Dans son livre American Philosophy and the Future, Michael Novak nous rappelle que nous vivons sous la menace des conflits nucléaires. Si nous n'y prenons garde, nous dit-il, nous serons bientôt dans l'impossibilité de philosopher. Cet avertissement a de quoi nous étonner. Y aurait-il des bombes atomiques sans une philosophie de la bombe?Il y aurait bien d'autres objets, les uns plus extraordinaires que les autres, que nous apporte à un rythme toujours plus accéléré la nouvelle technologic et sur lesquels il (...) nous faudrait aussi philosopher et même davantage. Ainsi, un éditorial de Journal of the American Medical Association nous fait part des craintes que provoquent, chez médecins et biologistes, les expériences faites en vue de la fabrication des bébés-éprouvette — ‘test-tube babies’. (shrink)

This site has been developed by the Center for Mental Health Services to "promote the development of healthy behaviors, competence, and resilience in school-aged children and youth," in the hopes of reducing violence in schools. Included is information about model programs and links to resources on topics such as safe and drug free schools, emergency services, and the influence of the media.

This is the first volume to apply insights from the material turn in philosophy to the study of play and games. At a time of renewed interest in analogue gaming, as scholars are looking beyond the digital and virtual for the first time since the inception of game studies in the 1990s, Material Game Studies not only supports the importance of the turn to the analogue, but proposes a materiality of play more broadly. Recognizing the entanglement of physical materiality with (...) cultural meaning, the authors in this volume apply a range of theoretical approaches, from material eco-criticism to animal studies, to examine games and play as existing within worlds of matter. Different chapters focus on the material properties of board, card and role-playing games, how they are designed and made, how they are touched and played with, and how they connect with other human and nonhuman things. Bringing together international scholars, Material Game Studies defines a new field of material game studies and demonstrates how it is a valuable addition to wider debates about the material turn and the place of embodied humans in a material world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"EVERY MARITAL ACT OUGHT TO BE OPEN TO NEW LIFE'': TOWARD A CLEARER UNDERSTANDING I. INTRODUCTION NE FREQUENTLY encounters misinterpretations of the statement " Every marital act ought to be open to new life " and similar statements in recent Catholic teaching concerning contraception.1 There are two common misinterpretations. One is: No couple may engage in marital intercourse without the intention to procreate. The other is: No couple may (...) engage in marital intercourse at times when they think procreation is impossible. As interpretations of the Church's teaching, these must be mistaken. For the Church teaches that contraception is always wrong and that natural family planning (NFP) is not always wrong. But NFP facilitates intercourse without the intention to procreate at times when procreation is thought to be impossible. Moreover, the Church has never taught that marital intercourse is good only if the couple desires to procreate; indeed, couples known to be sterile have never been forbidden to marry. We think that the only plausible interpretation of "Every marital act ought to be open to new life" is: It is wrong for those who engage in marital intercourse to attempt to impede the transmission of life which they think their act otherwise might bring about. For if they do try to impede that to which their act of itself might lead, they choose to close it to new life. 1 The proposition is formulated somewhat differently by Paul VI, Humanae vitae, 11, AAS 60 (1968), 488 (with references to Gasti connubii and to Pius XII's.Allocution to the Society of Italian Catholic Midwives); and by John Paul II, Familiaris consortia, 29, AAS 74 (1982), 115, following proposition 22 of the 1980 session of the Synod of Bishops. Moreover, the different formulations also are translated diversely. We do not think these differences matter for our present purpose. 365 366 GRISEZ, BOYLE, FINNIS AND MAY Un.derstood in this way, "Every marital act ought to be open to new life" expresses the same proposition as " Contraception is always wrong." Nevertheless, the affirmative formulation helps to clarify what contraception is, for it indicates the precise object of the contraceptive act. "Contraception" signifies only the prevention of conception, but the contraceptive act seeks to impede the beginning of the Zife of a possible person. The distinction is only conceptual, but we think it important, for the explicit reference to new life calls attention to the fact that contraception is a contralife act. The characterization of contraception as a oontralife act is one major element of the unbroken Christian tradition condemning contraception as always wrong. For example, a canon, Si aliquis, concerning contraception was included in the Church's universal law from the thirteenth century until 1917: " I£ anyone for the sake of fulfilling sexual desire or with premediated hatred does something to a man or to a woman, or gives something to drink, so that he cannot generate, or she cannot conceive, or offspring be born, let it be held as homicide." 2 This canon does not say that contraception is homicide ; the tradition made no such mistake. The canon rather says that contraception sihould be regarded as homicide is regarded. To regard contraception as homicide is regarded is not only to make it clear that.contraception is wrong, but also to point to its being contralife as the reason why it is wrong. When contraception is regarded as contralife, it is seen as evil outside marriage as well as within. Historically, contraception probably was more common among the unmarried than the married, and much of the tradition condemned contraception without distinguishing between its uses in and outside mar2 Deoret. Greg. IX, lib. V, tit. 12, cap. v; Oorpus iuris oanonioi, ed. A. L. Richter and A. Friedberg (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1881), 2, 794: "Si aliquis causa explendae libidinis vel odii meditatione homini aut mulieri aliquid fecerit, vel ad potandum dederit, ut non possit generare, aut concipere, vel nasci soboles, ut homicida. tenea.tur." Some transla.te "ca.usa explendae libidinis," which is broad enough to cover all motivation by sexual impulse, "to satisfy lust," which unnecessarily limits the motive to habitual vice. " OPEN TO NEW LIFE " 367 riage. But. Casti oonnubii dealt with contraception... (shrink)

