The aim of this paper is to consider the vicissitudes of “area studies” from the Second World War to the present focusing eventually on the normative imperative to develop a new paradigm of “planetary thinking.” First an overview of the history of “area studies” will be given from the start in the U.S. during the Second World War in response to the geostrategic imperative for America to know its new geopolitical responsibilities in a world divided by war. This security imperative (...) morphed into the postwar requisite to develop a counterhegemonic strategy against soviet communism in the hot spot parts of Asia, Latin American, and later Africa. The latter military-oriented strategy was added to with research into development and modernization in the third-world through to the boundary displacement of areas studies at the end of the Cold War into the current era of globalization. At this very historical moment of transition a new rationale for area studies emerged in the form of a geoeconomic imperative – both in the U.S. and, with a different gloss, in South Korea in the late 1990s. Second, on the basis of this historical apercu, the argument will be proposed that, given the problem of global warming and the issue‐area of global inequality lurking behind the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals, a pressing contemporary task for philosophy is to make a critical contribution to developing a new planetary perspective for area studies informed by a constitutive philosophical anthropology attendant to the species being of human beings. (shrink)

The essay characterizes an anthropological impasse of political philosophy dividing those in a more liberal tradition from those in a more Hegelian tradition, and then it proceeds to sketch a political philosophy without any human or anthropological content. I rely on Foucault’s notion of parrhesia to activate such a political philosophy, and I rely on the philosophical life of the Cynic to make parrhesia possible. Finally by invoking exercises of ascent and of descent, I suggest that this kind of political (...) philosophy can not only solve the anthropological impasse of political philosophy, but also in practice, it can cool hateful passions and warm cold hearts. (shrink)

It can be demonstrated in a very straightforward way that confirmation and evidence as spelled out by us can vary from one case to the next, that is, a hypothesis may be weakly confirmed and yet the evidence for it can be strong, and conversely, the evidence may be weak and the confirmation strong. At first glance, this seems puzzling; the puzzlement disappears once it is understood that confirmation is of single hypotheses, in which there is an initial degree of (...) belief which is adjusted up or down as data accumulate, whereas evidence always has to do with a comparison of one hypothesis against another with respect to the data and is belief-independent. Confusing them is, we suggest, a plausible source of the so-called “base-rate fallacy” identified by Kahneman and Tversky which leads most of us to make mistaken statistical inferences. It is also in the background, or so we argue in some detail, of the important policy controversies concerning human-induced global warming. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to consider the vicissitudes of “area studies” from the Second World War to the present focusing eventually on the normative imperative to develop a new paradigm of “planetary thinking.” First an overview of the history of “area studies” will be given from the start in the U.S. during the Second World War in response to the geostrategic imperative for America to know its new geopolitical responsibilities in a world divided by war. This security imperativemorphed (...) into the postwar requisite to develop a counterhegemonic strategy against soviet communism in the hot spot parts of Asia, Latin American, and later Africa. The latter military‐oriented strategy was added to with research into development and modernization in the third-world through to the boundary displacement of areas studies at the end of the Cold War into the current era of globalization. At this very historical moment of transition a new rationale for area studies emerged in the form of a geoeconomic imperative – both in the U.S. and, with a different gloss, in South Korea in the late 1990s. Second, on the basis of this historical apercu, the argument will be proposed that, given the problem of global warming and the issue‐area of global inequality lurking behind the UnitedNation’s Millennium Development Goals, a pressing contemporary task for philosophy is to make a critical contribution to developing a new planetary perspective for area studies informed by a constitutive philosophical anthropology attendant to the species being of human beings. (shrink)

