What is the role of conscious experience in the epistemology of perceptual knowledge: how should we characterise what is going on in seeing that o is F in order to illuminate the contribution of seeing o to their status as cases of knowing that o is F? My proposal is that seeing o involves conscious acquaintance with o itself, the concrete worldly source of the truth that o is F, in a way that may make it evident to the subject (...) that o is an instance of ‘x is F’ as she understands this, and hence evident that o is F. Seeing that o is F is thus a way of its being evident that o is F and is therefore a way of knowing that o is F. (shrink)

The most productive theoretical contribution I can make to this topic is to explain my thoughts about the by now rather traditional Freudo-Marxist project and to assess Lacanianism in that light. It will be understood that in this form which approximates that of the interview – my positions will be little more than opinions, a form of ideological expression I don’t much care for. Nor will I even try to give an opinion of Slavoj Žižek’s extraordinary production, which I admire, (...) learn from, and above all consider energizing, this last being certainly the ultimate aim of intellectual work. (shrink)

I don’t conceive of this as a debate with Burke, but if I did, I would be tempted to use the old debater's formula: there are many ways in which the word ideology can be used, most of them defensible, but there are two ways in which the word ought never be used, and that is to designate "value systems" on one hand or "false consciousness" on the other. The first meaning folds us back into the perspective of the history (...) of ideas, which it was the aim of the concept of ideology to spring us out of in the first place. The second betrays a vulgar Marxist approach to culture which it is the task of any genuinely contemporary Marxism to liquidate: indeed, from the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness to the Frankfurt School, from Sartre to Althusser and Macherey, there are a number of very different Marxian conceptions of ideology available today which have nothing in common with the old notion of ideology as a "false consciousness." And since I have gone this far, I will add something I didn't mention in my essay, that when Burke documents his own use of the Marxian category of ideology, unfortunately he turns out most often to have meant our old friend "false consciousness," so unavoidable a part of the baggage of thirties Marxism. Fredric R. Jameson is the editor, with Stanley Aronowitz and John Brenkmam, of Social Text and the author of Marxism and Form, The Prison House of Language, and, forthcoming, The Political Unconscious: Studies in the Ideology of Form. "The Symbolic Interference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis" Critical Inquiry 4 [Spring 1978]: 507-23) was presented in an earlier version at the English Institute in September 1977 as one of a group of studies in reevaluation of the work of Kenneth Burke. (shrink)

For a Ruthless Critique of All that Exists takes as its point of departure two profound and interrelated phenomena. The first is the pervasive sense of what Mark Fisher had called "capitalist realism", in which (to cite the famous expression variously attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek) it is easier to imagine the end of the world than then end of capitalism. As Jameson in particular has noted, "perhaps this is due to some weakness in our imaginations," (...) and the attenuation of the imaginative function in cultural criticism has far-reaching implications for the organization and reformation of institutions more generally. This manifests itself as a waning of speculative or theoretical energy, which in turn leads to a general capitulation to the tyranny of "what is," the actually existing state of affairs, and the preemptive disavowal of alternative possibilities. Connected to this is the second phenomenon: the prevalent tendency in literary and cultural criticism over the past 30 or more years to eschew critical theory and even critique itself, while championing approaches to cultural study that emphasize surface reading, thin description, ordinary language philosophy, object-oriented ontology, and post-critique. Together these forms of anticritical and antitheoretical criticism have constituted a tendency that has in its various incarnations come to dominate the humanities and other areas of higher education in recent years. The latter has served to reinforce the former, and the result has been to align literary and cultural criticism with the broad-based forces of neoliberalism whose influence has so deleteriously transformed not only higher education but the whole of society at large. Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that, in order to counter these trends and empower the imagination, the time is ripe for "a ruthless critique of all that exists," to borrow a phrase from the young Marx. This book is intended as a provocation, at once a polemic and a call to action for cultural critics. (shrink)

It is most tempting to think of Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future in utopian terms, as a contribution to the history of utopian philosophy represented by Theodor Adorno, Louis Marin and Herbert Mar- cuse, if not Hegel, Marx and Jameson himself. To trace the line of utopian ideas in their works is to be seduced by Jameson’s own project, which has, 1 since Marxism and Form , mapped the utopian continuities that exist between an assortment of (...) Marxist writers. Marxism and Form stands as a seminal beginning to Jameson’s utopian project, introducing the work of un- 2 translated German writers, including Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse, to a generation of Anglophonic scholars. One reviewer went so far as to recommend the book to English-speaking Germans to clear up the muddy phrases of Gyorgy LukÆcs and Ernst Bloch, claiming that Jameson presented a much more articulate version of their ideas! There is no better demonstration of the recognition effected upon the Marxist corpus by 3 Jameson’s intellectual clarity than the conclusion to Aesthetics and Politics , in which the hostility between LukÆcs and Bloch is transformed into two sides of the same politics. Indeed, the very meaning of Jameson’s Marxism comes about from just such theoretical sublimations as these, as 4 disparate European projects are unified both intellectually and politically. The sheer synthetic power of Jameson’s writing makes it difficult to think about his writing in terms that aren’t Jamesonian, the range of his project transforming Marxist literary criticism into a totality. (shrink)

