In this article I examine how Deleuzian-inspired assemblage theory allows us to offer a new challenge to the enlightenment categories of thought that have dominated archaeological thinking. The history of archaeological thought, whilst superficially a series of paradigm shifts, can be retold as arguments constructed within distinctions between ideas and materials, present and past, and culture and nature. At the heart of all of these has been the critical issue of representation, of how the gap between people and the world (...) can be bridged. In the last decade or so, however, archaeologists have begun to make a more significant challenge to these ideas, and have attempted to offer a critique of our enlightenment heritage that is ontologically, rather than epistemologically, inspired. Drawing on the manner in which assemblages allow for the vibrancy of matter, are non-anthropocentric, multiscalar and more-than-representational, this article argues that Deleuzian thought offers the best chance to rework our understanding of the past in this manner. This is explored through a case study of three scales of analysis of Neolithic Britain. (shrink)

Provides an accessible account of the changing world of archaeological theory. It charts the emergence of the new emphasis on relations as well as engaging with current theoretical trends and the thinkers archaeologists regularly employ. This book will be an essential guide to cutting-edge theory for students and for professionals wishing to reacquaint themselves with this field. Oliver J.T. Harris is lecturer in archaeology in the School of Archaeology & Ancient History, University of Leicester. Craig N. Cipolla is (...) lecturer in historical archaeology in the School of Archaeology & Ancient History, University of Leicester"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

The Jewish Philosophy Reader is the first comprehensive anthology of classic writings on Jewish philosophy from the Bible to postmodernism. The Reader is clearly divided into four separate parts: Foundations and First Principles, Medieval and Renaissance Jewish Philosophy, Modern Jewish Thought, and Contemporary Jewish Philosophy. Each part is clearly introduced by the editors. The readings featured are representative writings of each era listed above and are from the following major thinkers: Abrabanel, Baeck, Bergman, Borowitz, Buber, Cohen, Crescas, Fackenheim, Geiger, Gersonides, (...) Goodman, Graetz, Halevi, Hartman, Heschel, Hess, Hirsch, Ibn Ezra, Ibn Gabirol, Ibn Paquda, Kellner, Kook, Krochmal, Leibowitz, Levinas, Maimonides, Maybaum, Mendelssohn, Novak, Philo, Plaskow, Rosenzweig, Saadia, Scholem, Seeskin, Soloveitchik, Spinoza, Strauss, Wolf, Zunz. (shrink)

Alonzo Church (1903–1995) was a renowned mathematical logician, philosophical logician, philosopher, teacher and editor. He was one of the founders of the discipline of mathematical logic as it developed after Cantor, Frege and Russell. He was also one of the principal founders of the Association for Symbolic Logic and the Journal of Symbolic Logic. The list of his students, mathematical and philosophical, is striking as it contains the names of renowned logicians and philosophers. In this article, we focus primarily on (...) Church’s philosophical contributions. (For an account of his life and academic history see the Introduction to The Collected Works of Alonzo Church (2019).) However, we also discuss his mathematical results when it is desirable to do so in order to pursue a philosophical issue. (shrink)

Where is philosophy going? Are we entering a post-philosophy millennium? The Future of Philosophy presents the notion of what the future of philosophy is as a crucial concept, since it allows us to speculate not only on the future, but also on the past. The insightful essays consider a variety of issues, from ethics to mind, language to feminist thought, postmodernism to religion. Contributors: Peter Edwards, Lenn Goodman, Sean Hand, Heta Hayry, Matti Hayry, Gill Howie, Oliver Leaman, Harry Lesser, (...) Gerard Livingstone, William Lyons and Catherine Wilson. (shrink)

Between formal propositional knowledge and embodied skill lies ‘interactional expertise’—the ability to converse expertly about a practical skill or expertise, but without being able to practice it, learned through linguistic socialisation among the practitioners. Interactional expertise is exhibited by sociologists of scientific knowledge, by scientists themselves and by a large range of other actors. Attention is drawn to the distinction between the social and the individual embodiment theses: a language does depend on the form of the bodies of its members (...) but an individual within that community can learn the language without the body. The idea has significance for our understanding of colour-blindness, deafness and other abilities and disabilities. They say that love's a word. (shrink)