In a century dominated by the exacting methods and dramatic successes of science, it is difficult to imagine an informed contemporary religious believer never shaken by the doubt that his or her most sacred ideas are atavisms to a benighted age, vain and empty fantasies. To such a believer, Freud's late monograph, The Future of an Illusion , with its warm, solicitous tone, but relentless scepticism, must seem the patient knell of his or her worst fears. For here Freud uses (...) his dialectical skill and his psychoanalysis to augment motives for self-doubt at least as old as Abraham: Perhaps the most cherished of my beliefs are a kind of madness, a condition I do not recognize because it is so widely shared. Perhaps like the madman bewitched by the tapestry of his delusions, I hold fast to my faith only because I could not endure the threadbare fabric of a life without it. But it is not as though the religionist is utterly without defence against this source of doubt, nor that the familiar defence is without considerable prima facie force against Freud. For when sceptics such as Freud turn their account of the origin of religious faith into a case against the truth of religious claims, the believer can attack this line with an unassailable axiom: No examination of the motives for a belief is relevant to an assessment of its truth. To assume otherwise is to commit the genetic fallacy. The question I want to deal with here is whether the religious believer should rest content with this rejoinder to Freud. (shrink)

In this issue we include contributions from the individuals presiding at the panel All in a Jurnal's Work: A BABEL Wayzgoose, convened at the second Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group. Sadly, the contributions of Daniel Remein, chief rogue at the Organism for Poetic Research as well as editor at Whiskey & Fox , were not able to appear in this version of the proceedings. From the program : 2ND BIENNUAL MEETING OF THE BABEL WORKING GROUP CONFERENCE “CRUISING IN (...) THE RUINS: THE QUESTION OF DISCIPLINARITY IN THE POST/MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY” SEPTEMBER 21ST, 2012: SESSION 13 MCLEOD C.322, CURRY STUDENT CENTER NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY, BOSTON, MA. Traditionally, a wayzgoose was a celebration at the end of a printer’s year, a night off in the late fall before the work began of printing by candlelight. According to the OED, the Master Printer would make for the journeymen “a good Feast, and not only entertains them at his own House, but besides, gives them Money to spend at the Ale-house or Tavern at Night.” Following in this line, continent. proposes in its publication(s) a night out and a good Feast, away from the noxious fumes of the Academy and into a night of revelry which begins, but does not end, at the alehouse or Tavern. continent. proposes that the thinking of the Academy be freed to be thought elsewhere, in the alleys and doorways of the village and cities, encountered not in the strictly defined spaces of the classroom and blackboard (now white) but anticipated and found where thinking occurs. Historically, academic journals have served a different purpose than the Academy itself. Journals (from the Anglo-Fr. jurnal , "a day," from O.Fr. jornel , "day, time; day's work," hence the journalist as writer of the news of the day ) have served as privileged sites for the articulation and concretization of specific modes of knowledge and control (insemination of those ideas has been formalized in the classroom, in seminar). In contrast, the academic journal is post-partum and has been an old-boys club, an insider trading network in which truths are (re)circulated against themselves, forming a Maginot Line against whatever is new, or the distinctly challenging. All in a Jurnal’s Work will discuss (in part) the ramifications of cheap start-up publications that are challenging the traditional ensconced-in-ivory academic journals and their supporting infrastructures. The panel will be seeking a questioning (as a challenging) towards the discipline of knowledge production/fabrication (of truth[s]) and the event of the Academy (and its publications) as it has evolved and continues to (d)evolve. Issues to be discussed will revolve around the power of academic publishing and its origins, hierarchical versus horizontal academic modules (is there a place for the General Assembly in academia?) and the evolving idea of the Multiversity as a site(s) of a (BABELing) multivocality in the wake of the University of Disaster. STAGE NOTES AND/AS/OR TRACK CHANGES: INTRODUCTORY REMARKS AND MAGICAL THINKING ON PRINTING: AN ELECTION AND A PROVOCATION Isaac Linder “Of course most people don’t think of editing/publishing as theatre but as something boring or parasitical (vis-à-vis a ‘source’ text), a textual backwater populated by people with glasses. But I think publishing a book today is theatre, socially networked theatre…. Facebook and Flickr are our era’s administered and generic version of sixties happenings!” — Tan Lin 1 ELECTING A MASCOT: THE BARNACLE GOOSE After pitching the idea for this panel with the editorial help of my continental cohorts I became fascinated with the image of the goose—dead and roasted as it may be—and its relationship to the space of the printing press. For a long while after proposing this gathering I was seriously under the sway of delusions of grandeur, imagining that we might roast a goose (or goosefu) and, preparing a meal as one prepares a text for publication, feast in something approaching a warm and well-nourished revelry. I should note, by way of introduction, that a substantial part of my undergraduate experience involved learning to typeset and work as a devil, as typesetters mischievously