Fredric Jameson's exacting essay, "The Symbolic Interference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis" Critical Inquiry 4 [Spring 1978]: 507-23) moves me to comment. I shall apply one of my charges of my title to him, he applies the other to me. The matter is further complicated by the fact that there is a distance at which they are hard to tell apart. For any expression of something implies a repression of something else, and any statement that goes only so (...) far is analyzable as serving to forestall a statement that goes farther. And I can't go as far as I think if I share with Jameson what I take to be his over-investment in the term "ideology." . . . the line between the implicit and the explicit being so wavering, there are many cases where the distinctions between conscious and unconscious become correspondingly blurred. But the kind of methodological repression that is implicit in Jameson's hermeneutic model can be wasteful beyond necessity. For it encourages him to be so precociously prompt in his "rereading" of a text that he doesn't allow his readers to read a single sentence of it. He doesn't tell them what Sinn, in its own terms, my text has on the subject of "ideology," "mystification," and the "unconscious." Instead, he cuts corners and settles for a report of the Bedeutung that it has for him. In this case the procedure is particularly wasteful because Jameson is highly intelligent, and if it weren't for the bad leads of his models he's the last man in the world who would have to be so bluntly inaccurate as he is on this occasion. I believe that he could put me through quite a trying ordeal if he could have but kept on the subject and pursued me accordingly. Kenneth Burke's previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes" , "Post-Poesque Derivation of a Terministic Cluster" , " Motion/ Action" , and a hermeneutic fantasy, "A Critical Load . . ." . He would like us to mention that William Willeford, the interlocutor of a section in " Motion/ Action," is a professor of English at the University of Washington. (shrink)

Using Fredric Jameson’s theory of the ideologeme to trace representations of working- and white working-class characters through a selection of contemporary literary texts, this article shows how t...

In conventional identity politics subjective differences are understood negatively, as gaps to be overcome, as lacks of sameness, as evidence of failed or incomplete unity. In _Alterity Politics _Jeffrey T. Nealon argues instead for a concrete and ethical understanding of community, one that requires response, action, and performance instead of passive resentment and unproductive mourning for a whole that cannot be attained. While discussing the work of others who have refused to thematize difference in terms of the possibility or impossibility (...) of sameness—Levinas, Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Zizek, Jameson, Heidegger, Bakhtin—Nealon argues that ethics is constituted as inexorable affirmative response to different identities, not through an inability to understand or totalize the other. _Alterity Politics_ combines this theoretical itinerary with crucial discussions of specific and diverse sites of literary and cultural production—the work of William S. Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, Andy Warhol, Ishmael Reed, Rush Limbaugh, and Vincent Van Gogh—along with analyses of the social formation of subjects as found in identity politics, and in multicultural and whiteness studies. In the process, Nealon takes on a wide variety of issues including white male anger, the ethical questions raised by drug addiction, the nature of literary meaning, and the concept of “becoming-black.” In seeking to build an ethical structure around poststructuralist discourse and to revitalize the applied use of theoretical concepts to notions of performative identity, _Alterity Politics_ marks a decisive intervention in literary theory, cultural studies, twentieth-century philosophy, and performance studies. (shrink)

The use of multiple means of determination to “triangulate” on the existence and character of a common phenomenon, object, or result has had a long tradition in science but has seldom been a matter of primary focus. As with many traditions, it is traceable to Aristotle, who valued having multiple explanations of a phenomenon, and it may also be involved in his distinction between special objects of sense and common sensibles. It is implicit though not emphasized in the distinction between (...) primary and secondary qualities from Galileo onward. It is arguably one of several conceptions involved in Whewell’s method of the “consilience of inductions” (Laudan 1971) and is to be found in several places in Peirce. (From M. Brewer and B. Collins, eds., (1981); Scientific Inquiry in the Social Sciences (a festschrift for Donald T. Campbell), San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp. 123–162.). (shrink)

This paper develops an appearance view of perception (focusing on vision). When we see an object, we see it by having it appear some way to us. We see the object, not the appearance; but we see the object via the appearance. The appearance is subjectively conditioned: aspects of it depend on attributes of the subject. We mentally have the appearance and can reflect on it as an appearance. But in the primary instance, of veridical perception, it is the object (...) that we focus on and experience. I contrast this view with naive realism (sometimes called disjunctivism) (Brewer, Campbell, Noe) and with intentionalist or representationalist views, which I call the physical content view (Dretske, Tye, Crane, Hill, Burge). I agree with these views in rejecting sense-data intermediaries and in affirming direct perception, but I argue that direct perception occurs via appearances, making mine a critical direct realism. The other views attempt to explain the spatial content of perception (shape, size, distance) entirely through the physical properties of objects and their physical relation to the perceiver (viewing position). I argue instead that there are ineliminably subjective aspects of normal spatial perception, which are systematically manifested as a lack of full phenomenal constancy. This systematic underconstancy can’t be accounted for at all by a consistent naive realism; for the physical content view, it requires that most of our ordinary perception is classified as illusory, violating the spirit of that view. Accepting phenomenal underconstancy as pervasive, I suggest that our ability to perceive the mind-independent properties of objects depends on developed conceptual abilities. In the final section, I compare my appearance view with the adverbialism of Chisholm and the critical direct realism of Roy Wood Sellars. (shrink)

