We approach the physics of \emph{minimal coupling} in general relativity, demonstrating that in certain circumstances this leads to violations of the \emph{strong equivalence principle}, which states that, in general relativity, the dynamical laws of special relativity can be recovered at a point. We then assess the consequences of this result for the \emph{dynamical perspective on relativity}, finding that potential difficulties presented by such apparent violations of the strong equivalence principle can be overcome. Next, we draw upon our discussion of the (...) dynamical perspective in order to make explicit two `miracles' in the foundations of relativity theory. We close by arguing that the above results afford us insights into the nature of special relativity, and its relation to general relativity. (shrink)

The Oxford Calculator Roger Swyneshed put forward three provocative claims in his treatise on insolubles, written in the early 1330s, of which the second states that there is a formally valid inference with true premises and false conclusion. His example deployed the Liar paradox as the conclusion of the inference: ‘The conclusion of this inference is false, so this conclusion is false’. His account of insolubles supported his claim that the conclusion is false, and so the premise, referring to the (...) conclusion, would seem to be true. But what is his account of validity that can allow true premises to lead to a false conclusion? This article considers Roger’s own account, as well as that of Paul of Venice, writing some sixty years later, whose account of the truth and falsehood of insolubles followed Roger’s closely. Paul endorsed Roger’s three claims. But their accounts of validity were different. The question is whether these accounts are coherent and support Paul’s claim in his Logica Magna that he endorsed all the normal rules of inference. (shrink)

Critics of empathy—the capacity to share the mental lives of others—have charged that empathy is intrinsically biased. It occurs between no more than two people, and its key function is arguably to coordinate and align feelings, thoughts, and responses between those who are often already in close personal relationships. Because of this, critics claim that empathy is morally unnecessary at best and morally harmful at worst. This paper argues, however, that it is precisely because of its ability to connect (...) people by coordinating and aligning their feelings, thoughts, and responses, that empathy is especially well suited to perform one particular moral task that has been largely overlooked in moral philosophical discussions. That is, helping people, including those who are antagonistically opposed on matters of moral, social, and political importance—what I call antagonistic moral opponents—find common ground: a set of shared beliefs, attitudes, values, or experiences that lays the requisite ground for even minimally positive relationships. Doing so can contribute to a number of morally, practically, and epistemically important outcomes, including resolving fraught disagreements, mitigating antagonism, promoting cooperation, learning from differences, and even forging positive relationships of various sorts. Contra critics, I therefore maintain that empathy is important for at least one area of the moral life. (shrink)

In recent years, speech-act theory has mooted the possibility that one utterance can signify a number of different things. This pluralist conception of signification lies at the heart of Thomas Bradwardine’s solution to the insolubles, logical puzzles such as the semantic paradoxes, presented in Oxford in the early 1320s. His leading assumption was that signification is closed under consequence, that is, that a proposition signifies everything which follows from what it signifies. Then any proposition signifying its own falsity, he showed, (...) also signifies its own truth and so, since it signifies things which cannot both obtain, it is simply false. Bradwardine himself, and his contemporaries, did not elaborate this pluralist theory, or say much in its defence. It can be shown to accord closely, however, with the prevailing conception of logical consequence in England in the fourteenth century. Recent pluralist theories of signification, such as Grice’s, also endorse Bradwardine’s closure postulate as a plausible constraint on signification, and so his analysis of the semantic paradoxes is seen to be both well-grounded and plausible. (shrink)

Hartry Field's revised logic for the theory of truth in his new book, Saving Truth from Paradox , seeking to preserve Tarski's T-scheme, does not admit a full theory of negation. In response, Crispin Wright proposed that the negation of a proposition is the proposition saying that some proposition inconsistent with the first is true. For this to work, we have to show that this proposition is entailed by any proposition incompatible with the first, that is, that it is the (...) weakest proposition incompatible with the proposition whose negation it should be. To show that his proposal gave a full intuitionist theory of negation, Wright appealed to two principles, about incompatibility and entailment, and using them Field formulated a paradox of validity (or more precisely, of inconsistency). The medieval mathematician, theologian and logician, Thomas Bradwardine, writing in the fourteenth century, proposed a solution to the paradoxes of truth which does not require any revision of logic. The key principle behind Bradwardine's solution is a pluralist doctrine of meaning, or signification, that propositions can mean more than they explicitly say. In particular, he proposed that signification is closed under entailment. In light of this, Bradwardine revised the truth-rules, in particular, refining the T-scheme, so that a proposition is true only if everything that it signifies obtains. Thereby, he was able to show that any proposition which signifies that it itself is false, also signifies that it is true, and consequently is false and not true. I show that Bradwardine's solution is also able to deal with Field's paradox and others of a similar nature. Hence Field's logical revisions are unnecessary to save truth from paradox. (shrink)