call it, in a letterpress studio. This accounts in part for my fascination and helps to explain the fact that, when I began to leaf around in medieval beastiaries in lieu of being able to procure a goose, I was almost immediately struck by a fantastic monster that I hereby elect to be the mascot for our so-called para-academic practice(s) the relatively famed, but no less fabulous for it, barnacle goose. The barnacle goose is a creature that first makes its way into 12th century manuscripts with Giraldus Cambrensis in 1186. Phenomenologically speaking the monster is a tree, a tree which, when approached closer is seen to be birthing geese budding from the buds that hang like ripe fruit from its branches. As the story goes these trees were found over water; the fledgling geese, once wrested from their pods would take off in flight or fall to their watery death, where they would be transformed into driftwood. In retrospect we presume the barnacle goose was posited as a consequence of the fact that geese born in more northern regions, migrating to Ireland and western Europe at large, were never seen to give birth. And I should note that this is far from the only other animal posited to be born from trees at around this time, my other favorite being medieval accounts of Moroccan tree-climbing goats. 2 In particular I’ve thrown up the mascot of the barnacle goose and singled it out from the quires of its beatiaries because its thoroughly hybrid origins lead us to name two very real creatures we can find point to in abundance; discrete materialities of the world cobbled together in textual fancy: on the one hand, the modern day barnacle goose , a common species of goose and, on the other, goose barnacles , a particular type of crustacean with incredible feathery tendrils and—I can't help but mention—one of the largest body mass to penis size ratios of all of the animals in the kingdom. Why is this bit of genital trivia relevant? Because they’re all hermaphroditic and in rare cases have been found to reproduce just with themselves—to inseminate themselves and give birth to their kin. So I think it must be stressed, as a symbol for what we’re really here to talk about, it's not a boy’s club thing so much as a very queer thing and, I contend, para - in every perfect sense of the word... Alongside the natural world, a monstrous imaginary concatenation; Alongside the hulls of so many institutional structures, funding sources and resources, Serresian parasites in all manner of mutualist, symbiotic, or properly parasitic positions; migratory and adrift; The tree, center stage in the 21st century adaptation of Waiting for Godot that is unraveling in ateliers across the world, is a barnacle goose birthing a flurry of miscegenous texts beyond medium and genre. PROVOCATION 1: CHAOSMOSIS “Genre is obsolete.” — Ray Brassier 3 And so, here I was getting carried away in daydreams about this generative and genealogical symbol under which to think all of the diverse projects we are all involved in as architects of the dressed word, (well dressed, bespoke, mansy, butch, careless, or roguishly punk attired as those words may be), when it also dawned on me, mid-flight here from Denver, that we are, even in lieu of being able to roast geese together, very much so literalizing what was never just the metaphor of the wayzgoose—a tradition, as you know, celebrated to mark the crepuscular turn into fall—as we are poised here, tomorrow being the first official day of fall on our calendars in the US marking the seasonal change from at which point it will no longer be possible to print without the aid of candlelight. A beautiful thought, that tipped into magical thinking on account of a little quick math I was able to do to come to the conclusion that we can all be delighted to know that as we proceed into the autumn with our printing projects always ahead of us and still to be set, we will tonight be bathed not only by the artificial candlelight of our screens, but also in part by photons raining down on us at 186,282 miles per second—photons from an aspect of 9 cyg, a stereoscopic binary deep within Cygnus, the swan but not-so-distant-relative of the goose, with a distance of 572 Light years away; photons that are raining down on us, will rain down on us all winter, have been raining down on us all year, and which had their origin in the combustion cores at a center of 9 cyg 572 years ago, in 1440, the year which we point to today as the common year in which, as we all know, Gutenberg is said to have brought the movable type to the western world, inaugurating an era that stretches farther into the past and future than McLuhan could justify; the proliferation of so much ambient text; insurrectionary coups on (and re-crystallizations of) genre—perceived amidst so much ambient light—enveloping this campus, just now. So, with that thought, and perhaps a new mascot, Nico Jenkins... NOTES “ Writing as Metadata Container, An Interview with Tan Lin ,” Chris Alexander, Kristen Gallagher, Danny Snelson, Gordon Tapper, Tan Lin, Jacket 2. January 20, 2012. To explore Lin’s notion of ambient textuality, plagiarism, and parallel, cross­platform publication in the 21st century, also see Lin’s sampled novel, “ The Patio and the Index ,” Triple Canopy 14, October 24, 2011, as well as the Edit event, organized at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, April, 2010 . For a fascinating and fecund exploration of medieval plant­animal hybrids in relation to media ecology, see Whitney Trettien, “ Becoming Plant: Magnifying a Microhistory of Media Circuits in Nehemiah Grew’s Anatomy of Plants (1682) .” postmedieval 3.1 (2012):97. See also the crowd­review version of the essay. “ Genre Is Obsolete .” Compléments de Multitudes . 28 (2007). (shrink)

