Virginia Woolf famously wrote 'as a woman I have no country', suggesting that women had little stake in defending countries where they are considered second-class citizens, and should instead be forces for peace. Yet women have been perpetrators as well as victims of violence in nationalist conflicts. This unique book generates insights into the role of gender in nationalist violence by examining feature films from a range of conflict zones. In The Battle of Algiers, female bombers destroy civilians while (...) men dress in women's clothes to prevent the French army from capturing and torturing them. Prisoner of the Mountains shows a Chechen girl falling in love with her Russian captive as his mother tries to rescue him. Providing historical and political context to these and other films, Matthew Evangelista identifies the key role that economic decline plays in threatening masculine identity and provoking the misogynistic violence that often accompanies nationalist wars. (shrink)

In 2005, Charles Mills published “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology” in Hypatia: a withering critique of much of contemporary political philosophy and ethics. For Mills such work in philosophy failed to attend to the realities of social life and politics, and in remaining silent on actual issues of domination and oppression served an ideological role in supporting the interests of white bourgeois men. Around the time that Charles Mills launched his broadside against ideal theory, trans theorists had been fighting their own (...) battle against the abstraction of theory from the realities of trans lives and oppression. Vivian Namaste (2000) and Jay Prosser (1998) argued that contemporary gender theory failed to justice to the actuality of trans life, retreating instead to understanding trans life through literary archetypes and idealized radical figures. In this chapter I’ll compare Mills’ critique of ideal theory with the transfeminist critique of 1990s gender theory, arguing that they share much in common. Centrally, both critiques share an underlying commitment to theory needing to be grounded in the actuality of oppression and power relations. This common thread, I suggest, must continue to guide transfeminist thought and action: contra Marquis Bey (2022) transfeminist thought and praxis must continue to be about trans lives, about the oppression of trans women, and about ways of actually achieving liberation from our current dire position. (shrink)

Lucan's "Bellum Civile" is a poem filled with ethical contradictions. This paper contends that at least some of these contradictions can be traced to competing views regarding the composition of the community in civil war: the view that one's opponent is a civis and the view that he is a hostis are available simultaneously. Therefore the position that it is morally wrong to attack a member of one's own community competes with the position that it is morally right to use (...) violence against an enemy. The Pompeians tentatively and rather sporadically embrace the former view, while the latter view is more strongly characteristic of the Caesarians; the outcome of the battle of Pharsalus accords with this distribution of ethical stances. Yet these conflicting discourses and opposing views of the community are present not only in the voices of the various characters, but also in the narrative voice itself; such contradictions even within a single voice are inevitable artifacts of civil war as Lucan represents it. By portraying this competition in ethical discourses as he does, Lucan makes his civil war a context in which he can recreate and participate in the ideological struggles of Neronian Rome. (shrink)

The internal resistance to religious forms of power is often at issue in Michel Foucault’s genealogy of Christianity. For this anti-clerical Nietzschean, religion is, like science, always a battle over bodies and souls. In his 1978 Collège de France lectures, he traced the nature and descent of an apparatus of “pastoral power” characterized by confession, direction, obedience, and sacrifice. Governmental rationality, both individualizing and totalizing, is its modern descendant. At different moments, Foucault rather infamously opposed to the pastorate and (...) governmentality such ethico-political spiritualities as the Iranian Revolution and ancient Greek ascesis, but he also took care to identify numerous forms of resistance specific and internal to Christianity itself. His lecture of 1 March 1978 outlined five examples of “insurrections of conduct”: “eschatology, Scripture, mysticism, the community, and ascesis.” I will detail Foucault’s analysis of pastoral counter-conducts, and explore how he sets up the nature and stakes of this tension within Christianity and its secular kin. (shrink)

This review-essay examines two books about the history of the modern humanities: Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon and Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today by Eric Adler. Both studies reconstruct genealogies of discourse and practice by which to understand the “crisis” of the humanities, yet they draw disparate lessons from these reconstructions. The review traces the two monographs’ competing accounts of the historical continuity (...) of humanities practices and the moral dimension of humanistic inquiry. Together, Permanent Crisis and Battle of the Classics describe an antinomy that can be neither resolved nor ignored: the methodological norms of the modern university tend to subvert the humanities’ investment in meaning and value, but without that investment, humanistic study loses the motivations and purposes that define it. (shrink)

Two hundred and fifty years ago in A. D. 1763, the learned and brilliant German philologist PETRUS WESSELING published in Amsterdam his magisterial edition of the Greek text of Herodotos. His text became very influential and was the basis of nearly all later editions, with his emendations and readings adopted without question over the coming decades and eventually centuries. Many of these were the product of his deep knowledge of Greek history. But at 1.64.3, WESSELING emended the reading of all (...) the best manuscripts from Ἀλκμεωνιδέω to Ἀλκμεωνιδέων. This emendation means that those who fled Attica after the Battle of Pallene in 546 B. C. went into exile with the Alkmeonidai, rather than with a specific individual, Alkmeonides. Yet this removal of Alkmeonides from Herodotos’ narrative at this point is neither necessary nor justifiable. (shrink)

