This book is about "diamond", a logic of paradox. In diamond, a statement can be true yet false; an "imaginary" state, midway between being and non-being.

The final volume (XXVI) of Princeton's Kierkegaard's Writings series, the Cumulative Index provides wide-ranging navigation to the preceding twenty-five volumes in the series. Composed of over 90,000 entries, the Cumulative Index offers access to Kierkegaard's complex authorship and the extraordinary range of subjects he addressed in his writing. Covering the series' historical introductions, primary works, supplementary material (journal entries), and footnotes, the Cumulative Index provides a comprehensive entryway to the series' more than 11,000 pages of text. Readers are able to (...) survey via extended entries Kierkegaard's dual authorship(pseudonymous and signed), his frequent biblical references and allusions, his references to Christianity, God, and love, and his frequent use of analogies. A cumulative collation of the extensive supplementary material (over 4,000 journal entries) is also included, giving researchers and avid readers the opportunity to correlate and examine items from the current series, Søren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers , and the original Danish Søren Kierkegaards Papirer. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Recovering Aquinas's Common-Good-Oriented Right of RebellionNathaniel A. MoatsIntroductionAs recent events have woefully displayed, armed rebellion is not a topic of merely theoretical interest.1 While theory seemingly has very little impact on the citizens participating in armed rebellions, theory still remains of paramount importance, providing crucial criteria to evaluate, restrain, apply, and respond to such force. Criteria such as legitimate authority, just cause, right intention, necessity, proportionality, and likelihood of (...) success have been offered by thinkers advocating "just war" theory from across diverse political, philosophical, and religious backgrounds, garnering widespread agreement over the centuries. Contemporary scholars who identify as "historically oriented" just war thinkers have continued to defend that historical tradition as a sufficient and substantial guide for contemporary practice.2 Yet some have questioned whether the it can provide useful aid for dealing with contexts of political tyranny. In a 2013 article, Valeria Morkevičius describes [End Page 175] Western culture as divided over the moral permissibility of armed rebellion, with advocates basing their views on the Enlightenment ideas found in John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whereas traditional just war theorists have generally denied a right to armed rebellion.3 In Morkevičius's perspective, she argues that there can be justified use of armed force against tyranny and calls upon other scholars to help create a "just rebellion theory" that would "radically reimagine" traditional just war thinking.4 She claims that there is a "lack of a systematic and rigorous ethical framework for evaluating the justness of rebellions"5 and that "a new theory of just rebellion—a systematic way of evaluating the justness of real world rebellions, of determining appropriate state responses to domestic rebellions, and of weighing the pros and cons of intervention" is needed.6In line with Morkevičius' sentiments, the last ten years has seen the increasing rise of self-proclaimed just war revisionists.7 Jeff McMahan, the figurehead for this movement, claims that the classical just war criteria "can no longer stand."8 McMahan argues that traditional just war theory has [End Page 176] depicted war as a morally sui generis category of violence in which unique moral principles apply.9 The moral asymmetry of war is also reinforced by a "statist" and "collectivist" orientation that overrides the importance of individuals and their rights of life, liberty, property, and other fundamental goods. Instead of seeing war as a distinct category of violence, McMahan argues that war and self-defense are morally symmetrical. Further, he argues that combatants should be depicted as individuals distinct from their political or collective identity.10 In other words, McMahan offers a theory of war oriented around individuals and their rights based in the concept of justified self-defense.11 Extending McMahan's theory, Cécile Fabre has particularly targeted the criterion of legitimate authority as morally problematic.12 Rejecting the exclusive authorization of armed force by political authorities, she argues in favor of an individual's right to war, and by extension the right to rebellion.13 Therefore, given the historical just war tradition's emphasis on the criterion of legitimate authority (i.e., the restriction of armed force [End Page 177] to established authorities) and resistance to support armed rebellions due to the lack of recognized political leaders, revisionists conclude that traditional just war thinking is inadequate for providing contemporary guidance in the context of rebellion.14To challenge revisionist claims, I analyze Thomas Aquinas's ingenuity and relevance for future "just rebellion" thinking. First, I argue that classical just war thinking is not as antithetical to armed rebellion as suggested.15 One just rebellion theory has coexisted alongside the classical formation of just war theory, albeit often neglected or ignored by contemporary thinkers.16 It is well known that Aquinas formalized the Augustinian classical just war theory revolving around the criteria of legitimate authority, just cause, and right intention. Much less known, however, is the fact that Aquinas also crafted criteria for justified armed rebellions. While Aquinas's just war thinking rearticulates Augustine's perspective, Aquinas appropriated his mentor's views to allow for justified armed rebellions. Aquinas's originality was displayed not only in allowing justified armed... (shrink)

