The international trade in kangaroo skin and meat has been contested on ecological and ethical grounds for several decades. Yet, it continues unabated. This article reviews the constitutive practices of the kangaroo network, drawing on Actor Network Theory to provide insights into why and how this trade continues. Questions of agency, network, and space are explored in this account, which looks at the real and imagined geographies of the kangaroo trade.

When Australian economist Ross Garnaut proposed to increase the commercial kangaroo industry in 2008, it started a national debate on the supposed edibility of kangaroos. Campaigns against the commercial kangaroo industry and hesitance amongst many consumers to eat kangaroo reflect concerns about viewing kangaroos as food. This article explores the reactions and challenges that originate from the kangaroo’s changing role in society by using Judith Butler’s concept of grievable lives. Using this framework shows that what animals we eat (...) goes beyond nutritional value; it symbolizes deeper values regarding human–animal relations and illustrates why and how not all animals are seen and treated as the same. (shrink)

Gendlin's Philosophy of the Implicit offers root concepts, and a schema derived from them, for thinking about living and experiencing in very general terms, in ways that build bridges for thinking about human experience and animal experience together. He describes living as occurring into implying - what occurs is happening into implying something helpful - and when what occurs actually is helpful he describes this as living carrying forward. His term “the implicit” points towards the complexity involved in being helpful, (...) from the standpoint of a life appreciated as a whole. His concepts support disciplined thick description of animals’ lives. Looking, for example, at passages of kangaroo mothers' living, reveals their concurrent, crossed sensitivity to grass and other food, to their young's behavior, to predators, and to what other members of their group are doing. Standard methods for researching behavior hide this complexity. Looking at animal lives from the perspective of implying creates opportunities for describing animals’ lives holistically. This creates new research opportunities, and provides new tools for practical problems like designing conservation strategies so they work from animals' perspectives. (shrink)

In contemporary times, wildlife managers attempt to provide solutions to problems arising from conflicting uses of the environment by humans and nonhuman animals. Within the Kangaroo Management Zones of New South Wales , the commercial culling "solution" is one such attempt to perpetuate kangaroo populations on pastoral land while supporting farmers in continuing inefficient sheep farming. Because wildlife management rests on a distinction between the "nature" of humans and animals, then humanist attention to standards of individual welfare need not interrupt (...) the process whereby individual animals are killed within an economic framework designed to improve habitat management for the conservation of their populations. Building on Thorne's discussion of the meanings scripted onto individual kangaroo bodies, this paper explores the utilitarian underpinnings of the commercialization approach and considers the ethical implications of constructing the population as resource, even if this results in an improvement in the welfare of individual kangaroos. (shrink)

Ethical debate on the killing of kangaroos has polarised conservation and animal welfare science, yet at the heart of these scientific disciplines is the unifying aim of reducing harm to non-human animals. This aim provides the foundation for common ground, culminating in the development of compassionate conservation principles that seek to provide mechanisms for achieving both conservation and welfare goals. However, environmental decision-making is not devoid of human interests, and conservation strategies are commonly employed that suit entrenched positions and (...) commercial gain, rather than valuing the needs of the non-human animals in need of protection. The case study on the wild kangaroo harvest presents just such a dilemma, whereby a conservation strategy is put forward that can only be rationalised by ignoring difficulties in the potential for realising conservation benefits and the considerable welfare cost to kangaroos. Rather than an open debate on the ethics of killing game over livestock, in this response I argue that efforts to bring transparency and objectivity to the public debate have to date been obfuscated by those seeking to maintain entrenched interests. Only by putting aside these interests will debate about the exploitation of wildlife result in humane, compassionate, and substantive conservation benefits. (shrink)

