This paper deals with the political philosophy of Václav Havel, mainly its relation to ethics and what Michel Foucault called governmentality. Besides using his analytical framework, Foucault’s politics are engaged with to highlight similar trajectories of two intellectuals dealing with related dilemmas of ethics and politics. As a dissident of communist Czechoslovakia Havel, developed a profound critique of modernity, but also discovered technologies of the self, exclusive to dissidents, which empowered them in their moral struggle against the regime. The Velvet (...) Revolution in 1989 ascended Havel to the presidency of the republic, a position from which he quickly embraced and disseminated neoliberal governmentality. The final section deals with Havel’s use of human rights in the later years of his presidency, being a justification for military interventions and comparing them to Foucault’s conceptualisation of rights. Human rights discourse is the culmination of Havel’s lifelong quest for the ethical foundation of politics and it is the source of most difficulties and potentialities associated with this project. (shrink)

A SECOND COMPLETELY REVISED EDITION OF THIS TEXTBOOK ON INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH WAS PUBLISHED WITH AMSTERDAM UNIVERSITY PRESS IN 2022. Check out that version here and a PDF of its ToC and Introduction, as this first edition (AUP 2016) is no longer available. [This book (128 pp.) serves as an introduction and manual to guide students through the interdisciplinary research process. We are becoming increasingly aware that, as a result of technological developments and globalisation, problems are becoming so complex that they (...) can only be solved through cooperation between multiple disciplines. Healthcare, climate change, food security, energy, financial markets and quality of life are just a few examples of issues that require scientists and academics to work in a crossdisciplinary way. As a result of these developments, an interdisciplinary approach is becoming increasingly popular in higher education and must be considered an absolute necessity. Young academics are being called on to step beyond the boundaries of traditional disciplines in order to contribute to addressing fundamental problems and solving challenges facing society. There is a need for people who are not afraid to ask critical questions, who can work together well and can look beyond the boundaries of their own field. This means students need to learn more about how they can integrate and apply knowledge, methods and skills from different fields. Interdisciplinary research projects and practical training courses offer students more than one perspective on the same subject. Comparing and contrasting, connecting, adding and adapting concepts, theories and methodologies from different disciplines ultimately results in new insights and better answers to complex problems.]. (shrink)

We agree with Clarke and Beck that the approximate number system represents rational numbers, and we demonstrate our support by highlighting the case of the empty set – the non-symbolic manifestation of zero. It is particularly interesting because of its perceptual and semantic uniqueness, and its exploration reveals fundamental new insights about how numerical information is represented.

Las tecnologías de la comunicación y la alfabetización digital pueden suponer factores de exclusión en colectivos vulnerables. Mediante una práctica de inclusión social diseñada en base a metodologías participativas, un equipo transdisciplinar ha ofrecido a un grupo de mujeres refugiadas en situación de especial vulnerabilidad un programa formativo que, dirigido al emprendimiento y a la inserción laboral, fomentaba la adquisición de habilidades digitales. Asimismo, se presenta una experiencia de Aprendizaje Servicio con alumnado universitario que ha favorecido la inclusión social de (...) las mujeres refugiadas en la universidad y la formación real de este alumnado de la educación reglada. (shrink)

In a reply to my recent paper “The Cost of Denying Intrinsic Value in Nature,” Rut Vinterkvist raises an important objection to my claim that environmentalists must ascribe intrinsic value to some natural entities to consistently defend the protectionist views I believe many of them have. To defend this claim, I provided three hypothetical cases, involving threatened natural entities, designed to show that only an intrinsic value of these respective entities could explain a reason to protect them. My claim was (...) that, even in these cases, environmentalists would generally find the natural entities in question protection-worthy. Against this claim, Vinterkvist argues that environmentalists can consistently opt for protection of these entities without ascribing any intrinsic value to them, the idea being that we can argue for protection of the entities on the basis that other people care for them (for whatever reasons, if any). We should protect them, not for their own sake, but for the sake of those who care for them. In this response, I explain why I believe her suggestion—challenging to my argument as it is—does not provide a proper option for environmentalists who want to argue for protection in these and similar cases. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Paul Bartha’s ‘Making Do Without Expectations’. We provide an assessment of the strengths and limitations of two notable extensions of standard decision theory: relative expectation theory and Paul Bartha’s relative utility theory. These extensions are designed to provide intuitive answers to some well-known problems in decision theory involving gaps in expectations. We argue that both RET and RUT go some way towards providing solutions to the problems in question but neither extension solves all the (...) relevant problems. (shrink)

