Philosophy and Kafka is a collection of original essays interrogating the relationship of literature and philosophy. The essays either discuss specific philosophical commentaries on Kafka’s work, consider the possible relevance of certain philosophical outlooks for examining Kafka’s writings, or examine Kafka’s writings in terms of a specific philosophical theme, such as communication and subjectivity, language and meaning, knowledge and truth, the human/animal divide, justice, and freedom.

This takes a little-known reading of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” by Lyotard as the starting point for an examination of the relation between body and law. Lyotard’s late notion of the intractable serves as a frame for this examination: explicitly claimed to be an absolute condition of morals, I argue it also has political implications, which are here drawn out through the link between the intractable and the body. In Lyotard’s later writings, the body is usually associated with (...) an originary affectivity, which is sometimes equated with sexual difference but sometimes appears to come “before” and exceed this law of bodily differences. It is the latter case, I argue, that allows for a path to be opened beyond the bodily violence of the law to be found in Kafka, especially if this is framed in terms of a certain “politics of incommensurability.”. (shrink)

"Poetry does not impose, it exposes itself," wrote Paul Celan. Werner Hamacher's investigations into crucial texts of philosophical and literary modernity show that Celan's apothegm is also valid for the structure of understanding and for language in general. In _Premises_ Hamacher demonstrates that the promise of a subject position is not only unavoidable—and thus operates as a structural imperative—but is also unattainable and therefore by necessity open to possibilities other than that defined as "position," to redefinitions and unexpected transformations of (...) the merely thetical act. Proceeding along the lines of both philosophical argument and critical reading, Hamacher presents the fullest account of the vast disruption in the theories and ethics of positional and propositional acts—a disruption first exposed by Kant's analysis of the minimal requirements for linguistic and practical action. Focusing on the double trait of every premise—that it is promised but never attained—Hamacher analyzes nine decisive themes, topics, and texts of modernity: the hermeneutic circle in Schleiermacher and Heidegger, the structure of ethical commands in Kant, Nietzsche's genealogy of moral terms and his exploration of the aporias of singularity, the irony of reading in de Man, the parabasis of positing acts in Fichte and Schlegel, Kleist's disruption of narrative representation, the gesture of naming in Benjamin and Kafka, and the incisive caesura that Paul Celan inserts into temporal and linguistic reversals. There is no book that so fully brings the issues of both critical philosophy and critical literature into reach. _Reviews_ "Werner Hamacher's _Premises_ is the heir and successor to the most important theoretical and critical work done in American departments of comparative literature from the 1960s through the 1980s. Yet, _Premises_ is no more a work of literary scholarship than one of philosophical submission to philosophy. With the gesture that is genuinely called post-structural, which is the suspicion and suspension of every code, the book's act of freedom is freedom to read and write language _tout court_." —Timothy Bahti, University of Michigan "Hamacher's project can be described as the retracing of the epistemological ground upon which the modern conception of the literary was erected. It is quite clear to me that there is nothing presently available to rival this book." —Wlad Godzich, University of Geneva. (shrink)

Few twentieth century novelists have been subjected to as exhaustive and self-confident interpretations of the ultimate meaning of their work as was Franz Kafka. Veritable regiments of men of letters, psychoanalysts, sociologists, philosophers, and just plain busybodies followed the urge to formulate theories on Kafka’s concern with the alienation of Western man. Personal friends like Max Brod, dramatizers of the loveless world of The Trial, André Gide and Jean-Louis Barrault, analyzers of parental stunting of the child psyche like (...) Josef Rattner, observers of Kafka’s Austro-Bohemian world like Pavel Eisner and Peter Demetz, investigators of traditional themes in Kafka’s fiction—notably of their Hebraic and Chasidic ingredients—like André Nemeth and Hartmut Binder, hunters of allegorical and parabolic semantics like Norbert Fuerst and Clements Heselhaus, all seem to share one common trait in their vastly differing approaches: a singular disrespect for the frequent hints made by the author himself as to his ultimate objectives. (shrink)

