Silence is not simply the absence of noise. It is within us, in the inner citadel that great writers, thinkers, scholars and people of faith have cultivated over the centuries. It characterizes our most intimate and sacred spaces, from private bedrooms to grand cathedrals – those vast reservoirs of silence. Philosophers and novelists have long sought solitude and inspiration in mountains and forests. Yet despite the centrality of silence to some of our most intense experiences, the transformations (...) of the twentieth century have gradually diminished its value. Today, raucous urban spaces and a continual bombardment from different media pressure us into constant activity. We are losing a sense of our inner selves, a process that is changing the very nature of the individual. This book rediscovers the wonder of silence and, with this, a richer experience of life. With his predilection for the elusive, Corbin calls us to listen to another history. (shrink)

Comment le silence agit-il au cinéma? Qu'est-ce qui permet d'identifier ce phénomène? Implique-t-il la disparition intégrale de la matière sonore ou seulement sa minimalisation à l'intérieur d'un film? Son intervention, ponctuelle ou durable, tend à engager une raréfaction, voire une suppression, des paroles et de la musique, mais pas forcément de tout bruit. Des lieux particulièrement silencieux, ainsi que le mutisme ou la surdité d'un personnage, sont également propices à l'instauration de telles situations audiovisuelles. Cet ouvrage analyse, à travers (...) une approche généalogique et herméneutique, la présence du silence dans le cinéma contemporain sur le double principe d'héritages figuratifs et de ruptures discursives. Il s'appuie sur un corpus de films réalisés entre autres par Robert Bresson, Marguerite Duras, Andrei Tarkovski, Theo Angelopoulos, Tsaï Ming-liang, Béla Tarr, Pedro Costa ou Sharunas Bartas. Au-delà des considérations esthétiques, le livre interroge aussi les valeurs anthropologiques, morales, sociales et/ou politiques qui se glissent derrière ces manifestations concrètes du silence. Celui-ci nous invite, tant sur le plan éthique que sensible, à repenser notre rapport fondamental au monde."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Social science, history, and philosophy have often been neglect in thinking through their fundamentally intertwined relationship. The result is often an inattention to philosophy where social science and history is concerned, or a neglect of historicity and social analysis where philosophy is concerned. Meanwhile, the place of values in research is often uneasily passed over in silence. The inattention to, and loss of, the intersection between these different disciplines and their subject matters, leaves our (...) investigations all the more impoverished as a result. In resolving these problems, it is not enough to strive for cooperation or integration, but to rethink of the nature of the disciplines themselves; their interests, purposes, and presuppositions. In this volume, contributors explore different facets of these relationships, and move beyond the problematics erected by positivism often cast in terms of value-free or value-neutral science, that is, a science obsessed with empirical data, schematic classifications, and the pursuit of law-like forms. While positivism has been subject to critique, the influence and legacy of positivism remains. It remains in the way in which we often think about science; the line drawn between the sciences and the humanities; the norms researchers should follow; what a successful explanation looks like; and the ethical, normative, and political implications of scientific research. Aimed at students and researchers of philosophy, history and the social sciences, this book is driven by a desire to revindicate questions concerning ontology and social ontology, to rethink the nature of explanation, and to resituate normativity and values within scientific, social scientific, and historical pursuits. (shrink)

Diverse interpretations of Maimonides’ Guide have abounded since it was first written. A recent school depicts Maimonides as a critical philosopher, in the Kantian mold, who was skeptical of claims to know certain metaphysical truths. Josef Stern’s new book is a landmark in this skeptical interpretation, which refines and extends the debate in various new directions. This chapter claims that focusing on skeptical motifs can bring Maimonides into line with recent developments in understanding the history of philosophy. Stern (...) directs attention to the role that questioning can play in religious faith, and contends that Maimonides’ arguments are a series of spiritual exercises leading to equipollence and, ultimately, to silence and incomplete knowledge of God and the intelligences. The second half of the chapter turns to arguments that oppose a straightforward reading. It contextualizes them in studies of recent decades and offers alternative explanations of key passages in order to preserve a traditional reading. (shrink)

This open-access editorial discusses confronting silences in different disciplinary contexts, such as science and technology studies, cultural anthropology, and philosophy. It has a focus on race and concludes with thoughts about Indigenous expertise, the Australian referendum on the Indigenous Voice, to parliament, and racism.