'Practices without foundations' is, in genesis and in effect, a discussion of the following quotation , which serves therefore as an epigraph to it: ;Nelson Goodman's discussion of the 'new riddle of induction' ... deserves comparison with Wittgenstein's work. Indeed ... the basic strategy of Goodman's treatment of the 'new riddle' is strikingly close to Wittgenstein's sceptical arguments .... Although our paradigm of Wittgenstein's problem was formulated for a mathematical problem it ... is completely general and can be applied (...) to any rule or word. In particular, if it were formulated for the language of color impressions, as Wittgenstein himself suggests, Goodman's 'grue', or something similar, would play the role of 'quus'. But the problem would not be Goodman's about induction--"Why not predict that grass, which has been grue in the past will be grue in the future?"--but Wittgenstein's about meaning: "Who is to say that in the past I didn't mean grue by 'green', so that now I should call the sky, not the grass, 'green'?" vskip9pt ;This fascinating remark of Kripke's suggests a project, that of charting out both the interpretive and philosophic points of connection and disconnection between Wittgenstein, Goodman and Kripke. That project is this dissertation. ;My work severely tests Kripke's remark. For I argue that Kripke not only misreads Wittgenstein, but also mistakes the extremity of the 'scepticism' of his version of Wittgenstein for the priority of the philosophical puzzle that Goodman has bequeathed to us. ;To reach this conclusion, I show that Kripke's Wittgenstein's 'meaning-scepticism' is unanswerable if statable, but actually unstatable; and that, under certain interpretations, the same is true of putative scepticisms derivable from Goodman's text. The upshot is that the sceptical reading of most twentieth century philosophy must be displaced in favour of 'post-scepticism' and 'philosophical ethnography'. The latter concepts, sketched toward the end of the dissertation, are perhaps its telos. (shrink)

This thesis argues that Dame Iris Murdoch’s writings portray a dialectical picture of morality that invites the reader to acknowledge the presence of evil and reflect upon the necessarily ‘opposing forces’ of good and evil. Murdoch’s engagement with both historical and contemporary discussions of evil is traced through close reading of both her published texts, including fiction and philosophy, and her unpublished and recently published texts and resources, including annotations, interviews and letters. These close readings are focused (...) on the theological, psychological and literary aspects of the contemporary problem of evil. The perspectives offered within this study all transcend the focus on goodness invited by Murdoch’s fiction and philosophy, thus challenging the biased perspective of scholars of the late-twentieth century who sought to elevate Murdoch’s good characters by drawing equations between her moral philosophy and her fiction. This study begins, first, by demonstrating how Murdoch’s writings engage with the problem of evil, with the theological attempt to reconcile goodness with the presence of evil and suffering in the world, by drawing on her allusions to the Book of Job and to the writings of Simone Weil and Dame Julian of Norwich, all of which assert the necessary presence of evil and suffering in the moral life. Second, I interrogate the inconsistencies between Murdoch’s fictional and philosophical pictures of evil to illustrate how her fictional and philosophical engagement with Saint Paul’s writings reveals that she adopted the same dialectical picture of morality for which she critiqued Jung in her moral philosophy. For her, Jung’s picture of morality merges aspects of dualism and monism, both of which, traditionally speaking, offer two countervailing ways in which to picture the moral life, where evil represents, respectively, either an independent moral force separate from the good or a failure to carry out the moral iii ideals of goodness. Third, I identify and develop a link between contemporary moral, psychological and sociological discourses on psychopathy and the evil characters, both male and female, within Murdoch’s novels: not only do her antagonists and demons, often called ‘enchanter’ figures by scholars, echo the psychopath’s moral psychology, but so too do her saintly figures. Such an ambiguous picture resonates with contemporary interpretations of psychopathy, such as those offered by Robert D. Hare, Kevin Dutton, or Simon Baron- Cohen, which highlight the complex role of compassion, empathy and emotion on the individual’s moral awareness, whether they are saintly or psychopathic. In the final chapter, I argue that Murdoch’s dialectical picture of morality is indebted to Blake, whose The Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell illustrates the necessity of the ‘contrary’ pairs of innocence and experience, reason and passion, and good and evil. While Murdoch may praise goodness, her complex engagement with evil reveals a dialectical task for the moral agent in which they have to appreciate the complexity of the moral life, with its inherently ambiguous mixtures of emotion and rationality, the saintly and the psychopathic, and goodness and evil. (shrink)