Anglophone philosophers are often associated with rejecting philosophy’s moral guidance function after 1945. This article builds on existing work on Jean-Paul Sartre’s reception in universities to show that, actually, many British and U.S. philosophers embraced moral guidance roles by engaging with his work and that they promoted creativity and choice in society as a result. Sartre first came to philosophers’ attention in the context of post-war Francophilia, but interest in him quickly went beyond the fact that he was French (...) and expanded to include the wider existentialist movement that he was a part of. Sartre had enduring popularity among English-speaking philosophers because his philosophy resonated with the older British and U.S. philosophies of idealism and pragmatism that, like his, were inspired by Hegel. Sartre’s respondents also valued existentialism because, to them, it made certain Judeo-Christian principles relevant, thus protecting religion at a time when they believed it was threatened with decline and by the advance of specialisation. Anglophone philosophers who were interested in Sartre spread their responses to him through teaching an expanding student population, but also reached the wider public through activism, journalism, broadcasting, and government advisory roles. In doing so, philosophers integrated their interpretations of existential ideas into several aspects of culture in post-war Britain and U.S.A. (shrink)

Article Paul Géhin/Michel Cacouros/Christian Förstel/Marie-Odile Germain/Philippe Hoffmann/Corinne Jouanno/Brigitte Mondrain avec la collaboration de Dominique Grosdidiers de Matons. Les manuscrits datés des XIIIe et XIVe siècles conservés dans les bibliothèques publiques de France was published on April 1, 2007 in the journal Byzantinische Zeitschrift (volume 100, issue 2).

Voltaire called fanaticism the "monster that pretends to be the child of religion". Philosophers, politicians, and cultural critics have decried fanaticism and attempted to define the distinctive qualities of the fanatic, whom Winston Churchill described as "someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject". Yet despite fanaticism's role in the long history of social discord, human conflict, and political violence, it remains a relatively neglected topic in the history of philosophy. In this outstanding inquiry into the philosophical (...) history of fanaticism a team of international contributors examine the topic from antiquity to the present day. Organised into four sections, topics covered include: Fanaticism in ancient Greek, Indian and Chinese philosophy; Fanaticism and superstition from Hobbes to Hume, including chapters on Locke and Montesquieu, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson; Kant, Germaine de Stael, Hegel, Nietzsche, William James, and Jorge Portilla on fanaticism; Fanaticism and terrorism; and extremism and gender, including the philosophy and morality of the 'manosphere'; Closed-mindedness and political and epistemological fanaticism. Spanning themes from superstition, enthusiasm and misanthropy to the emotions, purity and the need for certainty, Fanaticism and the History of Philosophy is a landmark volume for anyone researching and teaching the history of philosophy, particularly ethics and moral philosophy. It is also a valuable resource for those studying fanaticism in related fields such as religion, the history of political thought, sociology, and the history of ideas. (shrink)