Foucault’s lectures from early 1979 on the German Ordo-liberalen are typically taken to comprise his most comprehensive account of why Germany is important for understanding neo-liberal governmentality more broadly. This paper argues, to the contrary, that the 1979 lectures actually obscure a potentially more complete account of German, neo-liberal governmentality Foucault had begun to sketch in 1977. To support this reading and to offer an explanation of why Foucault would have decided to alter his presentation of West German neo-liberalism, the (...) paper undertakes a genealogy of Foucault’s involvement with West German political issues in 1977 and 1978. The core claims that structure the argument are as follows: (1) Key aspects of the “security state” that Foucault began to work out in 1977, must have been at least partly modeled on West German “militant” or “battle-ready” democracy; (2) Yet, in his 1979 lectures, there is no longer any trace of these repressive, extralegal dimensions; (3) This shift was motivated to a significant extent by his 1977 disagreement with Deleuze, Guattari, and others over whether the West German state of the late 1970s could be considered “fascist.” This concern to contest the accusation of fascism is carried forward in his 1979 lectures in a critique of “state phobia.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:After Thermopylae: The Oath of Plataea and the End of the Graeco-Persian Wars by Paul CartledgeMatthew A. SearsPaul Cartledge. After Thermopylae: The Oath of Plataea and the End of the Graeco-Persian Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. xxx + 203 pp. 4 black-and-white maps, 9 black-and-white figs. Cloth, $24.95.This brief book employs the controversial fourth-century Oath of Plataea, inscribed on stone in the Attic deme of Acharnae, as (...) a hook on which to hang a lively and surprisingly thorough treatment of the Persian Wars—and Classical Greek history more generally. Writing for Oxford’s “Emblems of Antiquity” series, Cartledge aims to educate a wide general audience, an audience this book certainly deserves.From the outset, Cartledge wades into the interminable debate concerning which ancient battle, especially those of the Graeco-Persian wars, was most important for subsequent Western history. With Herodotus, many consider the Athenian-dominated Salamis to be the decisive clash, although, as Cartledge rightly reminds the reader, the largely Spartan victory at Plataea was the final triumph of the Greeks over the Persians. Even after Salamis, it was a close-run thing; Plataea ensured that the Persian king would never again send his armies into mainland Greece. Cartledge, though, does not provide a straightforward narrative of the Battle of Plataea nor of the wider struggle between the patriotic Greek poleis and the immense empire of Darius and Xerxes. Rather, he situates the Battle of Plataea and Athens’ commemoration of it on stone within a much broader context of Greek history in order to reveal how the Greeks remembered— and at times vigorously contested—their own past.After a very clear introductory chapter, with a succinct statement of the book’s main themes, chapter 2 provides a close reading of the inscription itself, along with a useful introduction to epigraphy. Cartledge takes the majority opinion concerning the oath’s historicity, namely, that the oath is literally and verbally inauthentic and belongs not to 479, but is rather an emblem of fourth-century Athenian propaganda. Several factors tell against reading the inscription as an accurate reflection of something that was sworn by the Greeks before the battle, including the conspicuous absence of this particular oath from fifth-century literary sources and the peculiar blending of military titles on the stone, such as the Athenian taxiarch with the Spartan enomotarch. In order to provide context for the oath’s inscription and presentation in Acharnae, Cartledge outlines the post-479 Greek world, highlighting Athenian self-presentation in the period after the [End Page 489] King’s Peace and during the Lycurgan era. The stele seems to have been inscribed shortly after Chaeronea, when the need for propaganda extolling the glorious Athenian past had never been greater. The ephebic oath that also appears on the stele, which implies a movement for military reform, reinforces Cartledge’s impression that the politically and militarily precarious situation after 338 was the background for this inscription. The technocrat Lycurgus, who dominated Athens in this period, was a great admirer of Sparta, which might partly explain why the Spartan-led triumph of Plataea, along with the Spartan-inspired institution of the ephebeia, feature prominently on this monument supposedly designed to highlight the past achievements of Athens.Chapter 3 treats the oath as a religious document. Along with some general observations about Greek religious practice, Cartledge focuses on Athena and Ares, the two gods explicitly mentioned in connection with the oath. That Athena should appear is hardly surprising, but Cartledge pauses briefly over the inclusion of Ares, who, despite being a full member of the Olympian pantheon, was rarely invoked directly by the Greeks. In the martial context of this inscription, however, Ares’ presence makes a great deal of sense, especially alongside the warrior goddess Athena. The chapter ends with an interesting discussion of stasis as a consequence of poor religious observance. As Cartledge reminds us, the Athenians, with their sometimes tumultuous political history, most obviously in the wake of the Peloponnesian War, would have been particularly keen to avoid stasis and the religious impiety that leads to it. In our age of skepticism, it... (shrink)