In his article “Storied Bodies, or Nana at Last Unveil’d” , Peter Brooks makes the claim that, for a certain dominant mode of nineteenth-century narrative, the female sexual organ is the occult source of the narrative dynamic. On a superficial reading, Brooks’s piece might appear to empower women by putting their sexuality at the generative origin of the story. But the opposite is the case: his argument reflects rather than critiques the misogynist strategies of the texts he discusses. I (...) will begin my analysis of his article with a brief return to the story by Barbey d’Aurevilly whose climactic scene Brooks offers as “a kind of allegory of the cultural story [he has] been delineating” . Charles Bernheimer is professor of romance languages and chair of the program in comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania. The author of Flaubert and Kafka and Figures of Ill Repute , he is currently working on a study of fin-de-siècle literature and art, The Decadent Subject. (shrink)

1. Imagery previewed -- 2. Philosophical and methodological problems -- 3. Consciousness -- 4. Types of imagery -- 5. Individual differences and dimensions of the image -- 6. Theories of imagery -- 7. Images and words: evidence for separate processing systems -- 8. Properties of the imagery system -- 9. Uses and functions of imagery -- 10. Imagery and memory: voluntary images -- 11. Imagery and memory: Aroused images -- 12. Conclusions and speculations.

Know-how has a distinctive, non-instrumental value that a mere reliable ability lacks. Some, including Bengson and Moffett Knowing how, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 161–195, 2011) and Carter and Pritchard :799–816, 2015b) have cited a close relation between knowhow and cognitive achievement, and it is tempting to think that the value of know-how rests in that relation. That’s not so, however. The value of know-how lies in its relation to the fundamental value of autonomy.

Adamson and Ganeri present a lively introduction to one of the world's richest intellectual traditions: the philosophy of classical India. They guide us through such famous works as the Vedas and the Upaniṣads, and tell the stories of how Buddhism and Jainism developed. Anyone curious about South Asian philosophy can start here.

Peter Adamson offers an accessible, humorous tour through a period of eight hundred years when some of the most influential of all schools of thought were formed: from the third century BC to the sixth century AD. He introduces us to Cynics and Skeptics, Epicureans and Stoics, emperors and slaves, and traces the development of Christian and Jewish philosophy and of ancient science. Chapters are devoted to such major figures as Epicurus, Lucretius, Cicero, Seneca, Plotinus, and Augustine. But in (...) keeping with the motto of the series, the story is told 'without any gaps, ' providing an in-depth look at less familiar topics that remains suitable for the general reader. For instance, there are chapters on the fascinating but relatively obscure Cyrenaic philosophical school, on pagan philosophical figures like Porphyry and Iamblichus, and extensive coverage of the Greek and Latin Christian Fathers who are at best peripheral in most surveys of ancient philosophy. A major theme of the book is in fact the competition between pagan and Christian philosophy in this period, and the Jewish tradition also appears in the shape of Philo of Alexandria. Ancient science is also considered, with chapters on ancient medicine and the interaction between philosophy and astronomy. Considerable attention is paid also to the wider historical context, for instance by looking at the ascetic movement in Christianity and how it drew on ideas from Hellenic philosophy. From the counter-cultural witticisms of Diogenes the Cynic to the subtle skepticism of Sextus Empiricus, from the irreverent atheism of the Epicureans to the ambitious metaphysical speculation of Neoplatonism, from the ethical teachings of Marcus Aurelius to the political philosophy of Augustine, the book gathers together all aspects of later ancient thought in an accessible and entertaining way. (shrink)

A collection of essays written by pupils, friends and colleagues of Professor Peter Dronke, to honour him on his retirement. The essays address the question of the relationship between poetry and philosophy in the Middle Ages. Contributors include Walter Berschin, Charles Burnett, Stephen Gersh, Michael Herren, Edouard Jeauneau, David Luscombe, Paul Gerhardt Schmidt, Joe Trapp, Jill Mann, Claudio Orlandi and John Marenbon. It is an important collection for both philosophical and literary specialists; scholars, graduate students and under-graduates in Medieval (...) Literature and in Medieval Philosophy. (shrink)

