Drawing on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, James Hatley uses the prose of Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski, as well as the poetry of Paul Celan, to question why witnessing the Shoah is so pressing a responsibility for anyone living in its aftermath. He argues that the witnessing of irreparable loss leaves one in an irresoluble quandary but that the attentiveness of that witness resists the destructive legacy of annihilation. "In this new and sensitive synthesis of scrupulous thinking (...) about the Holocaust (beginning with scruples about the term Holocaust itself), James Hatley approaches all the major questions surrounding our overwhelming inadequacy in the aftermath of the irreparable. If there is anything unique (in a non-trivial sense) about the Holocaust, surely it is the imperious moral urgency that compels those who contemplate it to revise their view of what it means to be human, and to bear witness to such an event. (shrink)

In his philosophical journal The Inward Morning, Henry Bugbee appeals to the Daodejing to derive principles, particularly that of ziran, of “self-soing,” by which one is guided in thinking heedfully. In this way, one is called reflexively into responsibility for and by things in what Bugbee terms their “density” and “omnirelevance.” Through Bugbee’s unique notion of wilderness as “emergent togetherness,” the periodicity and fluency cultivated in ecological contemplation refines the practice of natural history, such that it is attuned to the (...) manner in which one is called to be at home and so ecologically responsive among the ten-thousand things. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty advances a notion of witness in The Visible and the Invisible, which could be termed “gestate.” Gestate witness involves an acknowledgement through one's own body of how another living entity is born into its own body. This notion of witness is helpful in answering Anthony Weston's challenge that a sufficiently positive notion of environmentalism and so of environmental responsibility be developed, one that takes seriously how we come into contact with a more-than-human animate world. The work of biologist Tarn (...) Ream with Trillium ovatum serves as a case study in the aesthetic, ethical and ontological significance of gestate witness. (shrink)

The Cove, a recent documentary on the harvesting and slaughter of dolphins in Taiji Japan, envisions this practice as a mode of blasphemy. While the reintroduction of a notion of blasphemy into the search for inter-species justice can illuminate the intensity of the evil one witnesses, one must be wary of this notion’s ethical, political and social implications. In place of a politics of outrage that is deployed by the film, an argument is made for a politics of expiation. In (...) a politics of expiation one begins one’s conversation with the alleged wrongdoer/blasphemer in penitential rather than accusatory witness. (shrink)

Beginning in story and memoir, an appeal is made for the practice of “paranoiesis,” a mode of knowing appropriate to dwelling in the company of other living kinds. Paranoiesis is particularly called for in responding to the twin legacies of ecocide and genocide at work in the extirpation of Buffalo across the high plains. Philosophical responses to this plight are called upon to cultivate “rough knowledge,” a mode of hearing the other’s speaking—both human and more-than-human—that eschews dialectical opposition and negative (...) critique for the sake of dialogical fluency and torsion. (shrink)

How might human beings be called to exercise virtue, which is to say, modes of acknowledgement, humility, and discernment, in regard to the impending (no matter how distant chronologically) extinction of the human species? It is argued that the inevitable extinction of the human species be affirmed as a good, in spite of how daunting and uncanny this act might be. This affirmation is called for as humans struggle to find an ethical response appropriate to their creaturely existence, as well (...) as to their devastating complicity in a historical and geological moment of mass species extinction. (shrink)

