“Patience, patience, because the great movements of history have always begun in those small parenthesis that we call ‘in the meantime.’” —John Berger The last book that John Berger wrote was this precious little volume about time titled What Time Is It?, now posthumously published for the first time in English by Notting Hill Editions. Berger died before it was completed, but the text has been assembled and illustrated by his longtime collaborator and friend Selçuk (...) Demirel, and has an introduction by Maria Nadotti. What Time Is It? is a profound and playful meditation on the illusory nature of time. Berger, the great art critic and Man Booker Prize–winning author, reflects on what time has come to mean to us in modern life. Our perception of time assumes a uniform and ceaseless passing of time, yet time is turbulent. It expands and contracts according to the intensity of the lived moment. We talk of time “saved” in a hundred household appliances; time, like money, is exchanged for the content it lacks. Berger posits the idea that time can lengthen lifetimes once we seize the present moment. “What-is-to-come, what-is-to-be-gained empties what-is.”. (shrink)

Fragile kingdoms of innumerable organisms and rich beauty, forests today are both our most plentiful and our most endangered natural resource. Understanding their workings and how to sustain them is imperative to ensuring the future of humanity. John Berger urges us to learn what can be done to preserve these treasures, and he offers here a compelling guide to the complex issues surrounding forest preservation. An expanded and revised version of Berger’s bestselling Understanding Forests, Forests Forever offers (...) a clear and readable survey of forest history and management. Berger draws upon diverse sources in law, ecology, economics, politics, and anthropology to argue that ecology, rather than the marketplace, should be the driving force behind forest management. Historical case studies of forests worldwide support this contention, the book reveals, as does the history of governments’ forest policy. Keeping pace with today’s issues, Berger critically evaluates government policy over the last seven years, including a contrast between the destructive policies of the Bush Administration and model programs instituted by the Canadian Boreal Initiative and others. Ultimately, he offers us the guiding principles of sustainable forestry as an answer to the ever-increasing demand for wood products. Anchoring the account are galleries of breathtaking full-color images of trees, forest, wildlife, and other forestry subjects taken by the world’s leading nature photographers. A concise and wholly readable account, Forests Forever issues a call to arms for all those concerned with preserving and managing the world’s forests today. (shrink)

The Repugnant Conclusion served an important purpose in catalyzing and inspiring the pioneering stage of population ethics research. We believe, however, that the Repugnant Conclusion now receives too much focus. Avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion should no longer be the central goal driving population ethics research, despite its importance to the fundamental accomplishments of the existing literature.

: Two major philosophers of the twentieth century, the German existential phenomenologist Martin Heidegger and the seminal Japanese Kyoto School philosopher Nishida Kitarō are examined here in an attempt to discern to what extent their ideas may converge. Both are viewed as expressing, each through the lens of his own tradition, a world in transition with the rise of modernity in the West and its subsequent globalization. The popularity of Heidegger's thought among Japanese philosophers, despite its own admitted limitation to (...) the Western "history of being," is connected to Nishida's opening of a uniquely Japanese path in its confrontation with Western philosophy. The focus is primarily on their later works (the post-Kehre Heidegger and the works of Nishida that have been designated "Nishida philosophy"), in which each in his own way attempts to overcome the subject-object dichotomy inherited from the tradition of Western metaphysics by looking to a deeper structure from out of which both subjectivity and objectivity are derived and which embraces both. For Heidegger, the answer lies in being as the opening of unconcealment, from out of which beings emerge, and for Nishida, it is the place of nothingness within which beings are co-determined in their oppositions and relations. Concepts such as Nishida's "discontinuous continuity," "absolutely self-contradictory identity" (between one and many, whole and part, world and things), the mutual interdependence of individuals, and the self-determination of the world through the co-relative self-determination of individuals, and Heidegger's "simultaneity" (zugleich) and "within one another" (ineinander) (of unconcealment and concealment, presencing and absencing), and their "between" (Zwischen) and "jointure" (Fuge) are examined. Through a discussion of these ideas, the suggestion is made of a possible "transition" (Übergang) of both Western and Eastern thinking, in their mutual encounter, both in relation to each other and each in relation to its own past history, leading to both a self-discovery in the other and to a simultaneous self-reconstitution. (shrink)

