Comments on the view of life shared by existential protagonists in six works by Woolf, Greene, Golding, Faulkner, Ellison, and Malamud.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 462-464 [Access article in PDF] The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism,by Ann Banfield; 452 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, $55.00. We have grown accustomed to reading Woolf philosophically. Lucio Ruotolo, Mark Hussey, Gillian Beer, and Pamela Caughie are just a few notable scholars who have used philosophical texts and themes to shed light on Woolf's novels and (...) life, but Ann Banfield's The Phantom Table marks the beginning of a new approach. Contrary to the poststructuralist readings of the last two decades, Banfield treats Woolf as a "philosophical realist" (p. 294), an interpretation that presupposes that "Truth, although logically constructed, remains nonetheless objective, a discovery, as opposed to a creation, of the mind" (p. 94). To justify this approach, Banfield makes a case for privileging Bertrand Russell's "symbolic logic" (p. 42) as "a key if limited influence on Woolf's thinking about language" (pp. 42-43). Simply appropriating elements of Russell's rigorous epistemology, however, is not enough to determine Woolf's thinking, for as Banfield claims: "Woolf's philosophically inflected aesthetic is not one Russell would have foreseen" (p. 54). Roger Fry's astute reflections on Post-Impressionism aesthetics complement Russell's philosophical approach and thereby provide Woolf with a framework for the "novel's realism [which] must relate two competing realities, the private world and the public persona" (p. 324). Through an extraordinarily insightful analysis of the work of Russell and Fry, Banfield offers an intelligent interdisciplinary interpretation of the rigorous epistemological presuppositions at the base of Woolf's aesthetic.Central to Banfield's project is the conviction that reality is mind-independent (p. 101). On this view, "modern fiction ultimately aims to describe a reality beyond privacy" (p. 298), but to understand how we can access that reality we must carefully distinguish sensations, sense-data, and sensibilia. According to Russell, sensations are the private experiences or awareness of a subject, whereas a sense-datum is "that external object of which in sensation the subject is aware" (p. 70). Sensibilia, the lynchpin of Russell's and Banfield's theory, have the same ontological status as sense-data, though they are not necessarily data to a specific mind. Banfield cleverly articulates the ontological priority of sensibilia by reversing Berkeley's famous dictum: "What brings about" sensibilia's "actualization is the perspective's occupation by a subject and the corresponding interception of sensibilia by sense-organs located in time and space" (pp. 74-75). Sensibilia need not be perceived to exist, which places the perceiving subject at the mercy of sensibilia, rather than making sensibilia ontologically dependent upon the perceiving mind.Given the primacy of sensibilia, the epistemological "goal is now to leave one's perspective and imaginatively project oneself into other perspectives, even the possible ones inhumanly occupied, to experience the world as it would be without the thinker" (p. 213). According to this system, the perceiving [End Page 462] subject and the modernist artist become irrelevant because they can inhibit our experience and/or understanding of sensibilia. Eliminating the subject and effacing the author, therefore, become necessary so that "artistic creativity" (p. 173) is given free flow, which means that for art to achieve its goal of seeing "the world 'as far as possible as it is in itself, and not merely through the distorting medium of personal desire'" (p. 382), the death of the subject is mandatory—though this death of the subject differs considerably from Roland Barthes's, Michel Foucault's, and Paul de Man's. Once the subject is eliminated, which occurs in Woolf's novels according to Banfield, the novelist will be able to create a "method of multiple perspectives" which functions as a "route to wider knowledge" (p. 312) of sensibilia.In the last part of the book, Banfield examines how "Fry's aesthetic derives from analytic philosophy" (p. 248) and then argues that Woolf incorporates much of this aesthetic into her work. Fry makes a clear distinction between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Impressionism represents the "totality... (shrink)