Employing the rabbinical practice of midrashic reading in order to unfold a passage from The Song of Songs, the manner in which a European/colonial affirmation of the seasons, particularly the season of spring, might become a mode of injustice in a non-temperate climate is explored. The wilding of seasons imposed by colonial usurpation of country finds a particular case study in the invasion of Arrente lands in Australia by buffel grass even as the effects of climate change are being felt. (...) In conclusion, an argument is made for recasting the practice of midrashic reading in order to render the seasons as they are found in TheSong of Songs vulnerable to unanticipated intonations of the seasons as they emerge in Arrente country. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Textualities: Between Hermeneutics and DeconstructionJames HatleyTextualities: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, by Hugh J. Silverman; 269 pp. New York: Routledge, 1994, $16.95 paper.Especially indebted to the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Derrida, Silverman’s Textualities elaborates a practice of reading drawing on hermeneutics, semiology, and deconstruction. In “juxtaposing” hermeneutic and deconstructive approaches to reading, Silverman shows how these two modes of thought both interrogate and supplement one another. Silverman’s (...) approach to this daunting task revolves around his notion of “textuality.”Textuality is not easy to define. Silverman himself speaks of it as being a “meaning-structure” opened up in a text but not necessarily contiguous with it. “The text,” Silverman argues, “is what is read, but its textuality or textualities is how it is read” (p. 81). For example, insofar as one reads any text as an autobiography, one has become engaged in autobiographical textuality. The fact that one might read an autobiographical text, such as Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, as a philosophical text as well suggests that a given text might be implicated in any number of textualities. For this reason, one cannot simply assign the text to a single genre as if this assignment defined the limits of the text’s meaning.Textualities emerge as the text a reader confronts elicits in the reader a certain competency to read. This competency, Silverman argues, originates neither in the self of the reader, nor in the reader’s world, nor in the codes or metalanguages constituting the semiological axes of the text. In this assertion, Silverman exceeds the hermeneutical practice of Ricoeur and Gadamer, both [End Page 262] of whom were anxious in some manner to ground the meaning of a text in its writer or “first” reader. According to Silverman, the competency to read a text only emerges insofar as the reader “gives expression to the text, which itself asserts the interpretation” (p. 79). The reader, inextricably caught up in a “middle voice,” both reads and is read by the text. Only in this “between” where neither hermeneutics nor semiology takes precedence, where neither world nor code makes a claim for the origin of the text’s meaning, can a competency to read occur.While Silverman’s language runs very abstract in the earlier, more theoretical section of his book, later sections fill out the notion of textuality by engaging in readings of a series of texts grouped around three selected textualities: autobiographical, visible/scriptive, and institutional. The texts chosen range from Thoreau’s Walden to Cezanne’s paintings, from Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques to Blanchot’s essay, “Le ‘discours philosophique.’” In his treatment of each text, Silverman shows how a specific textuality is configured in terms of a series of “indecidables.” For instance, in Thoreau’s Walden, both fiction and nonfiction are at play in the text’s autobiographical textuality. Lying between fiction and nonfiction, Walden can be read juxtaposed against a series of other texts, such as Rousseau’s Confessions, or Montaigne’s Essays, in which the same “indecidability” is at play, although with a difference.Besides giving an account of textuality, Silverman’s book also functions as “a presentation and evaluation of continental philosophy from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to Foucault and Derrida” (p. 1). The first section engages in an interrogation of the phenomenological tradition, particularly insofar as it involves a theory of reading or interpreting texts. Silverman argues that descriptive phenomenology, the sort that has been appropriated by literary theorists such as Hirsch and Ingarden, cannot fully respond to the “richness, multiplicity, and even ambiguity of the literary object” (p. 14). Silverman is only interested in phenomenology insofar as it becomes an interpretive rather than descriptive practice. Thus, he emphasizes the thought of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty at the expense of Husserl.Textualities is a complex and ambitious work. While it too easily dismisses Husserlian phenomenology and at times seems too schematic, it offers a comprehensive and original reading of continental philosophy and its praxes of reading.James HatleySalisbury State UniversityCopyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

"Applies Emmanuel Levinas's thought in approaching environmental philosophy from both humanistic and nonanthropocentric points of view, arguing that themes at the heart of his work--the significance of the ethical, responsibility, alterity, the vulnerability of the body, bearing witness, and politics--are important for thinking about many of our most pressing contemporary environmental questions" --Provided by publisher.

