Though many well-known German philosophers have devoted considerable attention to music and its aesthetics, surprisingly few of their writings on the subject have been translated into English. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, a philosopher, and Oliver Fürbeth, a musicologist, here fill this important gap for musical scholars and students alike with this compelling guide to the musical discourse of ten of the most important German philosophers, from Kant to Adorno. _Music in German Philosophy_ includes contributions from a renowned group of ten (...) scholars, including some of today’s most prominent German thinkers, all of whom are specialists in the writers they treat. Each chapter consists of a short biographical sketch of the philosopher concerned, a summary of his writings on aesthetics, and finally a detailed exploration of his thoughts on music. The book is prefaced by the editors’ original introduction, presenting music philosophy in Germany before and after Kant, as well as a new introduction and foreword to this English-language addition, which places contemplations on music by these German philosophers within a broader intellectual climate. (shrink)

"... both an excellent introduction and a thoroughgoing analysis of Kristeva’s writing." —Signs "The book is a brilliant combination of a recuperative and a critical reading of Kristeva’s work." —Changes: An International Journal of Psychology & Psychotherapy "... a thorough, detailed, and critical analysis of the writings of Julia Kristeva." —Elizabeth Grosz "... the most involved and engaging study of Julia Kristeva’s work to date..." —The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory This first full-scale feminist interpretation of Kristeva’s work (...) situates her within the context of French feminism. Oliver guides her readers through Kristeva’s intellectual formation in linguistics, Freud, Lacan, and poetics. This comprehensive introduction to Kristeva makes accessible her important contributions to philosophy, linguistics, and psychoanalytic feminism. (shrink)

Critically engaging the work of Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida together with her own observations on contemporary politics, environmental degradation, and the pursuit of a just and sustainable world, Kelly Oliver lays the groundwork for a politics and ethics that embraces otherness without exploiting difference. Rooted firmly in human beings' relationship to the planet and to each other, Oliver shows peace is possible only if we maintain our ties to earth and world. Oliver (...) begins with Immanuel Kant and his vision of politics grounded on earth as a finite surface shared by humans. She then incorporates Hannah Arendt's belief in plural worlds constituted through human relationships; Martin Heidegger's warning that alienation from the Earth endangers not only politics but also the very essence of being human; and Jacques Derrida's meditations on the singular worlds individuals, human and otherwise, create and how they inform the reality we inhabit. Each of these theorists, Oliver argues, resists the easy idealism of world citizenship and globalism, yet they all think about the earth against the globe to advance a grounded ethics. They contribute to a philosophy that avoids globalization's totalizing and homogenizing impulses and instead help build a framework for living within and among the world's rich biodiversity. (shrink)

Challenging the fundamental tenet of the multicultural movement -- that social struggles turning upon race, gender, and sexuality are struggles for recognition -- this work offers a powerful critique of current conceptions of identity and ...

We are, Julia Kristeva writes, strangers to ourselves; and indeed much of contemporary theory describes the human condition as one of alienation. Eloquently arguing that we cannot explain the developement of individuality or subjectivity apart from its social context, Kelly Oliver makes a powerful case for recognizing the social aspects of alienation and the psychic aspects of oppression.

Introduction: The role of animals in philosophies of man -- Part I: What's wrong with animal rights? -- The right to remain silent -- Part II: Animal pedagogy -- You are what you eat : Rousseau's cat -- Say the human responded : Herder's sheep -- Part III: Difference worthy of its name -- Hair of the dog : Derrida's and Rousseau's good taste -- Sexual difference, animal difference : Derrida's sexy silkworm -- Part IV: It's our fault -- The (...) beaver's struggle with species-being : De Beauvoir and the praying mantis -- Answering the call of nature : Lacan walking the dog -- Part V: Estranged kinship -- The abyss between humans and animals : Heidegger puts the bee in being -- Strange kinship : Merleau-Ponty's sensuous stickleback -- Stopping the anthropological machine : Agamben's tick-tocking tick -- Psychoanalysis and the science of kinship -- Psychoanalysis as animal by-product : Freud's zoophilia -- Animal abjects, maternal abjects : Kristeva's strays -- Conclusion: Sustainable ethics. (shrink)

Family Values shows how the various contradictions at the heart of Western conceptions of maternity and paternity problematize our relationships with ourselves and with others. Using philosophical texts, psychoanalytic theory, studies in biology and popular culture, Kelly Oliver challenges our traditional concepts of maternity which are associated with nature, and our conceptions of paternity which are embedded in culture. Oliver's intervention calls into question the traditional image of the oppositional relationship between nature and culture, maternal and paternal. Family (...) Values also undercuts recent returns to the rhetoric of a "battle between the sexes" by analyzing the conceptual basis of these descriptions in biological research and the presuppositions of such suggestions in philosophy and psychoanalysis. By developing a reconception of maternity and paternity, Family Values offers hope for peace in the battle of the sexes. (shrink)