However this may be, it is clear that the rhetoric of the self in American criticism will no longer do, any more than its accompanying interpretative codes of identity crises and mythic reintegration, and that a post-individualistic age needs new and post-individualistic categories for grasping both the production and the evolution of literary form as well as the semantic content of the literary text and the latter's relationship to collective experience and to ideological contradiction. What is paradoxical about Burke's own (...) critical practice in this respect is that he has anticipated many of the fundamental objections to such a rhetoric of self and identity at the same time that he may be counted among its founding fathers: this last and most important of what we have called his "strategies of containment" provides insights which testify against his own official practice. Witness, for example, the following exchange, in which Burke attributes this imaginary objection to his Marxist critics: "Identity is itself a 'mystification.' Hence, resenting its many labyrinthine aspects, we tend to call even the study of it a 'mystification.'" To this proposition, which is something of a caricature of the point of view of the present essay, Burke gives himself a reply which we may also endorse: "The response would be analogous to the response of those who, suffering from an illness, get 'relief' by quarreling with their doctors. Unless Marxists are ready to deny Marx by attacking his term 'alienation' itself, they must permit of research into the nature of attempts, adequate and inadequate, to combat alienation."1 · 1. Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, p. 308. In fact, certain contemporary Marxisms—most notably those of Althusser and of Lucio Coletti—explicitly repudiate the concept of alienation as a Hegelian survival in Marx's early writings. Fredric R. Jameson is the author of The Political Unconscious: Studies in the Ideology of Form. He is also the editor, with Stanley Aronowitz and John Brenkman, of the Social Text. See also: "Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of Containment" by Kenneth Burke in Vol. 5, No. 2. (shrink)

Extrait de : Rodrigo Sobral Cunha, O essencial sobre ritmanálise, INCM, 2010, 78 p. A Ritmanálise é um novo modelo integral de conhecimento operacional concebido pelo filósofo, físico e matemático português Lúcio Alberto Pinheiro dos Santos (1889-1950) e apresentado à Europa pelo filósofo e epistemólogo francês Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962). O ritmo é a própria energia de existência em todas as escalas e assim o princípio unificador da física, da biologia e da psicologia. Tanto o universo como a (...) - Sociologie (...) – Nouvel article. (shrink)

No detailed description available for "Butler's Ethics".

Lenin's work "On the Significance of Militant Materialism," written in the spring of 1922, is justly regarded as the philosophical testament of our leader. In it, the tasks of the day were merged with the tasks of the entire epoch on the basis of a profound analysis of reality.

In his New Essays on Human Understanding, Leibniz presents an extended critical commentary on Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Leibniz read some of Locke’s work in English and then, a few years later, the whole of it in French, a language in which he was more comfortable. Over a period of about two further years, on and off, he wrote his New Essays, which he finished at about the time Locke died and which was not published until about half a (...) century after Leibniz’s death. (He left them unpublished partly because they had been motivated by a hope of getting Locke to reply, and Locke’s death put an end to that; though his character made it a forlorn hope in any case.) The New Essays has been an important work: for one thing, Kant read it on its first appearance, and scholars say that this was a decisive event in his philosophical development. Anyway, given that this is one of Leibniz’s only two philosophical works of substantial book length, in all the torrent that poured from his pen, and given also that it is focused - critically but with respect and careful attentiveness - on the greatest classic of English philosophy, it is surprising that the New Essays had to wait until 1981 for a usable English translation.1 In 1896 there was published a sort of translation by A. G. Langley;2 but it is inaccurate far beyond the bounds of normal incompetence, as well as being grimly unreadable for stylistic reasons. As Chesterton once said about The Origin of Species, it is surprising how many people think they have read it, but I'll bet that nobody alive has slogged through the Langley version from cover to cover. It is a pity that the work was not decently available in English for nearly three centuries, because even for those who can read the French of, say, Descartes, Leibniz’s French is difficult. He reserved his native German for writings on history and politics, using French and Latin for philosophy and mathematics; presumably French was chosen for the New Essays because Leibniz wanted to respond to a popular work by a popular work.. (shrink)