The study of identity crosses all disciplinary borders to address such issues as the multiple interactions of race, class, and gender in feminist, lesbian, and gay studies, postcolonialism and globalization, and the interrelation of nationalism and ethnicity in ethnic and area studies. Identities will help disrupt the cliche-ridden discourse of identity by exploring the formation of identities and problem of subjectivity. Leading scholars in literary criticism, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy explore such topics as "Gypsies" in the Western imagination, the mobilization (...) of the West in Chinese television, the lesbian identity and the woman's gaze in fashion photography, and the regulation of black women's bodies in early 20th-century urban areas. This collection of twenty articles brings together the special issue of Critical Inquiry entitled "Identities" (Summer 1992), two other previously published essays, and five previously published critical responses and rejoinders, all of which is interrogated in two new essays by Michael Gorra and Judith Butler. Contributors include Elizabeth Abel, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Akeel Bilgrami, Daniel Boyarin, Jonathan Boyarin, Judith Butler, Hazel V. Carby, Xiaomei Chen, Diana Fuss, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Avery Gordon, Michael Gorra, Cheryl Herr, Saree S. Makdisi, Walter Benn Michaels, Christopher Newfield, Gananath Obeyesekere, Molly Anne Rothenberg, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Sara Suleri, Katie Trumpener, and Joseph Valente. (shrink)

What importance does “race” have as a meaningful category in the study of literature and the shaping of critical theory? If we attempt to answer this question by examining the history of Western literature and its criticism, our initial response would probably be “nothing” or, at the very least, “nothing explicitly.” Indeed, until the past decade or so, even the most subtle and sensitive literary critics would most likely have argued that, except for aberrant moments in the history of criticism, (...) race has not been brought to bear upon the study of literature in any apparent way. Since T. S. Eliot, after all, the canonical texts of the Western literary tradition have been defined as a more or less closed set of works that somehow speak to, or respond to, “the human condition” and to each other in formal patterns of repetition and revision. And while most critics acknowledge that judgment is not absolute and indeed reflects historically conditioned presuppositions, certain canonical works do seem to transcend value judgments of the moment, speaking irresistibly to the human condition. The question of the place of texts written by the Other in the proper study of “literature,” “Western literature,” or “comparative literature” has, until recently, remained an unasked question, suspended or silenced by a discourse in which the canonical and the noncanonical stand as the ultimate opposition. In much of the thinking about the proper study of literature in this century, race has been an invisible quantity, a persistent yet implicit presence.This was not always the case, we know. By mid-nineteenth century, “national spirit” and “historical period” had become widely accepted categories within theories of the nature and function of literature which argued that the principal value in a great work of literary art resided in the extent to which these categories were reflected in that work of art Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois considered a culture’s formal social institution as the repository of its “guiding spirit,” while Giambattista Vico’s principi di una scienza nuova read literature against a complex pattern of historical cycles. Friedrich and August von Schlegel managed rather deftly to bring “both national spirit and historical period” to bear upon the interpretation of literature, as W. Jackson Bate has shown. But it was Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine who made the implicit explicit by postulating “race, moment, and milieu” as positivistic criteria through which any work could be read and which, by definition, any work reflected. Taine’s History of English Literature was the great foundation upon which subsequent nineteenth-century notions of “national literatures” would be constructed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is professor of English, comparative literature, and African studies at Cornell University. He has edited several books and has written Figures in Blood and The Signifying Monkey. (shrink)

