The essays collected in Persecution and the Art of Writing all deal with one problem--the relation between philosophy and politics. Here, Strauss sets forth the thesis that many philosophers, especially political philosophers, have reacted to the threat of persecution by disguising their most controversial and heterodox ideas.

The ‘philosophy’ of the title is here understood in terms of ‘its Socratic paradigm’ as involving ‘a critical disciplined search for wisdom that involves self-k.

The year Leo Strauss published "Persecution and the Art of Writing" (1941), he prepared a lecture ("German Nihilism") that he never published. An analysis of this lecture shows that Strauss hadn't fully mastered the art of writing he'd discovered in others: his secrets are too exposed. In the context of "German Nihilism," it becomes clear that "Persecution and the Art of Writing" is about liberal persecution of authoritarianism, no the reverse, as liberals would assume. (...) In response to recent apologias presenting Strauss as a liberal who didn't "write between the lines," a Strauss-style reading of "German Nihilism" disproves both claims. (shrink)

Philosophy and literature enjoy a close, complex relationship. Elucidating the connections between these two fields, this book examines the ways philosophy deploys literary means to advance its practice, particularly as a way of life that extends beyond literary forms and words into physical deeds, nonlinguistic expression, and subjective moods and feelings.

According to Tocqueville, the freedom of the press, which he treats as an extension of the freedom of speech, is a primary constituent element of liberty. Tocqueville treats the freedom of the press in relation to and as an extension of the right to assemble and govern one’s own affairs, both of which he argues are essential to preserving liberty in a free society. Although scholars acknowledge the importance of civil associations to liberty in Tocqueville’s political thought, they routinely ignore (...) the importance he places on the freedom of the press and speech. His reflections on the importance of the free press and speech may help to shed light on the dangers of recent attempts to censor the press and speech. (shrink)

This book critically examines Leo Strauss s claim that the philosophers of antiquity, especially Plato, wrote esoterically, hiding the highest truths exclusively between the lines.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Persecution of Writing: Revisiting Strauss and CensorshipGeorges Van Den Abbeele (bio)In the 1542 edition of Pantagruel, Rabelais’s narrator terminates a long tirade extolling the Gargantuan Chronicles’ extraordinary virtues (curing toothaches, relieving the pain of treatments for syphilis, and so on) with the proviso that he will maintain the absurd truth of these claims “jusques au feu exclusive (to any point short of the stake)” [215]. This (...) clause, absent from earlier editions, while implicating the comic cowardice of the narrator also adumbrates a tragic sense of prudence. In the early years of the sixteenth century, not just Rabelais but the rest of his Renaissance world had come increasingly to know the heavy hand of censorship and persecution. Bookburning, of course, had lost its traditional source of terror with the invention of the printing press: no longer could a single bonfire extinguish all versions of a single manuscript. Instead, Church and State authorities had in the course of the Renaissance to invent new practices for controlling and regulating the circulation of dangerous words: bans on publication, excision of offensive passages prior to printing, indices of prohibited books, and so on. When left with no other alternative, however, one could still burn not just sample copies of the book but the offending author too, such as in the case of Giordano Bruno, whose auto-da-fé menacingly lit up the skies in the very first year of the seventeenth century. 1Today, with the advent of electronic media and the virtual extirpation of texts from the materiality of print and paper, it is even more difficult to abolish or even regulate the spread of refractory discourses. In the last decade, though, we have seen renewed attempts at censorship, not just of modern visual, aural, and electronic modes of representation (as is commonly recognized and debated), but also of that reputed cornerstone of liberal democratic rights, the printed text. And while in the contemporary American context it may seem that the debate over censorship has “become an argument almost exclusively about pornography and obscenity” [McGrail 51], there is also a critical need for reflection on the renewed onslaught today in virtually every part of the planet against the freedom of writers and that of the press per se. The gravity of the situation best emblematized by the case of Salman Rushdie should not blind us to the parallel stories of Taslima Nasrin, Wole Soyinka, Farag Fuda, Nawal el Saadawi, and others sadly too numerous to list. 2 [End Page 3]In this context, Leo Strauss’s 1941 essay “Persecution and the Art of Writing” retains a remarkable currency on the subject and remains a crucial point of departure from which to reflect on the contemporary crisis of censorship and the writer. Written at a time, over half a century ago, when another wave of explicit attacks on writers shocked the intellectual world, Strauss’s essay, on the one hand, struck a hopeful chord by evoking the kinds of techniques available to writers in their efforts to evade or foil censorship, that is, by demonstrating that no censorship can fully succeed in terroristically bringing about an end to heterodox forms of expression. On the other hand, he posits at least the possibility for every text that it has an inexorable core that is esoteric. No censorship can be total, but there is also no such thing as a pristine state of letters prior to censorship. As Michael Holquist has written in a more recent venue, “censorship is” [16], and all discussion must begin from that understanding if we are ever to approach the magnitude of the contemporary debacle.It is perhaps no small irony, too, that a certain Straussianism begs the question of censorship, complaining about the strictures of “political correctness” while seeking to restore a canon that not only would deny many forms of alternative discourse but also the very historicity of such constructs as canons and approved reading lists as well as indices of “forbidden books.” A useful approach might be to consider whether more recent forms of censorship have historically exceeded the terms of Strauss’s argument or whether the Straussian version of history is not itself an... (shrink)