Psychoanalysis, History, and Radical Ethics: Learning to Hear explores the importance of listening, being able to speak, and those who are silenced, from a psychoanalytic perspective. In particular, it focuses on those voices silenced either collectively or individually by trauma, culture, discrimination and persecution, and even by the history of psychoanalysis. Drawing on lessons from philosophy and history as well as clinical vignettes, this book provides a comprehensive guide to understanding the role of trauma in creating (...) silence, and the importance for psychoanalysts of learning to hear those silenced voices. (shrink)

Who is recognised as a philosopher and what counts as philosophy influence both the content of a philosophical education and academic philosophy’s continuing demographic skew. The “philosophical who” and the “philosophical what” themselves are a partial function of matters that have been passed over in collective silence, even if that now feels to some like a silence belonging to the distant past. This paper discusses some philosophical silences regarding race, gender, and disability in the context of (...) reflection on philosophical education and on philosophical practice in the public sphere. It focuses on Charles Mills’ writings on race, Susan Babbitt’s on race and gender, and on more collaboratively-generated work on eugenics and disability. (shrink)

Negative theology or apophasis - the idea that God is best identified in terms of 'absence', 'otherness', 'difference' - has been influential in modern Christian thought, resonating as it does with secular notions of negation developed in continental philosophy. Apophasis also has a strong intellectual history dating back to the early Church Fathers. Silence and the Word both studies the history of apophasis and examines its relationship with contemporary secular philosophy. Leading Christian thinkers explore in (...) their own way the extent to which the concept of the apophatic illumines some of the deepest doctrinal structures of Christian faith, and of Christian self-understanding both in terms of its historical and contemporary situatedness, showing how a dimension of negativity has characterised not only traditional mysticism but most forms of Christian thought over the years. (shrink)

At a time when many institutions of higher learning are reflecting on their past complicity with chattel slavery, either in terms of the sources of their funding or their use of slave labor, philosophy as an academic discipline has been largely silent about its own complicity. Questions surrounding the legitimacy and practice of slavery were a regular part of moral philosophy courses at universities from the sixteenth century until its abolition. However, the discussions of slavery found in the (...) dominant textbooks tended to be deeply conservative judged even by the standards of those times. This partly explains why after emancipation the many moral questions posed by slavery are barely mentioned in survey histories of ethics or of political philosophy today: this is a context in which academic philosophy does not show itself to its best advantage. The present article explores what academic philosophers need to do to redress the discipline's past failures, including its virtual silence about slavery since the Civil War. Given today's political environment, academic philosophers need to reflect on how the discipline in its institutional form functions within a system governed by the legacy of slavery and its aftermath. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay meditates on the entanglement of history and memory with forgetfulness, with silencing, with what is before or outside speech. Recalling along the way a few of the manifold varieties of the unthinkable made manifest in recent events, it notes the same mute iteration that led Freud to the death drive, only to be troubled once again by the very same repetitions enfolded in the diagnosis of cultural malaise Freud built upon his insight. Turning to Georg Simmel’s (...) Philosophy of Money for an alternative, non-psychoanalytic account of unconscious purpose as a trans-individual, cultural phenomenon, it arrives once again at the hypertrophic life-technologies of the modern—and at Simmel’s account of money as the ultimate being without qualities, “the most extreme … configuration of Geist” itself, which so thoroughly underpins ways of living that, obscuring dimensions of value that cannot be quantified, silently hum on in the face of catastrophe. (shrink)

This essay tries to demonstrate two distinct but complementary visions to a central theme of Christian faith: humanity’s redemption in the crucified Christ. It will attempt to show how the poetics of Simone Weil (1909–1943) and the poetic art of Georges Rouault (1871–1943) embody different understandings of Christian faith. Considering faith from a philosophical approach, Weil detaches the sufferings of Christ from the totality of salvific history. Viewing faith from the artistic approach, Rouault places the crucified Christ in the (...) context of the history of salvation, including Mary and the Church. Though different from one another, these two visions reveal to us a light in the midst of our dark or suffering existence that makes audible or perceptible the silence of God’s love in Christ that is its source. (shrink)