As a linguist, Julia Kristeva has pioneered a revolutionary theory of the sign in its relation to social and political emancipation; as a practicing psychoanalyst, she has produced work on the nature of the human subject and sexuality, and on the "new maladies" of today's neurotic. _The Portable Kristeva_ is the only fully comprehensive compilation of Kristeva's key writings. The second edition includes added material from Kristeva's most important works of the past five years, including _The Sense and Non-Sense of (...) Revolt_, _Intimate Revolt_, and _Hannah Arendt_. Editor Kelly Oliver has also added new material to the introduction, summarizing Kristeva's latest intellectual endeavors and updating the bibliography. (shrink)

The effective collection and management of personal data of rapidly migrating populations is important for ensuring adequate healthcare and monitoring of a displaced peoples’ health status. With developments in ICT data sharing capabilities, electronic personal health records (ePHRs) are increasingly replacing less transportable paper records. ePHRs offer further advantages of improving accuracy and completeness of information and seem tailored for rapidly displaced and mobile populations. Various emerging initiatives in Europe are seeking to develop migrant‐centric ePHR responses. This paper highlights their (...) importance and benefits, but also identifies a number of significant ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI) and challenges to their design and implementation, regarding (1) the kind of information that should be stored, (2) who should have access to information, and (3) potential misuse of information. These challenges need to be urgently addressed to make possible the beneficial use of ePHRs for vulnerable migrants in Europe. (shrink)

Platon, Hegel, Nietzsche - ihre Namen kennt jeder. Aber längst nicht jeder weiß, welcher Philosoph welche philosophischen Ideen vertreten hat. Und was steht überhaupt drin in Klassikern wie der "Kritik der reinen Vernunft" oder "Sein und Zeit"? Einfach nachschlagen! Dieses Lexikon im Taschenformat informiert Sie schnell und in verständlicher Sprache über alle großen Philosophen und Werke. Machen Sie sich auf die Reise durch den Kanon des Denkens von der Antike über das Mittelalter und die Neuzeit bis in die Gegenwart!

The concept of vocal charisma has changed in the past decades from something that people have to something that people do, thereby stimulating research on how vocal charisma can be created and improved. Broadening the perspective on vocal charisma beyond the speaker’s performance itself to the context of the speech, we conducted acoustic-prosodic analyses of public speeches of two prominent Israelian politicians – Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz. The speech material consisted of 311–516 prosodic phrases per politician from the election (...) campaigns 2019–2020 and, crucially, was balanced so as to include an equal number of pre- and post-election speeches. Results show a superiority of Netanyahu over Gantz in almost all facets of vocal charisma, although Gantz caught up over time. Moreover, unlike Gantz, Netanyahu showed a strong adaptation of his vocal charisma patterns to before- and after-election contexts. Scrutinizing this versatility difference, an additional perception experiment with 42 listeners and excerpts from the two politicians’ speeches was carried out. Results show that Netanyahu’s speech excerpts were, unlike those of Gantz, mainly rated as more charismatic in those contexts in which they were performed. Gantz’ post-election speech excerpts, by contrast, were primarily rated as not fitting into that context, i.e., as unfolding their charisma better in a pre-election context. Moreover, listeners also rated Netanyahu as overall more charismatic than Gantz. The combined production and perception evidence suggests the relevance of context in the evaluation and interpretation of vocal charisma signals. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for a novel reading of Spinoza’s position in his exchangewith Boyle about Boyle’s experiment with nitre. Boyle claimed to have shownthrough experiments that nitre ceased to be nitre after heating. Spinozadisagreed and proposed the alternative hypothesis that nitre has changed itsstate and not its nature. Spinoza’s position was construed in the literature asrational scepticism denying that experiments can yield knowledge ofessences because all sensory experience is underdetermined and open tomultiple interpretations. I argue for an alternative (...) reading of Spinoza’sposition which focuses on Bacon’s notion of crucial instance. According tothis reading, Spinoza did not deny the possibility of knowing byexperimentation whether nitre has changed its nature, he asked for a crucialinstance, i.e. an experiment that would refute the hypothesis that nitre haschanged merely its state. Spinoza’s argumentative strategy shows that,contrary to the mainstream reading, the representational content of sensoryideas can be determined even if it does not represent the essence of theobject: we can know with absolute, rather than merely moral, certaintywhether nitre ceased to be nitre without knowing what nitre is. (shrink)