During the decades following World War II diverse groups of American biologists established a variety of distinctive approaches to organismal biology. Rhetorically, organismal biology could be used defensively to distinguish established research traditions from perceived threats from newly emerging fields such as molecular biology. But, organismal biologists were also interested in integrating biological disciplines and using a focus on organisms to synthesize levels of organization from molecules and cells to populations and communities. Part of this broad movement was the development (...) of an area of research variously referred to as physiological ecology, environmental physiology, or ecophysiology. This area of research was distinctive in its self-conscious blend of field and laboratory practices and its explicit integration with other areas of biology such as ecology, animal behavior, and evolution in order to study adaptation. Comparing the intersecting careers of Knut Schmidt-Nielsen and George Bartholomew highlights two strikingly different approaches to physiological ecology. These alternative approaches to studying the interactions of organisms and environments also differed in important ways from the organismal biology championed by leading figures in the modern synthesis. (shrink)

Data-driven historiography of philosophy looks to objective modeling tools for illumination of the propagation of influence. While the system of David Lewis, the most influential philosopher of our time, raises historiographic puzzles to stymie conventional analytic methods, it proves amenable to data-driven analysis. A striking result is that Lewis only becomes the metaphysician of current legend following the midpoint of his career: his initial project is to frame a descriptive science of mind and meaning; the transition to metaphysics is a (...) rhetorically breathtaking escape from this program's (inevitable) collapse. Understanding this process both aids a more focused debate whether it counts as progress, and also presents novel affordances for partisans on both sides to learn from Lewis's right and wrong steps. (shrink)

In this project, I present a combination of philosophical and political perspectives on universal human rights and the establishment of a permanent International Criminal Court in which to prosecute the most egregious violations of universal human rights. I then present William F. Jasper's reasons why the United States ought not ratify the permanent International Criminal Court. Contrary to the Jasper's pragmatic objections, I argue in favor of the International Criminal Court. I illustrate that the International Criminal Court will have protective (...) measures designed to prevent the political abuses of justice that worry Jasper. When working properly, these protective measures will satisfy Jasper's pragmatic concerns. In addition, I offer principled reasons why the United States ought not abandon its longer history of supporting the establishment of an international criminal court. I conclude that Jasper's pragmatic concerns do not justify the rejection of the International Criminal Court by the United States. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the relationship between Richard Lovat Summers and Ben Cooley in D.H. Lawrence's 1922 novel "Kangaroo." It argues that the psychological dynamic of the relationship between the two men as presented by Lawrence reveals one of the deepest of human paradoxes - the simultaneous kinship and opposition at work in the bipolarity of philosophy and tyranny, individual independence and unconditional love, the quest for glory and for ultimate truth, and the demands of self-love and of love of mankind. (...) The claim here is that Lawrence's "Kangaroo" is a classic literary statement of the role and meaning of "eros" in human life as played out in its most characteristic human expressions - art and philosophy on the one hand and politics and tyranny on the other. (shrink)

Data‐driven historiography of philosophy looks to objective modeling tools for illumination of the propagation of influence. While the system of David Lewis (1941–2001), the most influential philosopher of our time, raises historiographic puzzles to stymie conventional analytic methods, it proves amenable to data‐driven analysis. A striking result is that Lewis only becomes the metaphysician of current legend following the midpoint of his career: his initial project is to frame a descriptive science of mind and meaning; the transition to metaphysics is (...) a rhetorically breathtaking escape from this program's (inevitable) collapse. Understanding this process aids a more focused debate whether it counts as progress, and also presents novel affordances for partisans on both sides to learn from Lewis's right and wrong steps. (shrink)

How does the newborn kangaroo get into the pouch after birth? This question was much discussed by naturalists around the globe between 1826, when Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire first addressed the issue, and 1926, when Ellis Troughton published a “definite” account of the debate. In its first part, this paper focuses on the investigations conducted at European zoos. The advent of kangaroos made it possible to investigate the riddle through observation. In the early 1830s, Richard Owen enlisted the aid of (...) London Zoo to devise a research programme. He claimed that the mother put the embryo into the pouch using her lips, and naturalists in other Europeans zoos were eager to confirm Owen's hypothesis. In its second part, this paper contrasts the zoo-based investigations with observations made in Australia. Hunters and animal traders claimed that the joey travelled into the pouch without any assistance from the mother. This case study allows us to address a number of overarching questions: Could the zoo live up to its promise to generate knowledge in natural history, challenging the classical method of anatomical dissection? What practical difficulties did naturalists and animal keepers face in their observations? How did the information on the reproduction of marsupials circulate (or not) between metropolitan centres and colonial outposts? The riddle of the kangaroo birth casts light on the potential and the limitations of the zoo as a site for research. (shrink)