I firstly argue that there are two ways of thematizing silence philosophically, either as a phenomenon of the world or as the silencing of the philosopher, and that the second way constitutes a problem without whose solution the first way of thematization cannot occur. Secondly, I discuss Pyrrhonian scepticism as that philosophical theory which generates the silencing of the philosopher and repudiate three objections to the claim that this scepticism is not spuriously constructed. Next I show how the German (...) philosopher Georg Hegel proposes to refute Pyrrhonian scepticism in his magnum opus, the Science of Logic. Finally, I draw the consequences of Hegel’s solution to the problem for a specific attempt in the history of philosophy to secure a place for silence in ontological theory and practice. (shrink)

History has been disparaged since the late 19th century for not conforming to norms of scientific explanation. Nonetheless, as a matter of fact a work of history upends the regnant philosophical conception of science in the second part of the 20th century. Yet despite its impact, Kuhn’s Structure has failed to motivate philosophers to ponder why works of history should be capable of exerting rational influence on an understanding of philosophy of science. But all this constitutes (...) a great irony and a mystery. The mystery consists of the persistence of a complete lack of interest in efforts to theorize historical explanation. Fundamental questions regarding why an historical account could have any rational influence remain not merely unanswered, but unasked. The irony arises from the fact that analytic philosophy of history went into an eclipse where it remains until this day just around the time that the influence of Kuhn’s great work began to make itself felt. This paper highlights puzzles long ignored regarding the challenges a work of history managed to pose to the epistemic authority of science, and what this might imply generally for the place of philosophy of history vis-à-vis the problems of philosophy. (shrink)

From the beginning of history sounds have played a fundamentally important role in humanity’s development as ways of expression and of communication. However in contemporary western society, and indeed globally, we are experiencing an excess of speech and a relentless encouragement to expression. Such excess indicates a misunderstanding about what expression and dialogue should be. This condition encourages us to think about silence, solitude and contemplation and the role they might play in restoring the realm of personal understanding (...) of the Self and of one’s authentic experience of the Other. The purpose of this article is to explore the potency of a silence that arises from our participation in the world. We present first some ideas about silence as a human phenomenon. This is followed by an examination of silence and language, an investigation of silence in dialogue, and of its educational implications. The article concludes by emphasising the value of silence as potency in itself, assisting in recovering the expressive powers of language. We argue that it is important to understand the positive status of silence in order to recognise and avoid repressive speech and to introduce its potential for reflective learning. (shrink)

This volume is an interdisciplinary exploration of the modalities, meanings, and practices of silence in contemporary social discourse. How is silence treated in different cultures? In a globalized world, how is silence managed between and across cultures? Co-authored by a philosopher and an economist, the text draws on interviews with scholars and practitioners in fields as diverse as marine biology and African American history. International case studies are presented in operational contexts from the Black Lives Matter (...) movement to the creation of art installations to the struggles of transgender people in Southeast Asia. The authors examine the relationship between ethics and silence, and suggest strategies to transform social praxis through greater attention to silence. (shrink)

"Le philosophe chilien Javier Agüero Águila a consacré ses recherches à la psychanalyse, à la philosophie française contemporaine - avec une attention toute particulière à la pensée de Jacques Derrida -, à la « philosophie politique » : la violence, la démocratie et les droits de l'homme, l'hospitalité, la communauté et l'extranéité, la marginalité mais encore l'héritage, la mémoire, l'oubli, le pardon, etc. C'est autour du pardon que ce livre s'organise, engageant un débat sur le processus chilien de transition et (...) de démocratisation mis en oeuvre après la dictature militaire de Pinochet" (4ème de couv.). (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the question of divinity provides an important context for reading Heidegger’s initial two Nietzsche lecture courses (1936–37). First,I demonstrate how this often overlooked background can shed light upon the way in which Heidegger understood the meanings of will to power and eternal recurrence in this period. Second, I argue that the related themes of need (Not) and necessity (Notwendigkeit) in these lectures can be seen as an important framework for understanding the relation between Heidegger’s (...) early Nietzsche engagement and his Contributions to Philosophy (1936–38). (shrink)