While interest in Kant's philosophy has increased in recent years, very little of it has focused on his theory of science. This book gives a general account of that theory, of its motives and implications, and of the way it brought forth a new conception of the nature of philosophical thought. To reconstruct Kant's theory of science, the author identifies unifying themes of his philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of physics, both undergirded by his distinctive logical doctrines, and shows how (...) they come together to form a relatively consistent system of ideas. A new analysis of the structure of central arguments in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Prolegomena draws on recent developments in logic and the philosophy of science. Professor Brittan's unified account of the philosophies of mathematics and physics explores the nature of Kant's commitment to Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics as well as providing an integrated reading of the Critique of Pure Reason and the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Contemporary ideas help both to illuminate Kant's position and to show how that position, in turn, illuminates contemporary problems in the philosophy of science. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay is a critical study of Jason Brennan's Against Democracy. We make three main points. First, we argue that Brennan's proposal of a right to competent government only works if one considers the absence of government a viable proposition, something most of his opponents are not prepared to do. Second, we suggest that Brennan's account of competent decision-making is blind to forms of oligarchic power that work against the very ideals of justice and epistemic virtue that competence is (...) meant to safeguard. Third, we muster empirical evidence to argue that, in the real world, democracy is not just about making decisions and selecting policies, in which case Brennan's argument misses its mark. (shrink)

Batterman has recently argued that fundamental theories are typically explanatorily inadequate, in that there exist physical phenomena whose explanation requires that the conceptual apparatus of a fundamental theory be supplemented by that of a less fundamental theory. This paper is an extended critical commentary on that argument: situating its importance, describing its structure, and developing a line of objection to it. The objection is that in the examples Batterman considers, the mathematics of the less fundamental theory is definable in terms (...) of the mathematics of the fundamental theory and that only the latter need be given a physical interpretation---so we can view the desired explanation as drawing only upon resources internal to the more fundamental physical theory. (The paper also includes an appendix surveying some recent results on quantum chaos.). (shrink)

This article is a reflective essay, drawing upon insights on racism and related forms of oppression as expressions of bad faith, on several influential movements in contemporary philosophy of race and racism. The author pays particular attention to theories from the global south addressing contemporary debates ranging from Euromodernity, philosophical anthropology, and the racialization of First Nations or Amerindians to intersectionality theory, discourses on privilege, decolonization, and creolization.

The Reeh-Schlieder theorem asserts the vacuum and certain other states to be spacelike superentangled relative to local fields. This motivates an inquiry into the physical status of various concepts of localization. It is argued that a covariant generalization of Newton-Wigner localization is a physically illuminating concept. When analyzed in terms of nonlocally covariant quantum fields, creating and annihilating quanta in Newton-Wigner localized states, the vacuum is seen to not possess the spacelike superentanglement that the Reeh-Schlieder theorem displays relative to local (...) fields, and to be locally empty as well as globally empty. Newton-Wigner localization is then shown to be physically interpretable in terms of a covariant generalization of the center of energy, the two localizations being identical if the system has no internal angular momentum. Finally, some of the counterintuitive features of Newton-Wigner localization are shown to have close analogues in classical special relativity. (shrink)