Identifying the determinants of reproductive success in small-scale societies is critical for understanding how natural selection has shaped human evolution and behavior. The available evidence suggests that status-accruing behaviors such as hunting and prosociality are pathways to reproductive success, but social egalitarianism may diminish this pathway. Here we introduce a mixed longitudinal/cross-sectional dataset based on 45 years of research with the Batek, a population of egalitarian rain forest hunter-gatherers in Peninsular Malaysia, and use it to test the effects of four (...) predictors of lifetime reproductive success: foraging return rate, sharing proclivity, cooperative foraging tendency, and kin presence. We found that none of these factors can explain variation in lifetime reproduction among males or females. We suggest that social egalitarianism, combined with strikingly low infant and juvenile mortality rates, can mediate the pathway between foraging, status-accruing behavior, and reproductive success. Our approach advocates for greater theoretical and empirical attention to quantitative social network measures, female foraging, and fitness outcomes. (shrink)

Warne's original study provides an insightful analysis of the role of contemplation and creation in the thought of Josef Pieper, illustrating the importance of this practice to earthly happiness and human flourishing. What is the relationship between creation, contemplation, human flourishing, and moral development? Nathaniel Warne's Josef Pieper on the Spiritual Life offers a sophisticated answer to this question through a systematic analysis of philosopher Josef Pieper's (1904-1997) thought. Warne's examination centers on the role of contemplation and creation in (...) Pieper's thinking, arguing that contemplation of the created order is a key feature of earthly happiness. By emphasizing the importance of contemplation, Pieper illustrates the deep interconnections between ethics, creation, and spirituality. For Warne, to posit a binary between the contemplative life and active life creates a false dichotomy. Following Pieper, Warne claims that theology and spirituality cannot be bracketed from ethics and social action--indeed, our lived experience in the world blurs the lines between these practices. Contemplation and action are closer together than are typically assumed, and both have important implications for both our spiritual development and our engagement with the world around us. Ultimately, Warne's emphasis on creation and contemplation represents an attempt to resist a view of ethics and the spiritual life that is divorced from our environment. In response to this view, Warne argues that we need a renewed sense that creation and place are important for self-understanding. Contemplation of creation is, at bottom, a form of communion with God--we thus need a more robust sense of how ethics and politics are rooted in God's creative action. Taking Pieper as a guide, Warne's study helps to deepen our thinking about these connections. (shrink)

This article posits that Andy Clark’s model of distributed cognition manifests socially through the agonism of human activity, and that rhetorical theory offers an understanding of human conflicts as productive and necessary elements of collective response to situation rather than as problems to be solved or noise to be eliminated. To support this assertion, the paper aligns Clark’s argument that cognition responds to situated environmental conditions with the classical concept of kairos, it associates Clark’s assertion that language structures behavior with (...) the long-held rhetorical stance that language is constitutive, and it examines the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as an enactment of what Clark and rhetorical theorists claim about productive agonism and the litigious nature of identity and cognition. (shrink)

This article conducts a mixed-method content analysis of Chinese and American news media coverage of Google DeepMind’s Go playing computer program, AlphaGo. Drawing on humanistic approaches to artificial intelligence, combined with an empirically rigorous content analysis, it examines the differences and overlap in coverage by the Chinese and American press in their accounts of AlphaGo, and its historic match with Korea’s Lee Sedol in March, 2016. The event was not only followed intensely in China, but also made the front page (...) of The New York Times. This article finds that the Chinese press was more likely than the American press to frame AlphaGo as non-threatening, which the authors attribute to cultural differences and the two countries' different understandings of Go. In addition to quantitatively identifying similarities and differences in the framing of AlphaGo, this paper also investigates the underlying and evolving contestations over what constitutes the “human” and the “machine.” It concludes by discussing the implications of the study’s findings as well as outlining avenues for further research. (shrink)

This article examines Adam Smith’s views on animals, centering on the singularity of his economic perspective in the context of the general early ethical debate about animals. Particular emphasis is placed on his discussions of animals as property. The article highlights the tension between Smith’s moral sensitivity to animal suffering on the one hand, and his emphasis on the constitutive role that the utilization of animals played in the progress of civilization on the other. This tension is depicted as a (...) precursor of problematic aspects of the modern environmental crisis. (shrink)