According to many virtue ethicists, one of Aristotle’s important achievements was drawing a clear, qualitative distinction between the character traits of temperance and self-control. In an influential series of papers, John McDowell has argued that a clear distinction between temperance and self-control can be maintained only if one claims that, for the virtuous individual, considerations in favor of actions that are contrary to virtue are “silenced.” Some virtue ethicists reject McDowell’s silencing view as offering an implausible or inappropriate picture of (...) human virtue, but they argue that virtue can still be clearly distinguished from self-control by the absence of motivational conflict alone. In this paper, I argue that this criticism of McDowell is at most half right. If the silencing view is false, so that virtue can have a cost and the virtuous person can justifiably feel negative emotions in response to that cost, there is no principled reason why the virtuous person cannot also have motivational conflict. So, if one rejects the silencing view, then one must allow that the distinction between virtue and self-control is at most a matter of degree. (shrink)

"I cannot recommend this book highly enough!" Is this statement true or have I succeeded in lavishing enough praise on this book by writing this statement, making this statement in fact false? This is one way in which Adamson and Ganeri explain the view of the Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna that everything is empty. Nāgārjuna has to defend himself against the objection that if everything is "empty" then this surely also applies to his own view. He famously argues that he does (...) not have a thesis and provides the "silence" analogy, which I want to illustrate using my own example: if there is too much off-topic... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HumAnimality:The Silence of the AnimalDavid WoodDrawing Especially on Derrida and Agamben while looking over her shoulder at Foucault, Kalpana Seshadri’s central claim is that silence is not merely inscribed in discourse or in political life as the absence or negation of power, but can also be a site for transformation and resistance (Seshadri 2012). Derrida’s deconstruction weans us from any desire for a pure presence, whether in (...) speech or in silence, and draws us into the essential exteriorization he calls writing, which as gramme, trace, and program, opens onto the history and future of technology, and thereafter, the operations of power, in particular biopower, in the articulation of which Agamben in a way synthesizes Derrida and Foucault.Seshadri takes seriously the analogy between race discrimination and the human oppression of the animal. And yet the analogy is incomplete. Racial discrimination can be detected within unproblematically humanistic discourse and often in established legal concepts and frameworks, whereas speciesism needs to be more creative. Outcries over expressions such as “animal holocaust” show just how charged such analogical claims can be, and bring to the surface the complexities of their inscription in our political life and discourse.Seshadri focuses particularly on the paradoxes of autoimmunity (with Derrida) and sovereignty (with Agamben), the points at which the logics of life, power, and language break down, a process that can license both the reduction and curtailing of life (in slavery, in political oppression, and in factory farming), but which also allows for a different response. She writes of [End Page 193] “the possibilities that arise within regimes of domination to effectively annul, neutralize, or escape power in the very moment of its exercise” (Seshadri 2012, 19).Heidegger distinguishes between two reading strategies available to us when dealing with great thinkers, but which in effect are generalizable to anyone worth reading—first, frontal critique, going counter to the other, as he puts it, and second, going to their encounter (Heidegger 1976, 77). He adds that to take the latter path, one has to bring one’s own fundamental questions to the table. This may seem somewhat portentous, and it may seem too that one is merely using the other’s writing as a vehicle for exercising one’s own obsessions, but he is surely right. One’s own deep questions are never wholly personal, and there is no substitute for engagement with what is finally at stake.This is all to justify the line of response I am taking here. As I see it, Seshadri’s articulation of the “humAnimal” largely works on our conceptual protection and demarcation of the privilege of a certain concept of the human and the human subject, which, in the case of sovereignty, has a range of consequences that include but are far from limited to race and animal relations, and may even be distinctively applicable, as Spinoza or Deleuze might say, to what we imagine our bodies to be capable of. In this latter case what is being marked is not the plight of the animal but the impact of a certain discipline of life on the ways in which we live our own bodies. I am thinking in particular of that part of chapter 7, “HumAnimal Acts,” that deals with Philippe Petit’s high wire activity, in his particular his “agility” and, in a beautiful phrase, “exuberant body.”To be clear, this account is tied to Agamben’s rethinking of potentiality and Heidegger’s discussion of dynamis in Aristotle, each contributing to a renewed understanding of movement and life. For Seshadri, this also opens onto another kind of silence, an exuberant ethics, a politics of gesture, of “pure means,” creativity, the good life, the happy body, and so on. In the fascinating chapters 5 and 6 on the “Wild Child,” the upshot is a certain discombobulation, making the Human/Animal distinction tremble, as Derrida would say, arguably helping us live our humanity less dogmatically as well as helping us toward a more complex understanding of the various species of silence. But in each of these cases it could be said that while the shape and tenor of human animation is tweaked, critiqued, and deepened... (shrink)