The immediate occasion for this special issue was Christia Mercer’s influential paper “The Contextualist Revolution in Early Modern Philosophy”. In her paper, Mercer clearly demarcates two methodologies of the history of early modern philosophy. She argues that there has been a silent contextualist revolution in the past decades, and the reconstructivist methodology has been abandoned. One can easily get the impression that ‘reconstructivist’ has become a pejorative label that everyone outright rejects. Mercer’s examples of reconstructivist historians of philosophy are deceased (...) (P. F. Strawson, Margaret J. Osler, Richard Watson, and Bernard Williams), anonymous (the fans of philosopher* mentioned by Lisa Downing), or authors whose more recent work followed a contextualist methodology (Jonathan Bennett). The reconstructivist camp seems to have turned into a shadowy group, largely extinct by now, not unlike the Death Eaters in the fictional universe of Harry Potter. There are some figures who previously belonged to this group, but they have since reformed their ways – or so it seems. Sometimes it is rumoured that certain people may still have secret allegiance to it, but no one dares to fly its banner openly. We decided to create this special issue because we believe that reconstructivist methodology does not deserve this shadowy existence. (shrink)

The vagaries of the postal system, British or American, or both, apparently, have prevented until now by seeing Professor Hodgson’s complaints about my review of his and his colleagues’ translation of Part 3 of the Religionsphilosophie. I am dismayed and not a little surprised that he should have taken my comments so amiss, for I had not the least intention of suggesting anything but that their translation was admirable, and that the immense work they had accomplished was a very valuable (...) contribution to the subject. I thought I had made that clear. The use of the phrase “liberties taken with the text” was, perhaps, unfortunate, but to say that it was “a careless and irresponsible misrepresentation” is surely rather extreme. For what translator trying to put Hegel’s involved and involuted German into readable and intelligible English can avoid taking liberties with the text? One of the best and most gifted, William Wallace, takes liberties in almost every sentence, yet succeeds in great measure in conveying Hegel’s thought correctly and in lucid English. (shrink)

This essay critically engages the work of John Harris and Jürgen Habermas on the issue of genetic engineering. It does so from the standpoint of women's embodied experience of pregnancy and parenting, challenging the choice–chance binary at work in these accounts.

The vagaries of the postal system, British or American, or both, apparently, have prevented until now by seeing Professor Hodgson’s complaints about my review of his and his colleagues’ translation of Part 3 of the Religionsphilosophie. I am dismayed and not a little surprised that he should have taken my comments so amiss, for I had not the least intention of suggesting anything but that their translation was admirable, and that the immense work they had accomplished was a very valuable (...) contribution to the subject. I thought I had made that clear. The use of the phrase “liberties taken with the text” was, perhaps, unfortunate, but to say that it was “a careless and irresponsible misrepresentation” is surely rather extreme. For what translator trying to put Hegel’s involved and involuted German into readable and intelligible English can avoid taking liberties with the text? One of the best and most gifted, William Wallace, takes liberties in almost every sentence, yet succeeds in great measure in conveying Hegel’s thought correctly and in lucid English. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Moving Literary Theory OnWendell V. HarrisParadox has long been especially seductive to literary critics and theorists. For the New Critics, the presence of paradox in a text served to vouch for the complexity and therefore value of the perspective on life the text offered. For poststructuralists it seems to be even more important: paradox is the hallmark of earnestness. And if paradox is good, self-contradiction is even better. That (...) at least would seem to be the reasoning that justifies the amount of internal contradiction to be encountered among the critical principles most in vogue these days. Let us note twelve of the most egregious of these contradictions.(1) New Criticism is dead. But the New Critics’ major activity, the pursuit of the author’s intended meaning through close reading, is still very much with us. However much poststructuralists have wished to deny the importance of or possibility of achieving understanding of authorially intended meaning, their own critical commentary necessarily begins with the meaning the author is assumed to have intended. For instance, that which Derrida seeks to deconstruct or undercut in Saussure, Rousseau, Austin, or Searle begins in what he thinks they intended to say. However, the New Critic sought to resolve apparent contradictions on the principle that the interpretation producing the greatest consistency would be nearest the author’s meaning (since the author was assumed to have assumed that the reader would assume that the author intended a non-contradictory statement). In contrast, the poststructuralist typically seeks to find and emphasize or, if necessary, induce contradiction—but only after having assumed that degree of consonance and unity in the text necessary to interpret the intended meaning within which can be sought the contradictions for the [End Page 428] discovery of which the reading was undertaken. The result is thus more often than not a New Critical reading into which contradictions have been injected. One is reminded of the old story of the student in a short story writing class who told his friend that he had the story all written—all he had to do was go back and put in the symbols. The typical poststructuralist begins with a reading much like what one would expect from a New Critic and then begins inducing contradictions.(2) Literature and language cannot really be about anything beyond themselves. At the same time literature and the language on which it is dependent are regarded as largely constituting that which we experience. If language cannot refer to non-linguistic things and events, either it cannot have the power to shape our classifications, descriptions, and evaluations of things and events experienced, or there exists nothing beyond language—in which case we can abolish poverty, racism, and sexism by denying that those words have any meaning. Moreover, if language is about nothing but itself, any formulation that uses language to make statements denying the relationship of language to anything outside itself must be meaningless.(3) All narratives, indeed all statements about the world, are fictional. Yet “fictional” would have no meaning if it did not stand in contrast to those things that are not fictional, while the distinctions made available by the contrast are ones we can hardly do without. There are narratives (1) that both tellers and their hearers/readers know to be not true (“not to be the case” is the evasive formulation popular with philosophers), (2) that tellers and/or hearers/readers think true though they prove not to be, and (3) that tellers think true and are in fact partially, perhaps largely true, but erroneous in some details and necessarily incomplete. These classifications require a modicum of explanation, but to lose one’s way among them would seem to require a wilful pursuit of confusion.Class 1. Oliver Twist is fictional even though there were workhouses, thieves, and such sites as The Angel and Newgate existing at the time at which the narrative is set. Of course, within a fictional narrative, there may be subnarratives the reader is to regard as true within the total fictional narrative and others that are to be regarded as false. To take a light-hearted example, within the narrative of Gilbert and... (shrink)