Bradwardine’s solution to the the logical paradoxes depends on the idea that every sentence signifies many things, and its truth depends on things’ being wholly as it signifies. This idea is underpinned by his claim that a sentence signifies everything that follows from what it signifies. But the idea that signification is closed under entailment appears too strong, just as logical omniscience is unacceptable in the logic of knowledge. What is needed is a more restricted closure principle. A clue can (...) be found in speech act pluralism, whereby indirect speech reports are closed under intersubstitutivity of co-referential terms. The conclusion is that solving the semantic paradoxes does not require revision of logic, thus saving logic from paradox. (shrink)

Thomas Bradwardine's solution to the semantic paradoxes, presented in his Insolubilia written in Oxford in the early 1320s, turns on two main principles: that a proposition is true only if things are wholly as it signifies; and that signification is closed under consequence. After exploring the background in Walter Burley's account of the signification of propositions, the question is considered of the extent to which Bradwardine's theory is compatible with the distribution of truth over conjunction, disjunction, negation and the conditional.

[B]ecause I have shown my hands to be empty you must now expect not only that an illusion will follow but that you will acquiesce in it.Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.“Are you watching closely?”The last line of Parfit’s description of the “branch-line case” of tele-transportation, the very epicenter of his hugely influential thought experiment that famously proposes a radically new view on “personal identity,” (...) runs as follows: “[W]hile I stand here speechless, I can see and hear myself, in the studio on Mars, starting to speak.”1 Parfit, notoriously, goes on to argue that the “branch-line” version of me, the “I” in the.. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss the notion of merely confused supposition as it arose in the medieval theory of suppositio personalis. The context of our analysis is our formalization of William of Ockham's theory of supposition sketched in Mind 86 (1977), 109-13. The present paper is, however, self-contained, although we assume a basic acquaintance with supposition theory. The detailed aims of the paper are: to look at the tasks that supposition theory took on itself and to use our formalization to (...) relate them to more modern ideas; to explain the notion of merely confused supposition and to defend it against certain criticisms; and to discuss two issues closely related to the idea of merely confused supposition which we could not broach in a shorter article: the mode of supposition of terms in intensional contexts, and the possible existence of a fourth mode, often called suppositio copulatim. (shrink)

After joining the staff of the Burgholzli Mental Hospital in 1900, Jung developed and applied the word-association tests for studying normal and abnormal psychology. The studies have remained a significant phase in the development of Jung's conceptions and an important contribution to diagnostic psychology and psychiatry. Between 1904 and 1907 he published nine studies on the tests. These studies, together with two lectures on the association method given in 1909 at Clark University and three articles on psychophysical researches from American (...) and English journals in 1907-1908, compose this volume. Jung's association studies showed the definite influence of Bleuler and also of Freud, with whom he worked closely for several years. With this volume, the Collected Works are complete except for the Miscellany, Bibliography and Index volumes. (shrink)

