_Investigates the philosophical relationship between Levinas and Heidegger in a nonpolemical context, engaging some of philosophy’s most pressing issues._.

Establishes the importance of Husserl's phenomenology for Levinas's ethics.

This essay tracks the movement in Édouard Glissant’s work from thinking relationality as creolisation to Relation as such, to a globalised sense of cultural contact and transformation he ca...

What does Édouard Glissant have to contribute to theorizing decolonization and a philosophy of difference? And how is this contribution tied to rethinking place (from Caribbean to Caribbeanness) and world (comprised of creolized culture and identity)? This essay takes up Glissant’s work in the context of questions of history and memory, with particular focus on how historical experience grounds philosophical work on place and world through articulations of identity, language, cultural production, and thinking after catastrophe. Drawing from a contrast with (...) Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, this essay shows how Glissant’s critical concept “creolization” works as an expression of what I call “the afropostmodern,” and also as an important contribution to decolonial theories of world, culture, memory, language, and subjectivity after the Middle Passage. (shrink)

An examination of the question of influence in Senghor's work, with particular attention to the concept of assimilation - which I argue allows Senghor to responsibly adopt notions from French vitalist and life-philosophy traditions, despite their close ties to colonial and imperial histories.

Édouard Glissant passed away on 4 February 2011 at the age of 82. A few words of memory. As a person and thinker, Glissant lived through, then reflected with meditative patience and profundity upon some of the most critical years in the black Atlantic: the aesthetics and politics of anti-colonial struggle, the civil rights movement in the United States, postcolonial cultural anxiety and explosion, the vicissitudes of an emerging cultural globalism, and all of the accompanying intellectual movements from surrealism to (...) negritude to existentialism to those varieties of high modernism and postmodernism for which Glissant himself is such a generative, founding resource. His life bears witness to those years, events, and movements with a poet’s word and a philosopher’s eye. And so Glissant, like all important thinkers, leaves for us an enormous gift – in his case, a new, enigmatic vocabulary of and for the Americas. . (shrink)

In dialogue with key theorists of catastrophe and trauma--including Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, George Lamming, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Derek Walcott, as well as key figures in Holocaust studies--Glissant and the Middle Passage hones a sharp sense of the specifically Caribbean varieties of loss, developing them into a transformative philosophical idea. Using the Plantation as a critical concept, John E. Drabinski creolizes notions of rhizome and nomad, examining what kinds of aesthetics grow from these roots and offering reconsiderations (...) of what constitutes intellectual work and cultural production.Glissant and the Middle Passage establishes Glissant's proper place as a key theorist of ruin, catastrophe, abyss, and memory. Identifying his insistence on memories and histories tied to place as the crucial geography at the heart of his work, this book imparts an innovative new response to the specific historical experiences of the Middle Passage. - from the publisher. (shrink)

This essay examines James Baldwin's conception of what he calls “black English” and its link to historical and cultural identity. I link Baldwin's defense of black English to his reflections on the sorrow songs and sound, which draws on long-standing accounts of musicality as the foundation of the African-American tradition. In order to demonstrate this relation to the tradition, the essay puts Baldwin's remarks in relation to Frederick Douglass's and W. E. B. Du Bois's description of the sorrow songs. I (...) also underscore how that relation to the African-American tradition marks an important set of tensions with mid-twentieth century black Atlantic theory, tensions which make sense of the Americanness of Baldwin's work. Across the essay, I claim that Baldwin's account of language has epistemological and ontological significance, which gives an interesting and important twist to Martin Heidegger's famous phrase that “language is the house of Being.”. (shrink)

"Jean-Luc Godard is nothing if not an enigma. His image has a life of its own, especially in its younger form: cigarette, sunglasses, smirk, rambling revolutionary slogans, and important books. It wasn’t just an image, we all know, for it reflected perfectly in iconic image the more substantial revolutionary recklessness with the camera we see from Breathless forward. Filmmaking is never the same after Godard. Images and their sequencing – Godard cloaked them in sunglasses and made them smirk. He made (...) them revolutionary. That’s his thing. And even the older Godard makes for an iconic photograph: rough facial hair, the artist’s glasses, smirk, and important books. His films continue to be unpredictable, compelling, and revolutionary...". (shrink)