As an environmental philosopher I had long been aware of dilemmas between animal ethics and ecological ethics, but now, as the manager of my own biodiversity reserve, I was facing these dilemmas in a more gut-wrenching and complex form than I had ever encountered in the classroom. Pressured by environmental authorities to cull kangaroos on my property, in the name of ecological ethics, I started thinking about the very meaning of ethics, its origins in the evolution of society and (...) its material and metaphysical presuppositions. Two different conceptions of the normative root of society emerged, the deontic conception, appropriate within the material and metaphysical framework of hunter-gatherer societies, and the axial conception, appropriate within the framework of ’civilization’, viz the agrarian societies that evolved into the urban-industrial formations of the modern era. The axial conception, based on empathy, aligned with our modern conception of ethics, and underlay our contemporary sense of animal ethics. ’Ecological ethics’, on the other hand, seemed to be obscurely underpinned by the deontic conception, and was not ethical at all in the axial sense, and was moreover mismatched, normatively speaking, with the material and metaphysical realities of modern societies. A different set of practices from those currently prescribed by environmental authorities needs to be devised to meet both the ethical and ecological requirements of our contemporary natural environment. (shrink)

Questions about necessity (or what has to be, or what cannot be otherwise) and possibility (or what can be, or what could be otherwise) are questions about modality. Fictionalism is an approach to theoretical matters in a given area which treats the claims in that area as being in some sense analogous to fictional claims: claims we do not literally accept at face value, but which we nevertheless think serve some useful function. However, despite its name, “Modal Fictionalism” in its (...) usual manifestations is not primarily fictionalism about claims of necessity and possibility, but rather a fictionalist approach to claims about possible worlds. (For instance, modal fictionalism is not normally fictionalist about the claim that “it is possible that there be a species of tail-less kangaroo”, but rather about the claim that “there is a possible world in which there is a species of tail-less kangaroo”.) The practice of taking possible worlds to be merely convenient fictions, or of treating talk about possible worlds as being useful without being literally correct, is quite common in philosophical circles. It is only recently, however, that philosophers have seriously examined the implications of taking possible worlds to be merely fictional objects, like Sherlock Holmes or a frictionless surface. (shrink)

The domain of a quantifier is determined by a variety of factors, which broadly speaking fall into two types. On the one hand, the context of utterance plays a role: if the focus of attention is on a particular collection of kangaroos, for example, then “Q kangaroos” is likely to range over the individuals in that set. On the other hand, the utterance itself will help to establish the quantificational domain, inter alia through presuppositions triggered within the sentence. (...) In this paper, we concentrate our attention on constructions like the following, in which “the square to which... ” is the critical presupposition trigger: Q circles... Q of these circles... Q of these five circles...... have the same colour as the square to which they are connected. Many theories predict that all instances of these schemata will give rise to the presupposition that every circle is connected to a square. We present an analysis which predicts that these sentences should generally be accepted in a context in which not all the circles are connected to a square, with one exception only: if a quantified sentence is of type and Q is non-intersective, then the sentence should be more likely to be rejected. Furthermore, we predict that manipulating the context so as to make the connected circles more or less salient should have an effect on statements with non-intersective quantifiers only. These predictions were tested in a series of experiments. (shrink)