This first volume in a series entitled Founders of Modern Political and Social Thought, by John Finnis, Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy at Oxford, is the most comprehensive and detailed treatment in print of Aquinas’s political and ethical thought. Finnis is already well known for his 1980 book, Natural Law and Natural Rights, his Thomistic-inspired theory of “basic human goods” in Fundamentals of Ethics, and his attack on the morality of nuclear deterrence, written with Joseph Boyle and Germain (...) Grisez. The present work is an effort to understand and critique Aquinas’s political and ethical thought as philosophy rather than theology, to correct what Finnis considers “one-sided or wrong” beliefs about his thinking, and to see how well it stands up as “a critical theory” today. Thanks to modern technology, Finnis is able to draw upon the full sixty volumes of Aquinas’s works, over 8.5 million words, rather than restricting the discussion as earlier works have done, to the early Commentary on the Sentences, the two Summas, and his advice to the King of Cyprus. (shrink)

"Bernard Groethuysen (1880-1946), philosophe d'origine allemande, partage, dès 1904, sa vie entre Berlin et Paris où il étudie la Révolution française et rencontre, grâce à Bergson, Alix Guillain (1876-1951), traductrice et journaliste à L'Humanité. Vivant avec leurs compagnes dans le phalanstère de la rue Campagne-Première, Groethuysen et Paulhan, devenus amis, oeuvrent à partir de 1920 à La Nouvelle Revue francaise, dont ce dernier prend la direction cinq ans plus tard : ils font découvrir Hôlderlin, Kassner, Kafka, Büchner, Musil... En 1927, (...) ils inaugurent leur collection "Bibliothèque des Idées" par l'essai majeur de Groethuysen, Origines de l'esprit bourgeois en France, "notre premier enfant", écrit-il à Paulhan. Dans son ultime lettre d'Allemagne, de 1931, il s'inquiète : "L'Histoire devrait nous donner des vacances. On en profiterait pour reprendre la vie." En août 1932, devant l'essor du nazisme, Groethuysen s'exile en France. Quant à Paulhan, le Front populaire le voit s'engager aux côtés de Jean Longuet, maire socialiste de Châtenay-Malabry. Arrive la guerre : Germaine et Jean Paulhan quittent leur maison, leur jardin, leurs animaux, dont Alix Guillain et Groethuysen, naturalisé en 1938, prennent soin. Après la défaite de l'Allemagne, le philosophe rêve encore d'utopie, mais il meurt le 17 septembre 1946. Les travaux de Groethuysen m'intéressaient, il s'intéressait aux miens", confiera Paulhan à Ponge. Ce volume prouve leur affectueuse amitié, fondée sur le travail en commun pour la NRF. Mais c'est également un document sur les réseaux intellectuels et politiques de l'entre-deux-guerres: Maria Van Rysselberghe et les amis de Gide, la princesse de Bassiano et la revue Commerce, Paul Desjardins et les Décades de Pontigny, Henry Church et la revue Mesures, Alix Guillain et le Parti communiste, Aline Mayrisch et le groupe de Colpach... "Je n'ai pas connu d'autre homme, écrira Paulhan, pour qui une idée, fût-elle évidemment fausse ou absurde, dès l'instant qu'un homme l'avait inventée, eût un tel prix. Il disait: "C'est une idée" d'un ton de gourmet. C'est qu'il pensait que la vérité ayant été une fois dans la suite des temps atteinte (par Hegel et - pour ce qui concernait son application au monde moderne - par Marx), il ne nous restait qu'à former des idées - plus ou moins agréables, curieuses, attendrissantes de faiblesse." (Mort de Groethuysen à Luxembourg, rédigé en 1946)."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre is the author of possibly the most notorious one-liner of twentieth-century philosophy: 'Hell is other people'. Albert Camus was The Outsider. The two men first came together in Occupied Paris in the middle of the Second World War, and quickly became friends, comrades, and mutual admirers. But the intellectual honeymoon was short-lived. In 1943, with Nazis patrolling the streets, Sartre and Camus sat in a café on the boulevard Saint-Germain with Simone de Beauvoir and began a (...) discussion about life and love and literature that would pull them all together and finally tear them apart. They ended up on opposite sides in a war of words over just about everything: women, philosophy, politics. Their fraught, fractured friendship culminated in a bitter and very public feud that was described as 'the end of a love-affair' but which never really finished. Sartre was a boxer and a drug-addict; Camus was a goalkeeper who subscribed to a degree-zero approach to style and ecstasy. Sartre, obsessed with his own ugliness, took up the challenge of accumulating women; Camus, part-Bogart, part-Samurai, was also a self-confessed Don Juan who aspired to chastity. Sartre and Camus play out an epic struggle between the symbolic and the savage. But what if the friction between these two unique individuals is also the source of our own inevitable conflicts? The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre vs Camus reconstructs the intense and antagonistic relationship that was (in Sartre's terms) 'doomed to failure'. Weaving together the lives and ideas and writings of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, Andy Martin relives the existential drama that still binds them inseparably together and remixes a philosophical dialogue that speaks to us now. (shrink)