The acknowledged difficulty and even impossibility of finding a literal paraphrase for most metaphors is offered by [Donald] Davidson1 as evidence that there is nothing to be paraphrased - that a sentence says nothing metaphorically that it does not say literally, but rather functions differently, inviting comparisons and stimulating thought. But paraphrase of many literal sentences also is exceedingly difficult, and indeed we may seriously question whether any sentence can be translated exactly into other words in the same or any (...) other language. Let's agree, though, that literal paraphrase of metaphor is on the whole especially hard. That is easily understood since the metaphorical application of terms has the effect, and usually the purpose, of drawing significant boundaries that cut across ruts worn by habit, of picking out new relevant kinds for which we have no simple and familiar literal descriptions. We must note in passing, though, that the metaphorical application may nevertheless be quite clear. For just as inability to define "desk" is compatible with knowing which articles are desks, so inability to paraphrase a metaphorical term is compatible with knowing what it applies to, And as I have remarked elsewhere,2 whether a man is metaphorically a Don Quixote or a Don Juan is perhaps easier to decide than whether he is literally a schizoid or a paranoiac. · 1. In "What Metaphors Mean," Critical Inquiry 5 : 31-47.· 2. In "Stories upon Stories; or, Reality on Tiers," delivered at the conference Levels of Reality, in Florence, Italy, September 1978. Nelson Goodman, emeritus professor of philosophy at Harvard, has written The Structure of Appearance; Fact, Fiction, and Forecast; Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols; Problems and Projects; and, most recently, Ways of Worldmaking. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "The Status of Style" , "Twisted Tales; or, Story, Study, and Symphony" , and "The Telling and the Told". (shrink)

Human rights theory and practice have long been stuck in a rut. Although disagreement is the norm in philosophy and social-political practice, the sheer depth and breadth of disagreement about human rights is truly unusual. Human rights theorists and practitioners disagree – wildly in many cases – over just about every issue: what human rights are, what they are for, how many of them there are, how they are justified, what human interests or capacities they are supposed to protect, what (...) they require of persons and institutions, etc. Disagreement about human rights is so profound, in fact, that several prominent theorists have remarked that the very concept of a “human right” appears nearly criterionless. In my 2012 article, “Reconceptualizing Human Rights”, I diagnosed the root cause of these problems. Theorists and practitioners have falsely supposed that the concept of “human right” picks out a single, unified class of moral entitlements. However, the concept actually refers to two fundamentally different types of moral entitlements: (A) international human rights, which are universal human moral entitlements to coercive international protections, and (B) domestic human rights, which are universal human moral entitlements to coercive domestic protections. Accordingly, I argue, an adequate “theory of human rights” must be a dual theory. The present paper provides the first such theory. First, I show that almost every justificatory ground given for “human rights” in the literature – such as the notion of a “minimally decent human life”, “urgent human interests”, and “human needs” – faces at least one of two fatal problems. Second, I show that after some revisions, James Griffin’s conception of “personhood” provides a compelling justificatory ground for international human rights. Third, I show that the account entails that there are very few international human rights – far fewer than existing human rights theories and practices suggest. Fourth, I show that there are reasons to find my very short list of international human rights compelling: “human rights justifications” for coercive international and foreign policy actions over the past several decades have consistently overstepped what can be morally justified, and my account reveals precisely how existing human rights theories and practices have failed to adequately grapple with these moral hazards. Finally, I outline an account of domestic human rights which fits well with many existing human rights beliefs and practices, vindicating those beliefs and practices, but only at a domestic level. (shrink)

