For over twenty years Douglas Berger has advanced research and reflection on Indian philosophical traditions from both classical and cross-cultural perspectives. This volume reveals the extent of his contribution by bringing together his perspectives on these classical Indian philosophies and placing them in conversation with Confucian, Chinese Buddhist and medieval Indian Sufi traditions. Delving into debates between Nyaya and Buddhist philosophers on consciousness and identity, the nature of Sankara's theory of the self, the precise character of Nagarjuna's idea of (...) emptiness, and the relationship between awareness and embodiment in the broad spectrum of Indian thought, chapters exhibit Berger's unusually broad range of expertise. They connect Chinese Confucian and Buddhist texts with classical Indian theories of ethics and consciousness, contrast the ideas of seminal European thinkers like Nietzsche and Derrida from prevailing themes in Buddhism, and shed light on the spiritual and political dimensions of the Mughal prince Dara Shukoh's immersion into Vedantic thought. Always approaching the arguments from an intercultural perspective, Berger shows how much relevance and resonance classical Indian thought has with ancient Confucian views of ethics, Chinese Buddhist depictions of consciousness and medieval Mughal conceptions of divinity. The result is a volume celebrating the rigor, vitality and intercultural resonance of India's rich philosophical heritage. (shrink)

Incapacitated adult patients are commonly divided into two groups for purposes of decision making; those with a surrogate and those without. Respectively, these groups are often referred to as represented and unrepresented, and the relative ethics of decision making between them raises two particular issues. The first issue involves the differential application of the best interests standard between groups. Second is the prevailing notion that representedness and unrepresentedness are categorical phenomena, though it is more aptly understood as a multidimensional and (...) continuous variable based on relational moral authority. This paper examines the nature of representedness as it relates to ethical norms of surrogate decision making. (shrink)

Berger and Whistler provide a ground-breaking account of Schelling's first controversy with his critic A.C.A. Eschenmayer in 1801, which focused on the philosophy of nature. They argue that key Schellingian concepts, such as identity, potency and abstraction, were first forged in his early debate with Eschenmayer.

The question of the foreigner remains, as is well known, a pressing issue, now more than ever, even as “we allow the intolerable to happen : not just death, suffering, deportation, nameless woe, but also the imbecilic destruction of Europe and the Mediterranean’s chances in the new world to come,” as Jacques Derrida already noted in August 1995. This article retraces his seminars and public interventions as he calls for another concept of hospitality, thus wresting it away from fantasies of (...) blood and autochthony, even from the notion of a common language. Indeed, his emphasis on hostipitality gives rise to another experience of citizenship and of the political, of responsibility before the other. Lastly, the relationship between unconditional hospitality and non-knowledge also helps explain why a politics that tries to measure up to it necessarily implies poetic invention. More so than other aspects (geopolitics, urban planning, social work, international law) that are affected by the problem of hospitality, hospitality’s poetic dimension may well reveal itself to be the most crucial of all. (shrink)

This article studies the material production and consumption of the national community in 19th-century America. More particularly, it concentrates on the intersection between particular technologies of transportation, representation and dissemination in the spatial and imaginary formation of the American nation in the 1860s. Through an analysis of the contradictory mechanism of placement and displacement, identity and difference at the heart of a particular state-sanctioned field of national production the construction of America's first transcontinental railroad in 19th-century California the essay highlights (...) what tends to remain hidden in narrowly defined `cultural' (textual) approaches to nationhood: its involvement in racial, gendered and class-related divisions between private and public space, home and travel, labour and capital, technology and nature. (shrink)

In the quest for identity and healing, what belongs to the humanities and what to clinical psychology? Ginette Paris uses cogent and passionate argument as well as stories from patients to teach us to accept that the human psyche seeks to destroy relationships and lives as well as to sustain them. This is very hard to accept which is why, so often, the body has the painful and dispiriting job of showing us what our psyche refuses to see. In (...) jargon-free language, the author describes her own story of taking a turn downwards and inwards in the search for a metaphorical personal 'death'. If this kind of mortality is not attended to, then more literal bodily ailments and actual death itself can result. Paris engages with one of the main dilemmas of contemporary psychology and psychotherapy: how to integrate findings and insights from neuroscience and medicine into an approach to healing founded upon activation of the imagination. At present, she demonstrates, what is happening is damaging to both science and imagination. (shrink)