The domain of a quantifier is determined by a variety of factors, which broadly speaking fall into two types. On the one hand, the context of utterance plays a role: if the focus of attention is on a particular collection of kangaroos, for example, then “Q kangaroos” is likely to range over the individuals in that set. On the other hand, the utterance itself will help to establish the quantificational domain, inter alia through presuppositions triggered within the sentence. (...) In this paper, we concentrate our attention on constructions like the following, in which “the square to which... ” is the critical presupposition trigger: Q circles... Q of these circles... Q of these five circles...... have the same colour as the square to which they are connected. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the semantics of bare plural I-generics such as ‘Tigers are striped’, ‘Chickens lay eggs’, and ‘Kangaroos live in Australia’. In a series of recent papers, Bernhard Nickel has developed a comprehensive view of a certain class of bare plural I-generics, which he calls characterizing sentences :629–648, 2009. doi:10.1007/s10988-008-9049-7; Linguist Philos 33:479–512, 2010a. doi:10.1007/s10988-011-9087-4; Philos Impr 10:1–25, 2010b). Nickel’s ambitious proposal includes a detailed account of their truth-conditions, an account of certain pragmatic phenomena that they (...) give rise to, a metaphysical picture of their truth-makers in terms of mechanisms, and an epistemological story connecting characterizing sentences to such concepts as induction and explanation. This paper offers an extended critique of the central truth-conditional component of Nickel’s proposal. In a nutshell, his account has it that ‘Tigers are striped’ is true iff, for tigers, there is a way of being normal with respect to fur-pattern such that all tigers that are normal that way are striped. I begin by explaining what characterizing sentences are and distinguish several readings that are available for sentences with bare plurals in subject position. I then introduce Nickel’s account and discuss some of its predictions which, in my view, seem highly problematic. Moreover, I argue that Nickel’s principle of Homogeneity does not go together well with his proposed truth-conditions, and that his truth-conditional account violates a plausible principle about the logic of generics, a principle I call generic non-contradiction. (shrink)

Thomas Henry Huxley and Charles Darwin discovered in 1857 that they had a fundamental disagreement about biological classification. Darwin believed that the natural system should express genealogy while Huxley insisted that classification must stand on its own basis, independent of evolution. Darwin used human races as a model for his view. This private and long-forgotten dispute exposes important divisions within Victorian biology. Huxley, trained in physiology and anatomy, was a professional biologist while Darwin was a gentleman naturalist. Huxley agreed with (...) John Stuart Mill's rejection of William Whewell's sympathy for Linnaeus. The naturalists William Sharp Macleay, Hugh Strickland, and George Waterhouse worked to distinguish two kinds of relationship, affinity and analogy. Darwin believed that his theory could explain the difference. Richard Owen introduced the distinction between homology and analogy to anatomists, but the word homology did not enter Darwin's vocabulary until 1848, when he used the morphological concept of archetype in his work on Cirripedia. Huxley dropped the word archetype when Richard Owen linked it to Plato's ideal forms, replacing it with common plan. When Darwin wrote in the Origin of Species that the word plan gives no explanation, he may have had Huxley in mind. Darwin's preposterous story in the Origin about a bear giving birth to a kangaroo, which he dropped in the second edition, was in fact aimed at Huxley. (shrink)