At the risk of being ostracized (if not annihilated) by the community of Popperians present, I wish to remark that Professor Lakatos is - and, I think - cannot help being, a second-level inductivist. If Professor Kuhn has pointed out (most eruditely) that science quite frequently is in a rut, and occasionally gets out of it (and into a new one), then Professor Lakatos appraises problem and theory shifts, and methodological innova- tions in the sciences, in the light of his (...) criteria of 'progress' or 'degenera- tion'. There can be little doubt that he wishes to serve (at least) in a critical and/or advisory capacity to scientists. But he can do that only if he 'places his bets', i.e., conjectures as to the fruitfulness of a method, and along with it of a theory engendered or supported by such a method along the lines of success or failure, whichever may be plausibly indicated. I find Professor Lakatos's refutations of simple inductivism (here he agrees with Popper), as well as of simple falsificationism (here he disagrees with a caricature of the early Popper), completely convincing. But if he is to fulfill the critical and/or advisory functions, what else can he do but watch the course of the 'shifts' and extrapolate?! (shrink)

In the triumvirate of personalities and motives—from Wright and Baldwin to Coates—we encounter the essential elements of the “crisis” that configures black passage in the New World. These lines of kinship, both consanguineous and ineffable, travelling from father to son, from uncle to nephew, from one generation to the next, lend us a figurative rhythm that grasps the notion of the processional —the traversal of time and space that remains fundamentally mysterious, just as we can put our finger directly on (...) the problem—black life is still as endangered and precarious as it ever was. If one regards such passage as a “crisis,” then it is precisely because it is riddled with turning points, sudden ruts and rifts in the road when the way seemed smooth and clear—those moments when decisions must be made—and from that perspective, African-American cultural apprenticeship offers, by definition, crisis not as a state of exception, but rather, as a steady state, given historical pressures that bear in on it and that become, as a result, intramural pressures. What I wish to do in these remarks is to clarify one of the questions engendered by this predicament, and that is to say, the riddle of identity and how it matters, but even more than an inquiry into the identitarian, I am searching for a protocol through intramural space. (shrink)

This article regards the field of neuroscience and indicates on the proper or erroneous functioning of the human brain. Intellectual virtues, especially practical wisdom play a significant role in capturing the truth and implementing it in life. The agile formation of the cognitive function of man encompasses both his reason as well as the sensual judgment of utility with all the bodily backup. The brain possesses great plasticity in the production of neuronal connections. Habit as a permanent wont utilizes the (...) reactions being developed to the construction of often inappropriate mechanisms, that in turn are not easy or completely impossible to eliminate. When practical reason is introduced into a false ethos, the brain responds by forming “ruts” of neuronal connections which seem difficult to consider as something appropriate. The reparation of the existing situation and the removal of the wrong habit require relevant virtues so as to unblock the psychological resistance that is deeply rooted within the physiological neuronal substrate. The learning about the virtues of St. Thomas Aquinas is the best warranty not only for theoretical explanations, but also for the practical application of virtues in dealing with the arised situation. Only well-formed virtues give the opportunity to correct the false instinctive cognition and liberate from erroneous actions. (shrink)

Hilary Putnam has famously undergone some radical changes of mind with regard to the issue of scientific realism and its wider epistemological bearings. In this paper I defend the arguments put forward by early Putnam in his essays on the causal theory of reference as applied to natural-kind terms, despite his own later view that those arguments amounted to a form of 'metaphysical' realism which could not be sustained against various lines of sceptical attack. I discuss some of the reasons (...) for Putnam's retreat, first to the theory of 'internal (or framework-relative) realism proposed in his middle-period writings, and then to a commonsensepragmatist stance which claims to resituate this whole discussion on ground that has not been trorldden into ruts by the contending philosophical schools. In particular I examine his protracted engagement with various forms of anti-realist doctrine (Michael Dummett's most prominent among them), with Wittgenstein's thinking about language-games or meaning-as-use, and with a range of sceptical- relativist positions adopted in the wake of Quine's influential attack on the two last 'dogmas' of logical empiricism. My paper seeks to show that Putnam has been over-impressed by some of the arguments — from these and other sources — which he takes to constitute a knock-down case against the kind of extemalist and causal-realist approach developed in his early essays. It concludes by re-stating that position in summary form and relating it to other, more recent defences of causal realism in epistemology and philosophy of science. (shrink)

Written in a simple and easily understandable style, Concentration is a classic among books on the art of meditation. Published, as it was, before our fascination with things New Agey, it dispels many of the myths and misconceptions that have arisen and been promoted out of that movement. And for this reason alone, for the preservation of the truth, it is worth its weight in gold. First and foremost among the myths it dispels is the idea that developing concentration is (...) really of no consequence in the practical application of the art of meditation, as some so-called New Age gurus would have people believe. This is like saying that for an automobile to function properly it doesnt need gasoline! Without the ability to concentrate, our efforts at meditation will result only in going nowhere, in spinning our wheels in an unending rut. (shrink)

