Kris Sealey received her Ph.D. from the University of Memphis and is now Professor of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University. Her work ranges across a variety of ????ields from existential phenom-enology to the Philosophy of Race, Caribbean philosophy, and de-colonial philosophy. In this interview, conducted over email across several months, we track Sealey’s intellectual journey, focussing on her ????irst book, Moments of Disruption: Levinas, Sartre, and the Question of Transcendence, and her recent Creolizing the Nation, which received (...) the Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Along the way, we touch upon her shift from biology and mathematics to Continental philosophy, the relationship between philosophy and personal biography, the nature and promises of a creolizing ap-proach to philosophical research, and the need for philosophy to remain expansive, diverse, and inclusive. Kris Sealey a obtenu son doctorat de l’Université de Memphis et est maintenant professeure de philosophie à l’Université de Pennsylva-nia State. Son travail couvre une variété de domaines allant de la phénoménologie existentielle à la philosophie de la race, en passant par la philosophie caribéenne et la philosophie décoloniale. Dans cet entretien, mené par courrier électronique sur plusieurs mois, nous suivons le parcours intellectuel de Sealey, en nous concentrant sur son premier livre, Moments of Disruption: Levinas, Sartre, and the Question of Transcendence, et son récent Creolizing The Na-tion, qui a reçu le prix Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista de l’Association philosophique des Caraïbes. Chemin faisant, nous dis-cutons de son passage de la biologie et des mathématiques à la phi-losophie continentale, de la relation entre la philosophie et la bio-graphie personnelle, de la nature et des promesses d’une approche créolisante de la recherche philosophique, et de la nécessité pour la philosophie de rester expansive, diversi????iée, et inclusive. (shrink)

The Greek word eoikos can be translated in various ways. It can be used to describe similarity, plausibility or even suitability. This book explores the philosophical exploitation of its multiple meanings by three philosophers, Xenophanes, Parmenides and Plato. It offers new interpretations of the way that each employs the term to describe the status of their philosophy, tracing the development of this philosophical use of eoikos from the fallibilism of Xenophanes through the deceptive cosmology of Parmenides to Plato's Timaeus. The (...) central premise of the book is that, in reflecting on the eoikos status of their accounts, Xenophanes, Parmenides and Plato are manipulating the contexts and connotations of the term as it has been used by their predecessors. By focusing on this continuity in the development of the philosophical use of eoikos, the book serves to enhance our understanding of the epistemology and methodology of Xenophanes, Parmenides and Plato's Timaeus. (shrink)

Ryan, Jennie A current search of reliable internet sources gives the present number of recognised major world religions as somewhere between twenty two and twenty five. These religions have approximately 6.9 billion adherents. Recent meta-analysis of a range of surveys into non-belief in 'God' has reported that between 7% and 10% of the world's population identifies as non-theistic . Out of the top fifty countries with the largest percentage of self-professed atheists, , close to 80% are developed, democratic, mostly European (...) countries, with high standards of public healthcare and accessible food, water and housing. (shrink)

In Laboratory Epistemologies, Jenny Boulboullé examines the significance of hands-on experiences in contemporary life science laboratories. Addressing the relationship between contemplation and manipulation in epistemology, Boulboullé combines participant observations in molecular genetics labs and microbiological cleanrooms with a long durée study of the history and philosophy of science. She radically rereads Descartes' key epistemological text Meditations on First Philosophy, reframing the philosopher as a hands-on knowledge maker. With this reading, Boulboullé subverts the pervasive modern conception of the disembodied knower (...) and puts the hands-on experimenter at the heart of life sciences research. In so doing, she contributes a theoretical model to understanding how life processes on cellular and molecular levels is manually produced in today's techno-scientific spaces. By reassessing the Cartesian legacy and arguing that epistemology should be grounded in the standpoint of a hands-on practitioner, Boulboullé offers the philosophical and historical groundwork to understand and study contemporary life sciences research as multisensory embodied practices. (shrink)

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Stuart, Jennie Review of: My year without meat, by Richard Cornish, Melbourne University Press 2016, 185 pp.

Introduction -- Time and matter: temporality, embodied subjectivity and film phenomenology -- Knowing and nothing: Chris Marker, subjective temporalities and vocalic bodies in the future tense -- Agnès Varda's Trinket box: subjective relationality, affect and temporalised space -- Burlesque gestures and bodily attention: phenomenologies of the ephemeral in Chantal Akerman -- Threatened corporealities: thinking with the films of Philippe Grandrieux -- Conclusion: rethinking cinematic subjectivity and beyond.