Few have treated the critical literature on neoliberalism as an object of study in its own right. Those that have question the literature’s partisanship, theoretical coherence, and explanatory power, denouncing it as a thinly veiled form of leftist politics. Rather than leave the matter there, I pick up the thread and ask the following: if the critical theorization of neoliberalism is a leftist pursuit, what does it do for the left? How does the critique of neoliberalism affect the left’s self-understanding, (...) coherence, direction, and future? In this article, I argue that the critique of neoliberalism defines today’s political left via the negation of its neoliberal Other, is the ideological–discursive means by which the left articulates its diverse constituencies, and builds theoretical resources necessary for the left to go beyond marriages of convenience and achieve unity. Regarding the latter, the literature augurs a left battling for the subjectivity of popular actors, with solidarity, social freedom, and democracy as both the weapons and the stakes. I conclude the article by reflecting on what often goes missing in the literature – namely, Kapitalkritik and socialism – and the significance of these omissions for the left in light of the arguments above. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Ubiquity of MoodsMatthew R. Broome (bio) and Havi Carel (bio)Keywordsphenomenology, Heidegger, moods, affects, meaning, self, philosophyPhilosophy is often caricatured as one of the most disconnected and anemic academic enterprises. Yet in philosophers’ own accounts of what drew them to the problems they have sought to address they answer, typically, in two broad, passionate, ways: wonder or anxiety. As such, philosophy, and philosophers’ self-understanding of themselves and their enterprise, (...) can serve as a way to address some of the important topics raised by Rosfort and Stanghellini. Even for philosophers, the emotional experience of moods and affects is employed in narrativity, or at least, employed when one is called to give an account of oneself. One could envisage a party conversation along these lines:So why did you become a philosopher?Well, I wanted to go to university but wasn’t interested in science or in the humanities and I’ve always been dreadful at languages.(Laugh) But you must like something about it as you wouldn’t have become a professor?You know how it is... you drift into things. I did well as an undergraduate, my tutor suggested I should do a PhD. Found an excellent supervisor, and got a few papers published and then a teaching post....You must be very committed to the subject.Ummm—I guess so. I thought about joining the civil service after my PhD, but always managed to find work and the hours are much more flexible at universities!Well I think it is amazing: to think and teach about such important things.Do you?There is something slightly baffling here that may simply be part of the inherent irony and self-deprecation of some academics. The philosopher's interlocutor is asking about what philosophy means to the philosopher: why he has given his life to it. As such, she is alluding to a deeper, philosophical question that, after decades of falling out of favor, is returning to the attention of philosophers: namely, how has philosophy given your life meaning? The philosopher responds with possible irony, banality, or superficiality and invokes luck rather than meaning in his narrative. He serves as Nietzsche's feared nihilist. The account offered also seems to fail to meet normative standards, and depending on how the philosopher carries it off, this gap between expectation and reality in the conversation may generate humor.However, the greater likelihood is that the conversation engenders perplexity and disappointment in the interviewer. Rather like the characters in Evelyn Waugh's early novels, the philosopher is buffeted passively by life and luck and eschews agency or meaning. In Waugh's skilled hands this becomes tragic comedy; for the philosopher and his interlocutor we have disconnection and sadness. The crucial reason for this is that we need to use terms referring to moods, affects, meaning, and emotion when we offer an account of ourselves and when we try to understand ourselves. [End Page 267] Otherwise, something is missing and the reason a person gives for their actions either look like poor reasons or not reasons at all (Bortolotti and Broome 2008). Further, agency, rationality, and self-knowledge may themselves be dependent upon reason-giving.In invoking moods and affects in one's narrative the practical understanding (or ‘affordances’) of the world one inhabits are laid open in clear view. Hence Aristotle's account of wonder as the stimulus for philosophy. Aristotle says: ‘For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters’ (1984, 1554). Conversely, given the experience of transcendence, of ambiguity, of finitude rather than wondrous awe, the philosopher may be motivated by anxiety (Kant's awakening from his dogmatic slumbers, Heidegger's battles with ‘Crisis’ and the flight of the gods). Either manner of accounting for one's interest seems to work normatively in the giving of reasons and in generating a narrative, and, moreover, a philosophical narrative.Our fictional dialogue and discussion aims to reinforce the important link between narrative, reason-giving and moods and affects argued for by Rosfort... (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 40–43. Lance Olsen is a professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Utah, Chair of the FC2 Board of directors, and, most importantly, author or editor of over twenty books of and about innovative literature. He is one of the true champions of prose as a viable contemporary art form. He has just published Architectures of Possibility (written with Trevor Dodge), a book that—as Olsen's works often do—exceeds the usual boundaries of its genre as it (...) explores his interests in narrative theory and pedagogy. The book is a kind of “anti-textbook;” a performative polemic against the stale, conservative and monolithic conception of the literary that so often dominates institutional discourse around creative writing. The following interview takes the occasion of AoP's publication as a chance to speak with Olsen about the book itself as well as to engage with larger, unanswerable, questions about the futures and intersections of literature and education. —Ben Segal INTERVIEW: 1) First, I want to start before the beginning, with the title. I’m really fascinated by the concept it conjures. Can you say something about innovative/experimental/(choose your adjective) literature in relation to both ideas around architecture and possibility? Innovative or experimental are tremendously fraught adjectives, needless to say. But for the purposes of my book, they modify a fiction concerned with the questions: What is fiction? What can it do, and how, and why? Now, of course, what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 17 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 27 or 57, and what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 1812 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 2012. A certain existential and historical perspectivism is always at work. But I think it’s fair to say that innovative and experimental usually refer to a narrativity that includes a self-reflective awareness of and engagement with theoretical inquiry, concerns, and obsessions, as well as a sense of being in conversation with fiction across space and time. One can't create challenging writing in a vacuum; it has to challenge in relation to something. So contemporary writers interested in the subject are not only in pursuit of the innovative, but are also always-already writing subsequent to it—writing, that is, in its long wake. Architectures of Possibility conceives of creativity as a possibility space, a locale just outside our comfort zones where we can and should take multiple chances in order to imagine in new ways, explore fresh strategies for