There was a time, in the late 1970s and 1980s, when great feats were expected of recombinant DNA biotechnology, some verging on the miraculous. According to both business enthusiasts and sober analysts like the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, the new techniques of gene splicing would not only lift the drug industry out of its deep scientific and economic rut (characterized by long-declining introduction rates of genuinely novel medicines), but rejuvenate the American manufacturing sector (Chase 1979; Chemical Week 1987; (...) OTA 1984). Once freed by policy interventions to promote academic-industry collaboration, such as the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, lifesaving drugs locked up in ivory towers would .. (shrink)

[1] Hagadah shel Pesaḥ -- [2] Pirḳe Avot -- [3] Mishle -- [4] Shir ha-shirim -- [5] Megilat Ḳohelet -- 6. Megilat Ekhah -- [7] Megilat Rut -- [8] Sefer Tehilim.

[1] Hagadah shel Pesaḥ -- [2] Pirḳe Avot -- [3] Mishle -- [4] Shir ha-shirim -- [5] Megilat Ḳohelet -- 6. Megilat Ekhah -- [7] Megilat Rut -- [8] Sefer Tehilim.

The lost celebration. To live the sacred, that means to admit its presence in the world and to celebrate this presence; respectively, to affirm the presence of its absolute value, of the Meaning, finally, in the horizon of harmony and joy, and to fill up ourselves by that. In nowadays, do we really know to live the feast, namely the feast of our spirit? Do we still have the wish and the wisdom to institute sacred times and spaces, to offer (...) our soul to the joy and not to the manipulation, to the ritual and not to the rut-ness? Are we able to escape from the tyranny of clamor and of instinct? These are questions to which we are trying to find some answers in our essay. (shrink)

The lost celebration. To live the sacred, that means to admit its presence in the world and to celebrate this presence; respectively, to affirm the presence of its absolute value, of the Meaning, finally, in the horizon of harmony and joy, and to fill up ourselves by that. In nowadays, do we really know to live the feast, namely the feast of our spirit? Do we still have the wish and the wisdom to institute sacred times and spaces, to offer (...) our soul to the joy and not to the manipulation, to the ritual and not to the rut-ness? Are we able to escape from the tyranny of clamor and of instinct? These are questions to which we are trying to find some answers in our essay. (shrink)