The main difficulty utilitarians have faced is the problem of reconciling the dictates of utility with what seem clearly to be moral duties, but based on considerations of Justice. John Stuart Mill addressed this problem in his essay,Utilitarianism,and the result has not served to silence the critics of utilitarianism on this score. In part, this is due to the fact that Mill's position in the chapter on Justice is not entirely clear, nor is it entirely convincing where it is (...) clear. Still, I do not think Mill's views on Justice have been given their due. In this essay, I shall try to show that Mill anticipated recently defended principles that rely on appeal to a notion of fairness or fair play, and that these can be given a utilitarian foundation. (shrink)

The main difficulty utilitarians have faced is the problem of reconciling the dictates of utility with what seem clearly to be moral duties, but based on considerations of Justice. John Stuart Mill addressed this problem in his essay,Utilitarianism,and the result has not served to silence the critics of utilitarianism on this score. In part, this is due to the fact that Mill's position in the chapter on Justice is not entirely clear, nor is it entirely convincing where it is (...) clear. Still, I do not think Mill's views on Justice have been given their due. In this essay, I shall try to show that Mill anticipated recently defended principles that rely on appeal to a notion of fairness or fair play, and that these can be given a utilitarian foundation. (shrink)

El propósito central de este ensayo es proponer que entre la democracia y el liberalismo existe una relación pragmática. Para ello primero rechazaré la tesis de que este nexo es de tipo lógico-conceptual, así como la idea de que se trata meramente de un nexo contingente, para lo cual retomaré las concepciones de John Stuart Mill y Hans Kelsen. En suma, lo que sostendré es que los modelos democráticos, en tanto métodos de creación normativa, no implican ni las libertades (...) políticas ni las económicas, aunque sí hay lo que llamaré una relación pragmática entre la democracia y el liberalismo, por lo que ser demócrata y antiliberal, o liberal y no demócrata, es una contradicción performativa. (shrink)

This study based on manuscripts uncovers a network of Parisian Masters of Arts of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, especially in the period covered by the missing fifth Register of the English Nation of the Parisian Arts Faculty. Outstanding masters are Henry of Oy, Christian of Paris, John of Hokelem, James of Yvia, John of Paris and others. The life and work of John of Hokelem are critically studied here for the first time. The dominating (...) figure is, however, Marsilius of Inghen with his treatises on the Parva logicalia, especially the Suppositiones and the Consequentiae. Perhaps the list of works by Marsilius is not yet complete. Among the most important of the many topics is the semantics of terms like white, is and being. Among the wealth of interesting details are testimonies to Thomas of Cleve’s missing Logic, early occurrences of the names terministae vel... (shrink)

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.

Students and philosophers alike often find Dooyeweerd’s writings unclear and inaccessible, and the ideas expressed in them obscure and difficult to grasp. In this paper I will first explore the issue of unclarity in Dooyeweerd’s work—for example, what makes Dooyeweerdian writings difficult to understand? Why is it that his meaning is often unclear? And does this imply that something is wrong with his writings? Second, and as a case in point regarding unclarity in Dooyeweerd’s work, I will examine an important (...) distinction drawn in Reformational philosophy, namely, between naive experience and theoretical thinking. In his paper “The Amsterdam Philosophy: A Preliminary Critique,” philosopher and theologian John Frame criticizes Dooyeweerd for his unclear writings and for drawing an implausibly sharp distinction between naive experience and theoretical thinking. Assessing Frame’s critique will serve as a framework for the discussion of these two related issues. (shrink)