The study of Austrian and German modernist literature has a long and venerable history in this country. There have been no attempts yet, however, to reassess German and Austrian literary modernism in light of current discussion of modernity and postmodernity. Addressing a set of historical and theoretical questions central to current reevaluations of modernism, this volume presents American readers with a state-of-the-art account of German modernism studies in the eighties. Essays by Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Russell A. Berman, Peter Uwe Hohendahl, (...) Judith Ryan, Mark Anderson, Klaus R. Scherpe, Biddy Martin, Klaus L. Berghahn and Acbar Abbas, center around German and Austrian literary and philosophical prose of the early twentieth century. texts by well-known authors -Kafka, Rilke, Musil, Doblin, Benjamin, Benn, and Junger - and less well-known ones -Franz Jung, Carl Einstein, Ernst Bloch, Lou Andreas-Salome, are examined. Particular attention is paid to the processes and strategies by which certain experiences of "modern life" are translated into modern aesthetic forms. The unique contribution of this volume is that it combines theory with an attempt to reintroduce an historical and contextual dimension. The authors believe that their revisions of Ausrian and German modernism will themselves be informed by a new set of questions pertinent to the modernist debate. (shrink)

In this compelling and timely treatise, cultural theorist and educator Peter Trifonas puts forth the first book-length study of Jacques Derrida's 'educational texts:' that is, those writings most explicitly concerned with the ethics and politics of the historico-philosophical structures constituting the scene of teaching. The text examines how deconstruction allows us to re-think the socio-historical and ethico-philosophical aspects of pedagogical practices and policies, including pedagogical theories that have had direct bearing on the ethical and cultural ideals forming the reason (...) of Western educational systems and the exclusion of its 'Others.'. (shrink)

Peter Sloterdijk, der Medienstar unter den deutschen Philosophen, hat wieder zugeschlagen. Nach seinem dreibändigen Mammutwerk Sphären legt er nun ein mit gut 400 Seiten relativ schmales Buch vor, in dem er der viel beschworenen und beschwätzten Globalisierung aus philosophischer Perspektive zu Leibe rückt. Sloterdijks Clou: Die Globalisierung ist gar nicht ein so neuartiges Phänomen, wie oft behauptet wird, sie begann schon mit den Entdeckungsfahrten von Kolumbus & Co. Und die heutigen Globalisierer - die um den Globus nicht mehr segelnden, (...) sondern jettenden Business-People - sind die rücksichtslosen Tatmenschen, die Entdecker und Eroberer unserer Tage, im Guten wie im Schlechten. Sloterdijk skizziert den "kapitalistischen Weltinnenraum" als vorläufiges Endprodukt der Globalisierung: Es ist die westliche Wohlstandskugel, deren Bewohner sich zwar den Gesamtglobus verfügbar gemacht haben, die aber schön unter sich bleiben wollen. Sloterdijk schreibt wie gewohnt auf sprachlich hohem Niveau, kann sich aber auch so manchen Kalauer nicht verkneifen. Insgesamt eine äußerst anregende Lektüre, die getAbstract.com jedem empfiehlt, der ein Phänomen tiefer verstehen will, das allzu oft nur rein ökonomisch abgehandelt wird. (shrink)

Chapter 1: Introduction. S = <{We}c<w; C,U,n,0,w> is the substructure formed by restricting the lattice <^P(w); C , U, n,0,w> to the re subsets We of the ...