finding and cultivating ideas, re-view what it is we’re doing and why, better understand what Samuel Beckett meant when he wrote: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It reminds us that there are other ways of narrating our worlds and ourselves than those we have inherited from the entertainment industry, the government, academia, previous writing, and so on. 2) AoP seems to be directed at several audiences (and purposes) simultaneously. What I mean is that it seems at times a polemic in favor of innovative literature, at other times a creative writing textbook, and still other times a guide to the network of publishers, journals, and programs that make up the current world of non-mainstream literary art in the U.S. In my mind, Architectures is a theorized anti-textbook about writing. Most textbooks on the subject (think of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft , taught in most creative-writing classroom across the country) orchestrate how to construct conventional stories. They instruct from a place of power how to generate familiar stories that are repeated so often that many of us begin to take them as the primary model for narrativity, if not unconsciously as a kind of truth. The result, as Brian Kiteley points out in 3 A.M. Epiphany (one of the only other alternative textbooks about innovative writing around, by the way, and a tremendous repository of exercises), is merely competent texts. Architectures problematizes that gesture by outlining what conventional narrativity looks like, urging writers to think about its ideology of form as well as content, and invites them to imagine writing, not as a set of relatively stable conventions, but, rather, as a possibility space where everything can and should be thought, tried, challenged. It thereby rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer—which is to say Architectures poses complications to the act of writing rather than solutions. 3) One of the most notable things about the book is the use of interviews. This is also one of the reasons that I think the book works so well for a variety of audiences—that anyone with even a passing interest in the state and future of literature will have an interest in your conversation with people like Ben Marcus, Samuel Delany, and Lydia Davis. I was hoping you could just talk a little about how you chose these subjects to interview, how you edited the interview material, and which answers you received struck you the most. Experimentalism , like realism , wants to appear in the plural. The idea of gathering more than forty interviews (with the help of my awesome collaborator, Trevor Dodge, himself a fine innovative author) represents an attempt to suggest that: the wide, rich, exciting opportunities inherent in the term. There are interviews with younger writers, elder statesmen in the field, publishers, editors, hypermedia artists, comic book makers, and so on: Joe Wenderoth, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Nick Montfort, Kathy Acker, et al. Trevor and I decided to do flash interviews: short, concentrated Q&As, each focusing on a particular troubling of writing. We only lightly edited the results to match the manuscript’s overall style, and every interview arrived as a surprise housing several unexpected insights. Three brief examples: Michael Mejia, when asked about what he dreads when setting about writing: “Dread is an interesting word here. I associate it less with loathing or aversion, I suppose, than with a kind of productive fear. Do I dread a project’s failure? Sure, who doesn’t? Who wants to waste time on something that comes to nothing, or is unreadable? But then, what do these terms mean, and who or what defines a work as a ‘failure,’ as ‘waste,’ as ‘unreadable’? Should a work actually try to interrogate and exceed these conceptual limitations? My tendency is to write into dread in order to reveal to myself, as much as to any reader that may come after, the varied complacencies that make other, mostly more conventional writings, readable. It’s at the frontier between readability (security) and unreadability (terror) that I want to live creatively.” Carole Maso, when asked what she’d like a sentence to accomplish: “I think a sentence can if allowed carry emotional and intellectual states as they flee, as they come and go, an escaping essence difficult to hold in other ways. In this way I think the sentence can work as a phrase of music does, sounding something large and elusive in us. Alternatively it can provide sometimes a stability, an essence, a moment of being. Unlike music the sentence also of course carries language with all its potential for meaning making and memory traces and association with it as well. I probably love the accretion of sentences most—those patterns, that shimmer, that resonance.” Shelley Jackson, when asked what is innovative about the innovative: “The purpose of the innovative is, I think, to wake us up. We are not quite alive, most of the time; we occupy a sort of cartoon version of our lives, its lines made smooth by repetition. Writing can open the seams in that world, reintroduce us to the real lives that we have forgotten. Maybe all good writing is innovative in some sense, in that it shows or tells or makes you feel something you never felt before—something for which you have no cartoon ready.” 4) You talk a little about N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of Media Specific Analysis and propose the supplemental notion of Medium Specific Generation—basically taking Hayles and applying her thought from the perspective of the writer. I’ve been trying to develop somewhat related theoretical frameworks, so I was really excited to come upon this section of the book. I’m wondering if you can talk a little more about this idea and, in general, about the potentials that you see as being opened up by writers engaging with and exploiting different media as literary platforms? “Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print,” Hayles urges in her (at least for me) transformative 2004 essay, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep,” “literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters.” She goes on to argue critics should learn to become more attuned to the materiality of the medium under investigation—which is to say a story isn’t a story isn’t a story. Rather, the “same” story remediated through film is intrinsically different from that story remediated through conventionally printed books is intrinsically different from that story remediated through hypermedia. “Materiality,” Hayles goes on, “is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset.” My point in Architectures is simply to emphasize Media Specific Generation: the idea that when writing you should be cognizant, not only of the thematics of the text you are working on, and, as it were, the internal components of its narrativity (character, language, plot, etc.), but also of the material embodiment those components take, and, perhaps more important, the material embodiment those components can take. The idea that the way texts matter matters isn’t something usually addressed in any significant way in creative-writing classrooms and textbooks. It may almost go without saying such experimentation with typography, layout, and white space has a long tradition—certainly one that tracks back at least as far as Guillaume Apollinaire’s early twentieth-century Calligrammes , Laurence Sterne’s textually ribald eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy , although one could arguably plot a hypothetical trajectory that reaches to ancient Greek romances like Achilles Tatius’ second-century Leucippe and Clitophon . Experiments into atomic materiality and digital immateriality bracket the definition of “book” at the same time they highlight Michael Martone’s prediction of its present future as increasingly viral, collaborative, and ephemeral. Or, as Matthew Battles points out: the future of the “book” has already arrived, and it is “ethereal and networked” rather than “an immutable brick.”While conventional writing and reading practices are conceptualized as private, individual, relatively fixed experiences, many of the new forms indicate that writing and reading—from production through dissemination—are rapidly becoming public, collective, incrementally unfixed experiences. That strikes me as an astonishing set of opportunities for a writer to investigate. 