The idea of conceptual schemes is one of the most influential and widely used notions in contemporary philosophy. Within the analytic tradition the idea occupies a fundamental position in positivist views as well as in replacing them post-positivist conceptions. Outside the analytic tradition a similar idea is of key importance in structuralist and post-structuralist theories. Despite the broad applicability of the notion of a conceptual scheme, its precise sense is far from being evident in the context of various philosophical trends. (...) Moreover, the well-known American philosopher Donald Davidson's position is that any clear, non-metaphorical meaning cannot be as - cribed to that notion at all – the statement which he tried to substantiate in his famous paper On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme published in 1974.The present paper is aimed, firstly, at outlining the historico-philosophical evolution of the idea of conceptual scheme, concentrating on its development in logical positivism and post-positivist theories of such philosophers as Quine, Sellars, Kuhn, et al., and, secondly, at examining Davidson's criticism of both the idea and the position of conceptual relativism which was raised on its ground, revealing the assumptions which that criticism relies on and which concern relations between language and thought, truth and translation, as well as the role of the scheme-content dualism for empiricism and the place of extensionalism in semantics, etc. Our purpose, on the one hand, is to evaluate the historico-philosophical significance of Davidson's criticism; on the other hand, it is to show that his critical arguments remain to be actual since they shed a new light on the idea of conceptual schemes and allow us to determine their place in tackling the fundamental philosophical question of a relation between reality, thought and language. (shrink)

The author critiques one of the arguments commonly used by opponents of scientific realism—namely, the thesis that scientific theories are underdetermined by empirical data.

In this article, we examine citizenship inequalities in paid reproductive labor. Through an analysis of elder care in Los Angeles, California, based on interviews with Filipina home care agency workers and owners, we delineate citizen divisions made up of two interlocking dimensions. The longstanding U.S. welfare state abdication of responsibility for elder care for its citizens generates a racialized, gendered citizenship division that facilitates another citizenship division between women of color. The outsourcing of elder care by the government to the (...) private sector including small business in the ethnic economy allows Filipina immigrants with legal citizenship to become middle-women minorities who hire undocumented Filipinas to provide care for white, middle-class, older adult women and their families. Through this new social organization of reproductive labor, responsibility is directed away from the state and generating tensions between women of color with different legal statuses. Our findings show how racialized, gendered inequalities are reinforced through this new social organization of reproductive labor but also demonstrate potential for undermining intersecting inequalities. (shrink)

For some, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is the definitive example of the aesthete's outlook with its combination of the narrator's sordid actions and his iridescent wordplay—not to mention Nabokov's own endorsement of the novel as a locus for "aesthetic bliss."1 In recent years, criticism of Lolita has challenged the aesthete's amoral perspective by suggesting that the work's aesthetic qualities are inextricably coupled with moral questions.2 Leona Toker, Colin McGinn, and Richard Rorty are three notable critics who suggest, in different (...) ways, that Lolita is a normative text that can educate its readers; that it can teach virtue.In many ways, this is a boldly contrarian position, defying satirical elements in the text .. (shrink)

From the mediator, a veritable artificial sun, descends a mysterious ray which makes the object shine with a false brilliance. There would be no illusion if Don Quixote were not imitating Amadis. Emma Bovary would not have taken Rudolph for a Prince Charming had she not been imitating romantic heroines.And Humbert Humbert would not have chosen Lolita for a lover had he not been imitating romantic heroes. Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, probably due to its controversial subject, is regularly (...) analyzed as a piece of “technical virtuosity and hilarity.”2 In this essay, I will attempt to show how the novel unfolds with René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. This approach will highlight how the plot, style, and hero of... (shrink)

Aristotle claims that narrative can depict virtue and vice in particular cases, and that literature's moral meanings are not subject to philosophical paraphrase. He distrusts generalization in ethics, asserting that valid judgments rest on the perception of particulars. But this position is itself an unprovable generalization. If philosophy cannot prove the superiority of narrative over moral theory, perhaps literature can show it. In "Lolita", Nabokov reveals the moral hazards of theory while depicting one man's profound evil. Thus "Lolita" (...) is an illuminating example of pure Aristotelian fiction that serves a moral function without recourse to theory. (shrink)