Paul Sheehy will endorse a holist or realist thesis about groups: interrelational holism.

The author uses the central insight of the principle of double effect—that the distinction between intended effects and foreseen side effects is morally significant—to distinguish contraception from natural family planning. After summarizing the contralife argument against contraception, the author identifies limitations of arguments presented by Pope John Paul II and by Martin Rhonheimer. To show that the contralife argument does not apply to NFP, the author argues that agents do not intend every effect that motivates their actions. This argument (...) supplements the action theory of Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle, John Finnis, and other proponents of new natural law theory. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 11.1 : 83–97. (shrink)

Für Natorp selbst stand seine Arbeit an Plato in unmittelbarem Zusammenhang mit der Arbeit an seiner eigenen Philosophie; sosehr sein großes Buch sich als Hinführung zu Plato verstand, sosehr bildet die Ausarbeitung von Platos Ideenlehre auch einen originären Teil der Philosophie Paul Natorps. Die Sonderausgabe dieses Standardwerkes zur Philosophie Platons bietet den Text nach der zweiten Auflage von 1921.

My argument here is principally that the ubiquity of epistemics is evident in the ways in which knowledge claims and attributions of knowledge to self and other are embedded in turns and sequences, inform the design of turns at talk, are amended in the corrections that speakers sometimes make, to change from one epistemic stance to another, and are contested, in the occasional ‘struggles’ between participants, as to which of them has epistemic primacy. I show that these cannot be understood (...) in cognitive terms; furthermore, I show that epistemics – again the attribution of knowledge to self and other – is ‘real’ for participants. That is, in these four practices and aspects of interaction it is evident that participants orient to their states of knowledge relative to one another, on a moment-by-moment, turn-by-turn basis. (shrink)

In this book, Ramsey addresses the moral problems of medicine, life and death and not merely to those who share his faith.

This book is an important study in the philosophy of the mind; drawing on the work of philosopher Wilfrid Sellars and the theory of critical realism to develop a novel argument for understanding perception and metaphysics.

This volume brings together Paul Williams's previously published papers on the Indian and Tibetan interpretations of selected verses from the eighth and ninth chapters of the Bodhicaryavatara. In addition, there is a much longer version of the paper 'Identifying the Object of Negation', and nearly half the book consists of a wholly new essay, 'The Absence of Self and the Removal of Pain', subtitled 'How Santideva Destroyed the Bodhisattva Path'. This book will be of interest to those concerned with (...) the history and interpretation of Indian and Tibetan philosophy. (shrink)

In Studies on Early Modern Aristotelianism Paul Richard Blum shows that Aristotle’s thought remained the touchstone of modern philosophy; for it was the philosophy taught at universities. The concept of philosophy at Jesuit schools forms the first part of this book. Their impact on the sciences and mathematics in combination with Renaissance ideas of nature is the topic of the second part. The transformation of Aristotelian metaphysics and theology under the influence of the Renaissance is the third area of (...) this book. Surprising continuity from the late Middle Ages into modernity and the radical difference of subject centered modern philosophy from ‘teachable’ school philosophy are innovative in these studies. (shrink)