The more we know about medicine, the more we realize that many health questions have no one true answer. Realizing this, and thinking carefully about how medicine asks patients to treat their conditions, leads us to some questions. How reliable are the guidelines that might form the basis of doctors’ advice? Is it wrong, after all, to base an approach to medicine on patients’ preferences? And, given that there is often a distance between the treatment a doctor advises and what (...) a patient would like to do, how do we bridge the gap—especially in a health culture of inequality, technical proficiency, and increasing costs? In practical, engaging, narrative-driven chapters about common health conditions that millions of Americans are familiar with—depression and high blood pressure, arthritis and diabetes—Dr. Zackary Berger of Johns Hopkins demystifies the often bewildering disconnect between patients and doctors and asks us all to think more clearly about how best to protect and cure the human body. (shrink)

In 1922, Aleksander Birkenmajer presented an unknown work of Albert of Saxony, Quaestiones de sphaera, in a manuscript at the Dominicans in Vienna. In 1989, Jürgen Sarnowsky found a second manuscript in Rome. This paper presents a third complete manuscript (BNE Madrid) and an incomplete one (Amploniana Erfurt) of this work. Furthermore, it is argued that an anonymous expositio of Sacrobosco’s treatise can be ascribed to Albert of Saxony. Finally, an anonymous commentary on Albert’s questions in two manuscripts (Munich, Salzburg) (...) is presented. The possibility that this commentary stems from the famous Viennese master John of Gmunden (d. 1442) is considered, but no decisive result could be achieved yet. In an appendix, a complete list of the titles of Albert’s questions is added. (shrink)

A commentary on “Must We Be Courageous?,” by Ann Hamric, John Arras, and Margaret Mohrmann, and on “Patient-Satisfaction Surveys on a Scale of 0 to 10: Improving Health Care, or Leading It Astray?,” by Alexandra Junewicz and Stuart J. Youngner, bothin the May-June 2015 issue.