In attempting to answer whether Nabokov’s Lolita can be described as an unethical novel, the author ponders on what basis one could make such a determination. At (1) the author analyzes the merited-response argument offered by Gaut (and previously Hume and Carroll), which provides a conceptual framework for the resolution of the controversy surrounding Lolita. Based on this analysis, (2) the author decides what constitutes the novel’s ethical foundation and what (3) prescriptions and (4) responses can follow from (...) it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Eichmann, Empathy, and LolitaLeland de la DurantayeISometime in late 1960 or early 1961 Adolf Eichmann, jailed and awaiting trial in Jerusalem, was given by his guard a copy of Vladimir Nabokov's recently published Lolita, as Hannah Arendt puts it, "for relaxation." After two days Eichmann returned it, visibly indignant: "Quite an unwholesome book"—Das ist aber ein sehr unerfreuliches Buch—he told his guard. 1 Though we are not privy (...) to, and nor does Arendt speculate upon this officer's intentions, it is difficult to imagine that they were limited to procuring Eichmann a little "relaxation." The tale of a homicidal madman writing under observation and awaiting a trial that will consign him either to death or prolonged imprisonment—which fate spares him by felling him with a heart attack—could hardly have been very relaxing for someone at that moment writing his own memoirs and himself awaiting a trial with similar stakes.We might imagine other intentions on the part of Eichmann's guard. Could the gesture have been ironic? Or was it motivated by a dark curiosity—something of the order of an experiment? The sulphurous halo of Nabokov's book was still burning brightly in the popular consciousness of 1960. 2 Might Eichmann's guard have seen Lolita as a sort of litmus test for radical evil, and wanted to see whether the real-life villain—he who impassively organized the transport towards certain death of countless innocents—would coldly, even gleefully, approve the various and vile machinations of Nabokov's creation?This is all only speculation. In Arendt's account, she congratulates Eichmann for his indignation and moves on to other matters. In any event, given Eichmann's radical conventionality one could hardly imagine him liking—or even very well understanding—much of the book. As [End Page 311] Eichmann himself avowed, during his adult life he had read only two books, one of them being Theodor Herzl's The Jewish State. But whatever the motivations of Eichmann's guard, whatever Eichmann's degree of comprehension, and whatever congratulations Eichmann might have deserved for his disgust, the incident raises a question for the study of Nabokov's finest work which has yet to be answered.IIBefore turning to this question, let us remain with Arendt and her notorious reader for a moment. Arendt notes elsewhere that it appeared to her that Eichmann was nearly "aphasic." She comments that, "when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché," and that, "his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else." Arendt offers here nothing less than a definition of thought itself. "To think" is glossed ("... namely") by Arendt as, "to think from the standpoint of someone else." Though as a definition of thought, it is hardly impressive, it nevertheless expresses something essential about Arendt's conception of thought and thinking. (3) In her view, thought is to be placed under the sign of intellectual empathy, under the sign of living in the strangeness and wonder of another's world. (Though Arendt does not mention the connection, both the language she wrote Eichmann in—English—and her native one—German—make special provision for such a sense, as he or she who is "thoughtless" is not her or she who is incapable of some form of cognition or calculation, as "thoughtless" people can indeed be very clever and very clever people have been capable of great "thoughtlessness.")Thought is thus a communal, not individualistic, thing. 4 This point is important as, though Adolf Eichmann was unlikely to have seen much of himself in the irreverent and urbane genius of Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, nor in the latter's strange eloquence, Eichmann the man and Humbert the character of the first part of the novel (to leave the repenting Humbert of the book's last pages out for the moment), share an essential trait. What Eichmann the man shares with Nabokov's literary creation is the inability or unwillingness "to think from the standpoint of somebody else." The evil they share is the... (shrink)

THE TITLE OF THIS ESSAY, "READING MORE THAN LOLITA IN TEHRAN," IS meant to invoke Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, a memoir documenting how Western literary classics have the ability to change and improve the lives of people living under theocratic rule. In 1995, after resigning from her job as a professor at a university in Tehran, Nafisi invited seven of her best women students to attend a weekly study of Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, (...) and other authors she believed would provide the women with examples of how to successfully assert their autonomy despite great odds. (shrink)

Given the popularity and success of the Hindu-Right in India's electoral politics today, how may one study ostensibly 'Western' concepts and ideas, such as the secular and its family of cognates, like secularism, secularisation and secularity in non-Western societies without assuming them simply as derivative, or colonial legacies or contrast cases of Western societies? While recognizing that the dominant language of political modernity of Western societies is not easily translatable in non-Western societies, The Secular Imaginary elaborates upon an intellectual history (...) of secularity in modern India by focusing on the two most influential political leaders – M.K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. It is an intellectual history of both idea(s) and intellectuals, which sheds light on Indian narratives of secularity – the Gandhian sarva dharma samabhava, Nehruvian secularism, and unity in diversity. It revisits this dominant narrative of secularity of the twentieth century that influenced and shaped the imagination of the modern nation-state. (shrink)