Giorgio Agamben, a philosopher both celebrated and reviled, is among the prominent voices in contemporary Italian thought today. His work, which touches upon fields as diverse as aesthetics and biopolitics, is often understood within a framework of Aristotelian potentiality. With this incisive critique, Doussan identifies a different tendency in the philosopher's work, an engagement with the problem of time that is inextricably bound up with language and visuality. Founded in his early writings on metaphysics and continuing to his present occupation (...) with inoperativity, Time, Language and Visuality in Agamben's Philosophy forges an original path through Agamben's extensive commentary on the linguistic and the visual to illuminate the recurrent temporal theme of capture and evasion the cat-and-mouse game that bears the foundational violence of not just representation but concept-formation itself. In the process, Doussan both reveals its limit and establishes a ground for future engagements. (shrink)

This book directs discussions of critical theory to the Caribbean as a key source in the theory and practice of freedom, liberation, and justice. In dialogue with Frankfurt School Critical Theory, while highlighting contributions of Caribbean theorists, the volume offers a wider archive of Marxism as well as of social critique and construction.

Stuart, Jennie Review(s) of: Hands off not an option! The reminiscence museum mirror of a humanistic care philosophy, by Professor Dr Hans Marcel Becker assisted by Inez van den Dobbelsteen- Becker and Topsy Ros. Eburon Academic Publishers, Delft, 2011 272 pp.

Stuart, Jennie Review of: Norman Haire and the study of sex, by Diana Wyndham, Sydney University Press, 2012,.

La question qui anime tout ce travail est de savoir comment la philosophie peut se rendre digne du retour aux choses memes. Chez Merleau-Ponty, ce retour implique, de prime abord, une critique vigoureuse de la pensee representative. La phenomenologie merleau-pontienne nous enseigne que la perception, ou plus precisement l'aisthesis, precede le domaine de la representation. C'est donc a l'aisthesis que la phenomenologie doit remonter. Et c'est la tout l'interet d'une ontologie de la peinture qui se demarque profondement d'une ontologie de (...) la representation. Or, l'etude de Jenny Slatman montre clairement que ce retour aux choses memes ne s'acheve pas simplement dans une philosophie de l'art. En effet, l'auteur developpe la these, a travers une lecture rigoureuse de l'oeuvre de Merleau-Ponty, selon laquelle le retour aux choses memes resulte en une transformation de l'expression philosophique. Comparable a une oeuvre d'art, l'oeuvre ou l'expression de la philosophie ne devrait pas s'enfermer dans des concepts figes. Mais grace a la force de la metaphore, le discours philosophique peut rester a jamais ouvert et en mouvement perpetuel. (shrink)

Contesting Conformity investigates the writings of Tocqueville, Mill, and Nietzsche in order to examine the relationship between non-conformity and modern democracy. Jennie Ikuta argues that non-conformity is an intractable issue for democracy while non-conformity is often important for cultivating a just polity, non-conformity can also undermine democracy. Democracy therefore needs non-conformity, but not in an unconditional way. This book examines this intractable relationship, and offers resources for navigating the relationship in contemporary democracies in ways that promote justice and freedom.

Stuart, Jennie This is not intended to be a discussion about humanist art, its place in the history of art or a detailed coverage of work which might be described as such. I am not qualified to do so. However, I believe, it is a field which could be explored further by Australian Humanists.

Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy is often characterised in terms of competitive individuals debating orally with one another in public arenas. But it also developed over its long history a sense in which philosophers might acknowledge some other particular philosopher or group of philosophers as an authority and offer to that authority explicit intellectual allegiance. This is most obvious in the development after the classical period of the philosophical 'schools' with agreed founders and, most importantly, canonical founding texts. There also (...) developed a tradition of commentary, interpretation, and discussion of texts which itself became a mode of philosophical debate. As time went on, the weight of a growing tradition of reading and appealing to a certain corpus of foundational texts began to shape how later antiquity viewed its philosophical past and also how philosophical debate and inquiry was conducted. In this book leading scholars explore aspects of these important developments. (shrink)

Covering a broad range of approaches within critical theory including Marxism and post-Marxism, the Frankfurt School, hermeneutics, phenomenology, postcolonialism, feminism, queer theory, poststructuralism, pragmatism, scientific realism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis, this book provides students with a comprehensive and accessible introduction to 32 key critical theorists whose work has been influential in the field of international relations.

Guifeng Zongmi 圭峯宗密 (780-841) was a prominent Chinese Buddhist scholar who lived during the Tang Dynasty. He is considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of Chinese Buddhism, particularly the Huayan (Flower Garland) and the Chan school. Within his own philosophical framework, Zongmi introduced the concept of the “True Mind of original enlightenment” (benjue zhenxin本覺真心). This paper presents a fresh interpretation of True Mind theories in Buddhism, drawing inspiration from Zongmi’s teachings. The proposed interpretation holds (...) the following: (1) We are the same mind as the cosmic True Mind; (2) The essence of the True Mind is reflexive awareness devoid of content, whereas its conditioned function is reflexive awareness with content. To support this perspective, I characterize awareness as a dynamic activity within the threefold structure of inner time-consciousness. By applying this framework, I argue that the True Mind can be regarded as unchanging because reflexive awareness without content is without the experience of the flow of time. This proposal aims to reconcile the tension between the concept of the permanent True Mind as our True Self and the Buddhist doctrines of universal emptiness and no-self. (shrink)