There has been an excellent series of formative articles centring on Bernard Stiegler (1952-2020) as an inspiration to pedagogical thought; this is a summative article written from the perspective of after his death. Stiegler argued that education is ontologically crucial to human development, wherein technics or the ‘not-experienced-condition(s)-necessary-for-experience’ are crucial to humanity’s ability to create its own existence. Technics make possible the technologies underpinning contemporary Anthropocentric existence. While entropy poses the cosmological threat of death to life, technics supports negentropy or (...) the collecting and marshalling of energy opposed to entropy. Education is a crucial means of social negentropy, however all human agency is characterized by the pharmakon of more entropy or increased negentropy. The tension is inevitable in the pharmakon between on the one side, care and cure; and on the other, poison and death. In this article, we ask: ‘Given his suicide, what sort of pharmakon was Stiegler for himself and for us?’1 The authorial “I,” ‘Bernard Stiegler’ is no longer a living critic of social entropy or of proletarization and ‘technoscience’; what do we now make of his oeuvre for education? We will point to his inversions and purposeful mis-interpretations of Heidegger and Derrida as crucial to his oeuvre. Stiegler’s phenomenal being has ended; what technics have been strengthened and specifically: ‘What now of education?’. (shrink)

This book is framed as a dialogue, between Hugo Letiche's iconoclastic appeals to demontrate (as in a demo) for pedagogy/philosophy/politics of (re-)territoralization (as in the demos), and Jacques Rancière's call for dissensus and a new sensibility (le partage du sensible) that may lead to critical democratization. Writing here are: Asmund Born, Damian O'Doherty, Joanna Latimer, Hugo letiche, Geoff Lightfoot, Simon Lilley, Alphonso Lingis, Stephen Linstead, Garance Maréchal, Jean-Luc Moriceau, Rolland Munro, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Peter pelzer, Yvon Pesqueux, Burkard (...) Sievers, Isabelle Stengers, and Niels Thyge Thygesen. The authors explore learning and education, research and investigation, writing and practice, in the context of organization and of organizing. They champion, affect, hope, poetic narrative, slow science, justice, the commons, engagement and fairness. (shrink)

Although it is argued that social justice is a core concern for the discipline, nursing has not generally played a leadership role in the responses to many of the greatest social problems of our time. These include the accelerated rate of climate change, pandemic threats, systemic racism, growing health and social inequities, and the regulation of new technologies to ensure an equitable future ‘for all.’ In nursing codes of ethics, administration, education, policies, and practice, social justice is often claimed to (...) be a core value, yet it is rarely contextualized by philosophical or theoretical underpinnings. It appears that nurses’ commitment to social justice may stem more from a penchant for ‘doing good’ than an attempt to explore, understand, and enact what is meant by social justice from an ontological, epistemological, and methodological perspective. We contend that the dominance of a human science perspective in nursing contributes to a narrow definition of health and relegates many issues central to social justice to the margins of nurses’ care. In this article, we explore how the focus on ‘the human’ in the human science perspective may not only be limiting the capacity of nurses to develop strategies to adequately address social injustice, but in some instances, direct nurses to contribute to their very reproduction. We suggest that a critical interrogation of this human‐centric hegemony can identify avenues of rupture and introduce posthumanism as an additional philosophical perspective for consideration to help bridge the human‐social divide. (shrink)

By examining an exemplar sample of mental health nursing educational policies and related legislation, in this article, we trace the discursive production of madness as an “othered” identity category. We engage in a critical discourse analysis of mental health nursing education in Canada, drawing on provincial and federal policies and legislation as the main sources of data. Theoretically framed by critical posthumanism and mad studies, this article outlines how the mad subjectivity becomes decontextualized out of its identity‐based understanding and recontextualized (...) as an inferior category of “the human,” circulating within discourses of pedagogy, economics, law, and psychiatry. The article maps the intertextual nexus of the discourse of mental health nursing education, making visible the complex, the arbitrary, and the sometimes‐contradictory nature of the discipline's grappling with identity‐based mental health concepts. We close with several implications for nursing policy, education, and practice. (shrink)