Arguments for the extended mind suggest the possibility of extended knowers, individuals whose epistemic standing is tied to the operation of cognitive circuits that extend beyond the bounds of skin and skull. When applied to the Internet, this idea yields the possibility of Internet-extended knowledge, a form of extended knowledge that derives from our interactions and engagements with the online environment. This, however, yields a tension: proponents of the extended mind have suggested that cognitive extension requires the automatic endorsement of (...) bio-external content, but such a commitment appears to conflict with the need to carefully evaluate the veracity of online information. Lukas Schwengerer proposes a solution to this problem. He suggests that proponents of the extended mind ought to accept an alternative conception of the extended mind, one that allows for the evaluation of online content via the exercise of intellectual virtue. We highlight a number of problems with this proposal and suggest that further research is required before a virtue-theoretic approach to Internet-extended knowledge can be adopted. On a more positive note, we suggest that the exercise of intellectual virtue may play an important role in the developmental emergence of Internet-extended knowers. (shrink)

Focusing on the logistics of perception, this title introduces the author's understanding of 'picnolepsy' - the epileptic state of consciousness produced by speed, or rather, the consciousness invented by the subject through its very absence: the gaps, glitches, and speed bumps lacing through and defining it.

This one-of-a-kind collection contains portraits of some of the most significant theological voices in modern medical ethics, including Paul Ramsey, James M. Gustafson, Richard McCormick, Bernard Haring, and Germain Grisez, about whom the authors and other contributors have written essays that point the way to a recovery of creative and faithful religious reflection on medical ethics.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ought We to Require Emotional Capacity as Part of Decisional Competence?Paul S. Appelbaum* (bio)AbstractThe preceding commentary by Louis Charland suggests that traditional cognitive views of decision-making competence err in not taking into account patients’ emotional capacities. Examined closely, however, Charland’s argument fails to escape the cognitive bias that he condemns. However, there may be stronger arguments for broadening the focus of competence assessment to include emotional capacities, centering (...) on the ways in which emotions aid humans in processing information. Before emotional capacities are added to the list of functions essential for decisional competence, though, the feasibility and utility of such a reorientation must be demonstrated.To what extent ought persons’ capacities to experience emotion be taken into account when determining whether they should be deemed competent to make their own decisions? In the previous article, Louis Charland (1998) argues that traditional models of decision-making competence—of which the MacArthur Competence Treatment Study is a typical example—are mistaken in focusing narrowly on persons’ cognitive abilities to the neglect of emotional factors. In contrast, he suggests, constructs of competence ought explicitly to require a capacity to experience emotions, which he believes is central to meaningful decision making, before deeming persons competent.Charland, as he acknowledges, is not the first to suggest that the presence of some degree of emotional capacity is a necessary element of competence, but his argument is among the most elaborate to date and is certainly worth closer examination. Looked at carefully, however, Charland’s argument does not make quite the case for the determination of emotional capacity in competence assessment that he claims for it. Indeed, as I demonstrate below, Charland may share the same “pernicious [End Page 377] cognitive bias” that he ascribes to more traditional approaches. However, despite what I identify as the problems in Charland’s argument, others have raised more disturbing questions about the lack of attention to emotional issues in competence assessment. Thus, I am not ready to reject entirely the possibility that determinations of decisional competence ought to consider emotional factors. I conclude by outlining the questions that remain to be answered to identify more clearly the potential benefits of such an approach.The Construct of Decision-Making CompetenceSome preliminary comments about the nature of the dominant construct of decision-making competence may provide a useful frame for my response to Charland’s paper. Contemporary ideas of competence are tied inextricably to the ideal of self-determination in modern Western societies. Such societies are committed to respect for individual choice, both as a good in its own right and on the grounds that each person knows best what choices will maximize his or her own welfare. In general, therefore, states will not intervene to prevent persons from acting on their decisions, even when the choices they make—like the decision to smoke or to refuse potentially life-saving medical care—may objectively be thought to be detrimental to them.In some cases, however, the presumption that people will act in their own interests, as well as the notion that there is something intrinsically valuable in respecting their choices, fails (Buchanan and Brock 1989). When people’s minds are so disordered that they cannot be said to be making meaningful choices, other values come into play. Such people are called “incompetent.” When persons reach that point, the state’s interest in protecting its citizens becomes primary and someone else must make decisions on their behalf. Note that the size of this group must be sharply limited, lest a liberal society’s commitment to self-determination be undermined: There is no more profound infringement of the rights of citizens than the determination that they are incompetent. Thus, the criteria for incompetence must be selected in a deliberately narrow fashion—alternately, one might say that the standards for competence are made intentionally broad—so that all but a tiny percentage of citizens will be permitted to make decisions on their own.In the Anglo-American world, the process of formulating criteria of competence by and large has been left to the common law courts. Over the course of centuries they have identified the capacities that are, in... (shrink)

This book discusses some of the most challenging ideas emerging out of the research program on institutional diversity associated with the 2009 co-recipient of 2009 Nobel Prize in economics, Elinor Ostrom, while outlining a set of new research directions and an original interpretation of the significance and future of this program.