5) Another concept you elaborate in AoP is that of limit texts, basically texts that, once you read them, change what you imagine as the shape/horizon/potential of literature. You provide a fantastic reading list of limit texts at the end of AoP. I was hoping you could talk about a few of them in terms of how they specifically operate as limit texts for you—how they expand your understanding of what literature could be or do. Karl Jaspers coined the word Grenzsituationen (border/limit situations) to describe existential moments accompanied by anxiety in which the human mind is forced to confront the restrictions of its existing forms—moments that make us abandon, fleetingly, the securities of our limitedness and enter new realms of self-consciousness. Death, for example. Limit texts are a variety of disturbance that carries various elements of narrativity to their brink so the reader can never quite imagine them in the same terms again. Once you’ve taken one down from the shelf, you’ll never be able to put it back up again. They won’t leave you alone. They will continue to work on your imagination long after you’ve read them. Simply by being in the world, they ask us to embrace difficulty, freedom, radical skepticism. One of the most important for me is Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable . Instead of establishing conventional setting and building traditional character, from its first words it unsettles both: “Where now? Who now? When now?” That first trio of question marks broadcasts the thematics of the writing (“novel” may be too strong a word) that will follow: it is all about a voice (or, perhaps, voices, about the grammatical mistake of the first-person pronoun), a consciousness (maybe, again, too strong a word), often genderless, removed from place and chronology and socioeconomic reality, hovering in a state of perpetual aporia. All it knows is what it doesn’t know, and its not-knowing is blackly, sardonically comic. The Unnamable is the embodiment of an unreliable narrator—a subject position that can’t trust itself, let alone be trusted by a reader. It contradicts, takes back, digresses, undoes what it just did, forgets, lies, hallucinates gloriously. The language is abstract, disembodied, devoid of sensory data, grayish rather than painterly in texture. Without knowing this passage is from a novel, a reader might well conclude s/he were reading a patch of (anti-)Cartesian philosophy. It might be helpful to conceive of what Beckett is doing as post-genre writing, then, or perhaps what Raymond Federman referred to as critifiction—a mode that blurs conventional distinctions between theory and narrative. In completely different register, and much more recently, Anne Carson’s Nox blew me away. It takes the form of an elegy for her older brother, whom she didn’t know well and who died unexpectedly while on the run from the law in Europe. The thing itself arrives in a box that simulates a thick book, as well as the brother’s textual coffin. Open it, and inside you discover, not a codex, but an accordioned series of “pages” that folds out into an arrangement that suggests an ancient scroll (Carson is, perhaps illuminatingly, a professor of classics) made up of shards of her brother’s letters, old photographs, tickets, Carson’s observations, Catullus’ poem 101 (the one addressed to the Roman poet’s dead brother, a doubling of Carson’s situation), and extensive dictionary entries on all the words that compose that poem. The aggregate produces a collage about the impossibilities of aggregates, the impossibilities of understanding fully, of capturing absences in language. At times Nox feels less an example of what most readers consider a book than something closer to a three-dimensional work of assemblage art. It’s a beautiful mechanism for contemplating Media Specific Analysis, for urging us all to be more extreme. 6) Finally, I want to talk a little about pedagogy and institutions. I’m less interested in questions like “Are MFA programs good for writers?” than in questions about how your role as teacher informs your understanding of literature and your writing practice. I’m also very curious about your take on how commercially marginal literary art is largely patronized by large state institutions and at the same time often imagines itself as a critical and even possibly revolutionary practice. How have your own positions within universities and university-affiliated organizations shaped your thinking about them and about innovative literature? I can imagine in many ways it might make you even more critical. And (I know, another ‘and’...) how does AoP (especially given its relation to Rebel Yell , your previous text on creative writing) reflect your personal history and experience as a teacher and member of communities that are largely defined by institutions? In the classroom, I try to generate the pedagogical field I would have liked to have inhabited as a student, but didn’t. Roland Barthes has a lovely line about this: “We need to substitute for the magisterial [classroom] space of the past (the word delivered by the master from the pulpit above with the audience below, the flock, the sheep, the herd)—a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither teacher nor students, would ever be in his final place.” Easier said than done, of course, but an important life project for all who think of themselves as educators. My own classroom, my own writing, and Architectures of Possibility itself attempt to create the sort of possibility space where, as I mentioned at the outset of our interview, everything should be thought, tried, challenged; where everything rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer. I’m not sure I could write what I’m writing now without the conversations I have almost daily with my students, the conversations they have with each other, the conversations we all have with the texts we study. Especially in light of the paradigm shift over the last, say, quarter century from academia as intellectual exploration to academia as McDonaldized trade school, the irony isn’t lost on me concerning the discrepancy between the safe harbor innovative authors find there and the cultural critiques those authors launch through their writing and pedagogical work. In 2001, I quit my full professorship at one institution precisely because of my disappointment over what had happened to the learning environment there. I had no intentions of reentering the field. In 2007, however, the University of Utah approached me, and I found myself in an environment much more hospitable to the sort of work I want to do—teaching experimental narrative theory and practice. It isn’t by any means a simple irony. One could easily argue innovative writing and pedagogy represents the trace of the paradigm Barthes suggests, and that trace is tremendously productive in all kinds of ways. Innovative writing has never and will never change the world in any large, macrocosmic way. But we’ve all had our lives changed, one by one, by an encounter with a difficult, rich, resonant piece of prose, poetry, music, art, you name it. We’ve all had our lives changed at the ahistorical, microcosmic moment by a class we’ve taken, a teacher we’ve studied with, to such an extent that we became, quite literally, different people. I just came across a stunning set of sentences from Derrida on the topic: “What is education? The death of the parents.” That’s what we’re all up to in the innovative, be it in written texts or the texts we call our classrooms or the texts we call our politics: trying to disrupt what both can and can’t be disrupted, trying to undo what both can and can’t be undone, continuously. (shrink)