Where are we to look for the unique hues? Out in the world? In the eye? In more central processing? 1. There are difficulties looking for the structure of the unique hues in simple combinations of cone-response functions like ( L − M ) and ( S − ( L + M )): such functions may fit pretty well the early physiological processing, but they don’t correspond to the structure of unique hues. It may seem more promising to look to, (...) e.g., Hurvich & Jameson’s ‘chromatic response functions’; but these report on psychophysical behaviour, not on underlying physiology. So ‘opponent processing’ isn’t any particular help on the unique hues—and even physiology in general seems not to have come up with any good correlate or explanation. 2. Wright ( Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2: 1–17, 2011 ) looks in a different place: to (a) magnitude of total visual response that a stimulus light provokes, the maxima and minima of which, he thinks, give us the boundaries of the main hue categories (Wright connects these with Thornton’s ‘prime’ and ‘antiprime’ colours in an illuminant: Journal of the Optical Society of America 61 ( 1971 ): 1155–1163); and (b) the ratio of chromatic to achromatic response, the maxima and minima of which, he suggests, give us the focal points of the unique hues. The suggestions are extremely interesting; but the desired correspondences have some counterexamples; and where they hold, one could wonder how much they depend upon the particular choice of functions to measure (a) and (b); and one could hope for more of an explanatory linkage between the sets of items in question. 3. Could the unique hues come from, so to speak, the external world? White and black can easily be defined as particular kinds of reflectance. What of the standard four unique hues? Variation in kinds of sunlight and skylight coincides well with variation along a line from unique yellow to unique blue (cf. Shepard 1992 , Mollon 2006 ). If we wanted something to calibrate our standards for unique yellow and blue as the lens of the eye changes with age, and despite interpersonal cone differences, this would be a good basis—and there are several ways this can be extended to surface colours. But is there any essential connection between these things: is there any rationale why the light of the sun and the sky should be counted as unique hued ? An answer may be: because in our environment, these illuminants are as close to white (or the natural illuminant colour) as you can get—to see things tinged with sunlight or skylight should be to see them minimally tinged with any alien colour. Whereas other hues in an illuminant would be treated as tinging with a more alien colour the thing seen. (shrink)

Part I: The Life of Cognitive Science:. William Bechtel, Adele Abrahamsen, and George Graham. Part II: Areas of Study in Cognitive Science:. 1. Analogy: Dedre Gentner. 2. Animal Cognition: Herbert L. Roitblat. 3. Attention: A.H.C. Van Der Heijden. 4. Brain Mapping: Jennifer Mundale. 5. Cognitive Anthropology: Charles W. Nuckolls. 6. Cognitive and Linguistic Development: Adele Abrahamsen. 7. Conceptual Change: Nancy J. Nersessian. 8. Conceptual Organization: Douglas Medin and Sandra R. Waxman. 9. Consciousness: Owen Flanagan. 10. Decision Making: J. Frank Yates (...) and Paul A. Estin. 11. Emotions: Paul E. Griffiths. 12. Imagery and Spatial Representation: Rita E. Anderson. 13. Language Evolution and Neuromechanisms: Terrence W. Deacon. 14. Language Processing: Kathryn Bock and Susan M. Garnsey. 15. Linguistics Theory: D. Terence Langendoen. 16. Machine Learning: Paul Thagard. 17. Memory: Henry L. Roediger III and Lyn M. Goff. 18. Perception: Cees Van Leeuwen. 19. Perception: Color: Austen Clark. 20. Problem Solving: Kevin Dunbar. 21. Reasoning: Lance J. Rips. 22. Social Cognition: Alan J. Lambert and Alison L. Chasteen. 23. Unconscious Intelligence: Rhianon Allen and Arthur S. Reber. 24. Understanding Texts: Art Graesser and Pam Tipping. 25. Word Meaning: Barbara C. Malt. Part III: Methodologies of Cognitive Science:. 26. Artificial Intelligence: Ron Sun. 27. Behavioral Experimentation: Alexander Pollatsek and Keith Rayner. 28. Cognitive Ethology: Marc Bekoff. 29. Deficits and Pathologies: Christopher D. Frith. 30. Ethnomethodology: Barry Saferstein. 31. Functional Analysis: Brian Macwhinney. 32. Neuroimaging: Randy L. Buckner and Steven E. Petersen. 33. Protocal Analysis: K. Anders Ericsson. 34. Single Neuron Electrophysiology: B. E. Stein, M.T. Wallace, and T.R. Stanford. 35. Structural Analysis: Robert Frank. Part IV: Stances in Cognitive Science:. 36. Case-based Reasoning: David B. Leake. 37. Cognitive Linguistics: Michael Tomasello. 38. Connectionism, Artificial Life, and Dynamical Systems: Jeffrey L. Elman. 39. Embodied, Situated, and Distributed Cognition: Andy Clark. 40. Mediated Action: James V. Wertsch. 41. Neurobiological Modeling: P. Read Montague and Peter Dayan. 42. Production Systems: Christian D. Schunn and David Klahr. Part V: Controversies in Cognitive Science:. 43. The Binding Problem: Valerie Gray Hardcastle. 44. Heuristics and Satisficing: Robert C. Richardson. 45. Innate Knowledge: Barbara Landau. 46. Innateness and Emergentism: Elizabeth Bates, Jeffrey L. Elman, Mark H. Johnson, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett. 47. Intentionality: Gilbert Harman. 48. Levels of Explanation and Cognition Architectures: Robert N. McCauley. 49. Modularity: Irene Appelbaum. 50. Representation and Computation: Robert S. Stufflebeam. 51. Representations: Dorrit Billman. 52. Rules: Terence Horgan and John Tienson. 53. Stage Theories Refuted: Donald G. Mackay. Part VI: Cognitive Science in the Real World:. 54. Education: John T. Bruer. 55. Ethics: Mark L. Johnson. 56. Everyday Life Environments: Alex Kirlik. 57. Institutions and Economics: Douglass C. North. 58. Legal Reasoning: Edwina L. Rissland. 59. Mental Retardation: Norman W. Bray, Kevin D. Reilly, Lisa F. Huffman, Lisa A. Grupe, Mark F. Villa, Kathryn L. Fletcher, and Vivek Anumolu. 60. Science: William F. Brewer and Punyashloke Mishra. Selective Biographies of Major Contributors to Cognitive Science: William Bechtel and Tadeusz Zawidzki. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Awful Patriotism: Richard Rorty and the Politics of KnowingDavid Palumbo-Liu* (bio)Richard Rorty. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.This essay addresses the current debates surrounding what some have labeled the Two Lefts: a “cultural left” and an activist left. 1 Debate over this “divide” has made many strange bedfellows, but perhaps none quite so unheimlich as “liberal leftist” Richard Rorty and cultural conservative Harold (...) Bloom. To be sure, Rorty has often alluded to Bloom’s work, especially Bloom’s notion of “strong poets,” but in his most recent book, Rorty has appropriated Bloom in a particularly telling manner. In 1994, Harold Bloom published his polemic The Western Canon. At once eloquent and pathetic, it pressed all the right buttons. Bloom succinctly (or shall we say, reductively?) deployed his version of the “aesthetic” against any other approach. Cultural conservatives were gratified that someone of Bloom’s stature had done them the service of voicing their interests in a highly visible and contestatory manner; more moderate sorts squirmed uncomfortably at Bloom’s unabashed elitism and the shrillness of his tone; theorists and cultural studies folks were outraged at Bloom’s absolute ignorance of their work and his resort to parody instead of anything vaguely resembling an engaged critique; and ethnic, minority, queer, and feminist critics had more than enough to be insulted by in his racist and sexist arrogance. So far out is Bloom’s jeremiad that it probably came close to realizing his worst nightmare—it may have driven students screaming into all those horrid cultural studies classes to find out what was so seductive, so powerful as to corner The Canon. So I didn’t worry too much about The Western Canon. That is, until I read Richard Rorty’s essay “The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature” and its companion pieces in Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. What was Rorty, a self-proclaimed leftist, doing, calling to his aid the social and cultural archconservative Harold Bloom?In the first part of my essay I ponder this strange alliance, particularly as it joins forces against ethnic studies (to be sure, its common target is more generally “theory” of any stripe or color, but I want specifically to address the issue of ethnic literary study). Rorty adapts Bloom’s School of Resentment to characterize what he calls a certain, bad “knowingness,” against which he poses “hope” and “inspiration.” I want to examine more closely the nature and content of that destructive “knowledge,” for it becomes clear that [End Page 37] this knowledge is for Rorty the recognition of Otherness as a politically (as opposed to “merely” ontologically) functional identity. This knowledge is disturbing to Rorty and deeply informs his notions of “patriotism” and Americanism. For him, such knowledge impedes the formation of a leftist politics. It is precisely the disjunction between the “knowing” discourse of the cultural left obsessed with identity politics and an activist political left (modeled after the old reformist left) that troubles Rorty.My essay will be largely devoted to showing how Rorty’s recent work develops his earlier work on “ethnocentrism” into an “Americanism” that erodes precisely the liberal foundations of that earlier work and discloses the weakness of its claims. I understand this development as compelled by a certain impatience with identity politics that is shared by a number of liberal and leftist critics of American political society, an impatience fueled perhaps not so much by a conservative threat as by a perceived threat from “within” progressive politics. Basically, I ask, how and why are knowledge and recognition of “difference” taken to immobilize progressive politics? To frame that same question in a slightly different manner—what is the presumed content of that “progressive” politics, and what assumptions do we have to make in order to arrive at that point of view?Against the rather odd Bloom/Rorty pairing, set against “knowledge,” one would naturally seek out an enemies list for possible allies. Rorty in fact begins his essay by providing us with one in the figure of Fredric Jameson, an archpractitioner of theory whose “antiromantic” skepticism Rorty finds both debilitating and... (shrink)