In this paper we wish to analyze how Kierkegaard understood the art of writing novels, that is, as a way to express and develop the life-view of the author. We would like to argue that this notion, presented for the first time in From the Papers of One Still Living, was put into practice in the short novel Repetition, in which Kierkegaard used the biblical story of Job to explain the development of selfhood through the existential category of repetition. (...) According to Kierkegaard, true repetition—which is the central category of the life-view he is trying to convey—helps the individual “recollect” the past correctly so he or she can reconcile with the present and grow into the future. (shrink)

Plato's dialogues are usually understood as simple examples of philosophy in action. In this book Professor Rowe treats them rather as literary-philosophical artefacts, shaped by Plato's desire to persuade his readers to exchange their view of life and the universe for a different view which, from their present perspective, they will barely begin to comprehend. What emerges is a radically new Plato: a Socratic throughout, who even in the late dialogues is still essentially the Plato (and the Socrates) of the (...) Apology and the so-called 'Socratic' dialogues. This book aims to understand Plato both as a philosopher and as a writer, on the assumption that neither of these aspects of the dialogues can be understood without the other. The argument of the book is closely based in Plato's text, but should be accessible to any serious reader of Plato, whether professional philosopher, classicist, or student. (shrink)

Authors, especially “advocates for virtue,” writes Samuel Johnson in one of his Rambler essays, might consider following the example of monarchs, who, hiding themselves from the public, “avoid the conversation of mankind […], for men would not more patiently submit to be taught, than commanded, by one known to have the same follies and weaknesses with themselves.” It is easy to see, continues Dr. Johnson, that writing well is easier than living well: teaching navigation on land is not the (...) same as actually commanding a ship on sea, just as designing a life in “solitude, safety, and tranquility, with a mind unbiased, and with liberty unobstructed” is easier than actually living by that design “amidst tumult, and snares, and danger.” It is no surprise that allegedly even Milton was pleased that he did not disappoint an enthusiastic visitor and was “found equal to his own character”—a character born out of his textual world (Samuel Johnson, “The Rambler No. 14. (5 May, 1750)”, in Selected Essays from the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler, ed. W.J. Bate. Yale University Press, 1968, 39, 40, 38). Johnson’s essay speaks of his deep insight into the chasm between the thinking, breathing, embodied self and contingent life of a writer and the textual self and models of life sculpted in her works. This insight, needless to say, has become a cliché in twentieth-century criticism, which dispensed with the naive view that literary discourse, including autobiographical works, is somehow transparent, a reflection of the writer’s self. For this reason, it might seem odd to look at literature from the perspective of a tradition that considers writing a crucial technique of examining and cultivating the self—something the ancient Greeks termed epimelesthai sautou, “the care of the self,” which was once understood to be the true goal of philosophy itself, conceived as the “art of living.” Richard Shusterman’s latest book, Philosophy and the Art of Writing revitalizes this ancient tradition of philosophy as an embodied way of living, and examines the various ways the process and product of the art of writing can contribute to the philosophical life dedicated to self-examination and self-improvement, while also pointing out the ambiguities of such an enterprise. (shrink)

As the editors of the series, New Literary Theory, proclaim in the preface of the book, the purpose of the series is to make more room in literary theory for playful and accessible approaches to li...