Editor's introduction -- Author's introduction -- Interrelational subjects and social sublimation -- The gestation of the other in phenomenology -- The look of love and ecological subjectivity -- Social melancholy, shame and sublimation -- Responsible subjects and witnessing -- Witnessing subjectivity and testimony -- Witnessing, recognition, and response ethics -- Between ethics and politics -- Response ethics and the nonhumans -- Animal ethics: toward an ethics of responsiveness -- Service dogs: between animal studies and disability studies -- Earth ethics and (...) creaturely cohabitation -- Witnessing in the age of spectacle -- Death as a penalty and instant death -- Rape as spectator sport and creepshot entertainment -- The spectacle of war -- Bibliography -- Index. (shrink)

According to the received view Feynman diagrams are a bookkeeping device in complex perturbative calculations. Thus, they do not provide a representation or model of the underlying physical process. This view is in apparent tension with scientific practice in high energy physics, which analyses its data in terms of “channels”. For example the Higgs discovery was based on the observation of the decay H → γγ – a process which can be easily represented by the corresponding Feynman diagrams. I take (...) issue with this tension and show that on closer analysis the story of the Higgs discovery should be told differently. (shrink)

In his 2015 book, Valuing Health, the philosopher, Daniel Hausman, in referring to experienced utility maximization, touches on the question of whether people accept, and ought to accept, the assumption of health maximization vis-à-vis their own lives. This essay introduces Hausman’s arguments on experienced utility, before outlining the intellectual catalyst for the renewed interest in the maximization of experienced utility as an appropriate ethical rule; namely, the literature that arose in the 1990s that demonstrated that due to the so-called gestalt (...) characteristics, an individual’s retrospective and prospective assessments of an event—i.e. the remembered and decision utilities associated with that event—often systematically differ from the utility that he/she experiences or can reasonably expect to experience during the same event. The essay then touches upon some of the implications that this debate has on assuming that the maximization of quality-adjusted life years is the best way to judge the relative worth of different health profiles. To conclude, it is argued that, although contextual, it is sometimes important to consider in the policy discourse the apparent effects of the gestalt characteristics on remembered and decision utility. (shrink)

Islamic philosophy has often been treated as being largely of historical interest, belonging to the history of ideas rather than to philosophical study. This volume successfully overturns that view. Emphasizing the living nature and rich diversity of the subject, it examines the main thinkers and schools of thought, discusses the key concepts of Islamic philosophy and covers a vast geographical area. This indispensable reference tool includes a comprehensive bibliography and an extensive index.