A standard line in the contemporary philosophical literature has it that physical theories are equivalent only when they agree on their empirical content, where this empirical content is often understood as being encoded in the equations of motion of those theories. In this article, we question whether it is indeed the case that the empirical content of a theory is exhausted by its equations of motion, showing that (for example) considerations of boundary conditions play a key role in the empirical (...) equivalence (or otherwise) of theories. Having argued for this, we show that philosophical claims made by Weatherall (2016) that electromagnetism in the Faraday tensor formalism is equivalent to electromagnetism in the vector potential formalism, and by Knox (2011) that general relativity is equivalent to teleparallel gravity, can both be called into question. We then show that properly considering the role of boundary conditions in theory structure can potentially restore these claims of equivalence and close with some remarks on the pragmatics of adjudications on theory identity. (shrink)

Reading literature with the aid of computational techniques is controversial. For some, digital approaches apparently fetishize the curation of textual archives, lack interpretative rigor, and are thoroughly ’neoliberal’ in their pursuit of Silicon Valley-esque software-tool production. For others, the potential benefits of amplifying reading-labor-power through non-consumptive use of book corpora fulfills the dreams of early twentieth-century Russian formalism and yields new, distant ways in which we can consider textual pattern-making (Jockers; Moretti, Distant Reading; Moretti...

This essay delves into Alan Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", examining the entrenched the binary opposition between human and machine. Through deconstruction, the essay seeks to reveal and analyze the deeper insights inherent in Turing's work. Of particular significance is Turing's equivalence between language and thought, particularly in the context of the imitation game. Within the grammatological realm of Turing's text, writing and mechanism are nearly interchangeable, representing the intersection of humans and machines. By adopting a deconstructive perspective, the essay (...) illuminates the philosophical origins of the artificial intelligence debates and their implications for our understanding of human existence. (shrink)

AsbtractThis article does exactly what the title suggests: It reads Derrida’s idea of close reading into Doug Lemov’s idea of close reading by close reading Lemov’s definition for close reading. Building on work that considers poststructural approaches in reading classrooms, I engage Lemov and Derrida in a conversation about the meaning and uses of reading as a classroom practice. This approach asks questions about who gets to read, where, and in (...) what ways. Within this conversation, I aim to open new considerations of reading in classrooms in public schools in the U.S. The article concludes with some possibilities and risks of pursuing these ideas, focusing on the potential of new inquiries into the ‘right’ to read. (shrink)

This gesture tyrannises with the effect of supposition: as though. It is as though or as if there could only ever be one kind of reading, ...

The concept of “self-awareness” ( svasaṃvedana ) enters Buddhist epistemological discourse in the Pramāṇasamuccaya and - vṛtti by Dignāga (ca. 480–540), the founder of the Buddhist logico-epistemological tradition. Though some of the key passages have already been dealt with in various publications, no attempt has been made to comprehensively examine all of them as a whole. A close reading is here proposed to make up for this deficit. In connection with a particularly difficult passage (PS(V) 1.8cd-10) that presents (...) the means of valid cognition and its result ( pramāṇa/pramāṇaphala ), a new interpretation is suggested, inspired by the commentary of Jinendrabuddhi. This interpretation highlights an aspect of selfawareness that has hitherto not been claimed for Dignāga: self-awareness offers essentially subjective access to one’s own mental states and factors. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Report submitted by Gregory B. Sadler, Pilot Project Coordinator to Sonya Brown, WAC Activity Director, Fayetteville State University, June 28 2011. -/- A Pilot program focused on improving student performance in carrying out Close Readings in humanities-based discipline courses was developed and implemented under the auspices of Writing Across the Curriculum and Title III at Fayetteville State University in Winter and Spring 2011. Five faculty were involved in the Pilot, myself as the coordinator, and four other faculty from four (...) different disciplines as participants. -/- The central idea behind the Pilot was that by focusing on the lower-order skills which are scaffolded as components into the higher-order activity of Close Reading of texts, and redesigning courses to emphasize development of these lower-order skills, student performances in Close Readings would also be improved. This did turn out to be the case. Most of the supporting data is qualitative rather than quantitative. -/- It is recommended that similar activities be continued, but that participating faculty be required to provide much more prescriptively structured and detailed assessment data and information about their course design. (shrink)