As people age their actions often become entrenched—we might say they are not open to the new; they are less able to adapt; they are stuck in a rut. Indeed, in The Coming of Age (La Vieillesse) Simone de Beauvoir writes that to be old is to be condemned neither to freedom nor to meaning, but rather to boredom (Beauvoir 1996, 461; 486). While in many ways a very pessimistic account of ageing, the text does provide promising moments where her (...) descriptions do capture other possibilities for aged existence. In particular, I turn to Beauvoir’s suggestion that habit can take on a “kind of poetry” since it merges past, present and future in a sense of eternity that the present moment now lacks with its limited futural horizon (468; 492). In this paper, I draw out, delineate, and further explore this phenomenological reconfiguration of the present that she gestures towards through a consideration of the intensification and modification of the present through habit. Drawing as well upon Merleau-Ponty’s insights into the phenomenal body, I argue that poetical habit is an active passivity that allows for the spontaneity of the new out of the sedimentation of corporeal memory, and for the attentive perception of what appears in the present. To disrupt someone’s habitual life is to unanchor that life from the world, from an identity shaped by repetition, by the constancy of a shared reality of things, that is, from the spatial-temporal process of inhabitation, and thus from her ability to engage with others and to disclose the world. (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent., was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention. The editors recommend that to experience the drifiting thought (...) that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN SPACE & PLACE thread: April Vannini, Those Between the Common * Laura Dean & Jesse McClelland, Ballard: A Portrait of Placemaking * Amara Hark Weber, Crossroad * Isaac Linder & Berit Soli-Holt, The Call of the Wild: Terror Modulations * Ashley D. Hairston, Momma taught us to keep a clean house * Sean Smith, The Garage * * * * Instead of beginning with radical doubt, we start from naiveté. —Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest. —Jack London, The Call of the Wild The figure of the feral remains a perpetual enigma, but the parameters remain relatively consistent. A person, usually a child, enters civilization after having been raised by wolves or kept in some kind of cruel captivity. The outsider perspective on domestication ensuing in an edge of a culture's self-recognition of its clumsier attributes, what has been taken for granted becomes apparent, is brought to the foreground with the stranger and made questionable. Amusement follows naïve questions or observations such as Kaspar Hauser in the Herzog film, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, when Kaspar notes that while in his room he is engulfed by it, but when he looks at the tower he can turn away and it disappears. Ergo, the room is larger than the tower. How entertaining. The aberrant one destabilizes the comforting cultural normative. Places become seen as mere impressions out of space, a patterning, a rut that not everyone lives in like us. This is one figure of the feral. The naiveté that begs all the questions. As a figure for a certain philosophical disposition, the rapidity of one’s saccade scans the environment, intuits it’s space, not from an initial thaumazein or a Critchlean sense of disappointment, but from a child-like naiveté bent on survival. To serve the naïve is merely one form of critique, and it is not nearly used enough in lieu of the critique that provides answers. How dull. It is not necessary to be an outsider to entrench a critique with naiveté. After having forced to suffer in the most parched and rocky terror, itself for so long rooted upwards of fifty feet into the ground upon which it grows, even a grapevine can spontaneously produce a white grape on a red vine. The curious feral can arise from within, and like pinot grigio, it adds variety without admonishing its roots. There is also the feral dog. Not raised by wolves, but humans. Founded in place the figure of this feral denies this place. The trajectory of this feral roves from the cultivated to uncultivated, or in speaking of plants from controlled to volunteer, finding the necessary nutrients and survival patterns on its own. Finding other places, reaching out into space testing its fertility. And when introduced into a foreign environment, it withers or flourishes. We would like to attempt a thesis at this juncture and to accept neither feral figure in its entirety, but to argue for the intimate conjunction between a cultivated place and its resonance with the space it procures for its nest and kin. I'm not a biter, I'm a writer for myself and others. —Jay-Z, What More Can I Say? I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers. —Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans There is no subjective disposition outlining an unambiguous individual of the para-academy. There is no para-academic. We all have day jobs. 'Para-academic' seeped through the cracks as an adjective in the call to frame publishing dedicated to the critical rigor expected by academic publishing, but to deny the limitations of guarded legitimation through capital means. Open-access holds hands with this parasitic descriptor. Para-academic publishing's refusal to adhere to the valuation of locked access of a site, the site “of a desperate initiation to the empty form of value,” 1 seeks to recognize not merely an inclusive interpretation of significance, but the significance of thinking practice. The practice inside the paywalls of academic 'education' is held in a deathgrip by its infatuation with value and information, both empty without the apprehension of human experience, the barbaric yawp. “I can't breathe in here.” It is not that a para-academic practice leads one to the childish wonder of Kaspar Hauser who wonders about the spatiality of his room. It is the academic legitimation that distorts that one can hold the understanding of both in a constellation of place and space. Led to believe there is only a place for things, we are led to disillusionment. It is also not that a para-academic practice relinquishes itself to the invasive growth outside of careful cultivation, an abandonment of pleasantries for the toothy growl of a predator. It is the academy's fear that thought does not require capital to signify value. Some of the most nutritious meals can be foraged. Defining a para-academic practice is not outlining a place of accreditation of the practice, it is the recognition that any place is subject to modulation by the space it inhabits as well as creates. The para-academic practice keeps an eye of the creation of spaces, follows those paths that eat themselves in the name of academia. This is not unlike Red Peter's report to the academy, only successful if we report in idle idiosyncratic banalities that we have once again become victorious in our acculturation and nullification within the confines of accredited mush and our trajectory of wild rigor is defeated in our desire for recognition as recognizable in this place. Weeds are integral to the functioning of a large ecosystem. The manicured garden is entirely reliant on its keeper. The pansy can also go wild once neglected, the daisy definitely does.... a universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart. The skin of a living organism cuts off an outside from an inside. So does the circumference of a circle in a plane. By tracing the way we represent such a severance, we can begin to reconstruct, with an accuracy and coverage that appear almost uncanny, the basic forms underlying linguistic, mathematical, physical, and biological science, and can begin to see how the familiar laws of our own experience follow from the original act of severance. The act is itself already remembered, even if unconsciously, as our first attempt to distinguish different things in a world where, in the first place, the boundaries can be drawn anywhere we please. At this stage the universe cannot be distinguished from how we act upon it, and the world may seem like shifting sand beneath our feet. —George Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form Two edges are created: an obedient, conformist, plagiarizing edge, and another edge, mobile, blank, which is never anything but the site of its effect: the place where the death of language is glimpsed. These two edges, the compromise they bring about, are necessary. —Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text Between these two epigraphs, interminable questions of where and questions of happening, gesture, and interface. To stay buoyed between a site of visible happening and haptic perspicacity. Bounded by one or the other leads to a desiccation of potential knowledge. The tumbleweed tumbles until met with mud, a bare structure moving but not movement. A tumbleweed tumbleweeds, propagates only at a place. It becomes significant again, continues. Significance, the site where meaning is made known through kinesthetic apprehension. 2 The feral founds a gestural horizon; an outsider’s scrawl-becoming-law; Deleuze teaching Meno’s dog geometry. Place as marked, outlined, recognized, territorialized. The academies marked by their peculiar disciplines, outlined by their rigid boundaries, recognized as factories of value. This far from ensures complete purchase on the space of thought, but it has made an undeniably elaborate means of making work significant. The academy is a muddy spot, it is fertile, but its gates are high and its dogs are barking. The coordinates of concept and experience. Already claimed by a stabilizing suspension, the terms enter specificity of ‘this is this’. Another correlation: activity and the individual. The individual, a placeholder in the crosshairs of juridical identification. Activity, what expands and surrounds this location, but utterly indebted to the node of “one who”. What's happening in this oscillation of nature and nurture is practice. Practice, as Stengers tells us “is not the activity of an individual or the product of that activity. It is the ingredient without which neither that activity nor this product would exist as such.” 3 Moving outward from our own honing, we're curious about the ingredient creating the place for holding conceptual and experiential engagements in each hand. And we'd like to argue that this place is not a limiting specification, but a practice undulating daily, by the minute. And we call this practice the para-academic practice. I repeat: there was no attraction for me in imitating human beings; I imitated them because I needed a way out, and for no other reason. —Franz Kafka, A Report to an Academy In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limit it discovers in itself—a limit where minds meet and, in meeting, begin to exist. — Albert Camus, The Rebel Anyone is a para-academic or practicer of such means. The academic can, and we argue should, be active para-academically, to escape the bounds, recognizing no site specific place as a place to rest on or the place to grab the Kafka's top and wonder at its disobedience not to continue. Yet, the para-academic practice must maintain the desire for rigor in scholarship. Indeed desiring past itself to claim a more naïve rigor, one that does not take its form for granted. Without a para-academic practice, the scholar spends half the time merely working on behalf of a hierarchy, to maintain it, and the other measly amounts of time are in the name of thinking, but only in name. Not to mention the amount of debt it takes to attend the halls of higher education. Not to mention the snoring tenures. Not to mention the barely scraping by adjuncts. Not to mention the materials that shake the very force of producible theory. Not to mention when swimming in texts becomes slogging through data. Academia is a barbaric food chain and it is our claim that there is, as always, an imperative for thought to move, with Heidegger, beyond the logics of calculation and planning, to a time of its own. The path, into the panic of the dark wood of this space can be followed by any; any who let the silence and the rigor enter the play. Where the little theater is larger when inhabited ; where the data of the tutor asymptotically refutes; and where, as much as one wouldn’t expect it here, ballet may turn out to be the most feral of forms… NOTES Jean Baudrillard, “Value's Last Tango” Simulacra and Simulation trans. Sheila Faria Glaser,. “What is significance? It is meaning, insofar as it is sensually produced.” Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text. Isabelle Stengers, “The Science Wars” Cosmopolitics I trans. Robert Bononno, 47. (shrink)