Neural correlates of consciousness (for brevity NCC) are foundational to the scientific study of consciousness. Chalmers (2000) has provided the most informative and influential definition of NCC, according to which neural correlates are minimally sufficient for consciousness. However, the sense of sufficiency needs further clarification since there are several relevant senses with different entailments. In section one of this article, we give an overview of the desiderata for a good definition of NCC and Chalmers’s definition. The second section analyses the (...) merit of understanding the sufficiency of neural correlates for corresponding consciousness according to three relevant types of sufficiency: logical, metaphysical, and physical. In section three, a theoretical approach to consciousness studies is suggested in light of the sense in which NCC are sufficient for consciousness. Section four addresses a concern some might have about this approach. By the end, it will become apparent that our conception of NCC has important implications for research methodology, neuroethics, and the vitality of the search for NCC. (shrink)

This book explores how ancient philosophers, particularly Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Sextus Empiricus, understood relativity and how their theories of the phenomenon affected, and were affected by, their broader philosophical outlooks.

Conspiracy theories are a popular topic of conversation in everyday life but are often frowned upon in academic discussions. Looking at the recent spate of philosophical interest in conspiracy theories, The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories looks at whether the assumption that belief in conspiracy theories is typically irrational is well founded. -/- The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories is aimed at both the philosopher and the non-philosopher. It is a qualified defence of belief in conspiracy theories: belief in conspiracy theories can (...) be rational in some circumstances. It covers such issues as: who might be considered a qualified conspiracy theorist; how do we analyse claims of disinformation; is our reliance on official theories a good reason to be suspicious of rival conspiracy theories; and what should we do when official theories and conspiracy theories are in conflict? -/- Matthew Dentith is a New Zealand-based philosopher whose research includes analyses of why we have grounds to be suspicious of official theories, the reliability of the transmission of rumours, and the role of trust in the acceptance of theories. (shrink)

Sport Philosophy Now examines the current sports philosophy available and updates it in the “post-Lance Armstrong” age. While many sports philosophers have turned a blind eye to the reality of sport by focusing on ideologically-driven abstract ideals, this book offers an engaging alternative. Examining the field primarily through the competitive world of cycling, Matthew James McNees explores such issues as authenticity in sport, our tendency to create superficial high-minded meaning from the actions of athletes, and American capitalism in sports.

The word 'ought' is one of the core normative terms, but it is also a modal word. In this book Matthew Chrisman develops a careful account of the semantics of 'ought' as a modal operator, and uses this to motivate a novel inferentialist account of why ought-sentences have the meaning that they have. This is a metanormative account that agrees with traditional descriptivist theories in metaethics that specifying the truth-conditions of normative sentences is a central part of the explanation (...) of their meaning. But Chrisman argues that this leaves important metasemantic questions about what it is in virtue of which ought-sentences have the meanings that they have unanswered. His appeal to inferentialism aims to provide a viable anti-descriptivist but also anti-expressivist answer to these questions. (shrink)

In The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized, Owen Flanagan undertakes a project of what he calls ‘cosmopolitan philosophy’, with an aim to develop and interrogate a naturalized Buddhism. A project of naturalization requires a conception of naturalism that can serve as a hermeneutic and philosophical standard against which certain things may be judged naturalistically acceptable or unacceptable. On Flanagan’s account, Buddhism ‘naturalized’ is primarily a Buddhism, “without the mind-numbing and wishful hocus-pocus.” Instead, he sets out to sketch a version of Buddhism (...) (or a new view inspired by it) that is consistent with neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory and scientific materialism, including ‘neurophysicalism’ or the view that “mental events are brain events.” However, classical Buddhist philosophers rejected materialism on philosophical, not merely dogmatic, grounds. In contemporary terms, Buddhist philosophers saw that phenomenal consciousness, intentionality, and mental causation present serious problems for materialism. So, rather than dismissing Buddhist anti-materialist accounts of mind as simply ‘hocus-pocus’, in this chapter takes up the question of whether and how these views might inform a naturalistic Buddhist philosophy. The question, then, is whether a naturalistic Buddhism requires some form of neurophysicalism. It is argued that it does not, by way of examining two distinct versions of naturalistic, but non-physicalist accounts of consciousness reconstructed from the Indian Buddhist tradition. The first, drawing on the work of Dharmakīrti, is a form of trope dualism. The second, drawing on the work of Śāntarakṣita, is a form of pragmatic pluralism that gives a central place to consciousness. And while these two accounts are distinct, and in some important respects incompatible, what they have in common is the idea that consciousness is both non-physical and fully natural. (shrink)

Author note: Matthew Lipman, Professor of Philosophy at Montclair State College and Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, is ...

Spinoza was one of the most influential figures of the Enlightenment, but his often obscure metaphysics makes it difficult to understand the ultimate message of his philosophy. Although he regarded freedom as the fundamental goal of his ethics and politics, his theory of freedom has not received sustained, comprehensive treatment. Spinoza holds that we attain freedom by governing ourselves according to practical principles, which express many of our deepest moral commitments. Matthew J. Kisner focuses on this theory and presents (...) an alternative picture of the ethical project driving Spinoza's philosophical system. His study of the neglected practical philosophy provides an accessible and concrete picture of what it means to live as Spinoza's ethics envisioned. (shrink)

Mind Ecologies: Body, Brain, and World: Book Abstract from Columbian University Press -/- Matthew Crippen and Jay Schulkin -/- Pragmatism, a pluralistic philosophy with kinships to phenomenology, Gestalt psychology and embodied cognitive science, is resurging across disciplines. It has growing relevance to literary studies, the arts, and religious scholarship, along with branches of political theory, not to mention our understanding of science. But philosophies and sciences of mind have lagged behind this pragmatic turn, for the most part retaining a (...) central-nervous-system orientation, which pragmatists rejected as far too narrow. -/- Matthew Crippen, a biologically orientated philosopher of mind, and Jay Schulkin, a pioneer in neuroscience, offer an innovative interdisciplinary theory of mind. They argue that pragmatism in combination with phenomenology is not only able to give an unusually persuasive rendering of how we think, feel, experience, and act in the world but also the account most consistent with evidence from cognitive science and neurobiology. Crippen and Schulkin contend that cognition, emotion, and perception are incomplete without action, and in action they fuse together. Not only are we embodied subjects whose thoughts, emotions, and capacities comprise one integrated system; we are living ecologies inseparable from our surroundings, our cultures, and our world. Ranging from social coordination to the role of gut bacteria and visceral organs in mental activity, and touching upon fields such as robotics, artificial intelligence, and plant cognition, Crippen and Schulkin stress the role of aesthetics, emotions, interests, and moods in the ongoing enactment of experience. Synthesizing philosophy, neurobiology, psychology, and the history of science, Mind Ecologies offers a broad and deep exploration of evidence for the embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended nature of mind. (shrink)