In business ethics literature, the figure of Machiavelli is often taken as a representation of that which is dark, sinister and negative—a source of inspiration for undesirable and unethical actions. In this research, we examine the evaluation of Niccolò Machiavelli’s thought in extant studies, and posit that Machiavelli’s works consist of ideas that may appear contradictory, which, coupled with historically contextualized close reading of his texts have more to offer. In this theoretical investigation, we construct new conceptual categories (...) of a leader’s decision-making rubric and attempt to provide a structured framework that will allow us to specify the boundary conditions under which the apparent contrary views may be accommodated, by undertaking a close reading of Machiavelli’s texts. Our work contributes to business ethics literature in at least three ways. First, we present a holistic assessment of the research area that applies the tenets of Machiavelli’s writings to business ethics, management, and organizational studies, and delineate the dominant themes. We outline and substantiate the informal research networks, thought structures, and “invisible colleges” that form the intellectual framework of this research area through a bibliometric analysis and literature review. Second, we present a contextualized close reading of Machiavelli’s major treatises. Third, we reimagine the critical landscape of business ethics literature, specifically pertaining to Machiavelli’s oeuvre by shifting the single-minded focus from _The Prince_, by including _The Discourses_, which, as we show, has new and unprecedented implications for business ethics. In light of this, the parameters for ethical action by business leaders can be redrawn according to a Machiavellian schema. This marks a radical departure from the long-standing association between Machiavelli’s tenets and the absence of ethics, instead proposing a more positive and affirmative relationship between Machiavelli and business ethics. Specifically, while pointing out that the existing ethical frameworks foisted on Machiavelli’s texts do not do justice to the political philosopher’s worldview, which are complex insights into ideas of leadership, we urge researchers to incorporate the thoughts offered in this research in future investigations. (shrink)

Literature and Understanding investigates the cognitive gain from literature by focussing on a reader's close analysis of a literary text. It examines the meaning of 'literature', outlines the most prominent positions in the literary cognitivism debate, explores the practice of close reading from a philosophical perspective, provides a fresh account of what we mean by 'understanding' and in so doing opens up a new area of research in the philosophy of literature. This book provides a different reply (...) to the challenge that we can't learn anything worthwhile from reading literary fiction. It makes the innovative case that reading literary fiction as literature rather than as fiction stimulates five relevant senses of understanding. The book uses examples of irony, metaphor, play with perspective and ambiguity to illustrate this contention. Before arguing that these five senses of understanding bridge the gap between our understanding of a literary text and our understanding of the world beyond that text. The book will be of great interest for researchers, scholars and post-graduate students in the fields of aesthetics, literary theory, literature in education and pedagogy. (shrink)

This handbook teaches students to read for deep understanding, properly analyze and assess what they read, and reason within the logic of an author. Written by critical thinking authorities Richard Paul and Linda Elder as part pf the Thinker’s Guide Library, this guide includes activities for students to work through in developing close reading skills using the tools of critical thinking.

Detailed, precise and ridden with excellent examples, Jon Phelan’s Literature and Understanding: The Value of a Close Reading of Literary Texts is an inviting a.

Thinking of Death places Plato's Euthydemus among the dialogues that surround the trial and death of Socrates. A premonition of philosophy's fate arrives in the form of Socrates' encounter with the two-headed sophist pair, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, who appear as if they are the ghost of the Socrates of Aristophanes' Thinkery. The pair vacillate between choral ode and rhapsody, as Plato vacillates between referring to them in the dual and plural number in Greek. Gwenda-lin Grewal's close reading explores (...) how the structure of the dialogue and the pair's back-and-forth arguments bear a striking resemblance to thinking itself: in its immersive remove from reality, thinking simulates death even as it cannot conceive of its possibility. Euthydemus and Dionysodorus take this to an extreme, and so emerge as the philosophical dream and sophistic nightmare of being disembodied from substance. The Euthydemus is haunted by philosophy's tenuous relationship to political life. This is played out in the narration through Crito's implied criticism of Socrates-the phantom image of the Athenian laws-and in the drama itself, which appears to take place in Hades. Thinking of death thus brings with it a lurid parody of the death of thinking: the farce of perfect philosophy that bears the gravity of the city's sophistry. Grewal also provides a new translation of the Euthydemus that pays careful attention to grammatical ambiguities, nuances, and wit in ways that substantially expand the reader's access to the dialogue's mysteries. (shrink)