This paper presents new results regarding six Arts Masters of the Late Middle Ages. First of all, a new search target for the lost work Logica of Thomas of Cleves is suggested: a question commentary on Peter of Spain should be searched for. Second, recent research has shown that John of Hokelem is a prolific author: further findings are added here. A third notable magister artium Parisiensis of the late 14th century is Christian of Ackoy: in addition to his (...) known works, some new findings are discussed as possible or even probable works by him. Finally, the bibliography of an important magister artium Pragensis, Helmold of Salzwedel, as well as that of two Viennese Arts Masters, Conrad Seglauer and John Gossolt, is improved. In this way, the paper offers new insights into the manuscript tradition of late medieval philosophy and provides some corrections to the standard literature (C. H. Lohr, M. Markowski, and others). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Vivekacūḍāmaṇi of Śaṅkarācarya Bhagavatpāda: An Introduction and TranslationDouglas L. BergerThe Vivekacūḍāmaṇi of Śaṅkarācarya Bhagavatpāda: An Introduction and Translation. Translated by John Grimes. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2004. Pp. xii + 292.The Vivekacūḍāmaṇi or Crown Jewel of Discrimination has for centuries been celebrated as one of the most effective prakaraṇa grantha or independent pedagogical [End Page 616] treatises in the literature of Advaita, the nondualistic school (...) of Vedānta, owing to its straightforward dialogical style and lucid presentation of bedrock theories of the school. It has been ascribed, along with literally hundreds of other works, to the preeminent philosophical commentator in Advaita's illustrious history, Śaṅkara (ca. 650-700 C.E.). Modern lndological scholarship, however, has contested both of these grounds for its fame, calling into question its consistency with the theoretical framework laid down by Śaṅkara as well as its traditional attribution to the hand of the medieval Kerela master.In The Vivekacūḍāmaṇi of Śahkarācārya Bhagavatpāda: An Introduction and Translation, his recent translation of The Crown Jewel—the tenth made into English—John Grimes sets out to defend the integrity of tradition against modern criticism. Grimes, whose incisive scholarship has given us a number of important works on Advaita such as An Advaita Vedanta Perspective on Language and Problems and Perspectives in Religious Discourse: Advaita Vedanta Implications, as well as A Concise Dictionary of Indian Philosophy, applies his considerable Sanskrit and Advaita acumen to The Crown Jewel in order to achieve a twofold goal. In the Preface he vows to contribute a readable translation that is attentive to the religious sensibilities and goals of the Vivekac&umacrḍāmaṇi to guide the reader to ultimate wisdom and liberation but also to offer a rendition that speaks to contemporary audiences in an inclusive way, opening the possibility of knowledge of purified Selfhood to male and female readers alike (pp. vii-ix). At the same time, given the length to which he goes concerning this matter in his extensive Introduction, Grimes proves himself keen to show that, despite modern objections and reservations, "a strong case can be made that the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi is a genuine work of Śaṅkara's and that it differs in certain respects from his other works in that it addresses itself to a different audience and has a different emphasis and purpose" (p. 13). What is offered to the modern reader in this translation, then, is a defense of the traditional authorial and authoritative status of this popular Advaita treatise.Grimes' presentation falls into two parts. The first is a fifty-page Introduction that includes the life and teachings of Śaṅkara, a rundown on the basic doctrines of Advaita Vedānta, and reflections on the various approaches to the study of author and school. Much of this Introduction is occupied with the question of whether the historical Śaṅkara actually wrote the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi, in a discussion that engages the criteria for reliably attributing a work to him set down by Paul Hacker a half century ago. Here, Grimes immerses himself in a debate in which Hacker came down on the side of Śaṅkara having written the work, while Daniel lngalls and Sengaku Mayeda, following Hacker's own criteria, have rejected this conclusion. Grimes point by point traverses Hacker's criteria of authorship, particularly Hacker's analysis of how Śaṅkara defines basic terms such as avidyā, anirvacanīya, prāgabhāva, and other related concepts in works such his commentary on the Brahmasūtra compared to how these are defined in The Crown Jewel. Grimes concludes minimally that "there is still a likelihood that Śaṅkara is the author of the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi" (p. 23).The second half of the work is the translation itself, which includes the voluminous Sanskrit text in romanized form, Grimes' verse-by-verse rendition, and explications [End Page 617] on the meaning of each verse complete with relevant textual references to the Upaniṣads and a lexicon of important Sanskrit terms.With regard to Grimes' contribution to the intriguing ongoing... (shrink)

This article presents for the first time complete descriptions of four codices of the Austrian National Library at Vienna, viz. 1617, 5237, 5248 and 5377. Cod. 1617 is a fragment of Henry Totting of Oyta’s 13 Quaestiones Sententiarum, comprising part of q.7 and qq.8-13 in 198 ff.. The other three manuscripts contain mainly logical texts, e.g., Albert of Saxony’s Sophismata in Cods. 5237 and 5377, his Insolubilia in Cod. 5248, and his Quaestiones Posteriorum in Cod. 5377; 11 of the 12 (...) Tractatus by Peter of Spain in Cod. 5248; an apparently unnoticed copy of Porphyry’s Isagoge translated by Boethius and treatises by Thomas Manlevelt, Richard Billingham and John of Holland along with several anonymous texts in Cod. 5248; a fragment of John Buridan’s Quaestiones breves veteris artis in Cod. 5377. The latter codex has also two interesting sets of anonymous Quaestiones quodlibetales and an erratic leaf with questions on Peri heremeias. Charters or charter-like texts are to be found in Cods. 1617 and 5248 , which may be of value for the prosopography of the fourteenth century. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism continues to serve as a rich source of moral and theoretical insight. This collection of articles by top scholars offers fresh interpretations of Mill's ideas about happiness, moral obligation, justice, and rights. Applying contemporary philosophical insights, the articles challenge the conventional readings of Mill, and, in the process, contribute to a deeper understanding of utilitarian theory as well as the complexity of moral life.