Hope is crucial human agency, but its fragility grounds a substantive challenge to Christian belief. It is not clear how a perfectly loving God could permit despairinducing experiences of divine silence. Drawing upon a distinctively Christian psychology of hope, this paper seeks to address this challenge. I contend that divine silence can act as a corrective to misplaced natural hopes. But there are risks in God’s choice to allow a person to lose all natural hope. Thus, if God (...) is perfectly loving, God ought to find a way to demonstrate goodness to those who are tempted by theological despair. I argue that the Church demonstrates God’s goodness through its merciful care and hope for the afflicted. The local community can act to sustain or recover a person’s capacity to remain open to the gift of hope even in the midst of divine silence. (shrink)

Résumé Au cours des soixante-quinze dernières années, plusieurs traités internationaux ont été adoptés dans le but de promouvoir les droits universels des êtres humains, dont le principe d’égalité homme-femme. Pourtant, de nombreuses violations des _droits de l’homme_ commises contre les femmes en raison de leur sexe perdurent à l’échelle internationale. L’objet de cet article est de répondre à la question suivante: Y a-t-il une marginalisation des femmes et des problématiques qui leur sont propres en droit international? Notre article examine cette (...) question par l’exploration de la présence ou de l’absence de la « femme » en droit international, partant à la « recherche » de cette dernière. Dans un premier temps, nous étudions le silence concernant les femmes dans l’espace temporel sémiotique juridique qu’est le traité et la transmutation du langage français-anglais dans les dispositions pertinentes de la Charte internationale des droits de l’homme. Dans un deuxième temps, nous analysons la marginalisation de problématiques propres aux femmes dans la Charte internationale des droits de l’homme et la Convention sur l’élimination de toutes les formes de discrimination à l’égard des femmes (CEDAW). Nous procédons à une analyse sémiotique des traités internationaux dans le cadre de la théorie de la « signifique » développée par l’éminente sémioticienne Victoria Welby, notamment sa « Triade de Signification », que nous transposons dans le domaine juridique. En dernier lieu, nous proposons des réformes par la déconstruction du paradigme actuel des « _droits de l’homme de la femme_ » à l’échelle internationale. (shrink)

Abstract: If anger is the emotion of injustice, and if most injustices have prominent epistemic dimensions, then where is the anger in epistemic injustice? Despite the question my task is not to account for the lack of attention to anger in epistemic injustice discussions. Instead, I argue that a particular texture of transformative anger – a knowing resistant anger – offers marginalized knowers a powerful resource for countering epistemic injustice. I begin by making visible the anger that saturates the silences (...) that epistemic injustices repeatedly manufacture and explain the obvious: silencing practices produce angry experiences. I focus on tone policing and tone vigilance to illustrate the relationship between silencing and angry knowledge management. Next, I use María Lugones’s pluralist account of anger to bring out the epistemic dimensions of knowing resistant anger in a way that also calls attention to their histories and felt textures. The final section draws on feminist scholarship about the transformative power of angry knowledge to suggest how it might serve as a resource for resisting epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Early in the history of liberalism, its most important proponents were concerned with freedom of religion. As polities and individuals now accept a dizzying array of religions, this has receded to the background for most theorists. It nonetheless remains a concern. Freedom of speech is a similar concern and very much in the foreground for theorists looking at the current state of academia. In this essay, I argue that inappropriate limits to freedom of religion and inappropriate limits to freedom (...) of speech—especially in the form of de-platforming on college campuses—both have, as one of their effects, what I call harms of silence. This means we ought not have those limits, so should seek to change them where they exist. (shrink)

The principle that is, for Plotinus, both origin and goal of all things is labelled, for convenience, the One, or—equivalently—the Good. Plotinus is clear that even these titles may be misleading, since this principle is not one thing among many, nor can we even truly say that it exists. Nothing that we can say of it is really true, and we cannot ever strictly know or understand it. It must seem to follow that, having nothing true to say of it, (...) nor any way of grasping its nature, we had better simply be silent, as Plotinus agrees. This does not stop him from continuing... (shrink)