Do philosophic views affect job performance? The authors found that possessing a belief in free will predicted better career attitudes and actual job performance. The effect of free will beliefs on job performance indicators were over and above well-established predictors such as conscientiousness, locus of control, and Protestant work ethic. In Study 1, stronger belief in free will corresponded to more positive attitudes about expected career success. In Study 2, job performance was evaluated objectively and independently by a supervisor. Results (...) indicated that employees who espoused free will beliefs were given better work performance evaluations than those who disbelieve in free will, presumably because belief in free will facilitates exerting control over one’s actions. (shrink)

If you are like most people, you’re not sure what Postmodernism is. And if this were like most books on the subject, it probably wouldn’t tell you. Besides what a few grumpy critics claim, Postmodernism is not a bunch of meaningless intellectual mind games. On the contrary, it is a reaction to the most profound spiritual and philosophical crises of our time–the failure of the Enlightenment. Jim Powell takes the position that Postmodernism is a series of “maps” that help people (...) find their way through a changing world. Postmodernism For Beginners features the thoughts of Foucault on power and knowledge, Jameson on mapping the postmodern, Baudrillard on the media, Harvey on time-space compression, Derrida on deconstruction and Deleuze and Guattari on rhizomes. The book also discusses postmodern artifacts such as Madonna, cyberpunk sci-fi, Buddhist ecology and teledildonics. (shrink)