Der Sammelband nimmt seinen Ausgang in einer der prominentesten und lebendigsten Debatten inner-halb der neueren Politischen Theorie, die seit uber einer Dekade intensiv auch in der deutschsprachigen Politischen Theorie gefuhrt wird. Im Zentrum der Diskussion steht die Unterscheidung von Politik und Politischem, in deren Licht die Beitrage des Bandes Fragen der radikalen Demokratie, dem Widerstandigen des Politischen und den Rezeptionslinien dieser wichtigen Debatte nachspuren. Mit Beitragen von Werner Friedrichs, Mareike Gebhardt, Anastasoiya Kasko, Oliver Marchart, Martin Nonhoff, Hagen Scholzel, Karsten (...) Schubert, Manon Westphal und Markus Wolf. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:14 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Melissa Oliver-Powell Beyond the Spectacle of Suffering: Agnès Varda’s L’Unechante,l’autrepas and Rewriting the Subject of Abortion in France In the spring of 1971, three years after the revolutionary fervor of May 1968 in France, 343 women put their names to a courageous manifesto announcing that they were criminals of a particularly gendered nature. The authors of (...) Manifeste des 343 (Manifesto of the 343) comprised a large group of culturally eminent French women and activists declaring that they had all illegally undergone abortions, which at this point, despite growing decriminalization throughout much of Western Europe, were still outlawed within their republic. Though many of the revolutionary fires had now eased to embers, French feminists demonstrated that reproductive rights were still a vital and unresolved topic of social justice. Including names as weighty as Simone de Beauvoir, Jeanne Moreau, and Catherine Deneuve, the manifesto brought together exceptional women from the fields of academia, law, theater, film and literature, alongside grassroots activists. Their action was a bold challenge to the French authorities, daring them to arrest some of the country’s brightest thinkers and cultural innovators under a law the signatories felt was deeply unjust, sexist, and antithetical to the values of individual liberty and citizenship. It was a case of those with the broadest shoulders weaponizing their privilege to present a robust front line in the wider struggle for women’s rights. One of the signatories was filmmaker Agnès Varda. Her name, like those of several others on the list, demonstrates the symbiosis between Melissa Oliver-Powell 15 cultural production and gender politics that has often characterized French feminist thought. From the multidisciplinary writings of Beauvoir, to the novels of the écriture féminine movement, to the lyrical academic prose of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and others, French and Francophone feminist writers have tended to connect art and politics with a great deal of fluidity. As a committed activist and a filmmaker, Agnès Varda falls very much within this tradition, often adopting and developing feminist practices within her cinema. This article examines how Varda’s 1977 film, L’Une chante, l’autre pas (One Sings, The Other Doesn’t) interacts with and participates in the feminist political project of reproductive rights as well as the ongoing intellectual and moral debates over abortion taking place in France throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. I look particularly at the adversarial construction of abortion narratives within these debates and the location of victimhood therein. Within mainstream cultural representations in and beyond France, abortion is typically constructed as either a traumatic or a transgressive moment. The same is often true on either side of political and social debates on abortion, which have tended either to characterize the women who get abortions as irresponsible and amoral or as sympathetic victims in need of protection. Though the transgressive element persists, it is the interaction with representations of trauma that interests me here. In approaching discussions of gendered injustice, it is common for feminist writers and activists to leverage pathos as a rhetorical strategy. While suffering can be a highly effective and galvanizing expression of oppression, such discourses also run the risk of producing excessive depictions of victimhood, which can displace the capacity for action from the subject of hardship onto the privileged oppressor. This risk is particularly at stake within the cultural form of film, as its visuality and identificatory mechanics have the potential to spectacularize the female victim and make her relatable only through suffering. This was often the case in earlier French films that featured abortion such as Les Mauvaises rencontres (1955), Des gens sans importance (1956), Journal d’une femme en blanc (1965), and Une femme en blanc se révolte (1966), all of which made their subjects sympathetic by entwining them in long narratives of victimization ending in death or disgrace. This article looks at how Varda’s L’Une chante, l’autre pas disengages from the spectacle of suffering that so often characterizes representations of women’s experiences 16 Melissa Oliver-Powell and rejects the idea that abortion narratives must... (shrink)

This book critically advances readings of Jacques Derrida to offer a renewed understanding of the problem of decision and its inherent exclusivity. Michael Oliver applies this deconstructive insight to the contexts of justice pursuits and theological negotiations of divine decision, arguing for the necessity of reckoning with difficult decisions.

This enterprising book, written in the spirit of William James, urges our appreciation of the intensely personal character of spiritual transcendence. Phil Oliver's work has important implications for specialists concerned with the Jamesian concept of "pure experience," and it illuminates significant interdisciplinary ties among philosophy, literature, and other intellectual domains.

The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter, Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press 2013. 348 S., geb., $ 35,00. ISBN 978‐0‐226‐11181‐0.

Ci sono molti metodi diversi nell’interpretazione delle Scritture, e del Corano in particolare, e questi tendono a lavorare con diverse teorie del significato. Dopo tutto, la questione è cosa un particolare testo significhi effettivamente, e abbiamo bisogno di una teoria su come risolvere tali questioni, specialmente quando ci sono evidenti difficoltà nella comprensione del testo. Le argomentazioni tendono a spaziare su quale teoria del significato dia più senso al testo, o funzioni più adeguatamente come teoria del significato. Un metodo che (...) non è stato adottato nel complesso è quello di vedere la questione almeno parzialmente come morale ed epistemologica. Dovremmo avere fiducia di poter comprendere interamente ciò che abbiamo davanti e come potremmo sapere di avere la risposta alle questioni semantiche che ogni testo porta con sé? Si potrebbe sostenere che un’etica della moderazione, dell’equilibrio e della moderazione sono importanti tecniche ermeneutiche che finora non sono state sufficientemente impiegate quando si discute su come comprendere e interpretare il Corano. There are many different approaches to interpreting scripture, and the Qurʾān in particular, and these tend to work with different theories of meaning. After all, the issue is what a particular text actually means, and we need a theory about how to resolve such questions, especially when there are apparent difficulties in understanding the text. Arguments tend to range over which theory of meaning makes most sense of the text, or works most adequately as a theory of meaning. One approach which has not been taken on the whole is to see the issue as partially at least moral and epistemological. Should we have confidence that we can understand entirely what is before us, and how would we know that we have the answer to the semantic issues that any such text brings along with it? It might be argued that an ethics of moderation, balance, and restraint are important hermeneutic techniques that up to now have not been sufficiently employed when discussing how to understand and interpret the Qurʾān. (shrink)