Perhaps only Tar Baby is as enigmatic and compelling a figure from Afro-American mythic discourse as is that oxymoron, the Signifying Monkey.3 The ironic reversal of a received racist image of the black as simianlike, the Signifying Monkey—he who dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language—is our trope for repetition and revision, indeed, is our trope of chiasmus itself, repeating and simultaneously reversing in one deft, discursive act. If Vico and Burke, (...) or Nietzsche, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom, are correct in identifying “master tropes,” then we might think of these as the “master’s tropes,” and of signifying as the slave’s trope, the trope of tropes, as Bloom characterizes metalepsis, “a trope-reversing trope, a figure of a figure.” Signifying is a trope that subsumes other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, and also hyberbole, litotes, and metalepsis. To this list, we could easily add aporia, chiasmus, and catachresis, all of which are used in the ritual of signifying.The black tradition has its own subdivisions of signifying, which we could readily identify with the typology of figures received from classical and medieval rhetoric, as Bloom has done with his “maps of misprision.” In black discourse “signifying” means modes of figuration itself. When one signifies, as Kimberly W. Benston puns, one “tropes-a-dope.” The black rhetorical tropes subsumed under signifying would include “marking,” “loud-talking,” “specifying,” “testifying,” “calling out”, “sounding,” “rapping,” and “playing the dozens.”4 3. On Tar Baby, see Ralph Ellison, “Hidden Man and Complex Fate: A Writer’s Experience in the United States,” Shadow and Act, p. 147, and Toni Morrison, Tar Baby. On the black as quasi-simian, see Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds, p. 105; Aristotle Historia Animalium 606b; Thomas Herbert, Some Years Travels, pp. 16-17; and John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 8th ed., 2 vols., 2:53.4. Geneva Smitherman defines these and other black tropes and then traces their use in several black texts. Smitherman’s work, like that of Claudia Mitchell-Kernan and Abrahams, is especially significant for literary theory. See Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America, pp. 101-66. See also nn. 13 and 14 below. (shrink)

Our decision to bracket “race” was designed to call attention to the fact that “races,” put simply, do not exist, and that to claim that they do, for whatever misguided reason, is to stand on dangerous ground. Fromm understands this all too well, it seems, judging from the satirical tone of his response. Were there not countries in which the belief in racial essences dictates social and political policy, perhaps I would have found Fromm’s essay amusing and our gesture merely (...) one more token of the academic’s tendency to create distinctions which common sense alone renders unnecessary. The joke, rather, is on Fromm: one’s task is most certainly not to remain “permanently quiet”; rather, our task is to utilize language more precisely, to rid ourselves of the dangers of careless usages of problematic terms which are drawn upon to delimit and predetermine the lives and choices of human beings who are not “white.” Fromm’s response only reinforces Todorov’s worry about not bracketing “race” every time it occurs in our texts, because “race” simply does not exist. (shrink)

A literary historian might very well characterize the eighties as the period when race, class, and gender became the holy trinity of literary criticism. Critical Inquiry’s contribution to this shift in critical paradigms took the form of two special issues, ”Writing and Sexual Difference,” and “‘Race,’ Writing and Difference.” In the 1990s, however, “race,” “class,” and “gender” threaten to become the regnant clichés of our critical discourse. Our object in this special issue is to help disrupt the cliché-ridden discourse of (...) identity by exploring the formation of identities and the problem of subjectivity.Scholars in a variety of disciplines have begun to address what we might call the politics of identity. Their work expands on the evolving, anti-essentialist critiques of ethnic, sexual, national, and racial identities, particularly the work of those post-structuralist theorists who have articulated concepts of difference. The calls for a “post-essentialist” reconception of notions of identity have become increasingly common. The powerful resurgence of nationalisms in Eastern Europe provides just one example of the catalysts for such theorizing.Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of Assertion and Conditionals, Truth in Semantics, and Necessary Questions, has also published a novel, Avenging Angel, and a collection of essays, In My Father’s House. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry was “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?”. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is coeditor of Transition, a quarterly review, and the author of Figures in Black, The Signifying Monkey, and Loose Canons. His latest contribution to Critical Inquiry was “Critical Fanonism”. (shrink)

We review publications in automated scientific discovery using deep learning, with the aim of shedding light on problems with strong connections to philosophy of science, of physics in particular. We show that core issues of philosophy of science, related, notably, to the nature of scientific theories; the nature of unification; and of causation loom large in scientific deep learning. Therefore, advances in deep learning could, and ideally should, have impact on philosophy of science, and vice versa. We suggest lines of (...) further research, and highlight the role ‘theory-based’ AI could have in future developments of the field. (shrink)

