In Animal Rites, Cary Wolfe examines contemporary notions of humanism and ethics by reconstructing a little known but crucial underground tradition of theorizing the animal from Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Lyotard to Lévinas, Derrida, ...

Peppered throughout with previously unreported, and sometimes incendiary, higher education anecdotes, Nelson is at his flame-throwing best.The book calls on ...

This innovative collection points to the need for a reevaluation of the origins of toleration theory. Philosophers, intellectual historians, and political theorists have assumed that the development of the theory of toleration has been a product of the modern world, and John Locke is usually regarded as the first theorist of toleration. The contributors to Difference and Dissent, however, discuss a range of conceptual positions that were employed by medieval and early modern thinkers to support a theory of toleration, and (...) question the claim that Locke's theory of toleration was as original or philosophically adequate as his adherents have asserted. (shrink)

In What Is Posthumanism? he carefully distinguishes posthumanism from transhumanism (the biotechnological enhancement of human beings) and narrow definitions of the posthuman as the hoped-for transcendence of materiality.

This book is, along with Outward Signs, a sequel to Phillip Cary's Augustine and the Invention of the Inner Self. In this work, Cary traces the development of Augustine's epochal doctrine of grace, arguing that it does not represent a rejection of Platonism in favor of a more purely Christian point of view DL a turning from Plato to Paul, as it is often portrayed. Instead, Augustine reads Paul and other Biblical texts in light of his Christian Platonist (...) inwardness, producing a new concept of grace as an essentially inward gift. For Augustine, grace is needed first of all to heal the mind so it may see God, but then also to help the will turn away from lower goods to love God as its eternal Good. Eventually, over the course of Augustine's career, the scope of the soul's need for grace expands outward to include not only the inner vision of the intellect and the power of love but even the initial gift of faith. At every stage, Augustine insists that divine grace does not compromise or coerce the human will but frees, heals, and helps it, precisely because grace is not an external force but an inner gift of delight leading to true happiness. As his polemic against the Pelagians develops, however, he does attribute more to grace and less to the power of free will. In the end, it is God's choice which makes the ultimate difference between the saved and the damned, and we cannot know why he chooses to save one person and not another. From this Augustinian doctrine of divine choice or election stem the characteristic pastoral problems of predestination, especially in Protestantism. A more external, indeed Jewish, doctrine of election would be more Biblical, Cary suggests, and would result in a less anxious experience of grace. Along with its companion work, Outward Signs, this careful and insightful book breaks new ground in the study of Augustine's theology of grace and sacraments. (shrink)

Bringing these two emergent areas of thought into direct conversation in Before the Law, Cary Wolfe fosters a new discussion about the status of nonhuman animals and the shared plight of humans and animals under biopolitics.

The West's foremost translator of the I Ching, Richard Wilhelm thought deeply about how contemporary readers could benefit from this ancient work and its perennially valid insights into change and chance. For him and for his son, Hellmut Wilhelm, the Book of Changes represented not just a mysterious book of oracles or a notable source of the Taoist and Confucian philosophies. In their hands, it emerges, as it did for C. G. Jung, as a vital key to humanity's age-old collective (...) unconscious. Here the observations of the Wilhelms are combined in a volume that will reward specialists and aficionados with its treatment of historical context--and that will serve also as an introduction to the I Ching and the meaning of its famous hexagrams. (shrink)

A textbook anthology of important works of political thought revealing the development of ideas from the 12th to the 15th centuries. It includes new translations of both well-known and ignored writers, and an introductory overview.

Unique in its collation of major theorists rarely considered together, Critical Environments incorporates detailed discussions of the work of Richard Rorty, Walter Benn Michaels, Stanley Cavell, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Niklas ...