Theories of explanation are characterized as being either pragmatic or non-pragmatic, without a clear sense of what this is supposed to mean. The present paper offers a definition of a "pragmatic explanation-sentence", and in terms of this, of a "pragmatic theory of explanation". It is argued that van Fraassen's theory of explanation, despite claims to the contrary, is not genuinely pragmatic. By contrast, the author's own "illocutionary" theory is pragmatic. Attention is devoted particularly to sentences of the form "E is (...) a good explanation of q", which, it is urged, are pragmatic in a strong sense. In defense of this claim, and of the advantages of a pragmatic account generally, appeal is made to Rutherford's 1911 subatomic explanation of the results of his scattering experiments. Implications of a pragmatic theory are drawn for the debate between realists and anti-realists and absolutists and relativists. (shrink)

Context: The current situation in philosophy of science includes central, ongoing debates about realism and anti-realism. The same question has been central to the theorising of radical constructivism and, in particular, to its implications for educational theory. However the constructivist literature does not make significant contact with the most important, mainstream philosophical discussions. Problem: Despite its overwhelming influence among educationalists, I suggest that the “radical constructivism” of Ernst Glasersfeld is an example of fashionable but thoroughly problematic doctrines that can have (...) little benefit for practical pedagogy or teacher education. My critique has a positive goal: it is important to understand why constructivism has generated such severe polarization and disputation. A symptom of the problem is the concern with the most abstruse and obdurate problems of philosophy that have no conceivable bearing on educational practice or anything else, for that matter. The diagnosis is confirmed by those pedagogical recommendations that are allegedly derived from radical constructivism that are touted as revolutionary but are platitudes of common sense. I suggest that, ironically, this observation itself provides some pedagogical insight. Method: The approach adopted for the topic is critical, philosophical analysis of the various claims and theses of radical constructivism in the light of philosophy of science and psychology. Results: The findings of the paper are that central theoretical claims of constructivism are couched in an unclear and unnecessary jargon that obscures the implausibility or banality of these claims. Implications: The value of the paper lies in providing an analysis and critique of central, influential claims of radical constructivism both in relation to issues in epistemology and also in relation to the alleged bearing of these claims on pedagogy. It is suggested that, contrary to the claims of radical constructivists, there are few if any implications for practice and applications. (shrink)

Cultural commentator and journalist Peter York sets out to uncover the truth behind authenticity, the ultimate con of our generation.

Nach Inkonsistenzen, Evidenzterror, Splitter und Subjekt und Wahrheit setzt der Philosoph Marcus Steinweg mit den Proflexionen sein eigensinniges Denken fort und nimmt den Leser mit auf den Weg. In prägnanten und hochverdichteten Kurztexten, Denkbildern, Bemerkungen und Miniaturen zu Autoren wie Simone Weil, Georg Trakl, Fernando Pessoa, Etel Adnan, Peter Handke, Franz Kafka, Jean-Luc Nancy oder Ludwig Wittgenstein kristallisiert sich seine unabschliessbare Arbeit an den Antinomien des Denkens. Motive wie 'Manhattan', 'Kindheit', 'Gespenster', 'Liebestheologie', 'Diätetik', 'Schnee', 'Professorenphilosophie', 'Märchenstunde', 'Freundschaft' dienen (...) ihm nicht als Reflexionsgrund, sondern als Anlass zu Proflexionen: Affirmationen nicht des Bestehenden, sondern seiner Inkonsistenz. Immer geht es Steinweg darum, Denken als Vorwärtsdynamik statt als Rückversicherung zu praktizieren."--Publisher's statement. (shrink)

Modern political conflict characteristically reflects and represents deep-seated but also unacknowledged and un-analyzed disagreements about what it means to be 'objective'. In defending this proposition, Peter J. Steinberger seeks to reaffirm the idea of rationalism in politics by examining important problems of public life explicitly in the light of established philosophical doctrine. The Politics of Objectivity invokes, thereby, an age-old, though now widely ignored, tradition of western thought according to which all political thinking is inevitably embedded in and underwritten (...) by larger structures of metaphysical inquiry. Building on earlier studies of the idea of the state, and focusing on highly contested practices of objectivity in judgement, this book suggests that political conflict is an essentially discursive enterprise deeply implicated in the rational pursuit of theories about how things in the world really are. (shrink)

