This essay gives an account of thee exchanges between Jacques Derrida and Hans-Georg Gadamer at the Goethe Institute in Paris in April 1981. Many commentators perceive of this encounter as an "improbable debate," citing Derrida's marginalization, or, in deconstructive terms, deconcentration of Gadamer's opening text as the main reason for its "improbabliity." An analysis of the questions that Derrida poses concerning "communication" as an axiom from which we derive decidable truth brings us to the central feature of this discussion: How (...) does one engage the "other" in conversation in the light of the problems reptaining to meaningful communication? The essay suggests that the first round of exchanges between Derrida and Gadamer is a good example of the violence that is prevalent (and perhaps inevitable) in all academic discussions. Finally a more "ethical" approach to discussion, based on Derrida's postulation of a friendship," is suggested. It challenges the hermeneutic search for consensus, whereby the "other" is contracted into fraternity, but cannot eliminate elements of violence completely. (shrink)

The counterintuitive, radical message of Vedanta, the ancient science of self-inquiry, is that reality is non-dual consciousness. What this means and how it benefits people in their quest for freedom from limitation is the subject of this inspirational book. In an accessible style, James Swartz's new book develops teachings introduced in his popular first one, How to Attain Enlightenment, covering topics such as values and the enlightened person, dharma and the essence of enlightenment, and the relationship between consciousness, the (...) individual, and the total. Demystifying enlightenment, Swartz makes Vedanta understandable to all. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Abilify MyCite was granted regulatory approval in 2017, becoming the world’s first “smart pill” that could digitally track whether patients had taken their medication. The new technology was introduced as one that had gained the support of patients and ethicists alike, and could contribute to solving the widespread and costly problem of patient nonadherence. Here, we offer an in-depth exploration of this narrative, through an examination of the origins and development of Abilify, the drug that would later become MyCite. (...) This history illuminates how an antipsychotic can become a top-selling drug and maintain its blockbuster status for more than a decade. It also provides a detailed case study for how knowledge is constructed within the logic of biomedical capitalism, providing impetus to reexamine claims regarding how MyCite addresses patient nonadherence, engenders patient support, and is ethicist-approved. (shrink)

In this article we expand upon the conceptual framework of Félix Guattari’s 1989 essay, The Three Ecologies. Here Guattari examines changes in subjectivity that have come about due to scientific and technological advances which, as he sees it, brought about an “ecological disequilibrium” ([1989]2000, 27) and deteriorated individual and collective modes of being. In response to this Guattari proposes a kind of holistic therapy or ‘ecosophy’ between three ecological registers: “the environment, social relations and human subjectivity” (ibid., 28). Guattari cautions (...) that we not only take note of these macro determinations, but also heed the libidinal impulses of desire – what captures it, what directs it, and what shuts it down. Since the publication of The Three Ecologies, the rise of digital technologies has dramatically influenced the ways in which people think, live and communicate. Technological infrastructures, for instance, are used to spread disinformation at a vast speed and scale, and because social networks are often homophile many people infrequently encounter critical disagreement and debate. The increase in media and digital communications usage has also led to new forms of social inclusion and exclusion, the most exacerbated form of which is probably the phenomenon known as hikikomori – acute, prolonged social withdrawal. Taking hikikomori as our focus, we describe what we see as a general set of symptoms of society and trace its myriad intersections with an ever-increasing algorithmic ubiquity, which we posit as the new form of hyper-modulation following from Foucault’s disciplinary societies and Deleuze’s control societies. (shrink)