The aim of this article is to develop a postmetaphysical conception of reading by following Kierkegaard’s Either/Or Part I (1843) through such Derridian concepts as secret, hospitality, and spectrality. The work focuses on the three essays addressed to the Symparanekromenoi (“the community of the dead”), a fellowship neither young nor old with an aphoristic way of life (2010b, pp. 137–225) that can be understood as a figure of alterity. Special attention is paid to paratextual features of the book: the texts (...) are actually presented as old papers found in a secretary desk by a pseudonymous editor (“Victor Eremita”), which suggests that every text is a posthumous paper, that is to say, it will always be read after the death of its author. Instead of finding a solid author who holds the semantic weight of the text, these papers are based in a blank of sense, a specter, a secret: if they are sustained on its author, then they are sustained in a mystery, not in a sort of revelation of meaning. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a comprehensive account of Leibniz's important but neglected distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric. I argue that Leibniz distinguished between esoteric and exoteric modes of presentation, and esoteric and exoteric content. He endorsed the esoteric mode, which was modeled on the geometrical model of demonstration, as the ideal mode of presentation in metaphysics. However, he thought it would be a mistake to introduce his metaphysics to people in the form of an esoteric treatise. This (...) was not due to a problem with the esoteric mode per se. The problem stemmed from the gap between the esoteric content of his metaphysics and the received views of his time, particularly those that were grounded in what he regarded as sensory prejudices. This misguided reliance on the senses made it extremely difficult for people to conceive of the purely intelligible concepts and principles at the core of his metaphysics. Leibniz used pedagogical exoteric writing to compose texts that could function as intellectual stepping-stones that would enable his readers traverse the gulf between received opinions and esoteric truth. I isolate the key rhetorical strategies that Leibniz utilized in his pedagogical exoteric writing, and explain how one can develop principled esoteric/exoteric interpretations of his writings. Awareness of his nuanced views on the esoteric and the exoteric will allow us to more adequately address central questions in Leibniz scholarship about the extent to which his views change over time, about whether he attains considered views on particular topics, and about the extent to which his philosophy is systematic. (shrink)

This introductory piece provides context for this symposium on Richard Shusterman's new book, Philosophy and the Art of Writing. The piece reflects on the symposium genre from Plato's classic dialogue to its form today. It claims that Shusterman's work asks us to take this kind of philosophical writing more seriously, and for that reason the symposium itself has taken on a different structure. The piece discusses how each of the contributors responding to the book (with Shusterman leading the (...) way), Eli Kramer, Randall Auxier, and Charles Johnson, have engaged in practicing, nurturing, and supporting broad modes of philosophical writing, and in turn why they have chosen to do so in this context. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Artforum, Andy Warhol, and the Art of Living:What Art Educators Can Learn from the Recent History of American Art WritingDavid Carrier (bio)When around 1980 I began writing art criticism, Artforum was much concerned with historical analysis.1 When presenting the work of younger painters and sculptors, it seemed natural to explain artists' accomplishments by identifying precedents for their work. Much of my criticism published in the 1980s presented post-formalist (...) accounts of abstract painting. Seeking precedents for the painting I admired, I looked to the history of art. But such pleas for the value of tradition were doomed. Commentators preaching the values of tradition lost out to the writers emphasizing a break with the past. Much of interest for art education can be learned by studying the history of this very influential, small circulation journal.Only in retrospect did the urgency of this felt need for a break with the past become apparent. The history of responses to Abstract Expressionism suggested a different way of thinking about moments of change. HaroldRosenberg's conception of "action painting" implied that Pollock broke dramatically with the past. Clement Greenberg, by contrast, in a famous phrase said: "I do not think it exaggerated to say that Pollock's 1946-1950 manner really took up Analytic Cubism from the point at which Picasso and Braquehad left it...in their collages of 1912 and 1913."2 Greenberg's counter-intuitive analysis, asking us to see very different looking paintings as essentially similar, had prevailed. So it was not unreasonable to expect that after Greenberg, concern with tradition would remain important. But that was not what happened.Demand for a break with the past often carries political overtones. Historians debate whether the French Revolution broke with the past, or merely developed trends of the old regime. The idea of a complete break with tradition can seem attractive, but of course such dramatic ways of thinking underestimate real continuities. Struggle among post-Greenbergian artwriters to define a new critical paradigm mimics conflicts among artists to define the [End Page 1] leading post-Abstract Expressionist tradition. Once a critical paradigm has been established, debate may proceed peacefully. But when defining a period style is at issue, the stakes are high, and so conflicts are ferocious. Of course, struggle is always accompanied also by co-operation, but failing to grasp the real role of conflict leads to all-too-pious visions of what is possible.Greenberg developedthe most influential critical approach, and so when his way of thinking was rejected, a radically different approach was of most interest. Here we are dealing with what Harold Bloom famously called the anxiety of influence. Just as the most interesting painting after Abstract Expressionism deconstructed that tradition, so in criticism no ways of thinking too similar to Greenberg's stood a chance of being important. I think it interesting to reconstruct the process rationally in which an individual obtains such power. A totem, Freud explains, is "an animal (whether edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan."3 The communion bread and wine are just bread and wine, but for the believer they become Christ's body and blood. Rationally speaking, a representational painting is just pigment on canvas; and a minimalist sculpture, just shaped metal. But in what Arthur Danto calls the "transfiguration of the commonplace," "a work of art...has qualities to attend to which its untransfigured counterpart lacks...We are dealing with an altogether different order of things."4 Greenberg became a totem. He was not just an important writer whose arguments entitled him to reasonable respect. The mere mention of his name invoked irrational fears.Greenberg was obsessed with tradition. Abstract Expressionism was rooted in early modernism, so that the era from Manet through Pollock defined a period style. Greenberg's historiography may seem inescapable. How can a young painter be understood except by seeking precedents for her achievement? Cannot the now famous artists who emerged in the 1980s be understood in these terms? Barbara Kruger comes out of John Heartfield and dada... (shrink)