Explanation of inversions in Russian history causes major conceptual problems. The traditionally used conceptual apparatus and its theoretical schemes does not seem to really “grasp” this reality, at best, it only describes the Russian reality to some extent. It simply fails to capture the nature and mechanisms that lie in the specifics of Russian society and its dynamics. Hence, there are widespread conclusions about “pathology,” historical “rut,” constant matrix, and endless reproduction of the “predetermined” characteristics of social life in Russia. (...) However, expanding the conceptual apparatus with a constructive approach, combined with a specific historical approach, makes it possible to single out more than one agent of modernization processes (political elite, merged with state authorities), but at least two - authority and society taken discreetly. From this point of view, the inverse nature of Russian modernization has two causes. One of these is social, associated with the peculiarities of Russian society, where underdeveloped social forces are dominated by the imperious will. The second cause is related to modernization attempts based on external historical experience. However, due to the former cause, these attempts turn out to be premature and ill-conceived, giving rise to new conflicts and deformations in society. Both causes are complementary and intertwined. At the same time, there are general civilizational processes, such as urbanization and formation of a mass society, modernization processes in Russian society, including the formation of national identity. This creates prerequisites for a qualitative change in the development of society. If the main factors of inversion “from top down” are hasty and imitative, then doing things “from bottom up” presupposes slow development of the middle class, which, nevertheless, creates conditions for real mediation. (shrink)