The moral of Buridan's Ass is that it can sometimes be rational to perform one action rather than another even though one lacks stronger reason to do so. Yet it is also commonly believed that it cannot ever be rational to believe one proposition rather than another if one lacks stronger reason to do so. This asymmetry has been taken to indicate a deep difference between epistemic and practical rationality. According to the view articulated here, the asymmetry should instead be (...) explained by the difference between rational intentions and rational actions. Thus, it turns out, Buridan's Ass-style cases do not indicate an asymmetry between epistemic and practical rationality as such. (shrink)

Twentieth-century developments in logic and mathematics have led many people to view Euclid’s proofs as inherently informal, especially due to the use of diagrams in proofs. In _Euclid and His Twentieth-Century Rivals_, Nathaniel Miller discusses the history of diagrams in Euclidean Geometry, develops a formal system for working with them, and concludes that they can indeed be used rigorously. Miller also introduces a diagrammatic computer proof system, based on this formal system. This volume will be of interest to mathematicians, (...) computer scientists, and anyone interested in the use of diagrams in geometry. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000) 415-432 [Access article in PDF] Christiaan Huygens's Attitude toward Animals Nathaniel Wolloch The debate on the status of animals has interested people since ancient times. In the early modern era this debate reached one of its most historically important and sedulous stages, drawing the attention of some of the most famous minds in Europe. Curiously enough, the historiography of this (...) debate has failed to take cognizance of the part played in it by the famous Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens (1629-95), renowned for his invention of the pendulum clock, founding of the wave theory of light, and discovery of the true shape of the rings of Saturn, to name only a few of his prolific and varied activities. 1 While Huygens's contribution does not occupy a historically central part in this debate, which did not usually directly engross his attention, it is possible, based on some of his writings and activities, to piece together a picture of his general attitude toward animals. Such a study, as presented here, reveals more than anecdotal importance, since it both entails and affords an enlightening discussion of the connection between philosophy, science, and the treatment of animals, a discussion, moreover, which is relevant to the understanding not only of the early modern debate on animals, but also to the current debate of this issue. [End Page 415]One of the most prevalent features of the development of the attitude toward animals has been the recurrence of anthropocentric arguments. Such arguments were exhibited both by theriophiles (lovers of animals) and anti-theriophiles. 2 A significant instance of this is the recurring argument that harming animals is not bad in itself but rather because it might lead to the harming or corruption of human beings. While such an approach in effect states that those who are kind to animals would also be kind to human beings, it also implies that cruelty toward animals is excusable if committed to advance good causes, such as science and medicine. 3 Such anthropocentric views ultimately derive from both classical culture and philosophy, and especially the notion, rooted in biblical cosmology, according to which all of nature was given to man for his use by God, i.e., man was given the stewardship of nature. 4Theriophilic views which tend to regard animals as sentient beings in their own right became relatively common in early modern times. The most influential of these theriophiles was Michel de Montaigne, known for his love and praise [End Page 416] of animals, 5 and among the many theriophiles influenced by his views one of the most important was his disciple Pierre Charron. 6However, the most influential early modern view of animals, which became the main reference-point for the debate on animals, was anti-theriophilic. This was the Cartesian theory of the "beast-machine," which viewed animals as mere automata, devoid of an immortal soul as possessed by human beings; they were regarded as devoid of mind, and their behavior was compared to that of a clock. Descartes himself seems to have been rather agnostic regarding this issue. He did not deny animals some capacity for feeling but claimed that it was more probable they were senseless automata than beings with souls like human beings. 7 However, while many theriophiles attacked the beast-machine theory, its anti-theriophilic implications were developed and radicalized by various seventeenth-century Cartesians beyond what Descartes himself probably intended. The most prominent example of this was the leading Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche. The French intellectual Bernard Le Bovier, sieur de Fontenelle, related how he saw Malebranche, a generally kind man, kick a pregnant bitch, and when confronted with his (Fontenelle's) alarm, regarded this act as inconsequential, claiming that she did not feel a thing. 8 As cruel as the beast-machine [End Page 417] theory may seem, however, one should remember that it tried to explain away the suffering of animals. It implied that had such suffering been proven to exist, it would have required moral consideration. The views of Spinoza... (shrink)