The review argues that Plato makes a valid distinction between inferior hypothetical and superior unhypothetical methods. Given the distinction, the book confuses the hypothetical for unhypothetical dialectic.

Leo Strauss’s way of reading of Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise got changed after his rediscovery of exotericism. As early as in the comment article on Hermann Cohen’s analysis of Spinoza’s Bible science, Strauss put forward that the Treatise should not be understood on the basis of our readers’ own presupposes of Spinoza’s personal motives. Later, in Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (1930), Strauss indeed read the Treatise literally, trying to understand it on the basis of Spinoza’s explicit statements. After the rediscovery of (...) exotericism in 1930s, however, Strauss’s way of reading got changed. Strauss became very alert to Spinoza’s way of writing. Strauss found that Spinoza spoke with a view to the capacity of the vulgar and practiced exoteric writing. Some of Spinoza’s explicit statements were addressed to the non-philosophic majority and were not Spinoza’s true teachings. Based on this, Strauss regarded not all of Spinoza’s explicit statements, but those most opposed to what Spinoza considered the vulgar view, as well as those with an implication of a heterodox character, as expressing Spinoza’s true views. Strauss shows that “be alert to the art of writing” means two things. First, understand the author’s explicit statements. And second, try to find whether there are teachings that are different from or even opposed to the explicit statements. Keywords: Leo Strauss, exotericism, Spinoza, theologico-political treatise. (shrink)