© 2013 The Editors of The Philosophical QuarterlyScott Davidson and Diane Perpich set high standards for the assessment of this volume. Fifty years after its publication in 1961, Levinas's Totality and Infinity is going through a ‘midlife crisis’. Scholarship on Levinas ‘sometimes seems to do little more than plow familiar terrain, remaining stuck in the rut of well‐worn interpretations and overused phrases’. One response to a midlife crisis is to exchange one's established partner for a younger model. But the editors (...) do not recommend this solution to the ‘dull routine’ into which our relationship with Levinas has fallen. They believe that the essays they have collected will pep up our relationship with him by venturing ‘along unexplored pathways’. Other thinkers are introduced into the ménage – Karl Marx, Stanley Cavell... (shrink)

Philosophers should not be put off by the preconceived notion that there is nothing of interest or value to be gained from acquaintance with that hybrid genre of writing that is vaguely and for the most part disparagingly known as “theory”. For it is in just this long disputed border-zone where philosophy comes into contact (or conflict) with language at its most inventive, unpredictable and wayward that thought may find itself venturing onto ground that has not yet been trodden into (...) ruts by the keepers of received philosophical-linguistic lore. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK R]]JVIEWS room for different theories and new developments. He does not try to tie up every loose end. Furthermore, he avoids the rut of the specialist by willingly and capably addressing questions of biblical exegesis, philosophy, psychology, science, and popular culture with even-handed competence. Space does not permit me to discuss his fascinating analysis of the psychology of near-death experiences or specific rejoinders to important objections (e.g., the (...) Bible depicts the dead as bodily beings, not immaterial spirits; dualism is a result of the Fall; dualism implies that the whole person does not die; at death we pass out of time, and, hence, there is no intermediate state). But I can assure you that his account is cogent and illuminating. Lenoir-Rhyne College Hickory, North Carolina PHILIP BLOSSER: The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: A Straussian Perspective. Edited by KENNETH L DEUTSCH AND WALTER SOFFER. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. Pp. ix+ 304. $54.50 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). For Leo Strauss, the superiority of classical political philosophy over modern social science (and political theory based on social science) lies in at least four principles. First, it treats political matters as they actually appear to man qua philosopher and, in a qualified way, to the good citizen. Because Strauss claims that social science (and much post-classical political philosophy) abstracts from his canon of intelligibility, he thinks that it cannot lead to a humane, rational politics. (See "What is Political Philosophy?", in What is Political Philosophy? [Westport: Greenwood], pp. 27-28, and "Distinction between Facts and Values" in Natural Right and History [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953], pp. 78-80.) Second, Plato and Aristotle believed that only the good man properly judges politics. This belief attracts Strauss, because it identifies virtue as the best claimant to political rule. ("What is Political Philosophy? ", pp. 36-38.) A third principle is derived immediately from this second: politics ought to be organized hierarchically. In the hierarchy, either the truly virtuous or gentlemen should rule, and those having a passive, obediential form of virtue should be the ruled. Fourth, this arrangement is rational and humane. For although the virtues of the ruler and the ruled are complementary in justice and necessary to it, still they are different and, in fact, require the stratification just mentioned. ("Classic Natural Right" in Natural Right and History, pp. 130-44.) BOOK REVIEWS 527 Because of the controversial nature of these principles and Strauss's eminence in political philosophy, one welcomes the present collection of essays by his disciples. They believe that in liberal democracies people confuse liberty with the uses to which liberty can and ought to be put. Doing so, people undermine that regime's foundations. Strauss and his disciples believe that modern natural right makes the clash between liberty and natural right inevitable, because its principal founders, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, conceived man as non-political. They conceived individuals as gaining certain advantages from governments hut as gaining no good in the exercise of politics itself. Classic natural right, by contrast, bases itself on the assumption that man is radically political. Moreover, it conceives politics as an arena for liberating, ennobling activities. Hobbes and Locke viewed the individual as independent of politics, which they placed at the low end of the range of human activity, along with everyday concerns and popular morality, rather than at the high end, as Strauss would. Thus for Strauss, liberal democracy is founded on modern principles, which are either apolitical and liberal (Locke) or apolitical and illiberal (Hobbes). Consequently, it cannot withstand the individualist and collectivist onslaughts that we have seen in this century. What, then, have Strauss's disciples to say about liberal democracy and the prospect of classic natural right in a Western world which is more or less permanently Hobbesian-Lockean? This can be answered by describing first the hook's divisions and then its diagnoses and prescriptions. In part one the contributors appraise the work of Strauss itself; in part two they define issues in liberalism ; and in part three they discuss liberalism in American political life. In the first part, Michael Platt outlines how Strauss's thought... (shrink)