In this book, Matthew P. Meyer analyzes the archer and the bow as a metaphor for the human condition in Lacan, Nietzsche, and Greek literature. The bow is a model of the tension at the heart of the human condition, while the archer is a symbol of control.

The idea that science is or should be value-free, and that values are or should be formed independently of science, has been under fire by philosophers of science for decades. Science and Moral Imagination directly challenges the idea that science and values cannot and should not influence each other. Matthew J. Brown argues that science and values mutually influence and implicate one another, that the influence of values on science is pervasive and must be responsibly managed, and that science (...) can and should have an influence on our values. This interplay, he explains, must be guided by accounts of scientific inquiry and value judgment that are sensitive to the complexities of their interactions. Brown presents scientific inquiry and value judgment as types of problem-solving practices and provides a new framework for thinking about how we might ethically evaluate episodes and decisions in science, while offering guidance for scientific practitioners and institutions about how they can incorporate value judgments into their work. His framework, dubbed "the ideal of moral imagination," emphasizes the role of imagination in value judgment and the positive role that value judgment plays in science. (shrink)

The present study explored psychological predictors of response to a series of three 25 second inhalations of 20% carbon dioxide-enriched air in 60 nonclinical participants. Multiple regression analyses indicated that only anxiety sensitivity physical concerns predicted self-reported fear, whereas both physical anxiety sensitivity concerns and behavioural inhibition sensitivity independently predicted affective ratings of emotional arousal. In contrast, the psychological concerns anxiety sensitivity dimension predicted ratings of emotional displeasure (valence), and both psychological anxiety sensitivity concerns and behavioural inhibition sensitivity independently predicted (...) emotional dyscontrol. No variables significantly predicted heart rate. These data are in accord with current models of emotional reactivity that highlight the role of cognitive variables in the production of anxious and fearful responding to somatic perturbation, and help further clarify the particular predictors of anxiety-related responding to biological challenge. (shrink)

John N. Williams (1994) and Matthew Weiner (2005) invoke predictions in order to undermine the normative relevance of knowledge for assertions; in particular, Weiner argues, predictions are important counterexamples to the Knowledge Account of Assertion (KAA). I argue here that they are not true counterexamples at all, a point that can be agreed upon even by those who reject KAA.

Preservationism states that memory preserves the justification of the beliefs it preserves. More precisely: if S formed a justified belief that p at t1 and retains in memory a belief that p until t2, then S's belief that p is prima facie justified via memory at t2. Preservationism is an unchallenged orthodoxy in the epistemology of memory. Advocates include Sven Bernecker, Tyler Burge, Alvin Goldman, Gilbert Harman, Michael Huemer, Matthew McGrath, and Thomas Senor. I develop three dilemmas for it, (...) in part by drawing on research in cognitive psychology. The dilemmas centre on preservationism's implications for certain cases involving either stored beliefs, forgotten evidence, or recollection failure. Each dilemma shows that preservationism either is false or lacks key support. (shrink)

Matthew Stuart offers a fresh interpretation of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, arguing for the work's profound contribution to metaphysics. He presents new readings of Locke's accounts of personal identity and the primary/secondary quality distinction, and explores Locke's case against materialism and his philosophy of action.

Most people would agree that a small child, or a cognitively impaired adult, is less responsible for their actions, good or bad, than an unimpaired adult. But how do we explain that difference, and how far can anyone be praised or blamed for what they have done? In this fascinating introduction, Matthew Talbert explores some of the key questions shaping current debates about moral responsibility, including: What is free will, and is it required for moral responsibility? Are we responsible (...) for the unforeseen consequences of our actions? Is it fair to blame people for doing what they believe is right? And are psychopaths open to blame? As Talbert argues, we are morally responsible for our actions when they are related to us in particular ways: when our actions express our true selves, for example, or when we exercise certain kinds of control over them. It is because we bear these relationships to our actions that we are open to praise and blame. _Moral Responsibility_ will be an important resource for students and researchers in ethics, moral psychology, and philosophy of agency and of great interest to all those wishing to understand an important aspect of our moral practices. (shrink)

This book explores the historical development of new moral concepts, an activity the author labels "moral articulation." Starting from examples of new moral language developed in the twentieth century, like 'sexual harassment', 'genocide', 'racism', and 'hate speech', this book asks: are we simply naming moral realities that already existed, fully formed and intact, prior to their expression in language? Or do changes in our concepts and language sometimes reshape the objects they bring to light? Moral Articulation outlines an ethical framework (...) that allows us to embrace a version of the latter, transformative view without sacrificing notions of moral truth, objectivity, and knowledge. The result is a variation of moral realism that is sensitive to deep historical changes in morality. The book presents a view of moral value as extending beyond what we are presently able to put into words, urging that new developments in moral language often begin in dissonant experiences of conceptual and discursive breakdown. Resisting a tendency in contemporary ethics to start with situations and dilemmas whose descriptions are already given, this book argues that the struggle to piece together a discursively articulate picture of a situation in the first place is an ethical task in its own right. The result is a thoroughly historical yet objective picture of ethics that emphasizes the role of language in prompting moral change in our life-form. It draws inspiration from Aristotelian, Hegelian, Wittgensteinian, and liberatory praxis-inspired philosophy, as well as from Charles Taylor and Iris Murdoch. (shrink)