This chapter shows how al-Kindī interweaves ideas from Greek cosmology to give a theory that can explain the efficacy of astrology and how God’s providence is dispersed by means of heavenly influence. A concrete example is found in al-Kindī’s works on meteorology, since he thinks that weather is produced by celestial causation. The mechanics of this causation are explained differently in different works, which leads to a consideration of the authenticity of On Rays, which is ascribed to al-Kindī, and its (...) place in his corpus. Finally, the chapter considers whether al-Kindī’s account commits him to determinism, and whether he thinks universal causal determinism is compatible with human freedom. (shrink)

Philosophy and literature are natural allies--philosophy supplying perennial themes raised anew from one generation to the next, literature providing vivid illustrations of the meaning and poignancy of abstract thought. Illuminates basic philosophical concepts through literary worksThis unique text introduces students to philosophy through the medium of great literature. The book is divided into seven parts, each devoted to the illumination of a basic philosophical concept-such as Knowledge, Truth, Personal Identity, Ethics, and justice through the use of literary selections from Sophocles (...) (Oedipus the King), James Joyce (Araby), Kafka (The Metamorphosis), and John Dos Passos (The House of Morgan), among many others. The editors have given special attention to choosing the right combination of literary piece and philosophical issue to ensure that the story or play lend itself to philosophical scrutiny. Selections of the best philosophical writingsThe questions raised by these selections are then explored further through some of the best philosophical writings available, including the writings of Aristotle, William James, Plato, Locke, John Stuart. Mill, and many other classic philosophers, as well as contemporary pieces from Richard Rorty, Peter Unger, John Rawls, John Hick, and others. In each chapter, the editors have attempted to include the clearest presentation of a particular point of view, sometimes going back to an earlier article not generally found in other current texts. Throughout, they have made an effort to balance the analytic tradition with hermeneutics and feminist philosophy. Excellent introduction for studentsEvery chapter is introduced with an essay by the editors that provides a unifying thread through the various philosophical and literary pieces that follow. Each chapter ends with discussion questions and suggestions for further study. The result is a volume that will provide students with a valuable tool for illuminating timeless, as well as contemporary issues, and an introduction to philosophy that they will remember and to which they can return over and over again. (shrink)

In this special edition of his award-winning bestseller, visionary scientist Peter Russell updates his classic manifesto for awakening to the mounting planetary crisis while deepening the connection to inner tranquility. Amid fears of ecological catastrophe and political chaos, this book stands out for its message of sanity and hope.

In this account of his mature thinking, Peter Marshall develops a dynamic and organic philosophy for the coming millennium which he calls liberation ecology. Liberation ecology is holistic in viewing the world as a harmonious whole and all beings and things as interwoven threads in nature's web. It is intuitive in recognizing intuition as the main source of knowledge and the imagination as the great organ of morality. It is ecological in seeing human beings as fellow voyagers with other (...) species in the magnificent odyssey of evolution. Above all, it is libertarian in seeking to release humanity, society and nature from their existing burdens so that they can unfurl and realize together their full potential. Exploring our strengths and possibilities, this book presents the ideas and values needed to ride the winds of change at this crucial stage in our development and in the history of the world. It provides a new philosophy for a new era, an uplifting and inspired vision which combines ancient wisdom and modern insights, reason and feeling, science and poetry, myth and the marvellous. It offers a guide for the future on how to rive in the most fulfilling way and how to create a genuinely free and sustainable society in harmony with nature. (shrink)