Signs and Wonders: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel. By R.A. Anderson. Pp.xvii, 158, Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans; Edinburgh, The Handsel Press, 1983, £4.25. Inheriting the Land: A Commentary on the Book of Joshua. By E. John Hamlin, Pp.xxiii, 207, Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans; Edinburgh, The Handsel Press, 1984, £4.75. Servant Theology: A Commentary on the Book of Isaiah 40–55. By G.A.F. Knight. Pp.ix, 204, Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans; Edinburgh, The Handsel Press, 1984, £4.75. God's Chosen (...) People: A Commentary on the Books of Amos and Lamentations. By R. Martin‐Achard and S. Paul Re'emi. Pp.viii, 133, Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans; Edinburgh, The Handsel Press, 1984, £4.50. The Parable of the Wicked Tenants. By Klyne Snodgrass. Pp.x, 140, Tübingen, J.C.B. Mohr, 1983, 72 DM. The Johannine Paraclete in the Church Fathers. By Anthony Casurella. Pp.xiv, 258, J.C.B. Mohr Tübingen, 1983, 78DM. Sacraments and Liturgy: The Outward Signs. By Louis Weil. Pp.vii, 115, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1983, £9.50, £3.95. Le Sacrement de l'Ordination. By Joseph Lécuyer. Pp.281, Paris, Beauchesne, 1983, 150 Fr. Christ's Lordship and Religious Pluralism. Edited by G.H. Anderson and T.F. Stransky. Pp.viii, 209, New York, Orbis Books, 1981, £5.50. Christians and Religious Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religions. By Alan Race. Pp.xi, 176, London, SCM Press, 1983, £5.95. The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul. By Wayne A. Meeks. Pp.xii, 299, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1983, £15.00, £6.50. Antioch and Rome: New Testament Cradles of Catholic Christianity. By Raymond E. Brown and John P. Meier, Pp.xii, 242, London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1983, £5.95; Ramsey, Paulist Press, 1983, $9.95. The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians. By Rosamund McKitterick. Pp.xiv, 414, London, Longman, 1983, £9.95. The Medieval Reformation. By Brenda Bolton. Pp. 126, London, Edward Arnold, 1983, £4.50. Robert Grosseteste Hexaëmeron. Edited by Richard C. Dales and Servus Gieben. Pp.xxix, 374, London, for The British Academy by the Oxford University Press, 1983, £40.00. William of Auvergne and Robert Grosseteste. By Steven P. Marrone. Pp.xi, 318, Princeton University Press, 1983, £28.00. Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford. CM. Dent. Pp.viii, 262, Oxford University Press, 1983, £17.30. Paolo Sarpi between Renaissance and Enlightenment. By David Wootton. Pp.viii,192, Cambridge University Press, 1983, £20.00. The Jesuits in England from 1580 to the Present Day. By Francis Edwards. Pp.333, Tunbridge Wells, Burns and Oates, 1985, £20.00. Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom. By Alan White. Pp.xii, 201, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1983, £16.50. Sophists, Socratics and Cynics. By H.D. Rankin. Pp.263, London, Croom Helm, Totowa, Barnes and Noble, 1983, £17.95. Early Medieval Philosophy : An Introduction By John Marenbon. Pp.ix, 190, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983, £9.95. Aristotelian Aporetic Ontology in Islamic and Christian Thinkers. By Edward Booth. Pp.xxvi, 314, Cambridge University Press, 1983, £35.00. About Beauty: A Thomistic Interpretation. By Armand A. Maurer. Pp.135, Houston, Center for Thomistic Studies, 1983, $6.00. A History of Ideas and Images in Italian Art. By James Hall. Pp.xi, 415, London, John Murray, 1983, £17.50. Inconsistencies: Studies in the New Testament, the Inferno, Othello and Beowulf. By William Whallon. Pp.107, Woodbridge, D.S. Brewer, 1983, £15.00. The Language of Grace: Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy and Iris Murdoch. By Peter S. Hawkins. Pp.xiv, 137, Cambridge, Cowley Publications, 1983, $6.95. Iulia de Beausobre. By Constance Babington Smith. Pp.xi, 195, London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1983, £9.95. A History of Psychoanalysis. By Reuben Fine. Pp.xii, 686, New York, Colombia University Press, 1979, $31.20. Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan. Edited and translated by Stuart Schneiderman. Pp.viii, 265, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1980, £12.60. Work: The Shadow and the Substance. By David Bleakley. Pp. 121, London, SCM Press, 1983, £4.95. M.R. James: An Informal Portrait. By Michael Cox. Pp.xviii, 268, Oxford University Press, 1983, £14.50. (shrink)

Bloch, E. Discussing expressionism.--Lukács, G. Realism in the balance.--Brecht, B. Against Georg Lukács.--Benjamin, W. Conversations with Brecht.--Adorno, T. Letters to Walter Benjamin.--Benjamin, W. Reply.--Adorno, T. Reconciliation under duress.--Adorno, T. Commitment.--Jameson, F. Reflections in conclusion.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Heavy TrafficDenis DuttonIt was the Reverend Sidney Smith who said, “I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.” Thirty years ago that remark was still a joke. These days, it’s a downright plausible idea, one with a distinctly postmodern ring. If the objects of experience are nothing but constructions, inventions of our cultures and mind-sets, that must go as well for all the books (...) we read—including those books which urge this fact on us. To read them is to construct them, to write them for yourself. But wait—that can’t be a fact, because facts are just prejudices too. Takes your breath away to realize how far scholarship has come.These thoughts drifted through my mind reading The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, edited by George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers (University of California Press, $48.00 cloth, $17.95 paper). It comprises a long introduction plus eleven chapters which “explore the boundaries and affinities between art, anthropology, representation, and culture, casting a critical, ethnographic light on the art worlds of the contemporary West and the ways they give value to cultural form—in short, a “‘traffic’ in culture.” It is not easy to make out a consistent thread in the essays themselves. Carol Vance offers a fine discussion in the form of four small essays on censorship, the NEA, Jesse Helms, and so forth. There is no discernible connection with anthropology, and I cannot see why these pieces are included. Nancy Sullivan, described as a Ph.D. candidate in Fred R. Myers’s NYU anthropology department, struggles with her cumbersome account of the artworld in the last generation. Again, I can detect no hint of how anthropology has helped her understand the artworld. Hal Foster makes a cameo appearance of only a few pages, a kind of postmodern arabesque with lots of big words. Christopher B. Steiner revisits material [End Page 283] presented in his book, African Art in Transit, which is squarely in the field, and Steven Feld agonizes about appropriation of world music into commercial music business while telling some interesting tales about a radio program he produced of music from Papua New Guinea. The feminist Judith L. Goldstein does a late-capitalist, “late-postmodernist” job on women’s makeup, with much reliance on Fredric Jameson but no anthropology I can discern, despite the fact that she gave a version of it at an American Anthropological Association conference. If we really have reached “late-postmodernism” we can only be thankful. Molly H. Mullin’s account of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century enthusiasm for American Indian artifacts, on the other hand, may begin with clichés about “élite responses to the rise of consumer capitalism,” but it soon settles down to a solid account of the people and problems of trying to achieve recognition of Indian handicrafts as art. This was made possible, we learn, by much devoted work from people who were multiculturalists before the word existed, white Americans whose actions were based on a love of Indian cultures and arts, rather than postcolonial theory and the school of resentment. All the issues of art vs. craft, the relation of tourism to artistic development, authenticity, and so on, were raised in the 1920s and 30s, with sophistication not often seen today.But to figure out how it all is supposed to tie together, we have to turn to the book’s explanatory introduction. This is so turgidly vague that when I was done I felt like invoicing the authors for my time. These pages are peppered with half-assertions I’d half want to dispute if their meaning were plainer, and a few that are plain enough to be flat-out wrong. Among many examples: “Ironically, the very category of ‘art’—as opposed to ‘the arts’—goes unexamined in its own hierarchies of sense, so that various forms of popular performance, in which disinterested contemplation does not necessarily reign supreme, are excluded.” Excluded? Notice that irritating passive voice: who, I’d like to know, has left popular performance unexamined and excluded? What are “hierarchies of sense”? The sentence carries no reference. In... (shrink)