Inserido no ambiente universitário do século XIII do ocidente cristão, Tomás de Aquino lança-se à linha de frente dos debates de sua época, propondo uma crítica ao que chamará de platonismo e às leituras por ele consideradas errôneas de Aristóteles, imbuídas de interpretações de filósofos como Avicena e Averróis, que chegam à Europa latina nos últimos séculos do medievo. Um de seus alvos é a consideração sobre o intelecto agente e o ato de intelecção. Em Suma de Teologia Iª, 84, (...) o autor descreve o funcionamento deste ato, situando seu início na impressão causada pelos sensíveis nos sentidos, e, apontando como determinante para tal, a condição do homem no estado da vida presente como um conjunto composto de alma e corpo. (shrink)

Avec trois entretiens de Jean-Luc Nancy Cosa volante : l'art n'est ni un objet, ni un ensemble de composantes formelles, encore moins schème et substance. L'art les arts plutôt, dans leur pluralité différentielle élève la question d'une forme en formation. Cette forma formans traverse de part en part la pensée des arts de Jean-Luc Nancy où importe surtout l'approche de ce qui, dans l'art, fait sens (sensibilité, intelligence, sensation, sensualité). A travers touches, intensités, vibrations, timbres, tonalités, colorations, grains, résonances, rythmes, (...) il s'agit de voir comment les arts donnent forme au monde. Cet ouvrage explore plusieurs motifs du travail de Nancy : sa réflexion sur l'iconologie "chrétienne" au sein de sa "déconstruction du christianisme", la question de ses "étranges corps étrangers", les modalités de ses ekphraseis, sa poétique cinétique, entre autres. Trois entretiens avec le philosophe constituent des moments privilégiés de cet échange autour de la question de l'art. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Non-Cartesian Psychotherapeutic Framework: Radical Pragmatism as an AlternativeLouis S. Berger (bio)AbstractPostmodern criticism has identified important impoverishments that necessarily follow from the use of Cartesian frameworks. This criticism is reviewed and its implications for psychotherapy are explored in a psychoanalytic context. The ubiquitous presence of Cartesianism (equivalently, representationism) in psychoanalytic frameworks—even in some that are considered postmodern—is demonstrated and criticized. The postmodern convergence on praxis as a (...) desirable alternative to Cartesianism is reported, and its relevance for psychoanalysis is considered. The severe conceptual difficulties entailed in formulating such an alternative are discussed, as are those difficulties that would be encountered were psychoanalysis to attempt the shift from explanatory mental science to praxis. The principal psychoanalytic problematics explored are: the paradoxical relationships between theory and therapeutic technique; the therapeutic action; and validation of clinical practices. Initial, nontraditional suggestions for addressing these problems are offered.Keywordspsychoanalysis, therapeutic action, representation, state space, praxis, hermeneutics, Descartes, Heidegger, Wittgenstein“But the inability to bring one’s subject under conceptual control, fixing it propositionally, is not the end of thinking; on the contrary, it were better to say that the breakdown of concepts and the failure of words is an opening that takes us out of the realm where representation and calculation are all that matter to thinking.... [T]his is what happens in the Socratic dialogue where the negativity in which one ends up at a loss for words is at the same time that which sets thinking free.”Bruns 1989, 9“To evolve theory as though our methods and processes of study were essentially the same, or could be the same, as those of other sciences, or could be disregarded when it comes to theory, implies a view of reality that is no longer tenable, least of all in that ambiguous area which we call psychic reality. Nevertheless, all of us are still more or less captives of an erroneous understanding of objectivity and objective reality....”Loewald 1970, 45 [End Page 169]CartesianismCartesianism still underlies and dominates much of today’s thought. It is the label for a network of interrelated ideas and themes:the ontological duality of mind and body; the subjective individualism implicit in the ultimate appeal to direct personal verification; the method of universal doubt which was supposed to lead us to indubitable truths; the doctrine that language and signs are an external disguise for thought; the doctrine that vagueness is unreal and that the philosophic endeavor is one of knowing clearly and distinctly a completely determinate reality; and most fundamentally, the doctrine that we can break out of the miasma of our language or system of signs and have direct intuitive knowledge of objects. (Bernstein 1971, 5–6)[The Cartesian assumptions] constitute a picture of science and the world somewhat as follows: there is an external world which can in principle be exhaustively described in scientific language. The scientist, as both observer and language-user, can capture the external facts of the world in propositions that are true if they correspond to the facts and false if they do not. Science is ideally a linguistic system in which true propositions are in one-to-one relation to facts, including facts that are not directly observed because they involve hidden entities or properties, or past events or far distant events. These hidden events are described in theories, and theories can be inferred from observation, that is, the hidden explanatory mechanism of the world can be discovered from what is open to observation. Man as scientist is regarded as standing apart from the world and able to experiment and theorize about it objectively and dispassionately.(Hesse 1980, vii)Hesse goes on to say that “almost every assumption underlying this account has been subjected to damaging criticism,” a view echoed by others: “Most contemporary philosophers have been in revolt against the Cartesian framework” (Bernstein 1971, 5); “A rejection of the Cartesian view is a central theme for both of the giants of twentieth-century philosophy, Heidegger and Wittgenstein” (Sass 1992, 444n 77); and “The notion of alternative conceptual frameworks has been a commonplace of our culture since Hegel” (Rorty 1982, 3).These criticisms arise... (shrink)

This book reformulates the sociological subdiscipline known as the sociology of knowledge. Knowledge is presented as more than ideology, including as well false consciousness, propaganda, science and art.