The influence of Tocqueville in Australian cultural criticism is powerful, not least in the concern with the question of egalitarian democracy and its propensity to breed mediocrity. This article traces European criticism of Australia as the antipodes or other of Europe through the 19th century, ending with D. H. Lawrence's Kangaroo. It tracks the effect of the mediocrity thesis in local criticism, through Hancock and Horne to the work of Paul Kelly in The End of Certainty. How should we live? (...) The argument is posited that Australia is a kind of alternative modernity or civilization which can still be exemplary; a little mediocrity goes a long way, in a world obsessed with the spirit of inner restlessness prescribed by the endless pursuit of the project of rational mastery. (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN INTENTION & ATTENTION thread: Jeremy Fernando, Sitting in the Dock of the bay, watching... * R.H. Jackson, Reading Eyes * Gina Rae Foster, Nyctoleptic Nomadism: The Drift/Swerve of Knowing * Bronwyn Lay, Driftwood * Patricia Reed, Sentences on Drifitng * David Prater, drift: a way * * * * * Australia, Summer, 2012. …. essential humanity exists, and runs its course, within a system whose first principle is the preservation of balance. And arching over it all, is the logos of The Dreaming. How shall we state this when we fully understand it I do not know, but I should think we are more likely to ennoble it than not. Equilibrium ennobled is abidingness.” 1 On return to birthplace I write. Caught between jetlag and surprise, a relentless sun cracks my skin. Upright words fall under cockatoo roars. The attempt to settle, to be attentive, is shaken. Some kind of Dreaming surrounds and elements intrude without consent. Homeless at home. Exhausted, I fight sleep’s hard currents. Their victory would confuse the body clock, so the in-between wins. Half-there — half-awake — here in this place — I am driftwood. Driftwood: wood floating in or washed ashore by a body of water. A severed limb set adrift from the birthing body. Tossed from home it’s cast into processes of wind, water, sand, bacteria, decay and movement. Driftwood is orphaned members at the mercy and agency of weather, currents, submersion, and being thrown into dry world. Driftwood — singular plural. White man got no dreaming. Him go ‘nother way. White man, him go different Him got road belong himself. 2 photo: Bronwyn Lay The old man comes from the northern rivers. A while ago, he could no longer pay attention to wage slavery, so retreated north to be with dead redgum that lay abandoned in dry riverbeds. Derived from driftwood peoples tossed here by the sea, he followed the fragile river veins of his birth. He walked along water bodies and through country’s lungs. Some kind of displaced ancestral song compelled his leathered hands to pick up centuries old driftwood from flood plains. It emerged from under muddy creeks, was flung up by salt soaked coves, pushed underground by cracks in the claypan and lay embedded in mud and salinized soil. Smoothed and grooved in equal measure, the branches were marked by an organic alphabet that preceded him. As he held the wood, he touched decomposing circles that started with a blast and never ceased writing into abandoned flesh. When the ute was full the old man returned home having been away with the stuff that ‘growed him up’. His shed filled with red sawdust and the sound of tools at labour. His hands sculptured driftwood. History carved into itinerant skin. I sit opposite the old man. His body no longer holds the repetition of carpentry. He can no longer gift driftwood its detail. Outside redgum bits lie scattered around the fence line and beside the dam. He crouches over an unreliable computer researching the massacres of indigenous peoples that occurred along the same river veins that ‘growed him up’ long ago. Staring into the remnants of frontier resistance that he and I inherit, his eyes nurture fire. He discovers severed limbs and the slicing of tribes. In the ashes of sentences he sifts the lies that smoulder into our histories. In the 30’s the anthropologist Stanner said that due to certain factors — lack of change and isolation — the ideal and real come very close together in indigenous Dreaming. They are a people who were able to defeat history. 3 “If the Ideal and the Real drift too far away from one another (as they did at the end of the middle ages and seem increasingly to do this century) men face some difficult options. They have to change their way of life, or their philosophy, or both, or live unhappily somewhere in-between.” 4 Stanner says Indigenous Dreaming is blackfella thinking. 5 Dreamtime is not ethereal, not utopic, or otherworldly. It’s fused with the real and it’s not mine. I might never understand, but it’s the substance of my home. This here place ‘growed me up’. Is driftwood the unhappy in-between? Is it a radical itinerant written upon by currents? Where are we? The settler restless? photo: Alison Pouliot I return to the bush late one night, tired from high talk in city cafes, to find the old man at his computer. He’s either researching his white farming ancestors, or tracing unrecorded massacres of blackfellas. I laugh, “You know Dad, if you were indigenous you might go out by the dam and sing up your ancestors rather than try find them on a screen.” He peers over his glasses. His stare delivers an ancestral scold. He’s white man. Of course he archives. This is our way. One may see that, like all men, he is a metaphysician in being able to transcend himself. With the metaphysician goes a mood and spirit, which I can only call a mood or spirit of assent, neither despair nor resignation, optimism not pessimism, quietism nor indifference. The mood, and the outlook beneath it, make him hopelessly out of place in a world in which the renaissance has triumphed only to be perverted, and in which the products of secular humanism, rationalism and science challenge their own hopes, indeed their beginnings.” 