The metaphysics of presence has led not only to the closure of rationalized systems that define modernity, but also to what can appear as its opposite, the freely flowing movement of information (and of capital) characteristic of the post-modern “de-centered” world. Ideas, after all, require a depth dimension that ultimately proves irreconcilable with the one-dimensionality of the purely present. It is for this reason that the rejection of metaphysics (which is only the final consequence of the metaphysics of presence) fails (...) to solve our dilemma. An alternative strategy is to attempt the recovery of the living heart of metaphysics, its open and ecstatic gaze, rather than its final consequence, the constrictive will to closure, determination, and power. This is the genuinely Socratic possibility, a metaphysics not of presence but of radical transcendence. To clarify that possibility, it is necessary to show how Socrates himself was characterized less by practical and political concerns than by a metaphysical vision directed not to presence but to the unknowable region that opens with death. Socrates’ irony and courage have the same source, what I call a metaphysics of “silence.”. (shrink)

In this book, Sarah Mayberry Scott analyzes contemporary films to investigate how the history and values of the Deaf world provides opportunities for how the concepts of voice, silence, and listening can be expanded to include a diverse plurality of embodied experiences.

The responses to this discovery, in the press and elsewhere, seem to focus on the act of passing judgment, a judgment that reopens with some urgency the question of the ethical implications of de Man’s work and, by extension, of the whole school of critical approach known as “deconstruction.”The discourse of moral judgment takes as its target three distinct domains of apparent ethical misconduct:1. the collaborationist political activities themselves;2. de Man’s apparent erasure of their memory—his radical “forgetting” of his early (...) past;3. the silence that de Man chose to keep about his past: the absence of public confession and public declaration of remorse.The question of ethics thus seems to be linked to the separate questions of the nature of political activities, of the nature of memory, and of the nature of silence. It is judged unethical, of course, to engage in acts that lent support to Germany’s wartime position; but it is also judged unethical to forget; and unethical, furthermore, to keep silent in relation to the war and to the Holocaust. The silence is interpreted as a deliberate concealment, a suppression of accountability that can only mean a denial of responsibility on de Man’s part. Shoshana Felman, the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale University, is the author of The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages , Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis , and Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture: Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight . She is also the editor of Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading—Otherwise . She is currently working on a book entitled Testimony in History, Literature and Psychoanalysis. (shrink)

I focus in this response on what I take to be Bernasconi's proposal to dissolve and reframe moral and political philosophies around the problematic of slavery. Insofar as, in the wake of Afro-diasporic and Black radical thought, it offers us one version of an argument that has now touched virtually all aspects of modern European philosophy, how are we to understand the specific orientations of Bernasconi's approach? Reading Bernasconi's article, I comment on the following points: (1) the notion of (...) “absence” or “silence” about slavery, (2) Bernasconi's focus on methodology rather than individual moral or political responsibility, and (3) his shift away from canonical philosophical figures. To conclude, I open further questions regarding the relationships between the “material” approach to the history of philosophy he advocates in this article and the project of a “critical philosophy of race” he has defended elsewhere. (shrink)

This paper investigates critically the approaches to picturebooks as used in the history of philosophy for children movement. Our concern with picturebooks rests mainly on Morteza Khosronejad's broader criticism that children's literature has been treated instrumentally by early founders of P4C, the consequence of which is abolishing the independent voice of this literature. As such it demands that we scrutinize the position of children's literature in the history of this educational program, as well as other genres and (...) forms, including picturebooks as a highly valued artistic-literary form to educationalists. In our inquiry, we probe, therefore, the transition of approaches to picturebooks concomitantly with the investigation of the transition of approaches to children's literature. This research evinces that some later scholars and practitioners of P4C have departed significantly not only from Lipman's approach to children's literature and picturebooks, but also from his conceptualization of childhood and philosophy for children. Meanwhile, it demonstrates that in spite of P4C scholars' taking effective steps to address children's literature in general and picturebooks in particular, there are some steps for them to take in order to fully recognize this literature as an independent branch of knowledge and picturebooks as artistic-literary unique works. While revealing the limitations and paradoxes that P4C scholars continue to deal with, in this article, we see Khosronejad's earlier idea as a suggestion to overcome the instrumentalization of children's literature and picturebooks in P4C. Fundamental dialogue with children's literature theorists particularly those of picturebooks will open new horizons to the realization of our suggestion. (shrink)