In recent years, contemplative practices of meditation have become increasingly mainstream in American culture, part of a phenomenon that scholars call “Buddhist modernism.” Connecting the embodied practice of meditation with the embodied practice of democracy in everyday life, this essay puts the radical democratic theory of Jacques Rancière into conversation with the Zen writings of Shunryu Suzuki and Thomas Merton. I show how meditation can be understood as an aesthetic practice that cultivates modes of experience, perception, thinking, and feeling that (...) further radical democratic projects at the most fundamental level. Reading the landscape of Buddhist modernism to draw out democratic possibilities, we can understand contemplative practices like meditation as a form of political theorizing in a vernacular register. Buddhist modernism works as a practice of everyday life that ordinary users can employ to get through their days with more awareness and attentiveness, to reclaim and reauthorize their experience, and to generate more care and compassion in ways that enable, enact, and extend the project of democracy itself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy: Two Paths of Liberation from the Representational Mode of ThinkingRobert MagliolaZen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy: Two Paths of Liberation from the Representational Mode of Thinking. By Carl Olson. New York: State University of New York Press, 2000. 309 pp.Carl Olson's Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy compares two paths of liberation from the representational mode of thinking, namely, (...) Zen Buddhism and postmodern philosophy. Olson is to be commended for encouraging this dialogue, especially since professors of religious studies usually marginalize Gallic postmodern thought. He is also to be appreciated for the enormous effort that must have been required to describe so much material. Olson treats Bataille, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, Guattari, Foucault, Kristeva, Lacan, Levinas, and Lyotard on the postmodern side; and Dogen, Hakuin, Nishitani, many Chinese Ch'anists, and some Indian Buddhists on the Buddhist side. His method is to arrange the chapters according to topoi such as "Language, Disruption, and Play," "Ways of Thinking," "The Body," and so on, and to treat the pertaining ideas of the individual Buddhist and postmodern authors insofar as applicable.Because Olson's book assembles between two covers the names, selected works, and—at least in a general sense—the "key" ideas of the postmodern movement and their grosso modo similarities/dissimilarities via-à-vis Zen Buddhism, I think it serves an undergraduate readership well enough. The problem is that the book too often performs like a crib sheet in the CliffsNotes manner, reducing so-called "key" ideas to misleading clichés. The book is at its best when it gives an author some length of attention, as it does with Dogen. Rather than reduce my review to a series of sound bites (print bites?) corresponding to Olson's, I shall resort to what hermeneuts call an Auerbachian decoupage, that is, a close analysis of several passages that can be taken as indicative of an author's mode in general. I'll address three interpretations from Olson's book, one of Derrida, one of a Chinese kung-an (koan), and one of Lacan.Within his comparison of Derrida/language/Buddhism, Olson cites (p. 46) a sentence from Derrida's Writing and Difference: "Speech is stolen: since it is stolen [End Page 295] from language it is, thus, stolen from itself, that is, from the thief who has always already lost speech as property and initiative." Olson glosses as follows: "Derrida claims that a speaking subject, representing an irreducible secondary status, is no longer the person who speaks because his/her origin is elusive in an already established field of speech." Because of glosses like this, Derrida is all too often subjected to the ridicule of nonspecialists, who exclaim, "Derrida denies that a person can use speech instrumentally? Aren't his lectures the instruments of his own ideas?" Actually in the section Olson quotes, Derrida is appropriating Lacanian thought and mutating it for Derridean purposes. For Derrida, all life is stretched out in time and diced-out in space in such a way that phenomenological self-identity is an illusion. Physical writing is the best metaphor for this, in that written words (even Chinese ideograms) cannot, in the scientific sense, be perceived in one absolute moment: it "takes time" and it "takes space" to recognize a word, that is, "build" a word-meaning. Derrida calls life a "text" or "writing" because life is like writing: life on the phenomenological level appears holistic (much as a word-meaning appears self-identical, i.e., arising all at once), but life is actually a time/space "drift."1In the sentence Olson quotes, what Derrida means has the following gist: Speech (spoken words) is stolen from language in that it belongs to language as writing and is really writing; and insofar as it is really writing, it is stolen from itself; speech has "always already" been lost to language in that the instrumentality of speech is always undercut by language's nature as writing. Speech is always undercut by an inevitable drift that subverts intentionality and foils our attempts to make speech our absolute "property." This does not mean most of the intention... (shrink)

Review of Christopher Rowe, Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007.

In the Persecution and the Art of Writing Leo Strauss criticized the replacement of philosophical enquiry in youth education with history of philosophy and of philosophers with specialists in certain scientific fields. Contemporary calls for a “global social contract” emphasize the need of reforming international institutions and the importance of a youth education “for” sustainable development. Philosophical voices decry the ever-growing importance of institutions at the expense of individual freedom of expression and action. The article explores common points (...) and differences between our ideal of sustainable development and the Straussian ideal of creative philosophical thought. (shrink)

An introduction to writing proofs, presented through compelling mathematical statements with interesting elementary proofs. This book offers an introduction to the art and craft of proof-writing. The author, a leading research mathematician, presents a series of engaging and compelling mathematical statements with interesting elementary proofs. These proofs capture a wide range of topics, including number theory, combinatorics, graph theory, the theory of games, geometry, infinity, order theory, and real analysis. The goal is to show students and aspiring mathematicians (...) how to write proofs with elegance and precision. (shrink)

This paper develops an analysis of the relationship between politics and suffering in the writings of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Both thinkers uphold the tragic idea of suffering as a crucible in which the uniquely human powers of self-creation - having reached, apparently, their lowest point - are revealed in all of their grand majesty. Yet they diverge dramatically when it comes to working out the political implications of this idea. Whereas Hölderlin deploys the tragic revaluation of (...) suffering on behalf of democracy, Nietzsche deploys this same revaluation against democracy. My argument suggests that the differences between Hölderlin and Nietzsche refer more to their different points in the development of the modern age than to any substantive difference in the structure of their thinking, and that unearthing Nietzsche's origins in Hölderlin enables us to retrieve the wider compass of the idea of suffering on which Nietzsche relies in developing his critique of modern democratic politics, and so also a wider compass for settling some of the debates that have arisen around his political thought. Key Words: democracy • Hölderlin • Nietzsche • suffering • tragedy. (shrink)