Considerando que muitos livros desenvolvem nossa capacidade de identificação imaginativa e de disposição para evitar a crueldade, aproveitamos as sugestões de Richard Rorty e utilizamos o romance Lolita, de Vladimir Nabokov, como cenário para a redescrição da crueldade. Cabendo prontamente nos critérios liberais rortyanos de combate à crueldade, esse romance nos possibilita perceber os efeitos que as nossas próprias idiossincrasias privadas podem ter sobre a vida de outras pessoas. Dono de metáforas fortes, vívidas, Lolita nos permite abordar o (...) que chamamos de “a pequena crueldade”, a crueldade que um indivíduo pode infligir a outro sem sequer notar que é cruel. (shrink)

"Confessions of a Frigid Man: A Philosopher’s Journey into the Hidden Layers of Men’s Sexuality" is the translation of a Japanese 2005 bestseller, "Kanjinai Otoko." Soon after the publication, this book stirred controversy over the nature of male sexuality, male “frigidity,” and its connection to the “Lolita complex.” Today, this work is considered a classic in Japanese men’s studies. The most striking feature of this book is that it was written from the author’s first-person perspective. The author is a (...) professor who teaches philosophy and ethics at a university in Japan, and in this book he talks about his own sexual fetishism, his feeling of emptiness after ejaculation, and his huge obsession with young girls and their developing female bodies. He undertakes a philosophical investigation of how and why sexuality took such a form within a person who had grown up as a “normal,” heterosexual man. This may be the first case in which a philosopher delves deep into his own sexuality and poses an ambitious hypothesis about the formation of male “frigid” sexuality, which might actually be shared by many “normal” men in our society in a hidden way. Reading this book, female readers will come to know, for the first time, some hidden aspects of male sexuality which men have skillfully submerged in a deep layer of their psyches. (shrink)

Hind Swaraj is Mahatma Gandhi's fundamental work. Not only is it key to understanding his life and thoughts, but also the politics of South Asia in the first half of the twentieth century. Celebrating 100 years since Hind Swaraj was first published in a newspaper, this centenary edition includes a new Preface and Editor's Introduction, as well as a new chapter on 'Gandhi and the 'Four Canonical Aims of Life''. The volume presents a critical edition of the 1910 text of (...) Hind Swaraj, fully annotated and including Gandhi's own Preface and Foreword (not found in other editions). Anthony J. Parel sets the work in its historical and political contexts and analyses the significance of Gandhi's experiences in England and South Africa. The second part of the volume contains some of Gandhi's other writings, including his correspondence with Tolstoy and Nehru. (shrink)

Chapter 14. Andrea Timár engages with literary representations of the experience of perpetrators of dehumanization. Her chapter focuses on perpetrators of dehumanization who do not violate laws of their society (i.e., they are not criminals) but exemplify what Simona Forti, inspired by Hannah Arendt, calls “the normality of evil.” Through the parallel examples of Dezső Kosztolányi’s Anna Édes (1926) and Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing (1950), Timár first explores a possible clash between criminals and perpetrators of dehumanization, showing literature’s (...) exceptional ability to reveal the gap between ethics and law. Second, she examines novels focalized through perpetrators and the difficult narrative empathy they provoke, arguing that only the critical reading of these novels can make one engage with the potential perpetrator in oneself. As case studies, Timár examines Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which may potentially turn its reader into an accomplice in the process of dehumanization, and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), which puts on critical display the dehumanizing potentials of both aesthetic representation and sympathy as imaginative violence. Third, she reads Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones [Les Bienveillantes, 2006], which can make the reader question, through the polyphony of the voice of its protagonist, the notions of narrative voice and readerly empathy, only to reveal that the difficulty involved in empathizing with perpetrator characters lies not so much in the characters’ being perpetrators, but rather in their being literary characters. Eventually, Timár briefly touches upon the problem of the aesthetic and the comic via Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) to ask whether one can avoid some necessarily dehumanizing aspects of humor. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity by Suparno BanerjeeBarnita BagchiSuparno Banerjee. Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2020. xiii + 256 pp. E-book, ISBN 9781786836670.Suparno Banerjee’s monograph examines science fiction (henceforth SF) from India, a country that has a rich and fascinating tradition of SF. This is a book that will be of interest and value to scholars and students in (...) higher education of utopia, dystopia, and speculative fiction, and to readers across disciplines interested in SF as a mode. It is quite clear today that Darko Suvin’s canonical definition of SF as cognitive estrangement, an interplay between the familiar and the strange, and its emphasis on the novum that is created in SF, has been enriched with further attention to context, including postcolonial contexts. Whose familiarity in cognition are we speaking about, and what happens when contexts are not necessarily hegemonic Anglo-American or Western ones? Indeed, even in Western contexts, science is not a given, but an element that always has political, historical, and ideological overtones. The novum, too, as with the term utopia, is moored in the contexts of the text.Banerjee’s book is one among several excellent monographs on Indian SF that have been published in the 2020s: Sami Ahmad Khan’s Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction (2021) and Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s Final Frontiers: Science Fiction and Techno-Science in Non-Aligned India (2020) come to mind. Khan adopts a refreshing fan’s guide to Indian SF register in his monograph, discussing mythology, materiality, ideology, and technology, and he coins the abbreviation TransMIT to capture his approach. Mukherjee’s book examines how Indian SF syncs with or questions the technological and scientific paradigms of India under Nehru and the Non-Aligned Movement; arguing that Indian SF needs to be seen as semiperipheral, the book also applies concepts from energy humanities [End Page 586] to Indian SF in an arresting way. Suparno Banerjee’s monograph is a solidly grounded work in its clearly explained choice of corpus, and a methodology that elicits particularly generative insights in a number of areas, including the epistemological status of science in Indian SF, the importance of SF written in bhasha or non-English Indian languages, the interplay between past and future in Indian SF, analysis of how Indian SF imaginatively represents the Other, and attention to Indian women writers of SF.Banerjee offers a lucid and useful chronology of Indian SF in four historical periods: 1835–1905, 1905–47, 1947–95, and 1995–2019. The period from 1835 to 1905 offers the first specimens of Indian SF, primarily in the form of future histories that question colonialism, in the utopian mode, and adventure tales and stories with scientific and technological elements. The establishment of a British education system, starting in the 1820s, gave an impetus to the birth of Indian SF. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” was published in 1905, a year that heralds the second period lasting until Indian independence. In this period, SF starts appearing not just in the English, Bengali, and Hindi languages, as in the first period, but also in a number of other Indian languages, such as Assamese, Marathi, and Tamil. Children’s and youth magazines develop from the 1920s, spaces where science writing and SF both appear. Nationalist, anticolonial stances emerge, challenging western hegemony, in the 1940s. In the early post-Independence period, the nationalistic elements become even stronger, and SF interacts quite strongly with older forms of fantastic writing such as myths, fairytales, and ghost stories. This third period, Banerjee argues, is the golden age of bhasha SF. From the 1990s English-language SF again becomes very prominent in India and its diaspora, though SF in bhashas continues to flourish.Banerjee examines fiction not just from post-Independence India, but also from colonial British India, and diasporic Indian writing. SF written primarily in Bengali, English, Hindi, and Marathi is examined and, when possible, the book also brings into its ambit of analysis SF written in the languages Assamese, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada. Reflexivity about the corpus of... (shrink)

