This paper reports the social and medical characteristics of women resident in Aberdeen city who were sterilized in 195162 and 197152 women were offered sterilization, the majority being lower social class mothers with five or more children who were sterilized concurrently with abortion; the small number of upper social class women had one or two children and were sterilized for medical or obstetric reasons. By 196172, women themselves requested sterilization, the two–three child family was the norm, the proportion of upper (...) social class women continued to increase, and interval sterilization was gaining ground. (shrink)

This article is part of a larger project that explores how to channel people’s passion for popular arts into legal social justice by reconceiving law as a kind of poetry and justice as dance, and exploring different possible relationships between said legal poetry and dancing justice. I begin by rehearsing my previous new conception of social justice as organismic empowerment, and my interpretive method of dancing-with. I then apply this method to the following four “ethico-political choreographies of justice”: the choral (...) dance of souls qua winged chariot-teams, a dancingly beautiful friendship with the community, a tightrope-dance of the cool, and humans dancingly reimagined as positioned actors in fluidly moving groups. I then synthesize these analyses into “dancing justice,” defined as the dynamic equilibrium sustained by a critical mass of a community’s members comporting themselves like social dancers. (shrink)

In this paper we provide an interpretation of Aristotle's rule for the universal quantifier in Topics Θ 157a34–37 and 160b1–6 in terms of Paul Lorenzen's dialogical logic. This is meant as a contribution to the rehabilitation of the role of dialectic within the Organon. After a review of earlier views of Aristotle on quantification, we argue that this rule is related to the dictum de omni in Prior Analytics A 24b28–29. This would be an indication of the dictum’s origin in (...) the context of dialectical games. One consequence of our approach is a novel explanation of the doctrine of the existential import of the quantifiers in dialectical terms. After a brief survey of Lorenzen's dialogical logic, we offer a set of rules for dialectical games based on previous work by Castelnérac and Marion, to which we add here the rule for the universal quantifier, as interpreted in terms of its counterpart in dialogical logic. We then give textual evidence of the use of that rule in Plato's dialogues, thus showing that Aris... (shrink)

Showcasing American music and music making during the Great Depression, Hard Luck Blues presents more than two hundred photographs created by the New Deal's Farm Security Administration photography program. With an appreciation for the amateur and the local, FSA photographers depicted a range of musicians sharing the regular music of everyday life, from informal songs in migrant work camps, farmers' homes, barn dances, and on street corners to organized performances at church revivals, dance halls, and community festivals. Captured across the (...) nation from the northeast to the southwest, the images document the last generation of musicians who learned to play without the influence of recorded sound, as well as some of the pioneers of Chicago's R & B scene and the first years of amplified instruments. The best visual representation of American roots music performance during the Depression era, Hard Luck Blues features photographs by Jack Delano, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Marion Post Wolcott, and others. Photographer and image researcher Rich Remsberg breathes life into the images by providing contextual details about the persons and events captured, in some cases drawing on interviews with the photographers' subjects. Also included are a foreword by author Nicholas Dawidoff and an afterword by music historian Henry Sapoznik. Published in association with the Library of Congress. (shrink)

En este ensayo, traducido por primera vez al español, Jean-Luc Marion, sin duda el filósofo más importante de la última generación de pensadores franceses, desarrolla una interpretación no ontológica de la demostración de la existencia de Dios de san Anselmo. Con ello, Marion no sólo busca poner en tela de juicio el tratamiento que, desde Kant, se le ha dado a la demostración; antes bien, busca establecer las claves hacia un pensamiento fenomenológico —al margen de la tradición que (...) Heidegger llamó onto-teología—, que anticipan su controversial fenomenología de la “donación”. (shrink)