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is having an increasingly significant impact on Anglo-American political theory. His most prominent intervention to date is the powerful reassessment of sovereignty and the politics of life and death laid out in his multivolume _Homo Sacer_ project. Agamben argues that in both the modern world and the ancient, politics inevitably involves a sovereign decision that bans some individuals from the political and human communities. For Agamben, the Nazi concentration camps—in which some inmates are reduced to (...) a form of living death—are not a political aberration but instead the place where this essential political decision about life most clearly reveals itself. Engaging specifically with _Homo Sacer_, the essays in this collection draw out and contend with the wide-ranging implications of Agamben’s radical and controversial interpretation of modern political life. The contributors analyze Agamben’s thought from the perspectives of political theory, philosophy, jurisprudence, and the history of law. They consider his work not only in relation to that of his major interlocutors—Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Heidegger—but also in relation to the thought of Plato, Pindar, Heraclitus, Descartes, Kafka, Bataille, and Derrida. The essayists’ approaches are varied, as are their ultimate evaluations of the cogency and accuracy of Agamben’s arguments. This volume also includes an original essay by Agamben in which he considers the relation of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” to Schmitt’s _Political Theology_. _Politics, Metaphysics, and Death_ is a necessary, multifaceted exposition and evaluation of the thought of one of today’s most important political theorists. _Contributors:_ Giorgio Agamben, Andrew Benjamin, Peter Fitzpatrick, Anselm Haverkamp, Paul Hegarty, Andreas Kalyvas, Rainer Maria Kiesow, Catherine Mills, Andrew Norris, Adam Thurschwell, Erik Vogt, Thomas Carl Wall. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Benjamin ReduxGerhard RichterProfane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, by Margaret Cohen; 271 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, $35.00 cloth, $14.00 paper.Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition, by John McCole; xiii & 329 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993, $45.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.Walter Benjamin’s Passages, by Pierre Missac, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson; xvii & 221 pp. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995, $25.00.Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: (...) Destruction and Experience, edited by Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne; xiv & 298 pp. London: Routledge, 1994, $65.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.The word of ambition at the present day is Culture. Whilst all the world is in pursuit of power, and of wealth as a means of power, culture corrects the theory of success,” writes Emerson in his 1860 essay “Culture.” 1 Perhaps at no point since the publication of Emerson’s essay has the diagnosis it advances been more relevant than today, some 136 years later, when “Culture,” at least in the methodological and political struggles within the academy, has again become the word of ambition. As in Emerson’s nineteenth-century America, those who today pursue that word most ardently also tend—in their struggle to explicate history and culture—to shy away from the persistent instability of meaning with which the texts that they take as their objects of study are vexed. In other words, they are afraid of earthquakes. For Emerson continues: [End Page 200] “There are people who can never understand a trope, or any second or expanded sense given to your word, or any humor; but remain literalists, after hearing the music, and poetry, and rhetoric, and wit, of seventy or eighty years. They are past the help of surgeon or clergy. But even these can understand pitchforks and the cry of fire! and I have noticed in some of this class a marked dislike of earthquakes.” 2It has become one of the methodological orthodoxies of the new contextualism, the increasingly prominent engine driving a continuing metamorphosis of what is perhaps no longer usefully called “Humanities,” to posit a relatively transparent, unproblematic relationship between a textual artifact and its larger cultural or historical context. It is precisely this complex relationship between text and culture—and the theoretical possibility of doing justice to it—that this review of four new publications on Walter Benjamin will revisit.The urgent promise to think through the complicated relationship between text and culture, between the idiomatic artifact and its historical formation, has yet to be fulfilled. How does one account for the singularity of a specific instance of signification, be it a literary text, a film, or a neon sign, articulating the relationship between it and the cultural paradigm that gave rise to it and to which it gave rise? How might one talk about a text’s historicity without forcing a hasty assimilation of it into a crudely mimetic model? One way out of the difficulty, of course, is to suppress the vicissitudes of language altogether, with an eye to hastening the assimilation of a text, seen primarily as illustrative or evidential material, into pre-established assumptions. An example of such a dissatisfactory answer can be found in the introduction to a recent programmatic publication, in which the editors triumphantly proclaim: “Thus, for example, although there is no prohibition against close textual readings in cultural studies, they are also not required.” 3 A marked dislike of earthquakes is at work here. What is more, the logic of such a statement goes as follows: because close reading is no longer necessary, it is dispensable, and therefore eventually no longer performed at all. One is tempted to invoke the famous language of Kafka’s chaplain in The Trial who reprimands Joseph K. for his failure to read closely: “You have not enough respect for writing and you are altering the story.” 4Such methodological difficulties only get worse when one considers the particular problem posed to scholarship by the case of Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish critic, writer, and philosopher now widely regarded as one of the most significant theorists of our century. On the [End Page 201] one... (shrink)