A vivacious biography of the prophetic and sympathetic philosopher who along with Voltaire and Rousseau built the foundations of the modern world, and travelled as far as Russia to enlighten the Tsarina Catherine the Great. Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world's first comprehensive Encyclopédie into existence. But his most compelling and personal writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his most daring (...) books for posterity-for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings that he left behind after his death, Diderot dreamed of natural selection before Darwin, the Oedipus complex before Freud, and genetic manipulation centuries before Dolly the Sheep was born. Even more audaciously, the writer challenged virtually all of his century's accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial justification of slave trade, to the limits of human sexuality. He was also keenly aware of the dangers of absolute power, about which he wrote so persuasively that it led Catherine the Great not only to support him financially but also to invite him to St. Petersburg. In this thematically organized biography, Andrew Curran vividly describes Diderot's tormented relationship with Rousseau, his feud with Voltaire, his tortured marriage, his passionate affairs, and his often-paradoxical stand on art, morality, and religion. But what this book brings out most brilliantly is how a man's character flaws and limitations are often the flip side of his genius and his ability to break taboos, dogmas, and conventions. (shrink)

A textbook for students who are learning how to write a mathematical proof, a validation of the truth of a mathematical statement.

Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek's political and aesthetic investigations (...) concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women's literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism's experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the appreciation of art's emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles. (shrink)

This book explores the writings of philosopher and educator John Dewey in order to develop an expansive vision of aesthetic education and everyday poetics of living. Robert Pirsig's best-selling book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, provides concrete examples of this compelling yet unconventional vision.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American PsychoCarla Freccero (bio)R.L.: Do you believe in God?B.E.E.: Are you asking me if I was raised in a religious family or if I go to church? I was raised an agnostic. I don’t know—I hate to fly, I have a fear of flying. That means either that I have no faith in air traffic controllers or that I’ve (...) done something really bad, and this is God’s way of getting at me. Maybe I’m caught in the middle.... But no, I don’t believe in God. That’s such a strange thing to admit in an interview.—Robert Love, “Psycho Analysis,” Rolling Stone interview with Bret Easton EllisBefore Capitol Hill acts on these dimwitted proposals, we should remember what the writer Bret Easton Ellis might have said, but didn’t: “Doing bad stuff is wrong.”—Ted Rall, “Meet the Cusp Kids”US mass media has become a much-publicized target of censorious commentary within American public culture in recent years. Censorship, as E. S. Burt notes, may take at least two forms: philosophical censorship, such as that discussed by Leo Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing, and the more commonly applied form of US censorship enacted against “pornography” or “obscenity.” Philosophical censorship, in this reading, entails the state’s persecution of message-bearing texts or utterances that counter the doxa and threaten to disrupt the state, while the second form of censorship involves “a language use that falls outside the interpretive scheme defining the work as the intentional act of a moral being” [Burt 25]. In the United States, state censorship of the first kind may perhaps be practiced through the “incitement to riot” escape clause provision in the First Amendment, while obscenity censorship—in certain forms—is explicitly written into legislation as excluded from speech protection.Extending Strauss’s argument to the liberal state, Burt suggests in effect that these two forms of censorship become related insofar as the state’s censorious intent is directed not so much at the content of the expression as at the degree to which it confirms the axiom, what Burt calls the “very fundamental, convening assumption of the... liberal state” [25] that “virtue is knowledge” [see Strauss 25]. Thus obscenity is a form of expression that cannot be interpreted as productive knowledge but instead as a certain repetitive excess, “dirt for dirt’s sake” [Burt, quoting Judge Woolsey 28]. The problem here, of course, is that such distinctions do not apply comfortably to that category of utterance termed the literary, and especially to the use of figurative language, where “art for art’s sake” can be [End Page 44] seen precisely to resemble the nonproductivity of obscenity. The text I am going to discuss in depth here, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, has been attacked on both grounds—as an active (and violent) disruption of the doxa that is also obscenely nonproductive of knowledge—and as such, it serves as an illustrative, and I will argue, noncoincidental, case of “censorship” in the liberal state.It may be useful here to begin by surveying and making distinctions among the various popular and popularized censorships in recent US media: Ice-T’s “Cop Killer” was probably the most authentic case of “philosophical” censorship, even though its silencing did not derive directly from the state (the liberal state often does not function in some of the ways supposed when the definition of censorship is restricted to state censorship). “Cop Killer” is a song about killing policemen, and thus came closest—in the list I am going to propose of silenced works—to tempting the state’s retaliation. It was written and sung by a black man (a black man who often plays a gangster and a cop in popular films), in a genre already regarded as threateningly disruptive to the state: rap. The result is that the CD containing this song was pulled from the shelves of music stores and can no longer be purchased. There was no trial. The author withdrew his work from public circulation in the face of... (shrink)