Phillip Cary argues that Augustine invented or created the concept of self as an inner space--as space into which one can enter and in which one can find God. This concept of inwardness, says Cary, has worked its way deeply into the intellectual heritage of the West and many Western individuals have experienced themselves as inner selves. After surveying the idea of inwardness in Augustine's predecessors, Cary offers a re-examination of Augustine's own writings, making the controversial point (...) that in his early writings Augustine appears to hold that the human soul is quite literally divine. Cary goes on to contend that the crucial Book 7 of the Confessions is not a historical report of Augustine's "conversion" experience, but rather an explanation of his intellectual development over time. (shrink)

Text recycling, often called “self-plagiarism”, is the practice of reusing textual material from one’s prior documents in a new work. The practice presents a complex set of ethical and practical challenges to the scientific community, many of which have not been addressed in prior discourse on the subject. This essay identifies and discusses these factors in a systematic fashion, concluding with a new definition of text recycling that takes these factors into account. Topics include terminology, what is not text recycling, (...) factors affecting judgements about the appropriateness of text recycling, and visual materials. (shrink)

As Cary J. Nederman writes in the foreword to this new edition, "Marsilius continues to speak to many of the salient issues of modern political life, expressing his doctrines in a language that has resonance and relevance. Whether in addressing the role of citizenship as a buffer between individual and community, or in explicating the foundations of religious toleration, the _Defensor pacis_ (and Marsilius' other writings) affords a distinctive theoretical perspective that rivals that of any of the great thinkers (...) of the Western political tradition.". (shrink)

Only a few of the many political treatises from the early 1300s have been made available to English readers, and Nederman (political science, Texas A&M U.) helps remedy the situation by translating from the Latin several important commentaries on the political scene in England during the early years.

The idea of the Guantánamo detainee as a Muselmann , the lowest order of concentration camp inmates, contains within it important implications for the new understanding of sovereignty in the era of Guantánamo, in an age of exception. The purpose of this article is to explain the status of those who are detained at Guantánamo Bay. Stated broadly, in assessing that status, we will emphasize the connection between the altered meaning of sovereignty that has accompanied the placing of prisoners in (...) an American penal colony in Cuba and the biopolitical status of the prisoners who reside there. More particularly, we will locate the points of convergence among the factors (the war on terror, sovereignty, and the media) that have produced and reconstituted the legal and ethical status of Guantánamo detainees. (shrink)

This volume deals with the development of moral and political philosophy in the medieval West. Professor Nederman is concerned to trace the continuing influence of classical ideas, but emphasises that the very diversity and diffuseness of medieval thought shows that there is no single scheme that can account for the way these ideas were received, disseminated and reformulated by medieval ethical and political theorists.

Comedy is sacred—it's woven through the Bible. James Cary has rare first-hand experience of writing comedy for the BBC—and has a degree in theology. He and former actor and comedian, Barry Cooper (co-writer of Christianity Explored) do a weekly podcast called Cooper and Cary Have Words. This is an intelligent, funny, informative book for anyone who likes comedy.

The principle of liberal neutrality requires governments to avoid acting to promote particular conceptions of the good life. Yet by determining who uses natural resources and how, environmental policy makers can affect the availability of resources needed by individuals to carry on meaningful lives and in doing so can effectively privilege some versions of the good life at the expense of others. A commitment to liberal neutrality by implication promotes environmental policy that accommodates competing activities in order to provide a (...) wide range of resources that can support diversity in individual lives. It also encourages caution with regard to legislation based on deep ecology, the intrinsic value of species, and the fear of impending environmental catastrophe. (shrink)