The Trump presidency has been remarkable in its attacks on many mainstream institutions. It has tapped populist sentiment that reflects little confidence in the key decision-making centers in American society. Higher education has not escaped this attack. Indeed, criticism of the academy has gone well beyond the debated policies of affirmative action and political correctness to the very status of expert knowledge itself, questioning what is legitimate knowledge. Claims of “false data” and “alternative facts” parade in the public arena without (...) the benefit of reasoned scholarship that might separate fact from fiction. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the attack on science, particularly scientific research focusing on environmental issues and climate change. Nonetheless, a small number of academicians—supposed arbiters of truth—advocate for Trump. How does one explain this apparent anomaly? Why would scholars support a president and populist movement that attack the very foundations of their professional life: knowledge and expertise? I have identified 103 such professors who offer their public support of Trump through blogs, essays, op-ed pieces, public lectures, tweets, YouTube videos, and even a couple of trade books. These are public intellectuals who intervene beyond the classroom and laboratory to promote a political agenda that is supportive of Trump. They are public advocates for Trump: academic Trumpists. Who are these individuals? Where do they teach? What do they teach? What kinds of connections external to the academy do they cultivate? How do they justify their support of Trump? This article offers some answers to these questions. It draws inspiration from Bourdieu’s field analysis of the politics of higher education and the sociology of conservative intellectuals. (shrink)

New materialist frameworks have increasingly repudiated dualistic thinking and challenged representationalist views, which hold that discursive practices mediate our access to the material world. As it has become clear that the material cannot be considered inert, important questions concerning agency, politics and subjectivity have been raised. But while the significance of corporeality has been emphasised, Elizabeth Grosz, in an interview on her most recent book, The Incorporeal, notes that: ‘If materialism cannot account for the immaterial events we experience and articulate, (...) then it has a clear limit that it needs to address.’ An important question this raises in terms of the mutual conditionings of love and one I will address is: How can we account for the immaterial space and time tracings of love without negating the material in the process? To answer this, I turn to Deleuze's The Logic of Sense. (shrink)

Kojève’s lectures on Phenomenology of Spirit generated two ideas – otherness is something threatening that must be overcome and one’s relationships with others are inexorably violent – that fundamentally shaped the way many exponents of early French phenomenology regarded intersubjectivity. This essay shows how Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel in The Ethics of Ambiguity offers a perspective on intersubjectivity that defies the other-conquering Cartesian hero implied by Kojève and celebrated in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Beauvoir appreciates the degree to which Hegel (...) makes subjectivity indebted to otherness. Like Hegel, she defines oppression as the failure to recognise the otherness of the other. Beauvoir shares Hegel’s optimism that individuals can sublate their naïve solipsism. She associates reciprocal recognition between subjects with ethical freedom, which she distinguishes from Sartre’s concept of freedom. From the analysis of ethical freedom it is concluded that both conflict and friendship are side-effects of the essential bond between subjects and their mutual need for one another. The Hegel-inspired hopefulness at the core of The Ethics of Ambiguity is further demonstrated by Beauvoir’s rejection of the absurd in favour of ambiguity, her positive rendering of failure, her appeal to outrageousness, and focus on the joy of existence. (shrink)

7.3.1 Ostension 7.3.2 Extensional Definition by Naming 7.3.3 Extensional Definition by Unique Description 7.4 Two Case Studies in the Application of the Intension/Extension Distinction 7.4.1 "God exists, by definition" 7.4.2 The 'Width' of an Intensional Definition..

Within this important and insightful book, Sally Swartz introduces readers to early entanglements of psychoanalytic theory with colonialism, and how it has led to significant and long-lasting implications for psychoanalysis.

Pierre Bourdieu is one of the world's most important social theorists and is also one of the great empirical researchers in contemporary sociology. However, reading Bourdieu can be difficult for those not familiar with the French cultural context, and until now a comprehensive introduction to Bourdieu's oeuvre has not been available. David Swartz focuses on a central theme in Bourdieu's work—the complex relationship between culture and power—and explains that sociology for Bourdieu is a mode of political intervention. Swartz (...) clarifies Bourdieu's difficult concepts, noting where they have been misinterpreted by critics and where they have fallen short in resolving important analytical issues. The book also shows how Bourdieu has synthesized his theory of practices and symbolic power from Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, and how his work was influenced by Sartre, Levi-Strauss, and Althusser. _Culture and Power_ is the first book to offer both a sympathetic and critical examination of Bourdieu's work and it will be invaluable to social scientists as well as to a broader audience in the humanities. (shrink)