The legacy of Nisbett and Wilson’s classic article, Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes , is mixed. It is perhaps the most cited article in the recent history of consciousness studies, yet no empirical research program currently exists that continues the work presented in the article. To remedy this, we have introduced an experimental paradigm we call choice blindness [Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikström, S., & Olsson, A. . Failure to detect mismatches between intention (...) and outcome in a simple decision task. Science, 310, 116–119.]. In the choice blindness paradigm participants fail to notice mismatches between their intended choice and the outcome they are presented with, while nevertheless offering introspectively derived reasons for why they chose the way they did. In this article, we use word-frequency and latent semantic analysis to investigate a corpus of introspective reports collected within the choice blindness paradigm. We contrast the introspective reasons given in non-manipulated vs. manipulated trials, but find very few differences between these two groups of reports. (shrink)

"Besides the impact of their content, the clarity and reach of these essays force one to consider foundational questions concerning philosophy and its history."—Richard Watson, Journal of the History of Philosophy.

L’ itinerarium mentis entrepris par Dante, vers le bonheur et à travers Béatrice, entretient un rapport vital avec l’expérience philosophique, comme le montre le lien entre la Vita nova et le Convivio. L’essai de Jean-Luc Marion s’attache à cette continuité, en se concentrant sur le fait que « la voie unique de l’amour » ne se limite pas à indiquer la présence d’une intention unique informant de soi différents amours, mais implique la transformation radicale de l’idée de philosophie, transformation (...) fondée sur l’amitié étroite entre l’amour et la sagesse. Cette union donne vie à un nouveau dynamisme, à un habitus amoureux, ou plutôt à une posture amoureuse dans laquelle la pratique s’impose à la théorie et dans laquelle le sujet se découvre attendu par ce qui formait son but. (shrink)

En este texto Jean-Luc Marion ofrece una lectura crítica de la interpretación derridiana de Dionisio, aclarando su propia posición respecto de la teología mística. A partir de un análisis de cada una de las cuatro objeciones presentadas por Derrida, Marion presenta la tercera vía, la vía de la de-nominación; analiza el estatus de la alabanza y de la plegaria; distingue la mística de la metafísica de la presencia y de la ontoteología; y delinea los rasgos del fenómeno de (...) la revelación. (shrink)

In this interview, Jean-Luc Marion recalls the intellectual world of Paris in 1970s, reflecting on how his engagement with the ubiquitous “death of God” question led to the sketches of God without Being first presented at this 1979 Colloquium, and discusses the criticism it provoked not only from Heideggerians but also from Thomists. He discusses the reception history of phenomenology in France the reasons for the particular power it gained among thinkers of his generation. Finally, he recounts how his (...) work has led from the 1979 Colloquium through the “Theological Turn” and up to his forthcoming D’ ailleurs, la révélation, which he briefly previews here. Marion closes with words on originality, criticism, and the particular challenges of the contemporary world that await philosophical thinking today. (shrink)

A timely new work by one of France’s premier philosophers, A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment offers insight into what “catholic” truly means. In this short, accessible book, Jean-Luc Marion braids the sense of catholic as all-embracing and universal into conversation about what it is to be Catholic in the present moment. A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment tackles complex issues surrounding church-state separation and addresses a larger Catholic audience that transcends national boundaries, social identities, and linguistic (...) differences. Marion insists that Catholic universalism, with its core of communion and community, is not an outmoded worldview, but rather an outlook that has the potential to counter the positivist rationality and nihilism at the core of our current political moment, and can help us address questions surrounding liberalism and religion and what is often presented as tension between “Islam and the West.” As an inviting and sophisticated Catholic take on current political and social realities—realities that are not confined to France alone—A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment is a valuable contribution to a larger conversation. (shrink)

Being is evil not because it is finite but because it is without limits (TO 51). This extraordinary declaration no doubt marks the rather hidden center of a work (dating from 1946–47) that is seminal, in any case essential, because it constitutes, in the same way as the brilliant 1951 article “Is Ontology Fundamental?” one of the irrevocable decisions that helped Levinas to become what he was: the greatest French philosopher since Bergson and also the first phenomenologist who seriously attempted (...) to free himself from his provenance, which is to say, from Heidegger. (shrink)