Drawing on the work of Berger, Giddens and others, this article explores ways in which curricula might be reformed to take account of the experience of the self in the modern world. A degree of consonance is noted between the trajectory of the self in the circumstances of late modernity and the liberal educational ideal of personal autonomy.

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 lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Summary Of The Spoken Responses By The Poets To Their CriticsJohn HollanderMark Strand responded to Charles Berger’s comments by mak-ing appreciative remarks about the kind of attention his work had received, adding that he did occasionally in writing perceive “glimmers, in the kind of attention I pay, to what Charles Berger has spoken of.” With regard to certain aspects of prior intention, he said that “vague formal (...) imperatives got fulfilled in the writing” and that knowing at the time “the rightness of what I’ve said,” I was nonetheless able to “know the meaning of what I’d said only weeks afterward.” He also acknowledged the kinds of allusiveness which Berger had adduced in his writing, speaking of how and when in the course of writing the resources of his particular sort of echo and allusion seemed to make themselves available.He then turned to the specific question of one of the sequences of poems that Berger had discussed, the “Great Dog Poem No. 2.” He averred that in choosing a dog as speaker he had “not just meant to be funny” [he avowed later on in his remarks that his poems frequently began with “dark humor”] but had also sought for a mode of introspection more original than the fashionably solemn ones of so much contemporary poetry: “I could look within and bark.” With respect to the final line, he observed “I like to finish with a flourish, to pretend I’m Laforgue or Rimbaud,” manifesting “a desire to be a symbolist poet.” With respect to that concluding verse, “I feel like the end of a gorgeous line,” he added that if a dog said that—particularly “a [End Page 189] platinum retriever”—it could not be self-pitying. He spoke in general of the relation of high and low in the poem (a dog named “Rex,” and so forth) and of the relation of this sequence to a much earlier poem of his called “Eating Poetry” in which the speaker is likewise a dog.With regard to formal design, he concluded by saying that in general he tended to start poems “with rough drafts in blank verse” which he then “roughened up” in various ways, preferring as he said “cadences” rather than “measure” in the framing of lines. But he added that in the De Chirico poems he had read, he felt that if one wrote a villanelle, one should keep strictly to the form, without changing words in the refrain lines, and keeping to the iambic meter, saying that “I don’t think you should cheat” under those circumstances.Strand concluded by thanking Berger for the precise nature of his critical attentiveness.John Hollander started out by acknowledging with pleasure that Eleanor Cook’s analysis of his “Owl” had certainly helped him to understand it better; he observed that he felt he had only started to write what he called “real poetry” in his third book, when he had first written a poem he could not understand at the time, and only came to understand years later. He remarked that “The relation of poet and critic as framed by this panel is this: good criticism is a poem’s best friend. We all depend on our friends to point out to us things about ourselves we may not know or acknowledge; although their cousins and other familial relations are other poems, our poems’ best friends are pieces of critical writing.”He was particularly grateful to Cook for pointing out things he hadn’t himself seen—such as the question of the terminal words in the first stanza—but which as a result of the critical insight he had to acknowledge. And this brought up the crucial question of intentionality at the practical rather than theoretical level: in the case of such observations by critics and acknowledgments by poets, it would seem that the writing of a poem could have an intention of which the writer would be unaware. Hollander adduced the analogy of dreaming to poetic composition, paralleling the question “Did you mean to write that?” with (to anyone reporting a dream) “Did you mean to dream that?”He then observed about the... (shrink)

Drawing on the work of Berger, Giddens and others, this article explores ways in which curricula might be reformed to take account of the experience of the self in the modern world. A degree of consonance is noted between the trajectory of the self in the circumstances of late modernity and the liberal educational ideal of personal autonomy.