Abū al-Ḥajj¿j Yūsuf b. Muḥammad Ibn Ṭumlūs (Alhagiag Bin Thalmus, d. 620/1223) was a philosopher, physician and direct disciple of Ibn Rushd (Averroes, d. 595/1198), who lived and practiced rational sciences in Alzira and Marrakesh, a quarter of a century after the demise of his teacher. Ibn Ṭumlūs was not Ibn Rushd's only student who engaged in work on logic, but one of dozens of disciples, suggesting that the supposed simultaneous death of the latter's philosophy is "grossly exaggerated". As a (...) valuable window into the practice of logic in 13th century al-Andalus and the Maghreb, Ibn Ṭumlūs' Compendium on Logic (Al-Mukhtaṣar fī al-manṭiq) covers all the parts of "the expanded Organon", as it was known since al-F¿r¿bī (d. 339/951). The present volume offers a complete critical Arabic edition of this work, with an English and Arabic introduction, notes and indices. (shrink)

Geçtiğimiz onca yıl içinde kültürel çalışmaların birçok farklı biçimleri ortaya çıkmıştır. 1980’lerde ve 1990’lardaki küresel genişleme döneminde, kültürel çalışmalar genellikle İngiltere Birmingham’daki Çağdaş Kültürel Çalışmalar Merkezi’nde geliştirilen kültür ve toplum anlayışıyla tanımlanmıştır. Onların kültüre sosyolojik, materyalist ve politik yaklaşımları 20. yüzyılın kültürel Marksizmine dayanır. 20. yüzyıl Marksist teorisyenleri arasında yer alan Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin ve T.W. Adorno’dan Fredric Jameson ve Terry Eagleton’a kadar uzanan birçok düşünür, Marksist teoriyi kültürel formların üretiminin, toplum ve tarihle olan (...) bağını, kitleler ve sosyal hayat üzerindeki etki ve etkileşimlerinin ilişkisini incelemek için kullanmıştır. Kültürel Marksizm, kültürel çalışmaların ve onun günümüzdeki çeşitli tür ve biçimlerine dayanak noktası olması açısından önem arz etmektedir. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Postmodernism:A Self-InterviewIhab HassanThe following interview did not take place in Ihab Hassan's study in Milwaukee, with a view of Lake Michigan, rippling turquoise, blue, and mauve under a sky of fluffy paratactical clouds.Interviewer: You are sometimes known as the Father...Hassan: Please! At most, the Godfather of Postmodernism, though I don't know who the Godmother is. Maybe Madam Hype?I: Why hype?H: Because postmodernism began as a genuinely contested idea and (...) is fading as a form of media hype.I: Can you define it, however tentatively?H: I would prefer not to. In fact, I cannot, no more than I can define romanticism or modernism in a sentence or paragraph. Such definitions are best left to some onomastic genius. Once, I offered a table of features contrasting modernism with postmodernism. Once is quite enough.I: Why is that?H: Because it was as widely cited as pounced upon, nearly everyone ignoring my pointed disclaimer: "Yet the dichotomies this table represents remain insecure, equivocal. For differences shift, defer, even collapse; concepts in any one vertical column are not all equivalent; and inversions and exceptions, in both modernism and postmodernism, abound."I: Well, if we can't define postmodernism, how can we talk about it? [End Page 223]H: The way we talk about everything else: say, freedom, justice, love, spirit, happiness.... We talk about postmodernism by using the word in various verbal contexts—Wittgenstein would have said "language games"—and seeing what happens.I: What happens?H: Some discussions engage postmodernism and clarify it in certain perspectives, without actually defining it: for instance, the works of Hans Bertens, Charles Jencks, Andreas Huyssen, even Fredric Jameson....I: Why even Jameson?H: Because Marxism has a tenuous relation to contemporary reality, as everyone knows except some Western academics.I: Some would say that the entire phenomenon of postmodernism is an exercise of Western academics.H: That's a bit of a non sequitur but true enough, true up to a point. Remember, the phenomenon has overflowed its theoretical origins to become a kind of ironic cultural awareness, a mode of historical reflexivity—if you wish, a perpetually anxious exercise in self-definition.I: But Western, always Western, right?H: Japan has contributed vigorously to postmodernism, especially in art and architecture. So, instead of saying "Western," let's say high-tech, mass-media, omni-consuming societies.I: That, in effect, excludes four fifths of the world, wouldn't you say?H: Yes—and no. You see, cultural postmodernism has mutated into geopolitical postmodernity. By the latter, I mean both globalization with its thousand faces (multinational capitalism, cyber technology, cultural imperialism, "Americanization"), and counter-globalization with as many masks (local knowledge, old cultural traditions, postcolonial ideologies, anti-Western resentments). It's the monster phenomenon of our time.As I have written a good deal about this phenomenon, most recently in Angelika, I won't repeat myself here. The point, however, is that postmodernity is a planetary process, postmodernism is not.I: That suggests a political dimension, which some say you have slighted in your work. How would you respond to that criticism?H: Writing in the late sixties and early seventies about postmodernism, I lacked the benefits of hindsight. For instance, I focused on high culture, Beckett and Borges and Nabokov and Barthelme and Barth. I did not foresee then that postmodernism would become a media phenomenon, involving pop and kitsch. And I recognized the emergent process of globalization only in the Seventies, in Paracriticisms (1975).But I "slighted" the political only in the sense that I did not give it [End Page 224] priority, did not make it an "absolute horizon." In fact, I believe that a primary emphasis on politics flattens, impoverishes our lives. The current paradigm in the humanities ignores the inner cost of "politics."I: Forgive me, but that's another example of what some colleagues in the profession perceive as your contrary or cross-grained character. Can you explain why politics impoverishes our lives?H: Conformists—remember Harold Rosenberg's quip about "the herd of independent minds"?—are quick to discover perversity everywhere. But never mind that. The gravamen is that politics... (shrink)