Paul Herrick covers the fundamentals of logic with clear and thorough explanations and numerous everyday examples, whilst providing opportunities to move beyond the basics. The second edition contains new chapters on informal logic and critical thinking.

The writings published here are not so much an epitome as episodes. But most do not digress. They mark the turns and turning points of a human style, the tropes of an expressive life embodying the changing tempos of an age. Until we fall silent, all of us are trying to say. These fragmentary efforts to speak to, rejoin, and help create a new community of liberated human beings constitute the epigraphs of Sartre's historical inscription.

Over the past two decades, Philip Pettit has consistently argued for an understanding of “republican” liberty in terms of nondomination. Yet in his major published studies, he has almost nothing to say about markets, nor about the economy more generally. I contend that this is a seriously problematic omission, insofar as markets represent a major problem for republican views of freedom. In short: if freedom requires the absence of the mere possibility of arbitrary interference (as Pettit maintains), then the widespread (...) existence of markets indicates that on a republican view the vast majority of people in the world today exist in the dominated position of slaves. As a result, Pettit cannot adopt the “complacency” towards market transactions that he officially avows. But in turn, we ought to be highly skpetical that the republican account of freedom is a viable one. (shrink)

The Theaetetus is one of the most widely studied of any of the Platonic dialogues because its dominant theme concerns the significant philosophical question, what is knowledge? In this book Paul Stern provides a full-length treatment of its political character in relationship to this dominant theme. He argues that this approach sheds significant light on the distinctiveness of the Socratic way of life, with respect to both its initial justification and its ultimate character. More specifically, he argues that Socrates' (...) revolutionary decision to subject political life to philosophic reflection, the decision that leads directly to his trial and execution, is based on his awareness of the elusiveness of comprehensive knowledge and the implications of that elusiveness for the validity of philosophic inquiry. This view of Socrates' rationale has important consequences for our understanding of political philosophy and of the validity of the life of reason itself. (shrink)

Medicine increasingly envisions health promotion in terms of reducing risk as determined by quantitative risk factors, such as blood pressure, blood lipids, or genetic variants. This essay argues that this vision of health care as risk reduction is dangerous for Christian bioethics, since risk can be infinitely reduced leading to a self-defeating spiral of iatrogenic effects. Moreover, it endangers character because this vision of health is connected to a reductionist vision of the body and an understanding of individual risk that (...) undermines the more communal virtue of solidarity. The essay concludes by discussing how recent Thomistic analyses in favor of physical enhancements illustrate some of the problems that envisioning health care in terms of risk reduction holds for Christian bioethics. (shrink)

One of the signal developments in contemporary criticism over the past several years has been the ascendancy of the colonial paradigm. In conjunction with this new turn, Frantz Fanon has now been reinstated as a global theorist, and not simply by those engaged in Third World or subaltern studies. In a recent collection centered on British romanticism, Jerome McGann opens a discussion of William Blake and Ezra Pound with an extended invocation of Fanon. Donald Pease has used Fanon to open (...) an attack on Stephen Greenblatt’s reading of the Henriad and the interdisciplinary practices of the new historicism. And Fanon, and published interpretations of Fanon, have become regularly cited in the rereading of the Renaissance that have emerged from places like Sussex, Essex, and Birmingham.1My intent is not to offer a reading of Fanon to supplant these others, but to read, even if summarily, some of these readings of Fanon. By focusing on successive appropriations of this figure, as both totem and text, I think we can chart out an itinerary through contemporary colonial discourse theory. I want to stress, then, that my ambitions here are extremely limited: what follows may be a prelude to a reading of Fanon, but does not even begin that task itself.2 1. See Jerome McGann, “The Third World of Criticism,” in Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History, ed. Marjorie Levinson et al., pp. 85-107, and Donald Pease, “Toward a Sociology of Literary Knowledge: Greenblatt, Colonialism, and the New Historicism,” in Consequences of Theory, ed. Barbara Johnson and Jonathan Arac.2. A properly contextualized reading of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, the text to which I most frequently recur, should situate it in respect to such germinal works as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question Juive, Dominique O. Mannoni’s Psychologie de la colonisation, Germaine Guex’s La Névrose d’abandon, as well as many lesser known works. But this is only to begin to sketch out the challenge of rehistoricizing Fanon. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is coeditor of Transition, a quarterly review, and the author of Figures in Black and The Signifying Monkey, which received an American Book Award. (shrink)