The main point developed in this paper is the demonstration of the attitudes characterizing the major Belgian political parties. This is achieved through a factorial analysis applied to a set of data resulting from the answers given by the major parties leaders to various specific questions regarding bath the prevailing economie as well as institutional issues at the eve of the election of December 17th, 1978. From that point it has been possible to compare those results with the one obtained (...) from the data concerning the 1974 programmes.The results of the statistical analysis show that white in 1974 the strongest positive associations between parties corresponded to tht traditional ethical and socioeconomic cleavages, four years later the linguistic dimension was predominant with a stronger homogeneity characterizing the Dutchspeaking group than what could be observed for the Frenchspeaking one.The factorial analysis allows for a graphical representation of the respective positioning of the parties along the statistically significant factorial axes. Applied to two sets of data, the first one on purely institutional matters, the second one on both institutional and economic policies, the analysis reveals clearly through the various graphs presented the linguistic cleavage as well as the divergences about the extent of regional competences and minorities protection, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the degrees of regional economic autonomy and of public intervention in the business life. (shrink)

Before broaching our main subject, and exploring why, among all disorders of the mind, obsessive-compulsive disorders have a place apart, I would like to start from a dilemma that is well-known to historians interested in mental disorders. According to one approach, a mental illness X is considered as a bona fide or ‘genuine’ illness if, and only if, it originates from a disturbance of the brain. Its neurobiological form is in this case considered as invariant, whatever cultural veneer might give (...) it a different aspect in accord with historical and local settings. The assumption is that this veneer does not, properly speaking, have any deep grounding in reality... (shrink)

MATTER AND LIGHT The New Physics By LOUIS DE BROGLIE. Originally published in 1937. TRANSLATORS NOTE: THE Author has in certain places modified the original French text for the English translation, for the sake of greater cohesion, and has also revised some passages, in order to bring them into accord with the results of later research. Occasional Translators Notes are shown in square brackets. The chapter on The Undulatory Aspects of the Electron has the special historical interest of having (...) been delivered as a Lecture on the occasion of the Authors receipt of the Nobel Award, while that on Wave Mechanics and its Interpretations was given as an Address at the Glasgow meeting of the British Association in 1928. I am indebted to Dr. J. E. Turner, of the University of Liver pool, for assistance with the translation and the proofs, and to Dr. C. Strachan, of the same University, I am indebted for valuable assistance in dealing with the equations and the more technical passages, as well as for reading the proofs. W. H. J. PREFACE: THE amiable insistence of my friend Andr George has induced me to collect in the present Volume a number of Studies on con temporary Physics written from both the general and the more metaphysical point of view. Each of these Studies forms an inde pendent whole, and can be read by itself. A slight degree of repeti tion which the reader is asked to overlook has been the inevi table result for on more than one occasion I have been compelled to duplicate a summary of the great fundamental stages of con temporary Physics, such as the classification of simple substances, the investigation of the photo-electric effect and the origin of the Theory of Light Quanta and of Wave Mechanics the subjects are somewhat technical, and I cannot well assume that they are common knowledge. But though the same subject is outlined in several of these Studies, I have tried to take up a different point of view in each, and have endeavoured to throw light on different aspects of the essential problems of Quantum Physics in order to facilitate a grasp of their importance. On comparing the different chapters the reader will observe that, while overlapping, they also complement one another and he will feel the fascination and greatness inherent in the vast structure of modern Physics. And while admiring the vast number and the extreme delicacy of experimental facts which laboratory physicists have succeeded in revealing, and the strange and brilliant concepts devised by theorists to explain them, he will appreciate to what a degree the methods and ideas of physicists have grown in subtlety during recent years, and how great has been the progress from the somewhat ingenuous Realism and the over-simplified Mechanics of earlier thinkers. The more deeply we descend into the minutest structures of Matter, the more clearly we see that the concepts evolved by the mind in the course of everyday experience especially those of Time and Space must fail us in an endeavour to describe the new worlds which we are entering. One feels tempted to say that the outlines of our concepts must undergo a progressive blurring, in order that they may retain some semblance of relevance to the realities of the subatomic scales. Time and Space, in other words, are too loose a dress for the elementary entities individuality becomes attenuated in the mysterious pro cesses of interaction, and even Determinism, the darling of an older generation of physicists, is forced to yield... (shrink)