Em seu texto Por quê olhar os animais?, John Berger comenta como a metáfora animal foi um recurso indispensável para revelar uma proximidade entre as espécies, e que sem o exemplo de animais seria improvável, por exemplo, descrever eventos como aqueles narrados por Homero n’A Iíada. A correlação entre vidas semelhantes e heterogêneas permitiram aos seres humanos, inspirados pelos animais, darem respostas às primeiras perguntas. É razoável afirmar que a primeira metáfora tenha sido a do animal, como um (...) modo de partilhar o mundo que lhes era comum e diferente. Mas nossa relação com os animais não-humanos também contém contradições; a criação do zoológico representou a elevação de um monumento à impossibilidade de qualquer reencontro com a animalidade. Em vez de liberados, os animais foram capturados por outras categorias políticas. Para John Berger as ambiguidades permanecem “Eles são os objetos de nosso conhecimento sempre crescente. O que sabemos sobre eles é um índice de nosso poder, e assim é um índice do que nos separa deles. Quanto mais sabemos, mais distante eles ficam.”. (shrink)

This essay argues that Berger and Mohr’s A Fortunate Man (1967) – comprising social observation and photographs of the rural practitioner, Dr. Sassall and his patients – enacts an embodied, intersubjective empathy called “pain-work.” The book enacts “pain-work” through two strategies. Firstly, by conflating three ways of seeing – Berger’s observation, Mohr’s photography, and Sassall’s medical gaze – it shows that the clinical encounter embodies objective vision through intersubjective pain. Secondly, it employs the concepts of recognition and witnessing (...) to show how the subjectivity of the physician is distributed in his community. Thus, Berger and Mohr witness Sassall’s witnessing of his patients; even as Sassall and his patients are constituted intersubjectively, so too are Berger, Mohr, and Sassall. (shrink)

In The Necessity of Art Ernst Fischer develops a Marxist aesthetics in the humanist tradition, arguing art’s necessity as both a vehicle of social criticism and as an essential element of humanity. These twin themes place Fischer’s work, then, at the centre of issues in Marxist aesthetics that have traditionally proved contentious: firstly, about the function of art, both under capitalism and universally; and about the relationship – causal or otherwise – between economic conditions and art. Fischer’s aesthetics overemphasises the (...) humanising possibilities of great works of art to the neglect of an everyday aesthetics that argues the possibilities for aesthetic lives based on good work under communism. But he provides a theoretic start to effectively countering structuralist Marxism, and he was in his lifetime – as John Berger’s Introduction movingly conveys – a powerful opponent of the bureaucratisation of art under Zhdanov’s Socialist-Realist creed. (shrink)

_Revisioning Europe_ is among the few existing English language discussions of the films made by British novelist John Berger and Swiss film director Alain Tanner. It brings to light a political cinema that was both unsentimental about the possibilities of revolutionary struggle and unsparing in its critique of the European left, and at the same time optimistic about the ability of radicalism — while radical art — to transform the world. Jerry White argues that Berger and Tanner's (...) work is preoccupied with ideas that were at the same time central to the Enlightenment and characteristically Swiss. Translations of previously unpublished essays by both Berger and Tanner are included as appendices. (shrink)

One topic frequently explored in the philosophy of humor is the relationship of comedy and laughter with other facets of human existence—including theological insight and religious experience. The aim of this essay is to employ the mature thought of John Dewey not only to illuminate the nature of humor, but also to discern the deep source and connection between the spiritually exalting and the funny from a naturalistic perspective. While a number of passages on comedy and humor from Dewey’s (...) later work are addressed, mostly from Art as Experience, they are synthesized with other ideas from this same text along with a few quotes from John Morreall. The focus is then shifted toward the central themes of A Common Faith, Dewey’s proposal for a de-supernaturalized form of the religious life. It is suggested that the humorous and the religious, understood through Dewey’s refined account of experience, disclose a few very important things about our place within the cosmos as a whole—that greatest of contexts in and through which laughter and the spiritual alike acquire their significance. This Deweyan vision is further clarified by way of comparison with Peter Berger’s theological reflections on humor. The controversies over sin and the place of tragedy in Dewey’s religious naturalism are briefly discussed in the conclusion. (shrink)