Deconstruction and pragmatism constitute two of the major intellectual influences on the contemporary theoretical scene; influences personified in the work of Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty. Both Rortian pragmatism, which draws the consequences of post-war developments in Anglo-American philosophy, and Derridian deconstruction, which extends and troubles the phonomenological and Heideggerian influence on the Continental tradition, have hitherto generally been viewed as mutually exclusive philosophical language games. The purpose of this volume is to bring deconstruction and pragmatism into critical confrontation with (...) one another through staging a debate between Derrida and Rorty, itself based on discussions that took place at the College International de Philosophie in Paris in 1993. The ground for this debate is layed out in introductory papers by Simon Critchley and Ernesto Laclau, and the remainder of the volume records Derrida's and Rorty's responses to each other's work. Chantal Mouffe gives an overview of the stakes of this debate in a helpful preface. (shrink)

Broad in its geographic scope and yet grounded in original archival research, this book situates the inception of modern aesthetic theory – the philosophical analysis of art and beauty - in theological contexts that are crucial to explaining why it arose. Simon Grote presents seminal aesthetic theories of the German and Scottish Enlightenments as outgrowths of a quintessentially Enlightenment project: the search for a natural 'foundation of morality' and a means of helping naturally self-interested human beings transcend their own (...) self-interest. This conclusion represents an important alternative to the standard history of aesthetics as a series of preludes to the achievements of Immanuel Kant, as well as a reinterpretation of several canonical figures in the German and Scottish Enlightenments. It also offers a foundation for a transnational history of the Enlightenment without the French philosophes at its centre, while solidly endorsing historians' growing reluctance to call the Enlightenment a secularising movement. (shrink)

The chapters in is collection examine various aspects of JJ Rousseau's work as it relates to the concept of desire.

Levinas's idea of ethics as a relation of responsibility to the other person has become a highly influential and recognizable position across a wide range of academic and non-academic fields. Simon Critchley's aim in this book is to provide a less familiar, more troubling, and truer account of Levinas's work. He proposes a new dramatic method for reading Levinas, where the fundamental problem of his work is seen as the attempt to escape from the tragedy of Heidegger's philosophy and (...) the way in which that philosophy shaped political events in the last century. (shrink)

Beginning with a critical examination of the humanist assumptions of critical ethnography, this article interrogates and surfaces problems with the ontological and epistemological orientations of this research methodology. In drawing on exemplar empirical data from an arts‐based project, the article demonstrates the limitations in the humanist‐based qualitative research approach and advances a postdualist, postrepresentationalist direction for critical ethnography called entangled ethnography. Using data from a larger study that examined the perspectives of racialized mad artists, what is demonstrated in this inquiry (...) is that the entanglement of bodies, objects, and meaning‐making practices is central to working with the ontologically excluded, such as those who find themselves in various states of disembodiment and/or corporeal and psychic distribution. We propose the redevelopment of critical ethnography, extended by entanglement theory (a critical posthuman theory), and suggest that for it to be an inclusive methodology, critical ethnography must be conceptualized as in the process of becoming and always in regeneration, open to critique, extension, and redevelopment. (shrink)

The attempt to pursue philosophy in the name of phenomenology is one of the most significant and important developments in twentieth century thought. In this bold and innovative book, Simon Glendinning introduces some of its major figures, and demonstrates that its ongoing strength and coherence is to be explained less by what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called the 'unity' of its 'manner of thinking' and more by what he called its 'unfinished nature'. Beginning with a discussion of the nature of phenomenology, (...) Glendinning explores the changing landscape of phenomenology in key texts by Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Derrida. Focusing on the different ways in which each philosopher has responded to and transformed the legacy of phenomenology, Glendinning shows that the richness of this legacy lies not in the formation of a distinctive movement or school but in a remarkable capacity to make fertile philosophical breakthroughs. Important topics such as the nature of phenomenological arguments, the critique of realism and idealism, ontology, existentialism, perception, ethics and the other are also closely examined. Through a re-evaluation of the development of phenomenology Glendinning traces the ruptures and dislocations of philosophy that, in an age dominated by science, strive constantly to renew our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. Clearly and engagingly written, In the Name of Phenomenology is essential reading for students of phenomenology and contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Many environmental scientists, scholars and activists characterise our situation as one of alienation from nature, but this notion can easily seem meaningless or irrational. In this book, Simon Hailwood critically analyses the idea of alienation from nature and argues that it can be a useful notion when understood pluralistically. He distinguishes different senses of alienation from nature pertaining to different environmental contexts and concerns, and draws upon a range of philosophical and environmental ideas and themes including pragmatism, eco-phenomenology, climate (...) change, ecological justice, Marxism and critical theory. His novel perspective shows that different environmental concerns - both anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric - can dovetail, rather than compete with, each other, and that our alienation from nature need not be something to be regretted or overcome. His book will interest a broad readership in environmental philosophy and ethics, political philosophy, geography and environmental studies. (shrink)