We provide a retrospective of 25 years of the International Conference on AI and Law, which was first held in 1987. Fifty papers have been selected from the thirteen conferences and each of them is described in a short subsection individually written by one of the 24 authors. These subsections attempt to place the paper discussed in the context of the development of AI and Law, while often offering some personal reactions and reflections. As a whole, the subsections build into (...) a history of the last quarter century of the field, and provide some insights into where it has come from, where it is now, and where it might go. (shrink)

Now in a third edition, Introduction to Philosophy: Classical and Contemporary Readings is a highly acclaimed, topically organized collection that covers five major areas of philosophy--theory of knowledge, philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, freedom and determinism, and moral philosophy. Editor Louis P. Pojman enhances the text's topical organization by arranging the selections into a pro/con format to help students better understand opposing arguments. He also includes accessible introductions to each chapter, subsection, and individual reading, a unique feature for (...) an anthology of this depth. While the book focuses on a compelling sampling of classical material--including selections from Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant--it also incorporates some of philosophy's best twentieth-century and contemporary work, featuring articles by Bertrand Russell, Richard Taylor, John Searle, Thomas Nagel, and others. This third edition contains an expanded glossary, more extensive section introductions, and twelve new selections: Karl Popper: "Epistemology without a Knowing Subject" Richard Rorty: "Dismantling Truth: Solidarity Versus Objectivity" Daniel Dennett: "Postmodernism and Truth" Bruce Russell: "The Problem of Evil: Too Much Suffering" David Chalmers: "Against Materialism: Can Consciousness Be Reductively Explained?" Baron Paul Henri d'Holbach: "A Defense of Determinism" Michael Levin: "A Compatibilist Defense of Moral Responsibility" Plato: Socratic Morality: "Crito" Herodotus: "Custom Is King" J. L. Mackie: "The Subjectivity of Values" Louis P. Pojman: "A Critique of Mackie's Theory of Moral Subjectivism" Thomas Nagel: "Moral Luck". (shrink)

Daniel Susskind examines how machines will generate more prosperity, but he is convinced that their proliferation will have some alarming consequences, like higher income inequality, dangerous greed for power to control others, and a world in which people lose their sense of meaning in life for lack of work.

A new ontology that forms the groundwork for ethical practices of resistance What and how should individuals resist in political situations? While these questions recur regularly within Western political philosophy, answers to them have often relied on dogmatically held ideals, such as the distinction between truth and doxa or the privilege of thought over sense. In particular, the strain of idealist political philosophy, inaugurated by Plato and finding contemporary expression in the work of Alain Badiou, employs dualities that reduce the (...) complexities of practices of resistance to concepts of commitment. (shrink)

FROM VARIOUS THINKERS and in different languages we have been receiving an identical message: the philosophy of the subject initiated by Descartes' cogito has reached a definitive impasse. Critical reactions range from attempts to dispose of the subject altogether to efforts to restore pre-Cartesian theories. The authors here presented adopt positions different from either of those extremes. Fully aware of the modern predicament they advocate neither a return to a pre-Cartesian past nor do they dismiss outright the post-Cartesian subjective starting (...) point. Theoretical attitudes once adopted cannot simply be discarded: philosophy has to work its way through them. Still, the proposed answers vary substantially. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty advocates abandoning traditional truth claims in favor of a rational "conversation" carried on between incommensurable positions. Francis Jacques's Différence et subjectivité reverses the traditional priority of subject to relation. In Généalogie de la psychanalyse Michel Henry attempts to reclaim a theory of "pure" subjectivity from the wild growth of its objectivist deviations. Alasdair MacIntyre exposes the disastrous moral consequences that have resulted from the primacy of an autonomous, isolated subject and proposes a program for a socially and historically more integrated ethical reconstruction. No idea has of late more consistently come under fire than that of the subject as sole source of meaning and value. Heidegger attributed it to Descartes, and three of the studies show the direct impact of his reading. Yet similar tendencies had been at work in analytic philosophy. Rorty presents pragmatic anti-subjective interpretations of language going back to Wittgenstein; Francis Jacques supports his attack by Russell's theory of relations. (shrink)