This essay investigates the tradition of interwar German-Jewish political theology associated most of all with Leo Strauss and Franz Rosenzweig. It is suggested here that the Straussian notion of an eternal conflict between politics and religions may be derived, in part, from Rosenzweig's image of the depoliticized Jewish community. Furthermore, this "concept of the apolitical" represents something like a modernist reprisal of Stoic ideals, most especially the ancient ideal of ataraxia, or "freedom from disturbance." This apoliticism is distinguished most of (...) all by two interlocking principles; first, that politics is mere disorder if not a return to the state of unredeemed nature; and second, that religious peace must accordingly be found elsewhere than politics. This argument for the near-incommensurability of politics and religion represents the special if not altogether unique contribution of Weimar German-Jewish intellectuals to the enduring tradition of political theology. It is therefore worth posing the following question: Why does Hannah Arendt's political theory appear to bear almost no trace whatsoever of this political-theological tradition? By what logic did Arendt dissent from the political-theological principles that so captivated her German-Jewish contemporaries? And which tradition should command our allegiance today? (shrink)

There is a debate in Bayesian confirmation theory between subjective and non-subjective accounts of evidence. Colin Howson has provided a counterexample to our non-subjective account of evidence: the counterexample refers to a case in which there is strong evidence for a hypothesis, but the hypothesis is highly implausible. In this article, we contend that, by supposing that strong evidence for a hypothesis makes the hypothesis more believable, Howson conflates the distinction between confirmation and evidence. We demonstrate that Howson’s counterexample fails (...) for a different pair of hypotheses. (shrink)

Research in animal behavior begins by identifying what animals are doing. In the course of observation, the observer comes to see animals as performing a particular activity. How does this process work? How cn we be certain that behavior is identified correctly? Wittgenstein offers an approach to these questions. looking at the uses of certainly rather than attempting to find rules that guarantee it. Here two stages in research are distinguished: first, watching animals, and second, reporting the results to other (...) scientists. Certainly about what animals are doing, has different uses at each stage. (shrink)

This text sets the questions facing British universities today in their historical and educational context.

The study draws on life history, literacy studies and ethnographic approaches to exploring social practices as a frame to explore the narratives of two UK adult literacy learners, who provide a description of the value or otherwise of their engagement with a transformative curriculum and pedagogical approach. Whilst one of the learners reveals his frustration at the lack of transformative opportunities in his learning programme, the other offers illustration of how transformative learning can be encouraged and how it can actually (...) transform the life of its beneficiaries. In essence, both case studies highlight some requirements of transformative learning. Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capitals and habitus are applied; the critical elements of these concepts essentially being tools for consciousness raising and increasing the flow of capitals, including linguistic capital, which challenge the notion of spoilt identities based on neoliberal individual accountability which fails to address the structures and hierarchies of power. (shrink)

It is shown that data on the dissociation rate of deuterium obtained in an experiment at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory provides evidence that the Continuous Spontaneous Localization wavefunction collapse model should have mass–proportional coupling to be viable.

This essay argues for a convergence between, on the one side, Foucault’s characterization of the care of the self as a way of overcoming the traps of anthropological sleep, and on the other side, Deleuze’s characterization of initiating becomings as a way of fleeing the traps of organization, a line of flight, becoming becoming. This convergence is defended on the basis of a Bergsonian ontology of becoming, and in particular, Bergson’s opposition to what he calls the retrograde motion of truth. (...) One result of this convergence is that a Wittgensteinian approach to the sense of life floats to the surface. A kind of mysticism. (shrink)

No crucial experiment demonstrates that four hue categories are needed to describe color appearance. Instead, converging lines of evidence suggest that the terms red, yellow, green, and blue are sufficient and precise enough for deriving color discrimination functions and for a useful model constraining relations between color appearance and neuronal responses. Such a model need not be based on linguistic universals. Until something better is available, this holds.

L’historienne Gerda Lerner était remarquable par son éloquence, sa perspicacité et son courage. Toujours prête à défendre l’importance de l’histoire dans sa quête de justice sociale, elle a consacré sa vie à démontrer que les femmes ont une histoire et que le fait de s’en rendre compte avait un impact sur la conscience collective. « Écrire l’histoire en pensant aux femmes », écrivait-elle dans l’un des essais qui composent le recueil intitulé Why History Matters: Life and Thought (1998), « po...