This paper considers masculinity in two twentieth-century historical novels set in the eighteenth century: Andrew Miller’s Ingenious Pain (1997) and Hilary Mantel’s The Giant, O’Brien (1998). It argues that both novels create protagonists who embody masculine-coded attributes, including resistance to pain and bodily size and strength, and that, in both novels, earning potential is concomitant with such attributes. Complicating matters, however, the very exaggeration of stereotypical masculine characteristics in these texts causes each man to seem something other and less than (...) a man—ranging for both, at different times, from monstrous to pathetically weak (and childlike, or even womanish) victim. Qualities associated with manhood, therefore, paradoxically deny the men more agency than they allow in these stories set in the eighteenth century, inhibiting them from enjoying ideal manhood and making them the property of other men. (shrink)

Hospital ehtics committees are often consulted when cmopeting patient interests blur an otherwise clear course of medical treatment. Nowhere is the potential for competing interests greater than in the field of abosterics, wherer obstetricians have traditionally viewed themselves as having two patients: the pregnant woman and the fetus.

This intra-view explores a number of productive junctions between contemporary Deleuzoguattarian and new materialist praxes via a series of questions and provocations. Productive tensions are explored via questions of epistemological, ontological, ethical, and political intra-sections as well as notions of difference, transversal contamination, ecosophical practices, diffraction, and, lastly, schizoanalysis. Various irruptions around biophilosophy, transduction, becomology, cartography, power relations, hyperobjects as events, individuation, as well as dyschronia and disorientation, take the discussion further into the wild pedagogical spaces that both praxes have (...) in common. -/- . (shrink)

When Gilles Deleuze, in his book on Michel Foucault, asks, ‘who would think of looking for life among the archives?’, he uncovers something particular to Foucault's philosophy, but also to his own: a commitment to the question of what it means to think, and think politically. Although Foucault and Deleuze, who first met in 1952, immediately felt fondness for each other, a growing animosity had settled into the friendship by the end of the 1970s – a rift deepened by theoretical (...) differences. Notwithstanding these difficulties, Foucault and Deleuze shared a love for Nietzsche, as well as a curious fascination with Kant. Kant's influence, which was met with more opposition, is precisely the tension I tease out in this article, showing how Foucault critiques Kant's a priori through his own concept of the historical a priori, along with regularity and resistance, while Deleuze and Guattari, if more obliquely, critique Kant's a priori by further developing Foucault's notion of the historical a priori through their own method of pragmatics, particularly in three chapters of A Thousand Plateaus, namely ‘The Geology of Morals’, ‘Postulates of Linguistics’ and ‘On Several Regimes of Signs’. What I am interested in, then, is Deleuze and Guattari's treatment of redundancy, a concept mentioned seventy times in A Thousand Plateaus. Although not one of their main or most developed concepts, redundancy is a thread that can be traced back to Deleuze's first book, Empiricism and Subjectivity. Moreover, their more developed concepts, for example the diagram, the abstract machine, becoming, micro-politics and the ritornello, as well as their political philosophy, are grounded in their understanding of redundancy, which moves their philosophy beyond mapping out the conditions of possibility and demonstrating that the historical a priori emerges as a contingent function of its own expression to the genesis of thought. (shrink)

The Concept of Physical Law is an original and creative defense of the Regularity theory of physical law, the concept that physical laws are nothing more than descriptions of whatever universal truths happen to be instanced in nature. Professor Swartz clearly identifies and analyzes the arguments and intuitions of the opposing Necessitarian theory, and argues that the standard objection to the Regularity theory turns on a mistaken view of what Regularists mean by 'physical impossibility'; that it is impossible to (...) construct an empirical test that can distinguish between events Necessitarians call 'mere accidents' and those they call 'nornologically necessary', and that the Necessitarian theory cannot account fot human beings' free wills. Other topics in this important work include: the distinction between instrumental scientific laws and true physical laws; the distinction between failure and doom; potentialities; miracles and marvels; predictability and uniformity; statistical and numerical laws; and necessity-in-praxis. (shrink)