Critics, then, who label theories such as objectivism or deconstructionism as “authoritarian” or “subversive” are committing a fallacy of overspecificity. To call Hirsch’s theory authoritarian is to assume that such a theory lends itself to one and only one kind of political use and that that use can be determined a priori. To refute such an assumption, one need only stand back from the present in order to recall that today’s authoritarian ideology is often yesterday’s progressive one, and vice versa. (...) Indeed, there’s considerable historical irony in the fact that objectivism has now acquired the status of a right-wing idea, while Nietzsche and Heidegger have emerged as heroes of literary leftism. As recently as a few decades ago, these alignments were different. George Orwell, for instance, thought that the tendency to deny the possibility of objective truth reflected a totalitarian mentality. “Totalitarianism,” he wrote, “in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the existence of objective truth.” He added that “the friends of totalitarianism in this country tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or, on the other hand, that modern physics has proved that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of the senses is simply vulgar philistinism.”10It’s not that it hadn’t occurred to Orwell that the notion of objective truth could easily be used to justify the actions of tyrants and oppressors. But Orwell’s experience of Fascist and Communist falsification of history showed how the denial of the possibility of objectivity could also justify oppressive actions, perhaps in a more disarming way. For various historical reasons, Orwell’s insight is easily lost today. His is one of those Enlightenment concepts of truth which have been compromised in usage. As the Enlightenment has come to be associated not with progress, democracy, and equality but with the ideological exploitation of those concepts in the interests of social control, a great moral and political transvaluation of the epistemological vocabulary has occurred. Enlightenment thinking is frequently associated with the bourgeois complacency or the menacing technology of Western democracies or is identified with the totalitarian regimentation of the Soviet Union. Thus the concepts of objective truth, nature, essence, identity, and teleology have come to be viewed as conservative or reactionary ideas, as if these ideas had never operated, and never could operate, in quite other ways.11 10. George orwell, “The Prevention of Literature,” The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols. , 4: 63-64.11. As Frederic Jameson has noted, “it is certainly the case that a belief in the natural is ideological and that much of bourgeois art has worked to perpetuate such a belief…. Yet in different historical circumstances the idea of nature was once a subversive concept with a genuinely revolutionary function, and only the analysis of the concrete historical and cultural conjuncture can tell us whether, in the post-natural world of late capitalism, the categories of nature may not have acquired such a critical charge again”. (shrink)