The study of landscape and place has become an increasingly fertile realm of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. In this new book of essays, selected from presentations at the first annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Geography, scholars investigate the experiences and meanings that inscribe urban and suburban landscapes. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi bring philosophy and geography into a dialogue with a host of other disciplines to explore a fundamental dialectic: while our collective and personal (...) activity modifies the landscape, in turn, the landscape modifies human identities, and social and environmental relations. Whether proposing a peripatetic politics, conducting a sociological analysis of building security systems, or critically examining the formation of New York City's municipal parks, each essay sheds distinctive light on this fascinating and engaging aspect of contemporary environmental studies. (shrink)

Written in a jargon-free way, Body Matters provides a clear and accessible phenomenological critique of core assumptions in mainstream biomedicine and explores ways in which health and illness are experienced and interpreted differently in various socio-historical situations. By drawing on the disciplines of literature, cultural anthropology, sociology, medical history, and philosophy, the authors attempt to dismantle common presuppositions we have about human afflictions and examine how the methods of phenomenology open up new ways to interpret the body and to re-envision (...) therapy. (shrink)

The phenomenological movement begins in the Prolegomena to Husserl’s Logical Investigations as a philosophy of logic. Despite this, remarkably little attention has been paid to Husserl’s arguments in the Prolegomena in the contemporary philosophy of logic. In particular, the literature spawned by Gilbert Harman’s work on the normative status of logic is almost silent on Husserl’s contribution to this topic. I begin by raising a worry for Husserl’s conception of ‘pure logic’ similar to Harman’s challenge to explain the connection between (...) logic and reasoning. If logic is the study of the forms of all possible theories, it will include the study of many logical consequence relations; by what criteria, then, should we select one consequence relation as correct? I consider how Husserl might respond to this worry by looking to his late account of the ‘genealogy of logic’ in connection with Gurwitsch’s claim that ‘[i]t is to prepredicative perceptual experience … that one must return for a radical clarification and for the definitive justification of logic’. Drawing also on Sartre and Heidegger, I consider how prepredicative experience might constrain or guide our selection of a logical consequence relation and our understanding of connectives like implication and negation. (shrink)

Ethics appears early in the life of a culture. It is not the creation of philosophers. Many philosophers today think that their job is to take the ethics of their society in hand, analyse it into parts, purge the bad ideas, and organize the good into a systematic moral theory. The philosophers' ethics that results is likely to be very different from the culture's raw ethics and, they think, being better, should replace it. But few of us, even among philosophers, (...) settle real-life moral questions by consulting the Categorical Imperative or the Principle of Utility, largely because, if we do, we often do not trust the outcome or cannot even reliably enough decide what it is. By contrast, James Griffin explores the question what philosophers can reasonably expect to contribute to normative ethics or to the ethics of a culture. Griffin argues that moral philosophers must tailor their work to what ordinary humans' motivational capabilities, and he offers a new account of moral deliberation. (shrink)

This provocation critiques the notion of long-term thinking and the claims of its proponents that it will help address failures in dominant conceptions of time, particularly in regard to environmental crises. Drawing on analyses of the Clock of the Long Now and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, the article suggests that we be more wary of the concept’s use in what we might call chronowashing. Like the more familiar greenwashing, where environmental issues are hidden by claims to (...) be addressing the problem, the article explores how these examples of long-term thinking distract from extractivism, racism, and environmental injustice, making it harder to address the complexities involved. In particular, the article discusses examples where long-term thinking provides a veneer of environmental concern that actually disconnects from the work of building more equitable forms of relation. As a contrast, the article’s author asks: What is lost when we diagnose a problem as arising due to short-term thinking and propose long-term thinking as the solution? Against chronowashed environmental time, the author argues for more complex approaches that explicitly take into account the temporalities of inequality, political organization, ethical responsibilities and much else. The article engages with approaches to time that foreground the work needed to create time and move ethically within it, including Charles W. Mills’s white time and Kyle Powys Whyte’s kinship time. The author suggests that a stronger emphasis on the temporality of community, solidarity, and coalition—versus what James Hatley and Deborah Bird Rose have described as temporal narcissism—can better foreground the kinds of work that needs to be done, particularly by those with privilege. (shrink)

This generous omnium-gatherum brings together all the writings William James published that have not appeared in previous volumes of this definitive edition of ...