In this article I compare and contrast various elements of the work of George Santayana and Arthur Schopenhauer. Though others have acknowledged the relation between these thinkers, they have failed to consider whether and to what extent Santayana fits within the American tradition via this relation. I consider this by first identifying three areas of kinship in their philosophies, each of which I claim distinguish Santayana from the American tradition. Finally, I identify a significant point on which Santayana's philosophy departs (...) from Schopenhauer's, a point which I claim ultimately identifies Santayana with the American tradition. (shrink)

Richard Rorty is one of the most influential and provocative figures in contemporary intellectual life. He argues that many of philosophy's traditional concerns are redundant, and that the goal of inquiry should not be truth but human betterment. In this collection a distinguished team of scholars grapples with the implications of his writings for social and political thought. Avoiding mindless adulation or ritual denunciation, they offer careful but critical investigations of the meaning of Rorty's work for a range of important (...) issues. Topics explored include anti-foundationalism; irony and commitment; justice; liberalism and utopianism; reason and aesthetics; humanism and anti-humanism; the Holocaust; the theory of international relations; social democracy and the pragmatist tradition. Each essay is followed by a reply written for this volume by Rorty. The volume also includes a substantial essay by Rorty on 'Justice as a Larger Loyalty'. This volume is indispensable for any reader interested in Rorty's work, or in contemporary debates in social, political or ethical theory. Contributors: Molly Cochran; Daniel Conway; Matthew Festenstein; Norman Geras; John Horton; David Owen; Richard Rorty; Kate Soper; Simon Thompson. (shrink)

Yuval Steinitz has argued that, since it is logically possible that there are logically necessary beings, it follows that there is at least one logically necessary being. Steinitz switches the Leibnitzean ontological argument's concern from perfect beings to logically necessary beings. My paper has two primary aims. First, I argue that Steinitz's quick treatment is insufficient to establish the validity of his argument. Secondly, I argue that the correct approach to logical necessity must account for those possible situations in which (...) the meanings of some of the terms in our language might have been different; on such an approach, the premise of Steinitz's argument is false. My remarks here are intended to add to the prima facie plausibility of Hume's claim that logic has no existential implications. (shrink)

In the face of the Brexit vote and the election of Trump, there is serious worry about whether the liberal, democratic, and cosmopolitan values thought to underlie progressive immigration policies are in fact widely shared. In this article, I examine these worries and provide suggestions about how those who do favor just progressive immigration policies might best respond to the problems we currently face.

Discussions about the meaning of the word “ought” are pulled in two apparently competing directions. First, in ethical theory this word is used in the paradigmatic statement of ethical principles and conclusions about what some agent is obligated to do. This leads some ethical theorists to claim that the word “ought” describes a real relation, roughly, of being obligated to (realism) or expresses some non-cognitive attitude toward agents acting in certain ways (expressivism). Second, in theoretical linguistics this word is classified (...) as a modal auxiliary verb alongside words like “might,” “may,” “can,” “must,” etc. This leads some theoretical linguists to claim that the word “ought” is a weak necessity modal, which can be modeled with universal quantification over a restricted set of possible worlds. This chapter seeks some resolution of this tension by showing how versions of realism and expressivism can be modified in light of the best semantics of “ought” as a weak necessity modal. In addition, the chapter explains how this semantics might point to a third view—inferentialism—that accounts for the meaning of “ought” not in terms of what relation it describes, nor in terms of what attitude it expresses, but rather in terms of its inferential role. (shrink)

We are happy to announce that Libertarian Papers has been chosen for inclusion in the web archives of the Library of Congress. This means that, once archived, the complete journal will be available indefinitely both to researchers at Library facilities and by special arrangement. Of course, because Libertarian Papers uses an open-access format, the use of ….

I offer an account of truth that combines elements of deflationism and traditional correspondence theories. We need such an intermediary account, I argue, in order to adequately answer two kinds of questions: "Why do we find it obvious that 'p' is true iff p?" and "Why is it contingent that 'p' is true iff p?" If what it is for 'p' to be true is explained by simply saying that p, as the deflationist claims, it is hard to see how (...) it could be contingent that 'p' is true iff p. But if it is claimed instead that what it is for a sentence to be true is for it to correspond to a fact, we still need some explanation of why 'p's correspondence with reality insure that p, and vice versa. What we need, I claim, is to recognize a structure to truth: truth for sentences, utterances, and other non-propositional entities depends on, and is analyzable in terms of, the expression of true propositions. Propositional truth can then be treated as insubstantial, as deflationary, and truth for other entities as substantial, consisting of correspondence to a fact . ;This account of truth, which I call Weak Deflationism, anchors the dissertation. In an introductory chapter, I give a partial defense of realism about propositions and properties, later defending Platonism against attacks by David Lewis. After formulating Weak Deflationism, I examine its implications for such matters as the "absurd comparison" objection, the truthmaker project in ontology, and non-factualist theories in metaethics. In a final chapter, I provide a Kripke-inspired modification of Weak Deflationism aimed to avoid liar-like paradox. Premised on a distinction between propositions that predicatively involve truth, i.e., truth-dependent propositions, and those that do not, truth-independent propositions, I argue that truth for the latter is deflationary and that truth for the former consists in being determined by the totality of truth-independent fact. Falsity is understood as truth of the negation. Liars are then counted neither true nor false, and paradox is averted. (shrink)