Hegel remarked in his discussion of the nothing in the Science of Logic that: “It is well known that in oriental systems, and essentially in Buddhism, nothing, or the void, is the absolute principle.” Schopenhauer commented in a discussion of the joy of death in The World as Will and Representation: “The existence which we know he willingly gives up: what he gets instead of it is in our eyes nothing, because our existence is, with reference to that, nothing. The (...) Buddhist faith calls it Nirvana, i.e., extinction.” It is striking how nineteenth-century German philosophical discourses (from Hegel and Schopenhauer to Mainländer, von Hartmann, and Nietzsche) concerning negativity, nihility, and nothingness explicitly refer to Buddhism, which was initially conceived by Christian missionaries as a “cult of nothingness” and became entangled with European debates concerning pessimism (the Pessimismusstreit) and nihilism. In this article, I reconsider how the interpretation of negativity and nothingness in Schopenhauer and nineteenth-century German thought informed the reception of Buddhism as a philosophical and religious discourse, and trace the ways in which Buddhist emptiness was reinterpreted in the context of the Western problematic of being and nothingness. (shrink)

People consistently act in ways that harm the environment, even when believing their actions are environmentally friendly. A case in point is a biased judgment termed the negative footprint illusion, which arises when people believe that the addition of “eco-friendly” items to conventional items, reduces the total carbon footprint of the whole item-set, whereas the carbon footprint is, in fact, increased because eco-friendly items still contribute to the overall carbon footprint. Previous research suggests this illusion is the manifestation of an (...) “averaging-bias.” We present two studies that explore whether people’s susceptibility to the negative footprint illusion is associated with individual differences in: environment-specific reasoning dispositions measured in terms of compensatory green beliefs and environmental concerns; or general analytic reasoning dispositions measured in terms of actively open-minded thinking, avoidance of impulsivity and reflective reasoning. A negative footprint illusion was demonstrated when participants rated the carbon footprint of conventional buildings combined with eco-friendly buildings and conventional cars combined with eco-friendly cars. However, the illusion was not identified in participants’ ratings of the carbon footprint of apples. In Studies 1 and 2, environment-specific dispositions were found to be unrelated to the negative footprint illusion. Regarding reflective thinking dispositions, reduced susceptibility to the negative footprint illusion was only associated with actively open-minded thinking measured on a 7-item scale and 17-item scale. Our findings provide partial support for the existence of a negative footprint illusion and reveal a role of individual variation in reflective reasoning dispositions in accounting for a limited element of differential susceptibility to this illusion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Daoism, Practice, and Politics:From Nourishing Life to Ecological PraxisEric S. Nelson (bio)I. Daoism's Multiple ModelsManhua Li, Yumi Suzuki, and Lisa Indraccola have offered evocative insights, questions, and alternatives in their contributions concerning the arguments of Daoism and Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing Life (Nelson 2021). The present brief response and sketch of the book will not address every point in their essays, but I will strive to reply, directly (...) and indirectly, to their primary concerns.First, it should be noted that I take a pluralistic conception of 'Daoisms' as my point of departure. This is necessary since Daoist studies have been hampered by overly ahistorical and one-sided definitions that prioritize one philosophical or religious moment (such as skepticism or mysticism) in historically complex and varied transmissions that encompass a multiplicity of texts and perspectives. Due to the fact of the plurality of incompatible kinds of Daoism in Chinese antiquity and in subsequent history, my text considers a range of early Daoist and Daoist-related perspectives in the context of their potential consequences for environmental philosophy, ethics, and politics. Consequently, my approach is primarily philosophical without limiting any text to being exclusively philosophical, religious, or rigidly committed to one perspective, which would be untrue to the sources themselves.Second, examining distinctive tendencies (modifying Graham 1989 and Liu 1994) in the Daodejing 道德經, the Zhuangzi 莊子, and related texts enables us to articulate distinctive and conflicting ecological, ethical, and political paradigms. In place of constructing a mythologizing ideological construction of 'Chinese culture' and Daoism as intrinsically 'Green', a familiar essentializing tendency that has provoked skepticism regarding the very possibility of Daoist environmental philosophy, my book provides a different 'critical Daoist' strategy. This alternative entails that Daoist exemplars can be deployed as therapeutic models in the present, while at [End Page 792] the same time confronting their ideological codifications and uses. Early Daoist sources have roamed on long intercultural journeys. The Daodejing and the Zhuangzi have provided elements for European thinking about civilization, technology, and nature from Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger (Nelson 2017) to Peter Sloterdijk's 'Euro-Taoism' (Sloterdijk 1989) to contemporary progressive Green movements (Joshi 2022) and even ecofascism (Lubarda 2020). Similarly, in the current Chinese context, Green Daoism has both critical and authoritarian ideological functions in visions of 'ecological civilization' (shengtai wenming 生態文明) (Schönfeld and Chen 2019) and fears of a 'green leviathan'. Accordingly, it is not accidental that my anarchistic and participatory democratic interpretation of one key thread, which I call 'ziranist' and clarify below, in early Daoist and Wei-Jin mysterious-learning (xuanxue 玄學) discourses, has led to the most intense discussions and controversies about this book. These include the contributions by Li, Suzuki, and Indraccola that propose questions and alternative possibilities concerning agency and responsiveness, authority and self-determination, freedom and fate, and adaptation and intervention, as well as purposive techniques and anti-purposive uselessness.Third, this hermeneutical strategy points toward the tertiary aspect of our preliminary definition of Daoism. It does not primarily name a philosophical theory or a religious worldview. It concerns shifting, overlapping, and diverging ensembles of discourse and practice. This is not the vague ahistorical idea of 'a way of life' but rather refers to how philosophy is enacted through a specific configuration of—to adopt early Greek expressions—logos as dis-course (e.g., argumentation, hermeneutics, logic, rhetoric), ethos (e.g., comportment, orientation, a way of dwelling), and praxis (practices of the self, with others, and with things and nature). Thus, the Laozi 老子 and Zhuangzi collections can be analyzed textually and conceptually as having multiple threads (drawing on a variety of authors and sources) that form constellations in the received texts with better and worse historical, practical, and conceptual readings. My interpretive strategy in this discussion, which does not exclude other approaches, is that these texts express forms of practical instead of merely speculative philosophy. They are suggestive of an ethos of relational freedom, irreducible to rules and techniques, which dismantles hypostatized experiential and linguistic fixations, including moralistic fixations, in order to freely encounter the myriad things and enact and practice the dao in one's own singular way.'Critical Daoism', therefore, serves as a pluralistic, diagnostic, and practical designation... (shrink)