Dans cet essai inédit regroupant trois textes issus d'une conférence donnée en 1967 (sous le titre "Sens et fonction d'une communauté ecclésiale"), Paul Ricoeur s'intéresse en philosophe à l'idée d'Eglise. Il s'interroge d'abord sur la société, son obsession technique, son incapacité à produire du sens et sur la manière dont cette "communauté" pourrait être un contrepoint d'utopie en son sein. Il cherche ensuite un langage capable d'intégrer en même temps les critiques externes de la religion (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud), et, (...) d'une manière interne à la foi, une "déconstruction" des pseudo-rationalisations qui masquent la vivacité des textes bibliques, déconstruction inspirée par la "démythologisation" du théologien Rudolf Bultmann. Il propose ainsi une parole porteuse de sens pour l'ensemble de la société. Jamais publiés jusqu'ici, ces textes de Paul Ricoeur offrent une réflexion philosophique rare sur le rôle d'une communauté confessante au coeur d'une société désenchantée et qui reste d'une troublante actualité. (shrink)

I discuss the problem of whether true contradictions of the form “x is P and not P” might be the expression of an implicit relativization to distinct respects of application of one and the same predicate P. Priest rightly claims that one should not mistake true contradictions for an expression of lexical ambiguity. However, he primarily targets cases of homophony for which lexical meanings do not overlap. There exist more subtle forms of equivocation, such as the relation of privative opposition (...) singled out by Zwicky and Sadock in their study of ambiguity. I argue that this relation, which is basically a relation of general to more specific, underlies the logical form of true contradictions. The generalization appears to be that all true contradictions really mean “x is P in some respects/to some extent, but not in all respects/not to all extent”. I relate this to the strict-tolerant account of vague predicates and outline a variant of the account to cover one-dimensional and multidimensional predicates. (shrink)

Many of the leading Freudian analysts, including in the early days, Jung, Adler, Reich and Rank, attempted to link the writings of Nietzsche with the clinical ...

Excerpt from Nine Modern Moralists The greatness of the men whose insight and re ections are the subject of the following chapters is obviously a sufficient justification for this volume. The reader who simply wants to learn what was felt and thought and believed by some of the outstanding minds of the immediate past and of the present can, it is hoped, do so by reading the chapters of this book as expository essays. Here he will find their thought anatomized; (...) and, in relatively brief compass, it may be possible for him to become seriously engaged in thinking their thoughts after them. Certainly, no one can come to an understanding of the latest and best of contemporary ideas and ideals by going around these men; only by going through them can one gain a deeper understanding of himself and of our epoch. That is the first purpose of this book: to provide an introduction to nine selected modern moralists. The second purpose is constructive and critical. Exposition and ex planation by themselves are not the aim of these chapters. The highest tribute one can pay any thinker, or any body of writing, is to wrestle with it; and this may well be the best way to bring out the innermost and most vital meaning of what any man has said. I trust that in this wrestling I have nowhere simply commanded an issue to be gone, or have ignored the real meaning or the strength of an idea or point of view in rejecting or reformulating it. The procedure employed in criti cism is always an internal one. This is to say that it always seems best to go as far as one can with another man's thought, developing it up to the point where some criticism or objection or revision unfolds itself, as it were, from within the system or structure of thought under examina tion. In this way the most constructive results may be expected from criticism; and, in this way also, constructive and critical essays may fairly aim to be explanatory ones. As expository essays the chapters that follow may be taken one at a time and in any order, or one or more without the others. Their con structive and critical purpose, however, connects them all together. The author has been somewhat surprised at the extent to which this is true, when preparing for publication these papers which were written in some cases years apart. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.". (shrink)