McGinn's latest brings together moral philosophy and literary analysis in a way that illuminates both. Setting out to enrich the domain of moral reflection by showing the value of literary texts as sources of moral illumination, McGinn starts by setting out an uncompromisingly realist ethical theory, arguing that morality is an area of objective truth and genuine knowledge. He goes on to address such subjects as the nature of goodness, evil character, and the meaning of monstrosity in the context of (...) an aesthetic theory of virtue, which maintains that goodness of character is the same thing as beauty of soul. Looking at such literary works as Billy Budd, Lolita, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Frankenstein, as well as examples from film and painting, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction is an original and compelling book by a leading philosopher who is also a critic and novelist. (shrink)

Born in poverty in India, Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) became a leading spiritual and philosophical thinker whose ideas continue to influence us today. George Bernard Shaw declared that he was the most beautiful human being he had ever seen and Aldous Huxley was one of his close friends. Whether debating politics with Nehru, discussing theories with Rupert Sheldrake and Iris Murdoch, or challenging his students not to take his words at face value, Krishnamurti engaged fully with every aspect of life. (...) He is regarded by many modern religious figures as a great teacher, an extraordinary individual with revolutionary insights; Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra are all indebted to his writings. Freedom from the Known is one of Krishnamurti's most accessible works. Here, he reveals how we can free ourselves radically and immediately from the tyranny of the expected. By changing ourselves, we can alter the structure of society and our relationships. The vital need for change and the recognition of its very possibility form an essential part of this important book's message. (shrink)

Troubling Reason: Notes from Underground Revisited -- Love, Attention and Teaching: The Brothers Karamazov -- Passion as a Quality of Education: The Death of Ivan Ilyich -- Education, Rationality and the Meaning of Life: Tolstoy's Confession -- Pedagogy of the Gaze: An Educational Reading of Lolita -- Education Arrayed in Time: Nabokov and the Problem of Time and Space -- Conclusion: Literature, Philosophy and Education.

This long-awaited second volume of Russell's best letters reveals the inner workings of a philosophical genius and an impassioned campaigner for peace and social reform. The letters, only three of which have been published before, cover most of Russell's adult life, a period in which he wrote over thirty books, including his famous History of Western Philosophy . Richly illustrated with photographs from Russell's life, the collection includes letters to Ho Chi Minh, Tito, Jawaharlal Nehru and Albert Einstein.