Drawing on a landscape analysis of existing data-sharing initiatives, in-depth interviews with expert stakeholders, and public deliberations with community advisory panels across the U.S., we describe features of the evolving medical information commons. We identify participant-centricity and trustworthiness as the most important features of an MIC and discuss the implications for those seeking to create a sustainable, useful, and widely available collection of linked resources for research and other purposes.

Eric T. Poehlman, Ph.D., was an internationally recognized, tenured professor at the University of Vermont (UVM) in Burlington when, in October 2000, a junior member of Poehlman’s laboratory became convinced that he had altered data from a study on aging volunteers from the Burlington area. This suspicion developed into one of the most significant cases of scientific misconduct in the history of the US Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Research Integrity (ORI), launching a US Department (...) of Justice (DOJ) civil and criminal fraud investigation and, eventually, to a much publicized guilty plea and felony conviction. In the end, Dr. Poehlman admitted to 54 findings of scientific misconduct made by the UVM and ORI, agreed to retract or correct ten of his publications and to exclude himself from federal procurement and nonprocurement transactions for life. The United States Government’s handling of this case was distinguished by a highly cooperative approach that integrated the resources of the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Vermont (USAO) and both ORI and the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) in HHS in the common goal of prosecuting research fraud. (shrink)

Summary A provocative examination of the consequences of Levinas’s and Adorno’s thought for contemporary ethics and political philosophy. This book sets up a dialogue between Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno, using their thought to address contemporary environmental and social-political situations. Eric S. Nelson explores the “non-identity thinking” of Adorno and the “ethics of the Other” of Levinas with regard to three areas of concern: the ethical position of nature and “inhuman” material others such as environments and animals; (...) the bonds and tensions between ethics and religion and the formation of the self through the dynamic of violence and liberation expressed in religious discourses; and the problematic uses and limitations of liberal and republican discourses of equality, liberty, tolerance, and their presupposition of the private individual self and autonomous subject. Thinking with and beyond Levinas and Adorno, this work examines the possibility of an anarchic hospitality and solidarity between material others and sensuous embodied life. “This is an extremely impressive, original, and thorough treatment of two key twentieth-century thinkers and their applicability to the most pressing social and political issues of our time.” — Jeffrey A. Bernstein, author of Leo Strauss on the Borders of Judaism, Philosophy, and History “This book is an excellent and timely contribution to political and environmental philosophy, located around a nuanced historical and philosophical approach to Levinas and Adorno. It will be of great interest to anyone concerned with these figures or with the current moment.” — Martin Shuster, author of Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity. (shrink)