Ronald Rubin's new book provides a refreshingly even-handed interpretation and analysis of Descartes's Meditations. Rubin skillfully employs short expositions of Latin philosophical terminology, textual analysis, and contemporary analytic method to arrive at a largely sympathetic understanding of this seminal work. But his development and employment of the heuristic device of the "Demon's Advocate" surely sets this work apart from the other, vast literature on the Meditations.The first three chapters lay the groundwork for Rubin's study. Chapters 1–2 examine Descartes's use of (...) the opposing terms of 'doubt' and 'certainty' and shows how this is an opposition between the vacillation and stability of belief. Rubin's point is that Descartes establishes doubt in order to achieve a stable system of beliefs. This commonplace conclusion is, however, nicely augmented by Rubin's development of the "Demon's Advocate" in chapter three. In this chapter, Rubin imagines that Descartes the author has two personae in the Meditations. The one is Descartes himself—the seeker of stability—while the other is the Demon's Advocate, who holds all of the same beliefs as Descartes but. (shrink)

This essay addresses the following questions: How does the meta-sensory function of koine aisthesis relate to its other functions? How can a meta-level arise from the immanence of sensation? Can we give an account of meta-sensation that doesn’t assume a transcendental plane? My contention is that the representationalist model doesn’t apply to Aristotle and that Aristotle offers an alternative that is worth exploring. I propose to interpret the meta-sensory power of the koine aisthesis in terms of the sensing of the (...) limits of perception. The sensing of the limit of sensation is the sensing of sensation itself qua potentiality as exemplified by Aristotle’s observations on the experience of seeing darkness or hearing silence. If it is so, sensing-that-I-sense doesn’t require an appeal to a transcendent faculty and arises from the immanent experience of sensation itself. (shrink)

DNA methylation is a quintessential epigenetic mechanism. Widely considered a stable regulator of gene silencing, it represents a form of “molecular braille,” chemically printed on DNA to regulate its structure and the expression of genetic information. However, there was a time when methyl groups simply existed in cells, mysteriously speckled across the cytosine building blocks of DNA. Why was the code of life chemically modified, apparently by “no accident of enzyme action” (Wyatt 1951 )? If all cells in a body (...) share the same genome sequence, how do they adopt unique functions and maintain stable developmental states? Do cells remember? In this historical perspective, I review epigenetic history and principles and the tools, key scientists, and concepts that brought us the synthesis and discovery of prokaryotic and eukaryotic methylated DNA. Drawing heavily on Gerard Wyatt’s observation of asymmetric levels of methylated DNA across species, as well as to a pair of visionary 1975 DNA methylation papers, 5-methylcytosine is connected to DNA methylating enzymes in bacteria, the maintenance of stable cellular states over development, and to the regulation of gene expression through protein-DNA binding. These works have not only shaped our views on heritability and gene regulation but also remind us that core epigenetic concepts emerged from the intrinsic requirement for epigenetic mechanisms to exist. Driven by observations across prokaryotic and eukaryotic worlds, epigenetic systems function to access and interpret genetic information across all forms of life. Collectively, these works offer many guiding principles for our epigenetic understanding for today, and for the next generation of epigenetic inquiry in a postgenomics world. (shrink)

Guide I: 68 presents two challenges to Maimonides’ negative theology. In I: 50–60 Maimonides insists that we cannot ascribe positiveattributes to God; however, in I: 68, he affirms that God is intellect. Second, I: 56 and III: 20 assert that divine and human knowledge have nothing in common; “knowledge” is a purely equivocal term. However, I: 68 emphasizes that both divine and human knowledge exhibit a unity between subject, object, and the act of intellection. Guide I: 53 and I: 58 (...) offer a resolution to the first contradiction: intellect can be seen as an attribute of action. Guide I: 57 offers a resolution to the second problem: Maimonides describes a similarity between God’s knowledge and ours through “looseness of expression” [tasāmuh], which directs the mind towards a mystery it cannot fully grasp. Looseness of expression, attributes of action, and the way of negation ensure that the being we worship is truly God, and make room for genuine religious experience. (shrink)

In the history of culture there are "linking" themes, a common interest in which sometimes brings quite distant periods closer together. One such theme that affects the contemporary understanding of medieval culture is, in our view, the problem of speech and silence as types of relation to reality based, respectively, on its intelligible differentiation and its total acceptance as such.