La question du sujet se trouve, historiquement, toujours rapportée à Descartes : de Kant à Heidegger, par Nietzsche et Husserl, les critiques s’accordent sur cette paternité. Cette tradition ne peut se contester, mais elle ne doit pourtant pas, dans le détail, être admise sans réserves. En effet, Descartes n’a littéralement pas soutenu la thèse d’un ego sujet, ni substance, ni réfléchissant, etc. Ce qui ne signifie pas que ces thèses postérieures ne proviennent pas, en un sens à préciser, de son (...) initiative conceptuelle, mais au moins qu’elles ne lui sont pas identiques et que l’ego cartésien recèle plus de potentialités que ce que l’histoire y a compris.Descartes hors sujetLa questione dello soggetto se trovà relata per la storia della filosfia a Cartesio : Kant e Heidegger, ne meno che Nietzsche e Husserl, sono d’accordo sù questà paternità. Non si contesterà qui questa traditione interpretativa, purtoppo non dobbiamo accerter la senza qualcune riservazione. E un fatto che Descartes, nella litteralità de sui testi, non ha mai sotenuto che il ego sià un soggetto, una sostanzia, neanche ché si pensà per une reflessione, etc. Questo fatto non significà che queste tese non vengonno dell’impostazione cartesiana, mà che al meno non se identifacono con elle et che il ego di Cartesio tiene anché possibilite molte piu ampie che quelle che l’historia a già vista. (shrink)

John Cook Wilson (1849–1915) was Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College, Oxford and the founder of ‘Oxford Realism’, a philosophical movement that flourished at Oxford during the first decades of the 20th century. Although trained as a classicist and a mathematician, his most important contribution was to the theory of knowledge, where he argued that knowledge is factive and not definable in terms of belief, and he criticized ‘hybrid’ and ‘externalist’ accounts. He also argued for direct realism in perception, (...) criticizing both empiricism and idealism, and argued for a moderate nominalist view of universals as being in rebus and only ‘apprehended’ by their particulars. His influence helped swaying Oxford away from idealism and, through figures such as H. A. Prichard, Gilbert Ryle, or J. L. Austin, his ideas were also to some extent at the origin of ‘moral intuitionism’ and ‘ordinary language philosophy’ which defined much of Oxford philosophy until the second half of the twentieth-century. Nevertheless, his name and legacy were all but forgotten for generations after World War II. Still, his views on knowledge are with us today, being in part at work in the writings of philosophers as diverse as John McDowell, Charles Travis, and Timothy Williamson. (shrink)

La raison pour laquelle il y a inadéquation de notre connaissance à la nature des corps extérieurs, mais aussi à celle de notre corps propre ainsi qu'à celle notre esprit, et donc à la nature de notre ego, c'est que nous sommes des êtres finis. Pour Descartes comme pour Spinoza la finitude de notre entendement rend impossible l'adéquation de la connaissance. À la connaissance adéquate, Descartes substitue la connaissance complète : certaine, mais non-absolue, vérifiée, mais seulement provisoire. La mise au (...) jour de cette première origine cartésienne de la théorie spinoziste de l'idée adéquate conduit l'auteur à l'hypothèse suivante : cette théorie accomplirait au sein de la métaphysique rationnelle développée dans l'Éthique la doctrine de la révélation et de la grâce présente dans la pensée théologique chrétienne. Dès lors il met en évidence la correspondance entre la vision béatifique suarézienne et la connaissance adéquate spinozienne, la première anticipant historiquement la seconde, à cette différence près que pour Thomas d'Aquin comme pour Suarez, « c'est la vision béatifique qui commande la connaissance », alors que c'est l'inverse pour Spinoza. Pour l'auteur, c'est le refus de toute création qui a conduit Spinoza à retrouver le modèle théologique de la vision béatifique comme moyen d'accès à la connaissance adéquates des choses et de Dieu. (shrink)

Comment la conscience se rapporte-t-elle au corps? Peut-elle, telle est l’interrogation décisive, s’affranchir de toute dépendance à son égard? Le Journal Intime, au cours de ses plus de quarante années d’écriture (1839-1881), fait de ce questionnement un point central de la philosophie d’Henri-Frédéric Amiel. Le corps, pour lui, ne constitue pas une évidence première. La conscience, en tant que puissance dissociative et critique, le pose comme objet et s’en sépare, s’en reconnaissant diffé...