Recently developed theory using directed graphs permits simple and precise statements about the validity of causal inferences in most cases. Applying this while reading econometric papers can make it easy to understand assumptions that are vague in prose, and to isolate those assumptions that are crucial to support the main causal claims. The method is illustrated here alongside a close reading of the paper that introduced the use of settler mortality to instrument the impact of institutions on (...) economic development. Two causal pathways that invalidate the instrument are found not to be blocked by satisfactory strategies. The estimates in the original paper, and in many that have used the instrument since, should be considered highly suspect. (shrink)

This paper describes the practice of rabbinic Torah-Study in Pragmatist epistemological terms. Pragmatists describe the quest for knowledge as a process in which we interpret our experiences and thereby construct an idea of our reality. This description creates or generates a tension between the constructive aspect of the knowledge quest and the idea of an independent reality. The paper argues that Pragmatism shares this tension, as well as the hermeneutical and pragmatic method for overcoming it, with the rabbinic concept of (...) "Torah Study." This association is illustrated through a close reading of a Midrash on the first verse of the Biblical "Woman of Valor" song. (shrink)

This exegetical article seeks to offer a close reading of Ecclesiastes that would allow us to surmount the difficulties associated with its exegesis. The book’s text is widely known to be replete with contrasts and antinomies that introduce a certain vagueness to its writer’s intentions. The article suggests that the reader should approach the book as if it was written as a first-person logbook which appears, superficially, to have been written in no logical order, at random, and at (...) different times according to the order of the writer’s experiences and meditations. Such an approach would reduce the readers’ expectations for a logical order and would direct them to a deeper examination of the logical contexts scattered throughout the book. The article also presents the determinist con­texts of reality and their association with a wise person’s perspective as opposed to the randomness associated with a fool’s perspective. The writer’s sceptical descriptions of his encounter with reality and his first-person thoughts about this reality express an explicitly critical view of reality. The writ­er’s pre-reflexive doubt is thus nothing but a methodical doubt akin to Descartes’ pre-cogito doubts. An attentive reader will identify that the book’s text encompasses a reflexive/critical perspective on a sceptical view of reality. As such, the writer’s critical view voids the fool’s non-reflexive sceptical perspective (which is reflected in a superficial reading of the book’s text). The article’s close read­ing of the book thus posits a fool’s vanity which is a “vexation of spirit” (KJV) [re‘ut ruah․] among those who view reality as being coincidental. Conversely, it also posits a wise person’s vanity, which is a “vexation of spirit” [ra‘ayon ruah․], which critiques the fool’s pre-reflexive random view of reality as vanity and as a vexation of spirit [re‘ut ruah․]. This view of the wise person, whose “eyes are in his head” (2:14), is the true free will the writer is alluding to. (shrink)

This paper is about one of Arthur Prior’s earliest publications in philosophy, “The Nation and the Individual”. Its aims are to show that Prior made a remarkable contribution to social ontology in the 1930s which should be read with some attention to its historical background, which closely follows John Wisdom as to its theoretical elements, in particular the notion of a “logical construction”, but which is more clearly eliminativist with regard to nations and which is original in terms of rather (...) bold ethical consequences; to interpret Prior’s/Wisdom’s proposal as a promise of reduction by translation and to connect Prior’s/Wisdom’s ideas with John Searle’s recent work on social ontology. (shrink)

Metaphors have been inserted by philosophers in philosophical discourses to simplify abstract and intricate concepts. The practice of using metaphor denotes its rhetorical, aesthetic, linguistic and cognitive function. In basic formulation, metaphor has also been used by philosophers as a device, strategy, method, stylist ornament and a medium of expression. In this background, the following paper intends to vindicate the intimate interaction between philosophy and metaphor, with marked emphasis on the domain of feminist philosophy. Categorically, by considering the context of (...) feminist philosophical discourses, in this work, I explore the contributions of two influential feminist thinkers, namely, Young and Irigaray to elucidate the proposed metaphorical narrative. I suggest that these feminist philosophers ‘talk metaphorically’ beyond its ornamental or aesthetic value; beyond objectivism. To the contrary, I propose and argue that their employment of metaphor appeals to an epistemological thematic. Furthermore, I shall exhibit the close affinity between the metaphors they insert in their respective pursuits. Questions that shall be considered here are: Why metaphor matters in philosophical contexts? What does it mean to talk metaphorically in feminist philosophical scholarship? What and how do these feminist thinkers contribute to this endeavor? What is the implication of their respective contributions? Thus, I aim at uncovering and deepening the appearance, connotation and influence of metaphor in feminist scholarship. (shrink)