Patients with apraxia perform poorly when demonstrating how an object is used, particularly when pantomiming the action. However, these patients are able to accurately identify, and to pick up and move objects, demonstrating intact ventral and dorsal stream visuomotor processing. Appropriate object manipulation for skilled use is thought to rely on integration of known and visible object properties associated with ‘ventro-dorsal’ stream neural processes. In apraxia, it has been suggested that stored object knowledge from the ventral stream may be less (...) readily available to incorporate into the action plan, leading to an over-reliance on the objects’ visual affordances in object-directed motor behaviour. The current study examined grasping performance in left hemisphere stroke patients with (N = 3) and without (N = 9) apraxia, and in age-matched healthy control participants (N = 14), where participants repeatedly grasped novel cylindrical objects of varying weight distribution. Across two conditions, object weight distribution was indicated by either a memory-associated cue (object colour) or visual-spatial cue (visible dot over the weighted end). Participants were required to incorporate object-weight associations to effectively grasp and balance each object. Control groups appropriately adjusted their grasp according to each object’s weight distribution across each condition, whereas throughout the task two of the three apraxic patients performed poorly on both the memory-associated and visual-spatial cue conditions. A third apraxic patient seemed to compensate for these difficulties but still performed differently to control groups. Patients with apraxia performed normally on the neutral control condition when grasping the evenly weighted version. The pattern of behaviour in apraxic patients suggests impaired integration of visible and known object properties attributed to the ventro-dorsal stream: in learning to grasp the weighted object accurately, apraxic patients applied neither pure knowledge-based information (the memory-associated condition) nor higher-level information given in the visual-spatial cue condition. Disruption to ventro-dorsal stream predicts that apraxic patients will have difficulty learning to manipulate new objects on the basis of information other than low-level visual cues such as shape and size. (shrink)

This essay is about the United States Supreme Court's discursive creation of two kinds of persons, one corporate the other criminal, during its 1886 term. The aim is to contrast the Supreme Court's construction of corporate personhood in County of Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad with its view of the criminal's body in Ex parte Royall, a habeas corpus case. The Court's purpose in deciding these two cases was to design a way to disperse newly emergent and conflicting interests (...) in particular directions within the judicial apparatus. The result is that both criminal and corporate bodies come to be understood through discourse, not outside of it. So the body which is being introduced can be described as a discursive body, not as an anatomical given. (shrink)

During the past ten or twenty years this question has begun to concern a great many thinkers. The interest which it holds for our time is not only of an academic order. The vigorous growth of various forms of teaching of translation and interpreting; and the setting under way of gigantic programs of translation by electronic machines (to cite only two “spectacular” facts) illustrate its practical importance.

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics” A considers what it might mean for the administrative state to be antipolitical. Two conceptions of an antipolitical administrative state are identified. The first of these—antipolitics as in opposition to administrative discretion—holds that, in a democracy, value judgments should be made only by elected officials and that all administrators should do is carry out technical tasks calling for expertise. Administrators, however, inevitably make policy decisions that call for value judgments, making this first (...) conception unattainable. On the other hand, a second conception or standard—one of antipolitics as in opposition to favoritism—is both realistic and desirable to expect of those who occupy positions of administrative power. It holds that administrators should avoid making decisions for self-interested reasons. Many doctrines of administrative law follow from aversion to favoritism, as the law aspires to free the administrative state from decision-making that is based on the interests of administrators and their partisan overseers or friends. Today, as the state comes under increasing threat from populist and authoritarian attempts to capture its power, distinguishing between these two conceptions of antipolitics—one unrealistic, the other imperative—can help to channel antipolitical impulses where they are most needed. (shrink)

Ari Aster’s 2019 folk horror film Midsommar, which enjoyed both critical and popular success, features a bright colour palette and an eerily playful tone alongside a dark narrative exploring complexities of grief, depression, and bad relationships. The remote Swedish community to which protagonist Dani, her boyfriend, and his friends travel for a mid-summer festival is designed around beautiful objects, collective experiences, and rituals that foreground communal emotions, all of which contrast the technologically mediated communications foregrounded at the film’s outset. In (...) fact, this community offers meticulously constructed antidotes to the loneliness of the modern world, and to Western ideals of masculine emotional distance…but at a cost. This paper examines the intersection of emotion, community, and gender in Midsommar, using the concept of affective design – usually associated with technology design – as well as work on group-based emotions, to interrogate the film’s vision of a community that challenges gender norms and the boundaries of emotional experience. Through the depiction of ingroup boundary-policing, stark contrasts between visions of masculinity, and lush visions of aesthetic experience and emotional release, Midsommar offers a series of convincing compensatory mechanisms that invite viewers, along with the main character, to temporarily compromise morality for the sake of belonging. (shrink)