Inversion Quelle fonction pouvons-nous reconnaitre à la philosophie de la religion? Devons-nous même lui en reconnaître encore une? On pourrait en douter, ne serait-ce qu’en considérant son origine, en fait moderne. À proprement parler, il ne saurait y avoir de philosophie de la religion, car elle ne peut intervenir sans la constitution, ou plutôt la reconstitution d’un concept de « religion ». Or ce concept a une origine moderne, rendue possible par l’éclatement de la catholicité occidenta...

Les productions médiatiques contemporaines trouvent peut-être leur matrice dans le populaire, comme en atteste le développement important de la presse people. Si les personnalités qui y sont présentées n'appartiennent pas au peuple, elle sont néanmoins populaires, dans le sens où elles plaisent à un public très large, dans un jeu de tension entre accessibilité et inaccessibilité. Cette presse joue un rôle de médiation, d'intercession, dans une logique de proximité qui contamine aussi la télévision, dans les talks-shows comme les émissions de (...) télé-réalité. En dépassant le discours fondé sur l'aliénation des masses, on pourrait utiliser cette forme d'ascenseur tant descendant qu'ascendant comme outil de transformation sociale.Perhaps the contemporary media productions find their matrix in the popular one, as the significant development of the press people attests it. If the personalities which are presented there do not belong to the people, they are nevertheless popular, in the way they please a very large audience, in a play of tension between accessibility and inaccessibility. This press plays a part of mediation, of intercession, in a logic of proximity which contaminates also television, in the talks-shows like the emissions of real-tv. By exceeding the views based on the alienation of the masses, one could use this shape of elevator as well descendant as ascending like tool of social transformation. (shrink)

Je suis heureux que cette petite conférence s’inscrive dans le programme plus large d’un colloque consacré à la question de l’Eros, sujet dont je voudrais précisément, ici, montrer la centralité. En effet la question de l’Eros devrait apparaître comme centrale, bien que ou plutôt parce que tel n’est pas toujours le cas en philosophie, du moins en philosophie moderne. Nietzsche a pu dire, dans un fragment de 1886 : « Je n’ai jamais blasphémé le nom saint de l’amour – ich (...) habe den heiligen Name... (shrink)

Analyse ce qui, dans la Révélation, suggère ou dépasse une phénoménologie du révélé.

Being is evil not because it is finite but because it is without limits. This extraordinary declaration no doubt marks the rather hidden center of a work that is seminal, in any case essential, because it constitutes, in the same way as the brilliant 1951 article “Is Ontology Fundamental?” one of the irrevocable decisions that helped Levinas to become what he was: the greatest French philosopher since Bergson and also the first phenomenologist who seriously attempted to free himself from his (...) provenance, which is to say, from Heidegger. (shrink)

As they appear to us, we separate phenomena into objects and events according to an apparently phenomenological distinction that is both radical and undisputed. The object appears according to four basic characteristics: it is predictable; it is reproducible; it results from a cause acting as an effect; and it always inscribes itself within the conditions of possibility for experience. The event appears as a reversal of these characteristics: it appears without warning; it appears once and for all, that is, without (...) the possibility of repetition or reproduction; it appears without any assignable or anterior cause; and finally it appears in defiance of the conditions of the possibility for experience—as the impossible made possible. (shrink)

The question of the given is central to philosophy; phenomenology uses the method of reduction to find the given. This lecture asks whether there is anything that resists reduction, whether there is something irreducible. The author concludes that the phenomenology of givenness addresses the gap between what gives itself and what shows itself, so that the self of the phenomenon emerges only by the exercise of a properly phenomenological hermeneutics.