Daoism and Environmental Philosophy explores ethics and the philosophy of nature in the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi, and related texts to elucidate their potential significance in our contemporary environmental crisis. This book traces early Daoist depictions of practices of embodied emptying and forgetting and communicative strategies of undoing the fixations of words, things, and the embodied self. These are aspects of an ethics of embracing plainness and simplicity, nourishing the asymmetrically differentiated yet shared elemental body of life of the myriad things, (...) and being responsively attuned in encountering and responding to things. These critical and transformative dimensions of early Daoism provide exemplary models and insights for cultivating a more expansive ecological ethos, environmental culture of nature, and progressive political ecology. This work will be of interest to students and scholars interested in philosophy, environmental ethics and philosophy, religious studies, and intellectual history. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging and authoritative volume, leading scholars engage with the philosophy and writings of Wilhelm Dilthey, a key figure in nineteenth-century thought. Their chapters cover his innovative philosophical strategies and explore how they can be understood in relation to their historical situation, as well as presenting incisive interpretations of Dilthey's arguments, including their development, their content, and their influence on later thought. A key focus is on how Dilthey's work remains relevant to current debates around art and literature, the (...) biographical and autobiographical self, knowledge, language, science, culture, history, society, and psychology and the embodied mind. The volume will be important for researchers in hermeneutics, aesthetics, practical philosophy, and the history of German philosophy, providing a valuable introduction to Dilthey's work as well as detailed critical analysis of its ongoing significance. (shrink)

What did Heidegger learn and fail to learn from Laozi and Zhuangzi? This book reconstructs Heidegger's philosophy through its engagement with Daoist and Asian philosophy and offers a Daoist transformation of Heidegger on things, nothingness, and freedom.

We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)

ABSTRACTJudgments of emotional stimuli’s valence and arousal can differ based on the perceiver’s age. With most of the existing literature on age-related changes in such ratings based on perception...

What can we learn from reading Levinas alongside postcolonial theories of difference? With that question in view, Drabinski undertakes readings of Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Edouard Glissant, and Subcommandante Marcos in order to rethink ideas of difference, language, subjectivity, ethics, and politics. Through these philosophical readings, he gives a new perspective on the work of these important postcolonial theorists and helps make Levinas relevant to other disciplines concerned with postcolonialism and ethics.

This contribution unfolds an existential-ontological response to the question of sexual difference in the context of Heidegger’s formally indicative concept of “Dasein.” The question of Dasein’s “neutrality” concerns how formal indication formalizes, empties, and neutralizes the givenness of factical human existence. Ostensibly “given” biological and anthropological facts, such as sexual difference, are interpreted from an emptied and neutralized perspective that appears abstract and fictional to Heidegger’s critics. How, then, is the “neutrality” of formalizing emptying related to the “facticity” of in (...) each case factically existing as a sexual and gendered being? The answer lies in Heidegger’s elucidation of the existential-ontological structure of Dasein: Dasein is always relationally instituted in its factical entangled life through “being-with.” The sexual difference of human existence is not merely biologically or anthropologically given, but disclosed and enacted according to one’s relations with others, the environment, and oneself. The formally indicating concept “Dasein” indicates, accordingly, the concrete diversity and plurality of individuated sexual and gendered ways of being. (shrink)

This essay explores a philosophical encounter between Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin framed by the problem of the affect of shame. In particular, this essay asks how the affect of shame functions simultaneously as the accomplishment of regimes of anti-black racism and the site of transformative, revolutionary consciousness. Shame threatens the formation of subjectivity, as well as, and as an extension of, senses of home and belonging. How are we to imagine another subjectivity, another relation to home, and so another (...) kind of social and political order? For both Fanon and Baldwin, imagining the future requires an engagement with memory and history that purges black subjects of shame. The two thinkers part ways at that moment, however, with Fanon advocating a forgetting of abject history and Baldwin arguing for a retrieval of meaning and place won through pain and suffering. At the heart of this parting of ways, then, lies a conflict over the meaning of history across the black diaspora and its relation to cultural production, which, in turn, reflects important, differing conceptions of home. (shrink)

This edited collection gathers together leading commentators on the work of Édouard Glissant in order to theorize the philosophical significance of his work.