6 The clinamen sometimes comes abstract — the rarefied swerve of possibility. But in the place we gather &mdash where this text has landed — in the heart of settler colony denial — the clinamen reminds of familiar violence and goes maximum. The earth’s swerve. Topography’s tip. Physics gone violent. Here, drift is initiated by the tear of flesh, scurvy voyages, frontier blood and the deracination from belonging. Here, war precedes drift. We all got tossed. Here. Pay attention. The country has its own gaze. ‘Lest we forget’. The seasonal turn on aborescent substances starts with a fall, an upwards rupture, a drop, a cut, a storm, a violence, a loss, forced migration, refugees, agricultural imperialism, settler wheat and poisoned rations. Pay attention to aftermath debris. Don’t drift too far from the real. History hasn’t settled into the water. It still tosses limbs back and forth. Surrounded by the backdrop of Dreaming country the old man archives and dreams. Both ways of settling into the real. But lest we forget, time, in this place, has no textual tick — tock. Our bodies know this, even though we persist with shipwreck illusions. It’s difficult being here. Here. Pay inattention. I walk through eucalyptus, over dried out clay pans and under kookaburras. It’s been two years in-between. This time country speaks strong underfoot. Forget books, forget texts, forget other lands and times, beginning and end. Be here. All falls raw. Leaves drop and refuse to compost. Bark untethers quick. Light denudes worlds. The heated horizon melts monoliths. It’s enough to make Cartesians shiver. Awake. Refuse the temptation to run. Have enough courage to drift into here. Love with a gum tree. Stand with her whole and dissolving. She moves light between our limbs, tossing them to wind. She — the original romance — is the dream that dares touch flesh and reaches over nightmares with elemental desire. I gaze and lose me. There’s no distance. The land that ‘growed me up’ speaks with symbiotic breath. There’s no division, no separation, no other. The gum is plastic arborescence. You be my body for me, always were. …..but I wake to driftwood histories and recall slaughters. Drifted, wicked fellow citizen — the other is someone else’s blind sleep. Betrayal maintains the other as mine. Archives reveal this place doesn’t belong to me. Body articulates that it became here. Gumtree cares not………her arms take me in anyway. “Like all men he is a philosopher in being able to use his power of abstract reason. His genius, his metier, and in some sense — his fate is that because of endowment and circumstance this power has channelled itself mainly into one activity, making sense out of social relations among men living together.” 7 The old man excavates seven generations of settler ancestors. They’re an ordinary lot with written-upon skin. He records genocides that occurred alongside his peoples fertility. Bodies rise from riverbeds like sovereign sacrifices. It hurts. It disrupts. He labours at the past with gestures that might go unnoticed in a country suffocated by rich amnesia. Inside walls, he seems attentive to historical details. Outside he seems inattentive to time, lost to us and embedded in a family of active matter — the bush. His driftwood skin appears around my eyes - grooves of experience, the rush of cruel sun, the push of blind winds, and the love of everything. The sovereign’s reluctant children are thrown here by, with and through blood, but country gets in and sculpts us here. photo: Chris Corrigan “But his abstractions do not put him at war with himself.” 8 The kangaroo family appears at dusk. When the sun is soft I follow the old man into the back paddock. Children skip behind us. In-between generations, I step into the old man’s driftwood leanings. My feet find traces of his understanding – the archivist that reads trees. Here, on home dirt, inattention and attention collapse as we wander into where we are. The roo family gaze at us. Through the grass the old man’s wooden finger articulates kin’s details. He points to the head male, the mother holding a joey in pouch and the young warriors side by side. My children, quieter than ever, meet the laser - eyed silence of another family. In half-light Dad, me, and the kids mirror the kangaroo constellation and stand gentle together. At the bushblock’s limit we encounter ancestral desires. White peoples are subject to driftwood histories. We’re severed limbs attempting to fuse here now, with what was, only to discover our skin becomes racked and embedded with the weather. Into the shelter and fissures of this difficult and ambiguous inheritance, I fall into dream light until balance saturates. Light breaks when the kangaroos move. They bounce someplace else without effort or impact. We turn and tread through the dark towards home. It’s time to sleep. Driftwood skin covers the country. Dreaming is still. photo: Bronwyn Lay NOTES W.E.H. Stanner, The Dreaming and Other Essays , (Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2009), 72. Ibid., 56. Stanner is recalling one intelligent old man who said to him, “with a cadence almost as though he had been speaking in verse.” Ibid., 60. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 59.  . 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The orientation and leadership of the revolutionary “renewal of the German mind,” whose witnesses and participants we are, point in two directions. On, after seizing power, would like to talk the mind into helping out with internal development and promises it a golden age if it joins up; indeed it even offers it the prospect of a certain voice in decision making. The other direction, on the contrary, attests its mistrust of the intellect by declaring that the revolutionary process will (...) continue indefinitely, and has room for the mind in its task; or it might also assure the intellect that it is not needed at all because a new mind has already turned up, and that the old one might as well jump into the fire and either burn to ashes or purify itself into its elements. What has happened up to the moment these words are being written leaves no doubt that the second direction is on the march, the first its musical accompaniment. Nor can it be otherwise than that a Movement [National Socialism] that has manifested itself so powerfully demands above all that the intellect complete assimilate and subordinate itself to the Movement. But then again, it is possible that the intellect cannot do this without renouncing itself. Surely there must be some sort of boundary here, since nothing happens that is not contingent; so it is a good test for the intellect that today it has everywhere been saddled with a kind of kangaroo-court mentality that judges it not according to its own laws, but according to the law of the Movement. Robert Musil made a decisive contribution to twentieth-century European literature. Among his works available in English are Young Törless, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, and The Man Without Qualities. Burton Pike is professor of comparative literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. With Sophie Wilkins, he has edited and translated a new edition of Musil’s novel The Man without Qualities, available in 199. He is the author of Robert Musil: An Introduction to His Work and The Image of the City in Modern Literature . David S. Luft teaches modern European intellectual history at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture, 1880-1912. (shrink)