You know you should be staying positive, but how do you get back to your happy place after something sidetracks your thoughts? Whether you're having a bad day, are suddenly faced with a difficult situation, or you've found yourself in a bit of a rut, Whatever You Do, Be Happy is the perfect guide to getting back to a positive mindset. This book includes 400 totally manageable activities that will bring back your smile with ease! Try finding a quiet space (...) to help you reset from a stressful experience or take a few minutes to focus on your breathing when trying to solve a problem. You will discover that it doesn't take months of work or a total life overhaul to live a happy lifestyle. All it takes is the simple, actionable advice in this book to start changing your mindset immediately. Start your journey to optimism and happiness now! (shrink)

A partir d'un « stock d'axiomes de toute théologie », J.-Y. Lacoste inscrit à son cahier des charges plusieurs tâches. La première consiste à montrer que « ses » vérités ne sont pas celles de tout le monde. La seconde est celle d'une « précision conceptuelle » inscrite dans la distinction de l'expérience et du langage par et dans lequel elle se dit. Enfin, comme troisième tâche, il entend accomplir une « mise en perspective » ou « mise en critique (...) », celle des instruments conceptuels utilisés. De ce fait, devraient apparaître les grandes lignes d'un protocole d'accord entre instances , capable d'aider à éviter des ornières assez habituelles, que ce soit celle de la sacralisation du Vorzeit , ou celle du flirt perpétuel avec la nouveauté chérie comme telle. Ces tâches étant évidemment solidaires, il n'est pas question pour J.-Y. Lacoste de les séparer dans son projet.Beginning with a « stock of axioms from all theology », J-Y Lacoste has a number of items on his list. The first is to show that « these » basic truths are not held by everyone. The second is that of a « conceptual precision » written in the distinction of experience and language by and in which it speaks . Finally, as a third task, he wants to accomplish a « putting in perspective » or « placing in review » of the conceptual tools used. From this there should appear the main lines of an agreement of protocol between matters capable of helping to avoid the fairly habitual ruts, whether it be that of the sacralization of the Vorzeit or that of the unending flirting with the darling novelity as such. Since these tasks are clearly tied together, there is no question for-J -Y Lacoste of separating them in his project. (shrink)

Reacting against philosophers such as Braithwaite, Hare and Van Buren, caught in what not a few would believe to be an essentially positivist rut, John Wisdom and Ilham Dilman forcefully argue that there is more to religion than commitment to a way of life and yet they both are, like Braithwaite and Hare, adamant in maintaining that believers and non-believers need not differ, and indeed will not differ, when they are informed, reflective and philosophically sophisticated, ‘in what they expect by (...) way of a life after death’ and more importantly still – they will not differ in what ‘they infer about what lies beyond the reach of the senses’ . 1 Moreover, they agree that not only can we not make any valid inferences about what lies beyond any possible reach of the senses, we cannot directly know - encounter, become acquainted with - such a reality either. (shrink)