This volume is a contribution to the on-going debate over Heidegger’s Nazi involvement. Among those who would represent this debate juridically, there now seems to be general agreement concerning the quid facti. Lang does not claim to “disclose new information about Heidegger’s history,... or to draw on material previously unpublished”. Instead, by taking a particular perspective on already available information, he presumes to “shed new light on... [Heidegger’s] relation to Nazism as well as on the broader connection between Heidegger’s (...) political stance and his ‘professional’ philosophical thought”. Specifically, Lang “looks at Heidegger ‘through’ the Jewish Question”, and the fact of Heidegger’s virtual silence about it. He argues that this silence is neither accidental nor insignificant, but expressive of a basic pattern, according to which Heidegger’s political persona and philosophical work converge. This is a weak version of the thesis that “Heidegger’s political views and conduct were malign and that they were imbedded in his ‘deeper’ philosophical work”. It does not “assert a necessary or intrinsic connection between the philosophy and the politics,” but only a “dispositional relation”. The claim is that Heidegger’s approaches to philosophical and political matters are not logically implicated but, so to speak, mutually attuned, consonant with the whole tenor and tone of his thinking and person. To support this dispositional thesis, Lang presents corroborating evidence of Heidegger’s antisemitism. (shrink)

Annotation: This is a comprehensive and psychological history of art from a variety of cultures by one of the eminent thinkers of the twentieth century.

This paper investigates the contexts on the grand narrative and the memory manipulation of the media in the case of Soviet Korean migrants. The study focuses on the forced migration of Soviet Koreans and how their memories were covered up by dominant Soviet narratives. Specifically, the paper explores LeninKichi, a Korean newspaper that became the mouth of institutional power. The research brings to light part of the history of Soviet Koreans migrants, whose memories were buried by a socio-cultural system (...) that encouraged narratives of victory and progress through an oppositional symbolism of glorious patriots versus enemies and traitors. (shrink)

Ethics in the USSR revived in the middle of the twentieth century after more than twenty years of silence. The impetus for the development of research and teaching in this area was given by the supreme power, which considered ethics as one of the more effective tools of state propaganda, corresponding to the new social realities. But pretty soon, the very logic of research immersion in the subject required ethicists to deepen the philosophical and normative analysis of morality. This (...) ultimately led to the revision of the postulates of orthodox Soviet social science and to the formation of a strict moral theory within its framework. The latter, by the very fact of its appearance, called into question the agenda of moralizing ideologization. The renewal of Soviet ethics proceeded in several directions, but in theoretical perspective, the key one was the turn from understanding morality as a form of ideological superstructure (which was dogmatically asserted in historical materialism), to understanding it as a way of regulating human behavior with specific functional characteristics. Today one can trace that transition by a number of intermediate steps in the interpretation of morality, the reconstruction of which, based on the texts of the 1950s to early 1970s, is of interest not only in the context of the history of ideas, but also in terms of the development of the methodology of ethical research and understanding of how a rigorous moral theory can be formed. Some episodes of the history of Soviet ethics are relevant today as examples of emancipated thought and intellectual opposition to the domination of state ideology. (shrink)

The digital space has created a new form of public space: one which provides a dangerous blending of public protest, mob justice, and acquiescence. It offers transformative beliefs a voice while mob justice encourages sanctions against (and the erasure of) detractors. This article argues that the digital is not antithetical to the public sphere but has instead generated a ‘false public.’ It argues that hyperliberal illiberalism acts as a form of social control that triggers a Spiral of Silence, an (...) intolerance of opposing ideologies and a fracturing of the public sphere into macro- and micropublics. This article argues for a return to both free expression and meaningful debate which are fundamental to the proper exercise of democracy. (shrink)

This essay investigates the concluding myth of Plato’s Republic, as well as the section on anankē and the chōra in the Timaeus, to demonstrate that the maternal figure of Necessity (Anankē), appearing in the myth of Er as the ground of logos, serves as a fecund site for an engagement with the question of sexual difference in Plato’s works. Feminist thinkers have long noted that the image of the originary, powerful mother in ancient myth works as an ambivalent surface for (...) the projection of masculine desires and anxieties, fantasies and transferential projections. In this essay, I draw on both Platonic and feminist scholarship to examine the imaginal architectonics of the scene of Necessity in the myth of Er. By comparing this maternal figuration of anankē with its appearance in the Timaeus alongside the errant, maternal chōra, I argue that the conclusion of the Republic invites a feminist mythmaking that can generatively engage debates around language and sexual difference in the works of Plato. (shrink)