This book updates and adds to the classic Social Movements of the Sixties and Seventies, showing how social movement theory has grown and changed.

We think of modern liberalism as the novel product of a world reinvented on a secular basis after 1945. In The Theology of Liberalism, one of the country's most important political theorists argues that we could hardly be more wrong. Eric Nelson contends that the tradition of liberal political philosophy founded by John Rawls is, however unwittingly, the product of ancient theological debates about justice and evil. Once we understand this, he suggests, we can recognize the deep (...) incoherence of various forms of liberal political philosophy that have emerged in Rawls's wake.--. (shrink)

Continuous recordings of brain electrical activity were obtained from a group of 176 patients throughout surgical procedures using general anesthesia. Artifact-free data from the 19 electrodes of the International 10/20 System were subjected to quantitative analysis of the electroencephalogram (QEEG). Induction was variously accomplished with etomidate, propofol or thiopental. Anesthesia was maintained throughout the procedures by isoflurane, desflurane or sevoflurane (N = 68), total intravenous anesthesia using propofol (N = 49), or nitrous oxide plus narcotics (N = 59). A set (...) of QEEG measures were found which reversibly displayed high heterogeneity of variance between four states as follows: (1) during induction; (2) just after loss of consciousness (LOC); (3) just before return of consciousness (ROC); (4) just after ROC. Homogeneity of variance across all agents within states was found. Topographic statistical probability images were compared between states. At LOC, power increased in all frequency bands in the power spectrum with the exception of a decrease in gamma activity, and there was a marked anteriorization of power. Additionally, a significant change occurred in hemispheric relationships, with prefrontal and frontal regions of each hemisphere becoming more closely coupled, and anterior and posterior regions on each hemisphere, as well as homologous regions between the two hemispheres, uncoupling. All of these changes reversed upon ROC. Variable resolution electromagnetic tomography (VARETA) was performed to localize salient features of power anteriorization in three dimensions. A common set of neuroanatomical regions appeared to be the locus of the most probable generators of the observed EEG changes. (shrink)

An extended discussion of Donna V. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 217 pp.

This chapter examines: (1) the Black Notebooks in the context of Heidegger's political engagement on behalf of the National Socialist regime and his ambivalence toward some but not all of its political beliefs and tactics; (2) his limited "critique" of vulgar National Socialism and its biologically based racism for the sake of his own ethnocentric vision of the historical uniqueness of the German people and Germany's central role in Europe as a contested site situated between West and East, technological modernity (...) and the Asiatic. Heidegger did not break with radical right-wing Germanist thought, as some scholars have argued. He at most placed National Socialism within his narrative of the history of being, metaphysics, and technology, and thereby relativized it without addressing either its uniqueness or its totalitarian structures and practices. Heidegger formulated his own metaphysical and ontological version of Antisemitism during the National Socialist period. This vision was deeply connected with his understanding of the "history of being" and was intensified during and immediately after the Second World War. Heidegger could perceive no difference between the Shoah and the Allied bombing, defeat, and occupation of Germany. Heidegger's post-war philosophy (of home, history and technology) is deeply shaped by, and remained complicit with, his thinking during this period. (shrink)

This paper excavates the practice-oriented background and therapeutic significance of emptiness in the Madhyamaka philosophy attributed to Nāgārjuna and Sengzhao. Buddhist emptiness unravels experiential and linguistic reification through meditation and argumentation. The historical contexts and uses of the word indicate that it is primarily a practical diagnostic and therapeutic concept. Emptiness does not lead to further views or truths but, akin to yet distinct from Ajñāna and Pyrrhonian skepticism, the suspension of assertion. This sense of emptiness as a practice can (...) be traced in the intercultural transmission of Madhyamaka from Nāgārjuna, its paradigmatic philosopher, to Sengzhao 僧肇, its first pivotal indigenous Chinese representative. (shrink)