This paper reviews the hole argument as an argument against spacetime substantivalism. After a careful presentation of the argument itself, I critically review possible responses.

What is morality? How many moral values are there? And what are they? According to the theory of morality-as-cooperation, morality is a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation recurrent in human social life. This theory predicts that there will be as many different types of morality as there are different types of cooperation. Previous research, drawing on evolutionary game theory, has identified at least seven different types of cooperation, and used them to explain seven different (...) types of morality: family values, group loyalty, reciprocity, heroism, deference, fairness and property rights. Here we explore the conjecture that these simple moral ‘elements’ combine to form a much larger number of more complex moral ‘molecules’, and that as such morality is a combinatorial system. For each combination of two elements, we hypothesise a candidate moral molecule, and successfully locate an example of it in the professional and popular literature. These molecules include: fraternity, blood revenge, family pride, filial piety, gavelkind, primogeniture, friendship, patriotism, tribute, diplomacy, common ownership, honour, confession, turn taking, restitution, modesty, mercy, munificence, arbitration, mendicancy, and queuing. These findings indicate that morality – like many other physical, biological, psychological and cultural systems – is indeed a combinatorial system. Thus morality-as-cooperation provides a principled and powerful theory, that explains why there are many moral values, and successfully predicts what they will be; and it generates a systematic framework that has the potential to explain all moral ideas, possible and actual. Pursuing the many implications of this theory will help to place the study of morality on a more secure scientific footing. (shrink)

Written nearly fifty years ago, at a time when the world was still wrestling with the concepts of Marx and Lenin, 'The Illusion of the Epoch' is the perfect resource for understanding the roots of Marxism-Leninism and its implications for philosophy, modern political thought, economics, and history. As Professor Tim Fuller has written, this "is not an intemperate book, but rather an effort at a sustained, scholarly argument against Marxian views." Far from demonising his subject, Acton scrupulously notes where Marx's (...) account of historical and economic events and processes is essentially accurate. However, Acton also points out that Marx is generally right about things that were already widely known and accepted in his own time and indeed had been long understood in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Acton shows that in many cases Marx either is simply wrong or has stated his views so as to render his theories immune to disproof. Acton also explains why the embodiment of Marxist-Leninist theory in an actual social order would require coercive support if it were not, sooner or later, to collapse of its own contradictions. (shrink)

Despite its importance in the history of philosophy, the work of the Spanish thinker Averro"es (1126-1198) has been left largely unexplored in this century. This book is the only general account of Averro"es' philosophy in English. Leaman analyzes his thought and influence, particularly his metaphysics and theory of meaning, arguing that while his work belongs within the cultural and political context of medieval Islam, it remains of considerable philosophical and historical significance.