This article reviews contributions to The Volitional Brain, some of which defend a libertarian, contra-causal account of free will, while others take a so-called compatibilist view, in which adequate conceptions of human liberty and moral responsibility are claimed to be compatible with naturalistic causality. Siding with compatibilism, this review finds that defenders of libertarian free will place undue weight on the first person feeling of freedom, while discounting scientific evidence that human choices are fully a function of antecedent causes at (...) various levels of description. It is argued that morality, justice, and personal responsibility and efficacy do not require the assumption that persons are first causes, so that we need not fear mechanism when applied to human agency. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Baudelaire’s Satanic VersesJonathan Culler (bio)Paul Verlaine was perhaps the first to declare the centrality of Baudelaire to what we may now call modern French studies: Baudelaire’s profound originality is to “représenter puissament et essentiellement l’homme moderne” [599–600]. Whether Baudelaire embodies or portrays modern man, Les Fleurs du mal is seen as exemplary of modern experience, of the possibility of experiencing or dealing with what, taking Paris as the exemplary (...) modern city, we have come to call the modern world. T. S. Eliot wrote, “Baudelaire is indeed the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language, for his verse and language is the nearest thing to a complete renovation that we have experienced. But his renovation of an attitude towards life is no less radical and no less important” [426]. And outside the field of literature we find such affirmations as Harold Rosenberg’s dating of “the tradition of the New” to Baudelaire, “who exactly one hundred years ago invited fugitives from the too-narrow world of memory to come aboard with him in search of the new” [11]. Baudelaire, writes another critic, “did more than anyone else in the nineteenth century to make the men and women of his century aware of themselves as moderns.... If we had to nominate a first modernist, Baudelaire would surely be the man” [Berman 132–33].There seems to be considerable agreement on this point, but, surprisingly, there is great difference of opinion about what it is that makes Baudelaire modern and worthy of special attention. Is it, as Albert Thibaudet and Walter Benjamin argue, that he was the first true poet of the city, the first to take the alienated experience of life in the modern city as the norm? Or is it, as Leo Bersani claims, that Baudelaire discovered and displayed the mobility of fantasy and of the desiring imagination? Or is it, as Paul de Man maintains, that Baudelaire invents modern self-consciousness about poetry itself, producing poems that allegorically expose the operations of the lyric?There are many competing accounts of what is most particularly modern and important about Baudelaire, but the one thing on which contentious critics seem to agree is that there is a side of Baudelaire that is of no interest today, that belongs to a bas romantisme and is the very antithesis of Baudelaire’s modernity, of Baudelaire the founder of modern poetry: this is the Baudelaire who invokes demons and the Devil. Most critics today pass over this in silence, but even those who explicitly address this Baudelaire seem to find him an embarrassment. Even the author of a book entitled The Demonic Imagination: Style and Theme in French Romantic Poetry begins his chapter on Baudelaire: “Baudelaire has, by now, ceased to interest us for the reasons which once appeared important: his diabolical Catholicism is a familiar, historical mode of sensibility which neither shocks nor has morbid appeal...” [Houston 85]. And Fredric Jameson distinguishes the modernist and the postmodernist Baudelaires—both worthy of our attention—from what he calls the “second-rate post-Romantic Baudelaire, the Baudelaire [End Page 86] of diabolism and of cheap frisson, the poet of blasphemy and of a creaking and musty religious machinery that was no more interesting in the mid-nineteenth century than it is today” [427].But Baudelaire called his collection “Les Fleurs du mal” and opens it with a poem that declares, “C’est le Diable qui tient le fils qui nous remuent [it’s the Devil who holds the strings that move us]” [OC 1: 5; FE 5]. Can this be dismissed as an irrelevancy—something mistakenly appended to this quintessentially modern poetry? That critics of such different orientations should agree in shunting aside the Satanic Baudelaire suggests that there is something worth investigating here, something disquieting and embarrassing, which may not in fact be merely trivial—which may complicate the story of modernity that has come to depend on Baudelaire as its originator. Perhaps the Satanic Baudelaire would tell us things about modernity we don’t want to know.Certainly the idea of the Devil seems fundamentally at odds with accounts of modernity. Even Christianity itself seems to... (shrink)

SS RAMA RAO PAPPU PROFESSOR PT RAJU: EVOLUTION OF HIS PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT "In India (PT Raju) represents and is really the original initiator of, ...

In his investigation of the concept of "Being", Aristotle relates the question of "existence" to the question "essence" and considers essence as "whatness" and quiddity. Although in his logical discussions he treats the concepts of "existence" and "whatness" separately and makes a distinction between them, but does not extend this distinction to the area of philosophical topics. But in the prepatetic Islamic system of Philosophy, explanation and distinction between "Being" and "quidity" is without doubt one of the most fundamental philosophical (...) doctrines and beliefs. In the history of Islamic philosophy, the theory of metaphysical distinction between being and essence has been attributed to Ibn Sina, but it is Farabi who for the first time has propounded clearly and decisively a two – part division between "being" and "quiddity" and has prepared the way for Avecinian philosophy. In addition to his logical distinction between "existence" and "whatness" of things he has stressed on a metaphysical distinction between them and has made this distinction the foundation of his metaphysical system. From Farabi's view, being is an inherent accident of quiddity. In this article we try to explain the concepts of "existence" and "whatness" of things and their relation as one of the most fundamental topics in prepatetic philosophy in the philosophical thought of these two great prepatetic philosophers, ie Aristotle and Farabi, with specific stress on comparing their views. (shrink)

This classic study of Santayana was the first book to appear in the _Arguments of the Philosophers_ series. Growing interest in the work of this important American philosopher has prompted this new edition of the book complete with a new preface by the author reassessing his own ideas about Santayana and reflecting the new interest in the philosopher's work. A select bibliography of works published about Santayana since the book's first appearance is also included.

Controversy over providing financial incentives to research participants has a long history and remains an issue of contention in both current discussions about research ethics and for institutional review bodies/human research ethics committees which are charged with the responsibility of deciding whether such incentives fall within ethical guidelines. The arguments both for and against financial incentives have been well aired in the literature. A point of agreement for many is that inducement in the form of financial incentive is permissible when (...) the risk of harm to the individual is negligible in terms of degree and probability of occurrence. In the absence of harm to the individual, encouraging more people to participate in research would appear to be a good thing in so far as it will lead to statistically more robust research outcomes, which can then be translated into better healthcare and other practice. Whilst, on the face of it, this position seems highly defensible, I will explore the possibility that it is counterproductive – that is, providing individuals with financial incentives to become research participants may have the unintended outcome of reducing participation rates in some areas of research. In exploring this idea I will draw on empirical findings from the literature on crowding-out – the hypothesis that providing monetary incentives to people can backfire by overall reducing intrinsic motivation, in this instance intrinsic motivation to behave altruistically or undertake civic duties. (shrink)