers on other key areas in the study of religion such as spirituality and social capital.

It has been easy to take the apparently detached viewpoint of the two early Greek epics as actually objective, a window on a ‘Heroic Age’, on a ‘Homeric society’ and its values. We used to ask whether ‘Homeric society’ belongs to the poets' own time or to some earlier one. We still ask how to characterize and explain the ways in which the ‘Homeric world’ differs from any world that we can accept as having existed: we answer with phrases such (...) as ‘poetic exaggeration’ and ‘epic distance’. We have constructed ‘Homeric society’, but it remains an isolate. It can tell us nothing in return of the poets' intentions, or of the society of their time, unless we have a working hypothesis as to the place in that society that was held by the poets and their audiences. (shrink)

This book examines the process philosophies of Whitehead and others against current discussions of astrobiology, extraterrestrial life, and their engagement by theological and religious systems.

Foucault never presented a systematic history of tragedy, but reflections on the relationship between tragedy and the will to truth are scattered throughout his writings. Given the Nietzschean inspiration of his work, this is not surprising. Yet Foucault rarely referenced The Birth of Tragedy, preferring to draw on Nietzsche’s later genealogical writings. In this paper I highlight the importance of The Birth of Tragedy for understanding Foucault’s entire corpus, suggesting that it can be read as a sustained consideration on the (...) political significance of the madness of Orestes from Aeschylus to Racine. (shrink)

The title and blurb suggest that this book makes a case for eliminating concepts. The suggestion is misleading, however. What Machery really does is multiply them.Here is his characterization of what concepts are. He says that a concept is ‘a body of knowledge about x that is stored in long-term memory and that is used by default in the processes underlying most, if not all, higher cognitive competences when these processes result in judgements about x’. He holds that people represent (...) categories through exemplars, prototypes and theories, that these types of representations really exist, and that they all count as concepts according to the above characterization.Machery offers an interesting new take on the concept research undertaken by cognitive psychologists over the past three or four decades. Psychology textbooks tend to classify the main theories of concepts as follows. They draw a contrast between the ‘classical definition’ theory and late 20th century ‘probabilistic’ theories. They distinguish, within the probabilistic camp, between ‘prototype-based’ theories and ‘exemplar-based’ theories, and they admit a further family of ‘theory–theories’, according to which a concept of x is a mini-theory about x. Within each camp, different specific …. (shrink)

A research study on Theantropy (including shamanism) as the foundation of spiritual life in world religions.

How does a government arise from anarchy? In a classic article, Mancur Olson theorized that it could occur when a roving bandit decides to settle down. This stationary bandit comes to recognize an encompassing interest in its territory, improving its lot by providing governing and committing to stable rates of theft. The bandits highlighted by Olson are not individuals but rather groups organized to act collectively. I provide a club-theoretic analysis of bandits. I characterize the violence as a club good, (...) i.e., one that is non-rival but from which out-group members can be excluded. I elaborate on the changes in the club’s group interest and in-group that will likely accompany the roving-to-stationary transition. To illustrate the salient points of the analysis, I provide a case study of the Visigoths: their emergence as a roving confederacy in the late fourth century, their migration and subsequent settlement, and the establishment of the Visigothic Kingdom. (shrink)

Myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1) is considered a progeroid disease (i.e., causing premature aging). This hypervariable disease affects multiple systems, such as the musculoskeletal, central nervous, gastrointestinal, and others. Despite advances in understanding the underlying pathogenic mechanism of DM1, numerous gaps persist in our understanding, hindering elucidation of the heterogeneity and severity of its symptoms. Accumulating evidence indicates that the toxic intracellular RNA accumulation associated with DM1 triggers cellular senescence. These cells are in a state of irreversible cell cycle arrest (...) and secrete a cocktail of cytokines, referred to as a senescence‐associated secretory phenotype (SASP), that can have harmful effects on neighboring cells and more broadly. We hypothesize that cellular senescence contributes to the pathophysiology of DM1, and clearance of senescent cells is a promising therapeutic approach for DM1. We will discuss the therapeutic potential of different senotherapeutic drugs, especially senolytics that eliminate senescent cells, and senomorphics that reduce SASP expression. (shrink)

Semi-structured interviews with university students in the UK and Japan, undertaken in 2009 and 2010, are analysed with respect to the revealed attitudes to privacy, self-revelation and revelation by/of others on SNS.