Adults spend most of their conscious life speaking, comprehending, writing, and reading discourse. It is entirely appropriate for cognitive science to investigate discourse especially as transmitted texts or printed media, such as books, newspapers, magazines, and computers. However, there is another reason why text understanding has been one of the prototypical areas of study in cognitive science: Interdisciplinary work is absolutely essential. As cognitive scientists have unraveled the puzzles of text comprehension, they have embraced the insights and methodologies from (...) several disciplines. (shrink)

THE NATURE OF ART is a collection of 29 seminal, historically-organized readings that are focused on a basic philosophical question: What is Art? Including writings from the Western tradition'both Continental and Analytic traditions'as well as non-Western, minority, and feminist writings, this volume provides students with a rich set of resources to explore this matter both broadly and deeply. Introductions to each reading situate the selection amidst each respective thinker's body of work and the greater philosophical context in which the remarks (...) arose. Reading questions accompany each selection, drawing students' attention to key points to be encountered. Hailed by reviewers and adopters for its clarity and rigor, Wartenberg's THE NATURE OF ART offers a lively and engaging introduction to the philosophy of art. (shrink)

Like other early modern missionaries, the Jesuits made much of their status as eye?witness observers, but the observational methods which missionaries employed in gaining knowledge of non?European cultures have received little consideration. The Jesuit case affords a glimpse of the observational tools and cognitive practices deployed in the overseas missions. Prayer, reading and some kind of writing or annotation constituted the backbone of Jesuit devotional practice, and writing formed a routine component of Jesuit mission life. Notes played an (...) essential role in bringing order to the onslaught of new experiences, alien customs, unfamiliar languages and unexpected circumstances routinely encountered. (shrink)

In this analysis of the problem of freedom from a humanistic-Marxist perspective, philosopher Kevin M. Brien draws on the full chronological spectrum of Marx's writings to reconstruct the mature Marx's view of freedom under three broad categories: freedom as a mode of being, freedom as transcendence, and freedom as spontaneity. While recognizing that many students of Marx have noted two distinctly different perspectives in early and late Marx, Brien interprets Marx's philosophy as a coherent organic whole. He demonstrates that Marx's (...) thought is principally and systematically an elaborated philosophical-scientific theory of freedom. New to this second edition is an extended postscript in which Brien provides critical responses to a number of published reviews of the first edition of his book. In addition, Brien also presents a humanistic-Marxist interpretation of spirituality. In so doing he identifies a potential revolutionizing agency in the context of the 21st century. Finally, an addendum shows how humanistic Marxism and Buddhism converge on the same basic values and mutually complement each other. This comparison serves to emphasize the viability of projecting a nontheistic spiritual dimension and shows that there is a genuine moral basis for common social action among adherents of different perspectives. This rigorously argued and deeply thoughtful analysis reveals the continuing relevance and promise of Marx's thought in the 21st century. (shrink)

By modern standards Bacon's writings are striking in their range and diversity, and they are too often considered a separate specialist concerns in isolation from each other. Dr Jardine finds a unifying principle in Bacon's preoccupation with 'method', the evaluation and organisation of information as a procedure of investigation or of presentation. She shows how such an interpretation makes consistent sense of the whole corpus of Bacon's writings: how the familiar but misunderstood inductive method for natural science relations to the (...) more information strategies of argument in his historical, ethical, political and literary work. There is a substantial and valuable study of the intellectual Renaissance background from which Bacon emerged and against which he reacted. Through a series of details comparisons and contrasts we are led to appreciate the true originality and ingenuity of Bacon's own views and also to discount the more superficial resemblances between them and later developments in the philosophy of science. (shrink)