Phenomenology’s reversal of naturalism hinges on the central claim that the worldly objects that we experience acquire their ontological solidity throughout series of intentional acts that are accomplished over the course of our subjective and intersubjective lives. This posture has historically given rise to realist critiques stating that such a “correlational” ontology undermines our capacity to formulate a coherent discourse on generative natural events that predate humans, such as the Big Bang, the Earth’s accretion, the formation of the oceans, etc. (...) In this paper, I articulate a Merleau-Pontian response to this problem. I establish a continuity between the temporality that is at play in the genesis of empirical bodies and the pre-objective tension that precedes perceptual givenness. I therefore suggest treating the past of nature as a transcendental past, always at work within our present experience, instead of an objective moment that would have determined in advance a causal chain of events. (shrink)

Rowan Williams's theological-moral reasoning regarding the formation of personal identities in relation to gender, familial and communal ties is analysed in an article review of his book Lost Icons. This is his most sustained essay in theological social criticism, and was intended for the general public beyond academic theology. Williams exposes Christian moral reasoning on these issues to forms of secular critique whilst simultaneously using theological and historical strategies from liberal Anglo-Catholicism. His argumentation is subjected to theological and social-scientific scrutiny. (...) The article calls for closer attention to debates within secular feminism and social research concerning the formation of adult men and women in relation to the wider post-Christian society. Links are made from Williams's thought in Lost Icons to underlying patterns in his academic theological output. (shrink)

Environmental laws reflect the relationship between law and society and its implications for public health and economy. This article aims to make the central themes and findings from the empirical study of environmental law accessible to legal scholars and social scientists across all fields. It begins with an overview of the making and design of environmental law, thereafter discussing environmental law enforcement, which can be framed as a choice between cooperation and legalism. Environmental law responds to individual and organizational behavior (...) that results in harm to other people or the environment. Empirical research examines the causal connection between environmental law and changes in environmental outcomes and economic costs. The full impact of environmental law encompasses its effect on the environment as well as that on the economy. To advance the understanding of law in society, empirical analysts in the future should strive to piece together the various stages of environmental law. (shrink)

The correct legends of figures 1, 2, 5, 12, 13 and 14 read.

The persistently high rates of sexual assault on college campuses have led to an increasing demand for a solution to the problem. In response, research in the field is growing rapidly. With any expanding field, proper focus needs to be given to ethical dilemmas that may arise when studying a sensitive topic. College students who have experienced a sexual assault are a highly vulnerable population. As the current literature is limited, this article considers the ethical implications of conducting research with (...) college sexual assault victims. Drawing upon the 2010 American Psychological Association Ethics Code, specific ethical concerns including respect for persons, competence, confidentiality and privacy, and beneficence and nonmaleficence are discussed. Recommendations for researchers studying sexual assault in college students are provided. (shrink)

This article challenges two dominant views of religious and cultural toleration, namely, that it is modern and that it is Western. It claims instead that both medieval Latin thought and many non-Western traditions embraced a position that coherently defends tolerance beliefs and practices. Specifically, the article identifies four approaches that clearly favour toleration: scepticism, functionalism, nationalism and mysticism.

Learning about the causes and effects of human-induced climate change is an essential aspect of contemporary environmental education (EE). However, it is increasingly recognized that the familiar ‘information dump delivery mode’ (as Timothy Morton calls it), through which new facts about ecological destruction are being constantly communicated, often contributes to anxiety, cognitive exhaustion, and can ultimately lead to hopelessness and paralysis in the face of ecological issues. In this article, I explore several pathways to approach EE, beyond the presentation and (...) transmission of ecological facts. I position my conceptual discussion around my own teaching experiences speaking about climate change with undergraduate students across several Education classes through 2019 to 2021. I situate these reflections within the current discourse on education and teaching in/for the Anthropocene. Throughout this discussion, I locate various ways in which much EE fails to contribute to student’s agency and empowerment by consistently reducing complex ecological phenomena to a set of problems, mainly economic/technological, to be fixed by technocracy. I propose that a contemplative–existential perspective to EE is capable of responding to these reductions, most basically by providing opportunities and practices for students to process their grief and other emotions through recognizing the Anthropocene as an inescapable reality, but also a reality that cannot be determinately imagined or predicted. (shrink)