This is an essential guide to an thinker. Frederic Jameson sees Lyotard as responding to a contemporary "crisis of representation" in the sciences -- a crisis which calls into question "an essentially realistic epistemology, which conceives of representation as the reproduction, for subjectivity, of an objectivity that lies outside it -- projects a mirror theory of knowledge and art, whose fundamental evaluative categories are those of adequacy, accuracy, and Truth itself.".

Literature has an ethical obligation to respond to the climate change crisis, and scholars have a responsibility to understand how these responses work. Neither the humanities nor the sciences have a good record when it comes to encouraging people to limit their desires, their consumption, or their growth. While there may be genetic reasons for this failure, calls for humanity to limit itself need better responses. Literature can help us to respond better to climate change, but only if we reconceptualize (...) narrative and accord to it the importance it once held as a source not only of entertainment but of knowledge necessary for our very survival. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with two senses of disowning in the context of climate change and human modification of nature generally. In one of these senses disowning is something to be encouraged; but in the other sense discussed here, disowning is to be discouraged. Both raise problems for liberal theory. There is no space here to do little more than indicate some of these problems; consequently the paper is mainly negative and critical in tone. Although I focus mainly on the (...) other sense, I begin in the first part of the paper with the kind of disowning to be discouraged. This is the tendency to deny, or ignore, the responsibility we have for – and in that way ‘disown’ – the world we are in fact in the process of making including its climatic component. The other sense of disowning I go on to discuss mainly in relation to Hegel’s account of property. (shrink)

The Repugnant Conclusion and its paradoxes pose a significant problem for outcome evaluation. Derek Parfit has suggested that we may be able to resolve this problem by accepting a view he calls ‘Perfectionism’, which gives lexically superior value to ‘the best things in life’. In this paper, I explore perfectionism and its potential to solve this problem. I argue that perfectionism provides neither a sufficient means of avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion nor a full explanation of its repugnance. This is because (...) even lives that are ‘barely worth living’ may contain the best things in life if they also contain sufficient ‘bad things’, such as suffering or frustration. Therefore, perfectionism can only fully explain or avoid the Repugnant Conclusion if combined with other claims, such as that bad things have an asymmetrical value relative to many good things. This combined view faces the objection that any such asymmetry implies Parfit’s ‘Ridiculous Conclusion’. However, I argue that perfectionism itself faces very similar objections, and that these are question-begging against both views. Finally, I show how the combined view that I propose not only explains and avoids the Repugnant Conclusion but also allows us to escape many of its paradoxes as well. (shrink)

Protest against the mitigation of climate change has become a core issue for right-wing populism across the globe. Such politics can mobilize a widespread normalization of ecological destructiveness. Drawing on Frankfurt School critical theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, this article argues that climate protection provokes such outrage because it appears to negate all the sacrifices that had to be made for the world of work. Thus, the normalization of destructiveness relates to a fear of uselessness common to the modern subject. This (...) fear is taken up by the right-wing anti-climate protest and turned into something positive to be enjoyed. The phenomenon is illustrated by interviews with Swiss construction workers about their experiences with climate change. (shrink)

En el estudio de los partidos y movimientos contemporáneos de extrema derecha hay una laguna reiteradamente enunciada por los estudiosos de la materia: el análisis de su sustrato ideológico. La razón principal de esta situación radica en la heterogeneidad, la fragmentación, el oportunismo y la ocultación planificada característicos de estos movimientos extremistas. En este artículo se pretende realizar un análisis de elementos fundamentales de la ideología del Front National recurriendo al modelo de Totalismo Ideológico formulado por ROBERT JAY LIFTON como (...) herramienta heurística de reducción de la complejidad. Ello nos permitirá comprobar que el discurso del Front National agrupa, en diferente grado pero de un modo claro, todos los componentes que posibilitan calificarlo de discurso y movimiento totalista. (shrink)