This short essay attempts to bring D.H. Lawrence and Alexis de Tocqueville into the same field of vision via a comparative assessment of the former's 1922 novel entitled 'Kangaroo' and the latter's classic study of the politics of the New World, 'Democracy in America.' It argues that as 'Good Europeans' the two writers were seeking both to learn from, as well as to teach about the meaning of modern civilization's transition to Democracy via the example provided by a specific national (...) experiment 'in the field' - in Tocqueville's case as a result of his visit to America in the 1830's and in Lawrence's case as a result of his stay in Australia in the 1920's. The suggestion is that what Tocqueville's 'Democracy' is to America, so too Lawrence's 'Kangaroo'' is to Australia, which is to say that it is a book intended as a careful portrait of an 'actual democracy' (to use Lord Bryce's phrase) which is of universal significance in terms of the future of all societies moving in the direction of liberal freedom and democratic equality. In other words, the essay assumes that Lawrence's 'Kangaroo' may be taken as an 'update' of Tocqueville's classic study of democracy from almost a century before, even as Lord Bryce's 'The American Commonwealth' has always been so taken since its emergence about half way between the comparable studies of the 19th Century French 'sociologist' on the one hand and the 20th Century English novelist and the other. (shrink)

What are counterfactuals and what is their point? In many cases, none at all. It may be true that if kangaroos didn't have tails, they would fall over, but they do have tails and if they didn't they wouldn't be kangaroos (or would they?). This is the sort of thing that can give counterfactuals a bad name, as inhabitants of a La La Land of the mind. On the other hand, counterfactuals do useful service across a broad range (...) of disciplines in both the sciences and the humanities, including philosophy, history, cosmology, biology, cognitive psychology, jurisprudence, economics, art history, literary theory. They are also richly, albeit sometimes treacherously, present in the everyday human realm of how our lives are both imagined and lived: in the 'crossroads' scenario of decision-making, the place of regret in retrospective assessments of paths taken and not taken, and, at the outer limit, as the wish not to have been born. Christopher Prendergast take us on a dizzying exploratory journey through some of these intellectual and human landscapes, mobilizing a wide range of reference from antiquity to the present, and sustained by the belief that, whether as help or hindrance, and with many variations across cultures, counterfactual thinking and imagining are fundamental to what it is to be human. (shrink)