Crowning six decades of literary, rhetorical, and historical scholarship, Harry Berger, Jr., offers readers another trenchant reading. Berger subverts the usual interpretations of Plato’s kalos kagathos, showing Socrates to be trapped in a double ventriloquism, tethered to his interlocutors’ speech acts even as they are tethered to his. Plato’s Republic and Protagoras both reserve a small but significant place for a poet who differs from Homer and Hesiod: the lyric poet Simonides of Ceos. In the Protagoras, Socrates takes (...) apart a poem attributed to Simonides and uses this to finish off the famous and supposedly dangerous sophist, Protagoras. Couch City is a close reading of the comic procedures Socrates deploys against Protagoras as he reduces him to silence. But it also shows that Socrates takes the danger posed by Protagoras and his fellow sophists seriously. Even if they are represented as buffoons, sophists are among the charismatic authority figures—poets, rhapsodes, seers, orators, and lawgivers—who promote views harmful to Athenian democracy. Socrates uses Simonides’s poem to show how sophists not only practice misinterpretation but are unable to defend against it. Berger ports his roots as a pioneering literary theorist into this rhetorical discussion, balancing ideas such as speech-act theory with hard-nosed philology. The result is a provocative and counterintuitive reassessment of Plato’s engagement with democracy. (shrink)

Health disparities are primarily driven by structural inequality including systemic racism. Medical educators, led by the AAMC, have tended to minimize these core drivers of health disparities. Ins...

En este trabajo defenderé la factibilidad de una ciencia jurídica trascendental de las críticas que Jan Sieckmann y Christoph Kletzer han hecho a su carácter constitutivo. Sieckmann argumenta que las propias premisas de la teoría pura del derecho desembocan en una disciplina sin objeto de estudio, mientras Kletzer sostiene que el acto constitutivo se da realmente en la aplicación del derecho. De mi defensa se deriva una exégesis de la relación entre filosofía del derecho, ciencia jurídica y derecho positivo conforme (...) al modelo kantiano de la conexión entre la crítica de la razón pura, la ciencia física y los fenómenos naturales. (shrink)

"La poétique de Celan- a profondément incisé la réflexion de Derrida, lui devenant indispensable pour repenser les questions de la date, de la crypte et du secret. De Schibboleth à Béliers et à son dernier séminaire, La bête et le souverain, Derrida s'est aussi intéressé au poème celanien comme lieu d'une souveraine solitude, d'une souveraineté autre, peut-être, quand il parle de lui-même. Cet essai tente d'analyser la portée du deuil et de la dette contractée par le philosophe à l'endroit du (...) poète. De la rencontre entre Celan et Derrida, nulle archive ne saura témoigner. Le verbe "témoigner" évoque une sorte de mot de passe secret entre eux : "Niemand/ zeugt für den/ Zeugen" et "Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dicte tragen". Ces deux vers, Jacques Derrida incitait ses lecteurs à les apprendre par coeur pour deux raisons : d'abord, pour méditer sans fin le rapport à la langue, à l'idiome plutôt, de Celan, creusant, enibuissant, retournant sa langue dans la langue allemande ; ensuite, pour mesurer relever, dit Derrida la nécessaire et impossible épreuve de la traduction, cette question qui est non seulement l'un des enjeux les plus importants de la "déconstruction" mais aussi le foyer d'une éthique de la lecture."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This paper has been translated from the French by Cosmin Toma. It focuses on Jacques Derrida's very last lecture, given in Rio de Janeiro, on the 16thof August 2004, which Derrida drew from his ‘Le parjure et le pardon’ (‘Perjury and Forgiveness’) seminar held at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), in Paris, from 1997 to 1999. In reference to this final lecture in which Derrida deals with ‘forgiveness,’ ‘truth’, ‘reconciliation’, ‘testimony’ and ‘genre’, the paper also takes (...) up the question of justice as well as of what he calls the ‘worst violence’ via testimonial writings by Sarah Kofman and Antjie Krog so as to rethink forgiveness. (shrink)