In Behind Every Lesson There is a Wonderful Journey, Peter Burwash shows us how he took advantage of one the most important success keys to create an extraordinary life. The open secret that Peter reveals is that every successful person took the time to gather lessons from other successful people and imbibe those lessons. Parents, friends, teachers, employers, famous athletes, politicians, movie stars/ producers, comedians, spiritual leaders, entrepreneurs all helped the author through word and deed to transform his (...) life. Peter retraces the pivotal encounters he had with those who helped him rise from obscure beginnings in eastern Canada to become a top international tennis pro, an internationally sought after motivational speaker, the CEO of Peter Burwash Inernational (PBI), a worldwide tennis management company, and a successful author, husband, and father. In his humble and genuine style the author gives the reader a treasure house of wisdom. Some lessons are directly from his long and impressive list of mentors and some lessons are his personal realizations earned by working for decades to transform his own life both externally and internally. All are valuable gems for your taking. (shrink)

Unnatural States is a radical critique of international theory, in particular, of the assumption of state agency--that states act in the world in their own right. Peter Lomas argues that since the universal states system is inequitable and rigid, and not all states are democracies anyway, this assumption is unreal, and to adopt it means reinforcing an unjust status quo. Looking at the concepts of state, nation, and agency, Lomas sees populations struggling to find an agreed model of the (...) state, owing to inherited material differences; and unsurprisingly, among theorists of the nation, only controversy and a great confusion of terms. Meanwhile, the functional incarnations of the state agent are caricatures: the mandarin state, the lawyer state, the landlord state, the heir-to-history state, and the patriot state. Yet recent developments in international theory (constructivism, scientific realism, postmodernism) sacrifice state agency only at the price of an unhelpful abstraction. The states system is dysfunctional and obsolete, Lomas contends, and international theory must be recast, with morality as central, to inspire and to guide historic change. He focuses in his conclusion on prescriptions for change, led by four moral concerns: human rights, weapons of mass destruction, relations between rich and poor societies, and the environment. "I begin this book," writes Lomas, "with the commonest commonplace of international theory, to expose it as a meaningless cliche. In the masterly hands of Hobbes, it was elaborated into a shock formula for organized society, a reading of history as civilization's failure. Kant sought to rescue morality from Hobbes and create the structures of modernity, but Kant's influence is coming to an end. In the Cold War, politicians disagreeing over another philosopher almost brought the world to an end. Hence the challenges of our time. These are primary and profound. Philosophers have done much to define the modern world. The point of international theory is to change it.". (shrink)

How do we challenge the structures of late capitalism if all possible media through which to do do is inescapably capitalist? This urgent political question is at the heart of Peter Trawny's major new work. With searing precision Trawny demonstrates how our world has become wholly determined by technology, capital, and the medium. In this world of the 'TCM', we universal subjects remain in a state of apathy that is temporarily punctuated, but also reinforced, by the phantasmatic dream of (...) difference offered us by the 'Hollywood machine.' Our sole motivation is to gain money and the power it brings. The only meaningful difference in the world of the TCM universal is the difference between wealth and poverty. Freedom here is then the freedom to dispose of things (particularly technological objects) and to gain pleasure. It makes our relation to our surroundings essentially 'touristic,' and our relation to the earth an essentially exploitative one. The notion of personal or societal freedom has never been more controversial or, seemingly, more far from our grasp. While exploring in details the difficulties we face in our attempts to be free, Trawny builds an almost Utopian vision of how to break out of the mediums in which we operate and experience a new kind of freedom – both one of intimacy, and one through philosophy. An ambitious and lively yet completely rigorous work, this book offers a fascinating vision of how to live and live well. (shrink)

The outcome of this is explored, in detail, in relation to the teaching of literature, creative writing and drama.