On their voyage of discovery to Australia a group of Captain Cook's sailors captured a young kangaroo and brought the strange creature back on board their ship. No one knew what it was, so some men were sent ashore to ask the natives. When the sailors returned they told their mates, ‘It's a kangaroo.’ Many years later it was discovered that when the aborigines said ‘kangaroo’ they were not in fact naming the animal, but replying to their questioners, ‘What did (...) you say?’1. (shrink)

Education and the collective construction of knowledge. An overview -- Teaching modality : a corpus analysis of the use of must by university Spanish learners of English -- Motivation and anxiety towards mathematical learning in primary education -- Criteria for the sequencing of contemporary music in education -- Sustainability training evaluation of Spanish university students -- Art as a means of fostering peace, communication and freedom of expression from childhood -- Culturemes vs. humoremes as translation problems in practice exemplified in (...) the German Cabaret of Marc-Uwe Kling and his Kangaroo stories -- Is there homogeneity among business students regarding the level of concern towards the sustainable development goals? A cluster analysis -- Use trends and methodological pertinence of Delphi within educational research in IberoAmerica : a systematic review in Scopus -- Gamification in the improvement of speaking competences in the English as a foreign language classroom : a case study -- Quality management in the Spanish university : an analysis of the success and performance rates in communication degree programs -- Teacher stories from the future : technology for the language and literature classroom. (shrink)

The world I grew up in believed that change and development in life are part of a continuous process of cause and effect, minutely and patiently sustained throughout the millenniums. With the exception of the initial act of creation ..., the evolution of life on earth was considered to be a slow, steady and ultimately demonstrable process. No sooner did I begin to read history, however, than I began to have my doubts. Human society and living beings, it seemed to (...) me, ought to be excluded from so calm and rational a view. The whole of human development, far from having been a product of steady evolution, seemed subject to only partially explicable and almost invariably violent mutations. Entire cultures and groups of individuals appeared imprisoned for centuries in a static shape which they endured with long-suffering indifference, and then suddenly, for no demonstrable cause, became susceptible to drastic changes and wild surges of development. It was as if the movement of life throughout the ages was not a Darwinian caterpillar but a startled kangaroo, going out towards the future in a series of unpredictable hops, stops, skips and bounds. Indeed, when I came to study physics I had a feeling that the modern concept of energy could perhaps throw more light on the process than any of the more conventional approaches to the subject. It seemed that species, society and individuals behaved more like thunder-clouds than scrubbed, neatly clothed and well-behaved children of reason. Throughout the ages life appeared to build up great invisible charges, like clouds and earth of electricity, until suddenly in a sultry hour the spirit moved, the wind rose, a drop of rain fell acid in the dust, fire flared in the nerve, and drums rolled to produce what we call thunder and lightening in the heavens and chance and change in human society and personality.LAURENS VAN DER POST, The Lost World of the Kalahari. (shrink)

Truthmaker theory is the branch of metaphysics that explores the relationships between what is true and what exists. Discussions of truthmakers and truthmaking typically start with the idea that truth depends on being, and not vice versa. For example, if the sentence ‘Kangaroos live in Australia’ is true, then there are kangaroos living in Australia. And if there are kangaroos living in Australia, then the sentence ‘Kangaroos live in Australia’ is true. But we can ask whether (...) the sentence is true because of the way the world is, or whether the world is the way it is because the sentence is true. Truthmaker theorists make the former claim that the sentence is true because of what exists in the world; it is not the case that the world is the way it is because of which sentences are true. Truthmaker theorists use this fundamental idea as a starting point for clarifying the nature of truth and its relationship to ontology, and to advance various views in metaphysics concerning the nature of the past and future, counterfactual conditionals, modality, and many others. Because truthmaker theorists end up with differing views concerning all these matters, what ultimately unites them is not any single thesis but rather a commitment to thinking that the idea of truthmaking is a useful one for pursuing metaphysical inquiry. Others might conceive of ‘truthmaker theory’ more strictly (such as by requiring a commitment to all truths having truthmakers, or all truthmakers being of a particular ontological variety), though defining the enterprise in this way will inevitably fail to capture all those earnestly pursuing investigation into truthmaking. (shrink)