Hardt and Negri’s Empire series has inspired twenty years of debate and experimentation across the social sciences and humanities in fields as divergent as international re...

This essay explores aesthetics, affect, and educational politics through the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière. It contextualizes and contrasts the theoretical valences of their ethical and democratic projects through their shared critique of Kant. It then puts Rancière's notion of dissensus to work by exploring it in relation to a social movement and hunger strike organized for educational justice in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood. This serves as a context for understanding how educational provisions are linked to the aesthetic (...) distribution of perception within the neoliberal city. It also serves as a powerful example of how these orders of perception are resisted and subverted at the local level by aesthetic and affective means. Through the Little Village hunger strike the essay argues that while Rancière allows us to recognize the aesthetic dimensions of the political, he falls short in addressing tactical and/or affective considerations. The essay concludes by seeking to extend the critical efficacy of Rancière's dissensus through a rendering of tactical affect within Deleuzian metaphysics. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging conversation, Michael Hardt reflects on recent transformations within Empire. Several unique themes emerge concerning power and pedagogy as they intersect with subjectivity and global crisis. Drawing on the common in conjunction with the tradition of love in education uncovers a different path that attends to today’s real political, ecological, and social needs. Finally, a focus on collectivity points to a possible strategy—collective intellectuality—for educators to revise traditional notions of leadership to encourage more ethical, democratic, and sustainable futures. (...) Yet, what this looks like in practice remains for us to imagine. (shrink)

Michel Foucault was one of the 20th century’s great practitioners of study. Time in the archives and library, teaching, reading, thinking, and writing were all integrated aspects of his tireless la...

The medieval computus was intended primarily for literate and numerate ecclesiastical users; reading the Latin computus required a good knowledge of technical Latin, while understanding its calculations presupposed some formal education in arithmetic and astronomy. By the mid-thirteenth century, users would have included a small group of literate and numerate laymen; by the mid-fifteenth century, users would have included the less educated and even semiliterate, as a consequence of a more extensive range of computus material made available for the purpose (...) in the vernacular. (shrink)

In this volume, critical scholars and educational activists explore the intricate dynamics between the enclosure of global commons and radical visions of a common social future that breaks through the logics of privatization, ecological degradation, and dehumanizing social hierarchies in education. In its institutional and informal configurations alike, education has been identified as perhaps the key stake in this struggle. Insisting on the urgency of an education that breaks free of the bonds of enclosure, the essays included in this volume (...) weave together bright threads of radical thought into a vivid tapestry illustrating a critical framework for enacting a global educational commons. (shrink)

The concept of biopolitics was first outlined by Michel Foucault (2003, 2007, 2009) in his lectures at the Collège de France in the late 1970s in order to name and analyze emergent logics of power...

For a century at least, parties have been central to the study of politics. Yet their typical conceptual reduction to a network of power-seeking elites has left many to wonder why parties were ever thought crucial to democracy. This book seeks to retrieve a richer conception of partisanship, drawing on modern political thought and extending it in the light of contemporary democratic theory and practice. Looking beyond the party as organization, the book develops an original account of what it is (...) to be a partisan. It examines the ideas, orientations, obligations, and practices constitutive of partisanship properly understood, and how these intersect with the core features of democratic life. Such an account serves to underline in distinctive fashion why democracy needs its partisans, and puts in relief some of the key trends of contemporary politics. (shrink)

In this paper an approach to the exhaustive interpretation of answers is developed. It builds on a proposal brought forward by Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984). We will use the close connection between their approach and McCarthy's (1980, 1986) predicate circumscription and describe exhaustive interpretation as an instance of interpretation in minimal models, well-known from work on counterfactuals (see for instance Lewis (1973)). It is shown that by combining this approach with independent developments in semantics/pragmatics one can overcome certain limitations of (...) Groenenedijk and Stokhof's (1984) proposal. In the last part of the paper we will provide a Gricean motivation for exhaustive interpretation building on work of Schulz (to appear) and van Rooij and Schulz (2004). (shrink)

Contemporary accounts of logic and language cannot give proper treatments of plural constructions of natural languages. They assume that plural constructions are redundant devices used to abbreviate singular constructions. This paper and its sequel, "The logic and meaning of plurals, II", aim to develop an account of logic and language that acknowledges limitations of singular constructions and recognizes plural constructions as their peers. To do so, the papers present natural accounts of the logic and meaning of plural constructions (...) that result from the view that plural constructions are, by and large, devices for talking about many things (as such). The account of logic presented in the papers surpasses contemporary Fregean accounts in its scope. This extension of the scope of logic results from extending the range of languages that logic can directly relate to. Underlying the view of language that makes room for this is a perspective on reality that locates in the world what plural constructions can relate to. The papers suggest that reflections on plural constructions point to a broader framework for understanding logic, language, and reality that can replace the contemporary Fregean framework as this has replaced its Aristotelian ancestor. (shrink)

This book presents the case for belief in both creation and evolution at the same time as rejecting creationism. Issues of meaning supply the context of inquiry; the book defends the meaningfulness of language about God, and also relates belief in both creation and evolution to the meaning of life. Meaning, it claims, can be found in consciously adopting the role of steward of the planetary biosphere, and thus of the fruits of creation. Distinctive features include a (...) sustained case for a realist understanding of language about God; a contemporary defence of some of the arguments for belief in God and in creation; a sifting of different versions of Darwinism and their implications for religious belief; a Darwinian account of the relation of predation and other apparent evils to creation; a new presentation of the argument, from the world's value to the purposiveness of evolution; and discussions of whether or not meaning itself evolves, and of religious and secular bases for belief in stewardship. (shrink)

It has often been thought, and has recently been argued, that one of the most profound impacts of Darwin's theory of evolution is the threat that it poses to the very possibility of living a meaningful, and therefore worthwhile, life. Three attempts to ground the possibility of a meaningful life are considered. The first two are compatible with an exclusively Darwinian worldview. One is based on the belief that Darwinian evolution is, in some sense, progressive; the other is based on (...) the belief that the natural world is a thing of value and hence, that our lives are lived in the presence of value. The third is based on a belief in providence, and holds that we must transcend the exclusively Darwinian worldview if we are to find meaning. All three are, for different reasons, rejected. The conclusion reached is that, contrary to what has often been thought and recently argued, the impact of Darwin's theory is precisely to liberate us to lead the most meaningful of lives. (shrink)