Fictionalists about a kind of disputed entity aim to give a face-value interpretation of our discourse about those entities without affirming their existence. The fictionalist’s commitment to non-realism leaves open three options regarding their ontological position: they may deny the existence of the disputed entities (anti-realism), remain agnostic regarding their existence (agnosticism), or deny that there are ontological facts of the matter (ontological anti-realism). This paper outlines a method of adjudicating between these options and argues that fictionalists may be expected (...) to hold preferences between them. The typical arguments and motivations for fictionalism lead naturally to a practice-based metaontological framework under which our practices regarding a kind of disputed entity might inform our ontological beliefs about those entities. When that framework is applied to fictionalism, it is found that the usual motivations for fictionalism lead naturally, though not decisively, to ontological anti-realism. And, where there are reasons against ontological anti-realism, fictionalism leans more toward anti-realism than agnosticism. (shrink)

Recent anthologizing of Davidson’s articles from the 1980s and 1990s encourages us to reconsider arguments contained in them. One such argument is Davidson’s omniscient-interpreter argument (“OIA”) in “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” first published 20 years ago. The OIA allegedly establishes that it is necessary that most beliefs are true. Thus the omniscient interpreter, now 20 years old, was born to answer the skeptic. In §1 of this paper, I consider charges that the OIA establishes only that it (...) is possible that most beliefs are true; if correct, then it is also possibly the case that most beliefs are false—the skeptic’s very position. Next, I consider two responses on Davidson’s behalf, showing that each fails. In §2, I show that the OIA establishes neither that it is necessarily nor possibly but actually the case that most beliefs are true. I then conclude that this is enough to answer the skeptic. (shrink)

The "two-envelopes" problem has stimulated much discussion on probabilistic reasoning, but relatively little experimentation. The problem specifies two identical envelopes, one of which contains twice as much money as the other. You are given one of the envelopes and the option of keeping it or trading for the other envelope. Variables of interest include the possible amounts of money involved, what is known about the process by which the amounts of money were assigned to the envelopes, and whether you are (...) allowed to know how much money is in the envelope in hand before deciding whether to keep or trade. In an earlier study, Butler and Nickerson found that when participants were allowed to know how much was in the envelope in hand, they generally elected to trade if that amount was small relative to the range of possibilities and to keep otherwise. The present experiments showed that this propensity was independent of the amount of money in the envelopes. Participants made decisions with a strong bias for avoiding the risk of losing by trading, particularly when the amount in hand was known and large relative to the range of possible amounts, regardless of the absolute value of the gamble. The results illustrate the dependence of thinking on the context in which it occurs, and demonstrate a tendency to treat quantities that are large or small relative to a particular context in which they are encountered as though they were large or small in a more general sense. (shrink)

George Lippard’s 1845 best-selling novel, The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall, provides insight into utopian longing in the United States during an era of uncertainty following a major economic crisis. Published in the wake of a banking panic, it portrays class hostilities stemming from notions that the poor were bearing the brunt of economic hardships caused by bad decisions on the part of wealthy investors. Lippard was a serial novelist and social activist who ultimately used his fiction-writing (...) success to two key ends. First, he founded the Brotherhood of the Union, an early U.S. labor organization. Second, he founded The Quaker City Weekly, a newspaper published from 1848 to 1850 that focused on .. (shrink)

The publication of Davidson 2001, anthologizing articles from the 1980s and 1990s, encourages reconsidering arguments contained in them. One such argument is Davidson's omniscient-interpreter argument ('€˜OIA'€™) in Davidson 1983. The OIA allegedly establishes that it is necessary that most beliefs are true. Thus the omniscient interpreter, revived in 2001 and now 20 years old, was born to answer the skeptic. In Part I of this paper, I consider charges that the OIA establishes only that it is possible that most beliefs (...) are true; if correct, then it is also possibly the case that most beliefs are false—the skeptic’s very position. Next, I consider two responses on Davidson'€™s behalf, showing that each fails. In Part II, I show that the OIA establishes neither that it is necessarily merely possibly but actually the case that most beliefs are true. I then conclude that this is enough to answer the skeptic. (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 1956.