Abstract The institution of war is the broad framework of rules, norms, and organizations dedicated to the prevention, prosecution, and resolution of violent conflict between political entities. Important parts of that institution consist of the accountability arrangements that hold between armed forces, the political leaders who oversee and direct the use of those forces, and the people in whose name the leaders act and from whose ranks the members of the armed forces are drawn. Like other parts of the institution, (...) these arrangements are responsive to changes in military technology and needs, to geopolitical facts, and to moral and political norms. In particular, they are sensitive to the forms that military organization takes. Since the emergence of modern states in Europe some 500 years ago, there have been three main such forms: private providers?in the form of mercenaries, in early modern Europe?then professional standing armies, which in turn developed into citizen armies. Although elements of the three organizations have coexisted in many armies, the citizen army model has dominated until recently. That model brought with it a particular conception of the accountability relations between the army, the state, and the people. The state had authority over and directed the army, which was accountable to it. In turn the state was accountable for its use of the army to the people, on whose behalf it acted. The dominance of state authority over the military is now under strain, with the professional and private elements?in the form of private military and security companies (PMSCs)?having increasing importance. As those elements increase in power and presence, so it becomes more difficult to make the state accountable to the people for its use of the military, and more difficult for the people to act as a restraining force on the way in which the military used. In this essay, I outline and assess these developments?with particular emphasis on the emergence of PMSCs?in the light of a liberal view of (political) violence. The essay focuses on the situation in the United States, which possesses by far the most important military force in the world today, and in which the use of PMSCs is most developed. The paper has three main sections and a brief conclusion: the first section sketches the liberal view of violence and its implications for organizations dedicated to its use; the second outlines the salient characteristics of the three historically dominant forms of armies; and the third looks at the current situation in which the three forms coexist uneasily. (shrink)

Tobey Scharding claims that Bitcoin’s lack of a central regulator makes it open to price fluctuations. I argue that a currency not having a central regulator does not necessitate it being more volatile than centrally regulated currencies. First, I argue that Scharding’s reason for suggesting that Bitcoin is open to price fluctuations – its potential to face legal restrictions – is also faced by centrally regulated currencies. Second, I use silver in London as an example of a non-centrally regulated currency (...) with relatively low price volatility when compared to other centrally regulated currencies showing that non-centrally regulated currencies are not necessarily more volatile. (shrink)

Fully named _Discourse on the Method for Reasoning Well and for Seeking Truth in the Sciences_, this work offers the most complete presentation and defense of René Descartes’ method of intellectual inquiry— a method that greatly influenced both philosophical and scientific reasoning in the early modern world. Descartes’s timeless ideas strike an uncommon balance of novelty and familiarity, offering arguments concerning knowledge, science, and metaphysics that are as compelling in the 21st century as they were in the 17th. Ian Johnston’s (...) new translation of the original French text is modern, clear, and thoroughly annotated, ideal for readers unfamiliar with Descartes’ intellectual context. An approachable introduction engages both the historical and the philosophical aspects of the text, enabling the reader to interpret this easily misunderstood work within Descartes’ larger project. This edition joins Broadview’s growing list of affordable classic texts from the philosophical canon, adapted from Andrew Bailey’s popular anthology series _First Philosophy_. (shrink)

This volume presents chapters from internationally renowned scholars in the area of goals and social behavior.

PurposeAs part of an international study of knowledge of and attitudes to Snowden’s revelations about the activities of the National Security Agency/Government Communications Headquarters, this paper aims to deal with Germany, taking its socio-cultural and political environment surrounding privacy and state surveillance into account.Design/methodology/approachA questionnaire was answered by 76 German University students. The quantitative responses to the survey were statistically analysed as well as qualitative considerations of free text answers.FindingsSnowden’s revelations have had an important influence over German students’ attitudes toward (...) privacy and state surveillance, and show concerns over the privacy risks associated with Internet activity.Practical implicationsThe study results imply a need to build a collective awareness of the importance of the right to privacy and its responsibilities, the available technological options for individuals to exert their own privacy and security and the democratic means to agree and enforce appropriate legal restrictions on state surveillance.Social implicationsYoung Germans support Snowden’s actions and would be more willing to emulate him in Germany than in the USA. While many believe that people must give up some privacy and freedom for security, few seem to believe that current US or German approaches are valid and justified.Originality/valueThis study is the first attempt to investigate the social impact of Snowden’s revelations on German students’ attitudes toward privacy and state surveillance as part of cross-cultural analyses between eight countries. (shrink)

The Black Circle explores the Russian roots of one of the most brilliant and seminal thinkers of the twentieth century. The subtitle, A Life of Alexandre Kojève, is perhaps misleading because Jeff...

The use of storytelling in the judgment process is based on the necessary assumption that experience and meaning are universal. In place of recognizing legitimate differences in the interpretation of social experience, jurors more often are compelled to regard unfamiliar story elements or dissonant interpretations as signs of guilt. When key elements in a case are anchored in different social worlds, defendants may be found guilty simply by reason of their social experiences and their communication styles. The important question arising (...) from this state of affairs is whether anything can be done to correct biased judgment of trials.Securing access to justice means, at a minimum, recognition for the legitimacy—if not the validity—of one's grievances and aspirations. (shrink)