This fascinating study in the sociology of science explores the way scientists conduct, and draw conclusions from, their experiments. The book is organized around three case studies: replication of the TEA-laser, detecting gravitational rotation, and some experiments in the paranormal. "In his superb book, Collins shows why the quest for certainty is disappointed. He shows that standards of replication are, of course, social, and that there is consequently no outside standard, no Archimedean point beyond society from which we can lever (...) the intellects of our fellows. "- -Donald M. McCloskey, Journal of Economic Psychology "Collins is one of the genuine innovators of the sociology of scientific knowledge.... Changing Order is a rich and entertaining book. "- - Isis "The book gives a vivid sense of the contingent nature of research and is generally a good read. "- -Augustine Brannigan, Nature "This provocative book is a review of [Collins's] work, and an attempt to explain how scientists fit experimental results into pictures of the world.... A promising start for new explorations of our image of science, too often presented as infallibly authoritative. "- -Jon Turney, New Scientist. (shrink)

Quassim Cassam has argued that psychological and epistemological analyses of conspiracy theories threaten to overlook the political nature of such theories. According to Cassam, conspiracy theories are a form of political propaganda. I develop a limited critique of Cassam's analysis.This paper advances two core theses. First, acceptance of conspiracy theories requires a rejection of epistemic authority that renders conspiracy theorists susceptible to co-option by certain political programs while insulating such programs from criticism. I argue that the contrarian nature of conspiracy (...) theories partially accounts for the prominence of such theories in populist movements.Second, the contrarian nature of conspiracy theories partially accounts for their attractiveness, especially among those to whom populism already appeals. I argue that for those who resent what appears from their perspective as the shaping of the epistemic landscape by alien perspectives, conspiracy theorizing may facilitate the reassertion of epistemic autonomy. (shrink)

In this enlightening book, Sam Harris argues that free will is an illusion but that this truth should not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom; indeed, this truth can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-11360-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-11360-4 ... HM651.C64 2007 158.1—dc22 2007022671 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information ...

Introduction: The role of animals in philosophies of man -- Part I: What's wrong with animal rights? -- The right to remain silent -- Part II: Animal pedagogy -- You are what you eat : Rousseau's cat -- Say the human responded : Herder's sheep -- Part III: Difference worthy of its name -- Hair of the dog : Derrida's and Rousseau's good taste -- Sexual difference, animal difference : Derrida's sexy silkworm -- Part IV: It's our fault -- The (...) beaver's struggle with species-being : De Beauvoir and the praying mantis -- Answering the call of nature : Lacan walking the dog -- Part V: Estranged kinship -- The abyss between humans and animals : Heidegger puts the bee in being -- Strange kinship : Merleau-Ponty's sensuous stickleback -- Stopping the anthropological machine : Agamben's tick-tocking tick -- Psychoanalysis and the science of kinship -- Psychoanalysis as animal by-product : Freud's zoophilia -- Animal abjects, maternal abjects : Kristeva's strays -- Conclusion: Sustainable ethics. (shrink)

This paper describes the ways in which trolls and bots impede the acquisition of knowledge online. I distinguish between three ways in which trolls and bots can impede knowledge acquisition, namely, by deceiving, by encouraging misplaced skepticism, and by interfering with the acquisition of warrant concerning persons and content encountered online. I argue that these threats are difficult to resist simultaneously. I argue, further, that the threat that trolls and bots pose to knowledge acquisition goes beyond the mere threat of (...) online misinformation, or the more familiar threat posed by liars offline. Trolls and bots are, in effect, fake persons. Consequently, trolls and bots can systemically interfere with knowledge acquisition by manipulating the signals whereby individuals acquire knowledge from one another online. I conclude with a brief discussion of some possible remedies for the problem of fake persons. (shrink)