The author observes that Plato's Republic and Job have a common premise, namely the extremely unjust treatment of a just person to prove that the person is just, proceeding with a close comparative commentary on both works.

Ziel dieser philosophischen Forschung ist, die Begriffe Performativität und Performance in drei grundlegenden Büchern der queer feministischen Theorie zu analysieren. Es handelt sich um die folgenden Texte: Butlers Gender Trouble, die 1990 veröffentlicht wurde, Halberstams Female Masculinity, die 1998 herausgebracht wurde, und Preciados Testo Yonqui, die 2008 verlegt wurde. Die Analyse-Technik, die ich für das detaillierte Lesen der Texte angewendet habe, ist die so gennante Technik des hermeneutischen close reading, die auch im Laufe des Artikels zur Erklärung gebracht (...) wird. Aus diesem methodologischen Grund habe ich die drei Bücher auf die Muttersprache der Schrifteller_innen gelesen (Spanisch und Englisch). Darüber hinaus enthält dieser Artikel eine ausführliche Überprüfung der zur Philosophie und Theaterwissenschaften bezogenen Geschichte der Konzepte von Performativität und Performance, die in jedem Text sowohl getrennt als auch im Zusammenhang betracht werden. (shrink)

In her fifth dystopian novel, The Heart Goes Last, Margaret Atwood portrays North America in the not so far future, in the wake of a global economic crisis. Parts of the country are in the state of complete chaos, subjected to a ruthless gang rule. The solution to the system's breakdown comes in the form of the socio-economic experiment that requires from its participants relinquishing their freedom as every other month they will spend in prison. The seemingly preposterous experimental project (...) enables Atwood to explore principal questions about the limits of our freedom in the times of an economic crisis or a neoliberal model of economy. The satirical form the novel takes, especially towards its end, helps the writer to decry people's over-willingness to give away their freedom and civil liberties in exchange for happy, uninterrupted consumption. The following article aims to demonstrate that the notion of freedom and free will permeate The Heart Goes Last, which is, in that respect, a politically and socially engaged satire. (shrink)

Traditional as well as contemporary interpreters of Indian Yogācāra divide that tradition into a variety of doxographical camps depending on whether awareness is understood tobe endowed with phenomenal content (ākāra) and, if so, whether that content is understood to be real or true. Kamalaśīla’s extensive commentary on his teacher Śāntarakṣita’s Tattvasaṃgraha contains passages that throw into question certain doxographical equivalencies, especially the equivalencies sometimes proposed betweenthe doctrine that awareness is endowed with phenomenal content (sākāravāda) and the doctrine that such content (...) is true or real (satyākāravāda) and between the doctrine that awareness is devoid of phenomenal content (nirākāravāda) and the doctrine that such content is false or unreal (alīkākāravāda). Further, in accord with his broadly rhetorical approach to the application of reason, Kamalaśīla is seen in this commentary to endorse a range of seemingly contradictory positions vis-à-vis ākāra. This article argues that this situation can be explained by way of reference to Kamalaśīla’s larger philosophical and soteriological program as a Mādhyamika thinker, a program not made explicit in the text yet nonetheless present in nascent form. That is, while various theories of awareness as endowed or not endowed with phenomenal content are useful in different rhetorical contexts as well as at different stages of philosophical analysis, at the end of the day such distinctions are moot since neither awareness nor its content is upheld as ultimately real. Instead, soteriologically efficacious phenomenal content is said to be like a “true dream” (satyasvapna), an illusion that satisfies only for as long as it remains unanalyzed. (shrink)

Review of Gaston and Machlachlan's 2011 book "Reading Derrida's Of Grammatology".