Averroes is the Latin name of Abu'l Walid ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd (1126–1198 ce), who was born in Cordoba, Spain. He was a public official, serving as both royal physician and judge, but his political career was often difficult, and by the time of his death he had suffered banishment to North Africa. He is an outstanding representative of the great cultural achievements of Muslim Spain, and produced philosophical works which came to resonate through the West for many (...) centuries after his death. (shrink)

The four books under review here are all very different, and yet they all set out to describe Islamic philosophy and they all succeed to a certain extent. Three of them are substantial texts, two by many authors, but actually the most interesting is the short book The Story of Reason in Islam by Sari Nusseibeh. It is a sustained discussion of the role of reason in Islamic culture, and actually constitutes an argument that extends from start to finish on (...) the topic—and it is a very potent argument at that. Nusseibeh follows the familiar line that Islamic culture was in earlier times dynamic and flexible but in the last few centuries has become stultified and rigid. The book starts with some reflections on the role of... (shrink)

Neither legalistic gender-neutral categories nor prior feminist theories adequately capture all of the gender dynamics of child sexual abuse. Surveys of 923 young adults, 88 of whom reported sexual contact with adults before they were 16, complemented by intensive follow-up interviews with 18 reporting contact, reveal that gendered constructions of sexuality and dominance make the experience of abuse significantly different for boys and girls. Girls nearly always had contact with men and tended to experience it as harmful abuse. Boys were (...) more likely to have contact with women than with men; they generally interpreted contact with women as consensual, but their contact with men as abusive. Extensions of feminist gender analysis are required to explain these patterns. (shrink)

The author devotes a good number of pages to clarifying the relations between PHN, experimental psychology, and metaphysics. It is this thesis, a problem of the order of knowledge, that we wish to question. We shall first present some of the difficulties that give rise to the problem. Second, we shall indicate the kind of knowledge which PHN is. Third, we shall attempt to demonstrate that in the body of his work the kind of knowledge represented is that of the (...) "metaphysics of man" and not the "philosophy of human nature." Finally, we shall point out the importance, and non-verbal character, of a correct answer to the problem. (shrink)

_ AS Critical Thinking for AQA_ is the definitive textbook for students of the current AQA Advanced Subsidiary Level syllabus. Structured very closely around the AQA specification, it covers the two units of the AS level in an exceptionally clear and student-friendly style. The chapters are helpfully subdivided into short digestible passages, and include: intended learning objectives at the beginning of each chapter student exercises at the end of each section with a ‘stretching activity’ for more advanced learners exam orientated (...) questions key point summaries at the end of each section cross references. In line with the AQA specification, there is a heavy emphasis on more imaginative forms of source material, for example, music, film, artwork, historical documents, adverts, moral dilemmas and scientific debates, as a means of illustrating key points. A great deal of emphasis is also placed on ‘live’ or ‘real’ arguments, taking topical examples from the world of science, politics, entertainment and sport. The book is accompanied by a companion website with extensive resources for both instructors and students. (shrink)

Wie verhalten sich Körper und Geist oder Natur und Freiheit zueinander und welche Rolle spielt der Lebensbegriff bei der Bestimmung des Verhältnisses der Begriffe? Die Erarbeitung der „Funktionen des Lebendigen“ kann als ein vielschichtiges Arbeitsprogramm verstanden werden, mit dem eine zentrale Problemlage unserer Zeit, unserer Gesellschaft und unserer Technik erschlossen werden kann. In der Verbindung des methodologischen Begriffs der Funktion mit dem phänomenalen Begriff des Lebendigen liegt ein philosophisches, wissenschaftstheoretische und kulturreflexives Potential. Denn zum einen ist der Funktionsbegriff ein Schlüsselbegriff (...) im Diskurs der Moderne, gerade im Kontext von anthropologischen, lebensphänomenologischen und bioethischen Fragen. Und zum anderen stellt das Phänomen des Lebendigen nach wie vor eine der großen Herausforderungen für das philosophische Denken dar, sei es in ontologischer, anthropologischer oder ethischer Hinsicht. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes beleuchten die unterschiedlichen Problemdimensionen des Lebendigen durch begrifflich-systematische Überlegungen ebenso wie spezielle Analysen zu Formen, Normen, Erfahrungen und Grenzen des Lebendigen. (shrink)