Does traditional Christianity involve paradoxical doctrines, that is, doctrines that present the appearance (at least) of logical inconsistency? If so, what is the nature of these paradoxes and why do they arise? What is the relationship between "paradox" and "mystery" in theological theorizing? And what are the implications for the rationality, or otherwise, of orthodox Christian beliefs? In Paradox in Christian Theology, James Anderson argues that the doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation, as derived from Scripture and formulated (...) in the ecumenical creeds, are indeed paradoxical. But this conclusion, he contends, need not imply that Christians who believe these doctrines are irrational in doing so. In support of this claim, Anderson develops and defends a model of understanding paradoxical Christian doctrines according to which the presence of such doctrines is unsurprising and adherence to paradoxical doctrines cannot be considered as a serious intellectual obstacle to belief in Christianity. The case presented in this book has significant implications for the practice of systematic theology, biblical exegesis, and Christian apologetics. (shrink)

This intriguing volume provides a thorough examination of the historical roots of global climate change as a field of inquiry, from the Enlightenment to the late twentieth century. Based on primary and archival sources, the book is filled with interesting perspectives on what people have understood, experienced, and feared about the climate and its changes in the past. Chapters explore climate and culture in Enlightenment thought; climate debates in early America; the development of international networks of observation; the scientific transformation (...) of climate discourse; and early contributions to understanding terrestrial temperature changes, infrared radiation, and the carbon dioxide theory of climate. But perhaps most important, this book shows what a study of the past has to offer the interdisciplinary investigation of current environmental problems. (shrink)

That art historians have felt it necessary to emulate this effort to express personal input can be explained by our need to gain credibility in that aspect of our work that is indistinguishable in method from other historical research: the reconstruction, through documents and artifacts, of past events, conditions, and attitudes. Most of us simply ignore the ambivalence of our position; I cannot recall having heard or read discussions of it, but it is bound to creep out from under the (...) rug. If a student asks me why I think Rembrandt and Picasso are good artists—which most students are too well trained to do—and if I answer that judgments of value are not discussed by historians, I am within my rights, like a witness at a congressional hearing claiming the protection of the Fifth Amendment. But I ought to be found in contempt of the classroom. And if I try to answer seriously, I ought not begin by saying that I chose Rembrandt because he has been acknowledged by generations to have been a great artist but rather because I find more to think, feel, and speak about in his works than in those of, for example, Nicolaes Maes, and because I believe that the student stands to gain more by looking at them. I want the student to have the most rewarding experiences, and, as a result, perhaps to learn to make value discriminations of his own—even ones different from mine and from the so-called consensus of history—and ultimately to explain the grounds on which he makes them. This means having to know and to explain what I think is "rewarding." James S. Ackerman, professor of fine arts at Harvard University, is the author of, among other works, The Architecture of Michelangelo, Art and Archaeology, The Cortile del Belvedere, and Palladio. He is currently writing on Renaissance art, science, and naturalism and making a film on Andrea Palladio and his influence in America. "Transactions in Architectural Design," his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Winter 1974 issue. (shrink)

Kuhn closed the Introduction to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions with what was clearly intended as a rhetorical question: How could history of science fail to be a source of phenomena to which theories about knowledge may legitimately be asked to apply? (Kuhn 1970, 9) This paper argues that there is a more fruitful way of conceiving the relationship between a historical and philosophical study of science, which is dubbed the 'phylogenetic' approach. I sketch an example of this approach, and (...) take a first pass at an abstract characterization of the method. (shrink)

The objectivity of Bayesian induction relies on the ability of evidence to produce a convergence to agreement among agents who initially disagree about the plausibilities of hypotheses. I will describe three sorts of Bayesian convergence. The first reduces the objectivity of inductions about simple "occurrent events" to the objectivity of posterior probabilities for theoretical hypotheses. The second reveals that evidence will generally induce converge to agreement among agents on the posterior probabilities of theories only if the convergence is 0 or (...) 1. The third establishes conditions under which evidence will very probably compel posterior probabilities of theories to converge to 0 or 1. (shrink)