A growing body of empirical research suggests many animal species are capable of social learning and even have cultural behavioral traditions. Social learning has implications for community ecology; changes in behavior can lead to changes in inter- and intra-specific interactions. The paper explores possible implications of social learning for ecological community dynamics. Four arguments are made: social learning can result in locally-specific ecological relationships; socially-mediated, locally-specific ecological relationships can have localized indirect interspecific population effects; the involvement of multiple co-existing species (...) in socially learned, locally-specific behavior has the potential to create community-wide effects, including varying levels of stability and instability; and social learning can create new intra- and inter-specific selection pressures on local taxa, potentially resulting in rapid evolution. Implications of all four arguments are discussed in relation to community ecology research and modeling. (shrink)

It is obvious that teaching and research in informal logic is a growth industry, indeed one of burgeoning proportions. Judging by skyrocketing enrolments and the avalanche of books, journals, computer aids, conferences, and workshops during the last decade, it would seem to be no passing fad but the overdue recognition of a societal need.

For a finite universe of discourse, if Φ → and ~(Ψ → Φ) , then P(Ψ) > P(Φ), i.e., there is always a loss of information, there is an increase in probability, in a non reversible implication. But consider the two propositions, "All ravens are black", (i.e., "(x)(Rx ⊃ Bx)"), and "Some ravens are black" (i.e., "(∃x)(Rx & Bx)"). In a world of one individual, called "a", these two propositions are equivalent to "~Ra ∨ Ba" and "Ra & Ba" respectively. (...) However, (Ra & Ba) → (~Ra ∨ Ba) and ~[(~Ra ∨ Ba) → (Ra & Ba)]. Consequently, in a world of one individual it is more probable that all ravens are black than that some ravens are black! (shrink)

Inquiry into object happiness -- What is enlightenment? -- The means of knowledge -- Qualifications -- The self -- Obstructions -- Inquiry into karma and dharma -- Inquiry into practice -- Love -- The assimilation of experience -- Lifestyle -- Knowledge yoga -- Meditation -- After enlightenment -- The teachings of Ramana Maharshi -- Neo-Advaita.

A volume in Landscapes of Education. In From Socrates to Summerhill and Beyond: Towards a Philosophy of Education for Personal Responsibility, Ronald Swartz offers an evolving development of fallible, liberal democratic, self-governing educational philosophies. He suggests that educators can benefit from having dialogues about questions such as these: 1). Are there some authorities that can be consistently relied upon to tell school members what they should do and learn while they are in school? 2.) How should the imagination of (...) social theorists be both used and checked in the development and implementation of innovative educational reforms? 3.) How can teachers in personal responsibility schools help their students learn? These questions are representative of problems that Swartz raises in his book. Swartz identifies four educational programs as personal responsibility schools. These are Little Commonwealth (Homer Lane); Summerhill (A.S.Neill); Orphans Home (Janusz Korczak) and Sudbury Valley School (Daniel Greenberg). Swartz then suggests that these learning environments create social institutions that are liberal, democratic, and self-governing and therefore endorse the policy of personal responsibility. This policy states: All school members, students included, are fallible authorities who should be personally responsible for determining their own school activities and many policies that govern a school. Schools which incorporate this policy can interchangeably be referred to as personal responsibility, self-governing, or Summerhill style schools. In providing an historical and philosophical understanding of Summerhill style schools, Swartz suggests that these educational alternatives have intellectual roots in the ideas associated with Socrates as portrayed in Plato's Apology. Specifically, in personal responsibility schools teachers are not viewed as authorities who attempt to transmit wisdom to their students. Rather, self-governing schools follow the Socratic tradition which claims that teachers can be viewed as fallible authorities who attempt to engage students in dialogues about questions of interest to students. The interpretation of Plato's works used by Swartz can be found in Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies. Swartz has also been significantly influenced by the educational writings of Bertrand Russell and Paul Goodman. Goodman's Compulsory Miseducation makes it clear that schools which follow in the tradition of Summerhill compete with the educational programs that are an outgrowth of John Dewey's writings. In summary, Swartz's book aims to engage educators in dialogues that will lead to improved educational theories and practices. (shrink)

The basic issues which this paper will be concerned with are: how has history been defined, what has been asked about history, and what sort of answers have been found. These questions may also be stated as: what is the nature of historical theory and how do different theories affect what may “be done” with history.