According to the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument (QPIA), we should be realists about mathematics because mathematics is indispensable to science. QPIA’s reasoning can be understood in two ways. Under the confirmational analysis, QPIA argues that mathematics is confirmed as part of our best scientific theories. Under the pragmatic analysis, QPIA argues that our scientific practices implicitly assume the truth of mathematics. The usual reasons given in favour of the pragmatic analysis are that it affords advantages to proponents of QPIA by avoiding (...) some dependencies of the confirmational analysis. This paper argues that these reasons are indecisive, because the pragmatic analysis introduces some dependencies of its own. Nevertheless, the paper also argues, there are other reasons to prefer the pragmatic analysis. QPIA is an instance of a wider class of realist arguments—indispensability arguments—and the pragmatic analysis yields a preferable overall understanding of indispensability arguments than does the confirmational analysis. (shrink)

The death of Alfred North Whitehead late in 1947 was a double loss. Those who knew Whitehead, even slightly, feel keenly the loss of a warm and stimulating personality, which in the last years of his retirement had mellowed to a benign radiance. The wider circle of students and teachers of philosophy who knew him through his writing alone regret the passing of the man who, many thought, was the most capable cosmologist of our time.

Joseph Agassi, together with Yehuda Fried, presented the paradoxes of paranoia and proposed to explain and solve them by introducing innovative diagnostic criteria for psychosis as reflecting a specific kind of rationality. Their ethical-clinical framework however, discouraged discussion of placing impositions on the mentally ill, even when in danger. According to these very criteria, Agassi’s institutional individualism framework renders paranoiacs defective in autonomy. Introducing the idea of degrees of autonomy as a guiding principle for research and practice will promote responsible (...) commitment to the mentally ill and to all other persons in society. (shrink)

Donald Davidson contributed more deeply to our understanding of language, thought, and reality than perhaps any other recent philosopher. His discussions of skepticism are sometimes seen as peripheral to those contributions. As I read him, Davidson argued against three skeptical worries. First, beliefs are true or false relative to a conceptual scheme. Second, beliefs generally are false. Third, other minds and an external world do not exist. Call those worries ‘conceptual relativism’, ‘falsidicalism’, and ‘solipsism’, respectively. I investigate how Davidson’s arguments (...) are connected. I then show that those connections are so systematic that Davidson ultimately offers a single, master argument with two premises. Premise one is that I think. Premise two is an application of his account of radical interpretation. Focusing on the systematicity of Davidson’s anti-skeptical arguments demonstrates that discussions of skepticism were more central to his views than often appreciated and shines fresh light on his project overall. (shrink)

Joseph Agassi, together with Yehuda Fried, presented the paradoxes of paranoia and proposed to explain and solve them by introducing innovative diagnostic criteria for psychosis as reflecting a specific kind of rationality. Their ethical-clinical framework however, discouraged discussion of placing impositions on the mentally ill, even when in danger. According to these very criteria, Agassi’s institutional individualism framework renders paranoiacs defective in autonomy. Introducing the idea of degrees of autonomy as a guiding principle for research and practice will promote responsible (...) commitment to the mentally ill and to all other persons in society. (shrink)

By the start of the 1860s, architecture and the materials, processes, and cultures of emerging modernity were combining in Paris, above all other cities, with unprecedented consequences. Georges-Éugene Haussmann, Emperor Napoléon III’s Prefect of the Seine, had in 1853 been tasked with modernizing the city. His principle strategy was to demolish entire quarters of ramshackle medieval fabric for the creation of pristine, arrow-straight boulevards and sparkling squares, all of which were lined by luxurious standardized buildings, serviced by underground sewers, and (...) brilliantly lit by gas lamps.1 As the city heaved in every quarter, a group of Parisian authors stepped forward to respond to the literal. (shrink)

In an article in the Journal of Philosophical Logic in 1996, "Towards a Model Theory of Venn Diagrams,", Hammer and Danner proved the full completeness of Shin's formal system for reasoning with Venn Diagrams. Their proof is eight pages long. This note gives a brief five line proof of this same result, using connections between diagrammatic and sentential representations.

In several articles, Mumma has presented a formal diagrammatic system Eu meant to give an account of one way in which Euclid's use of diagrams in the Elements could be formalized. However, largely because of the way in which it tries to limit case analysis, this system ends up being inconsistent, as shown here. Eu also suffers from several other problems: it is unable to prove several wide classes of correct geometric claims and contains a construction rule that is probably (...) computationally intractable and that may not even be decidable. (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 1956.

When world’s most famous taxidermist, Carl Akeley, died in 1926, many obituaries cited his consummate skill and innovative technique, often arguing that he had elevated taxidermy from a craft to an art. Such claims notwithstanding, taxidermy tends still to be considered as a craft. While scholars have studied the various ways in which taxidermy has been deployed within art practices – to critique gender, colonialism and concepts of mortality – late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century attempts to classify it as a (...) fine art failed. This critical and historical asymmetry frames the following article, which explores what it tells us about how art is conceived today. I argue that taxidermy ‘failed’ as a form of art not because its procedures were distasteful, nor because its practice lacked the skill and vision an art might require. Rather, taxidermy remains outside of art due to a confluence of historical shifts in art practice and theory in the late nineteenth century, particularly those associated with the rise of instant photography and the advent of the snapshot. In this context, the making and display of taxidermied specimens entailed tensions – between ideal and real, type and example, multiple and singular, index and object – that were and remain central to photography and art. But, unlike photography, around which art historians have developed a sophisticated discourse, taxidermy lacks a critical vocabulary. Importantly, I argue, the taxidermied animal’s status involves no author-function, thus throwing into question methods of production and display. And, in light of this, I delineate taxidermy’s ‘failure’ in order to elucidate some of the tacit exclusions enacted by art history, particularly with regard to works that simultaneously reveal and negate their own manufacture. (shrink)

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen may be the most acclaimed graphic novel of the twentieth century. This chapter examines how it explores two metaphysical questions: What is the nature of time? Does free will exist? Moore and Gibbons explore these questions together, illuminating connections between time and free will through connections between the graphic novel’s form and content. The chapter introduces three views of the nature of time: presentism, the view that only the present exists; growing-universe theory, the view (...) that only the present and past exist; and eternalism, the view that past, present, and future exist. Because of Moore and Gibbons’ distinct use of images and words within the visual structure and their depiction of a character who is simultaneously aware of past, present, and future events, the chapter deduces that the operative view in Watchmen is eternalism. After discussing three views of the existence of free will, the chapter then argues that eternalism entails that people could not have acted otherwise than they actually acted. Hence the operative view in Watchmen is either determinism, according to which no one has free will because no one could have done otherwise, or compatibilism, according to which people can have free will because having it merely requires having acted. The chapter concludes that the operative view is compatibilism. Finally it responds to the objection that compatibilism is mistaken. If no one could have done otherwise, then determinism must be true. (shrink)

New Blackfriars, Volume 103, Issue 1107, Page 640-661, September 2022.

Volume 25, Issue 4, June 2020, Page 494-496.

Nathaniel J.P. Barron offers the first book length account in English of Ernst Bloch's contribution to a Marxist philosophy of language. It is ambitious both in situating Bloch's ideas in the broader Marxist engagement with language as it currently exists, and in using Bloch's utopian categories to challenge that engagement. In particular, Barron reads Voloshinov's insights into language through Bloch's categories, and argues that Bloch advances on Voloshinov by offering an understanding of the social materiality of language which is (...) more useful for challenging fascist forms of utterance. (shrink)

In July 2015, shortly after the murder of an elderly priest in the city of Rouen, the leading French daily Le Monde announced it would no longer publish the names or images of individuals involved in acts of terrorism. The decision, wrote the editors, was intended to limit the "posthumous glorification" of terrorist acts. It was not the first time the notion of conscientious self-censorship in the fight against terrorism had bubbled to the fore. The strategy had been flowing through (...) media circles and policy centers for over a decade. By the time the Islamic State emerged in the summer of 2014, it had become nearly impossible for the average Western consumer to hear or see any actual trace of the... (shrink)

Yes, Roya, a 2016 graphic novel written by C. Spike Trotman and illustrated by Emilee Denich, depicts Roya, a woman of color who writes and illustrates a comic strip; Joe, a white man who gave up his career after meeting Roya, who now publishes under his name; and Wylie, a young white man starting in the profession. Roya completely dominates Joe’s career, making it hers. She also partly dominates Wylie’s, acting as his mentor. Roya dominates Joe and Wylie personally too. (...) She is their sexual dominant, and they are her submissives. Professionally and personally, moreover, Joe and Wylie each submit to Roya consensually. Further, though Roya both writes and illustrates her comic strip, often writer and illustrator differ. The former, creating the story, dominates the latter, illustrating the story after the fact – as Trotman and Denich themselves did consensually via a contract when creating their graphic novel. Hence Yes, Roya highlights domination and submission in comics creation and in sex. More than that, the graphic novel also presents both kinds of domination and submission as ethical. Because Aristotle, Kant, and Mill are the most influential ethicists in the Western tradition, this chapter investigates how each could accommodate such professional and personal dominant/submissive relationships in their philosophy. (shrink)