This volume examines some of the most contentious social justice issues present in the corpus of Augustine's writings. Whether one is concerned with human trafficking and the contemporary slave trade, the global economy, or endless wars, these essays further the conversation on social justice as informed by the writings of Augustine of Hippo.

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 0, Issue 0, Page 1-4, Ahead of Print.

Creating a snapshot of current thinking about psychoanalysis, this lively collection examines the legacy of Freud and Lacan. Through provocative and penetrating arguments, the contributors take psychoanalysis to task for 0ts dark view of human nature, theoretical sorcery, devaluation of femininity, self-referentiality, discipleship, negativity, ignorance of history and more. The essays also examine the complex relationships between Freudian and Lacanian theory and philosophy, feminism, anthropology, communications theory, deconstruction, Foucauldian genealogy and medical history. The outstanding list of contributors includes Paul Roazen, (...) Francois Roustang, John Forrester, Rodolphe Gasche, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Jacques Derrida. (shrink)

French philosophy since World War II has been preoccupied with the issue of difference. Specifically, it has wanted to promote or to leave room for ways of living and of being that differ from those usually seen in contemporary Western society. Given the experience of the Holocaust, the motivation for such a preoccupation is not difficult to see. For some thinkers, especially Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gilles Deleuze, this preoccupation has led to a mode of philosophizing (...) that privileges difference as a philosophical category. Nancy privileges difference as a mode of conceiving community, Derrida as a mode of conceiving linguistic meaning, Levinas as a mode of conceiving ethics, and Deleuze as a mode of conceiving ontology. _Reconsidering Difference_ has a twofold task, the primary one critical and the secondary one reconstructive. The critical task is to show that these various privilegings are philosophical failures. They wind up, for reasons unique to each position, endorsing positions that are either incoherent or implausible. Todd May considers the incoherencies of each position and offers an alternative approach. His reconstructive task, which he calls "contingent holism," takes the phenomena under investigation—community, language, ethics, and ontology—and sketches a way of reconceiving them that preserves the motivations of the rejected positions without falling into the problems that beset them. (shrink)

The political writings of the French poststructuralists have eluded articulation in the broader framework of general political philosophy primarily because of the pervasive tendency to define politics along a single parameter: the balance between state power and individual rights in liberalism and the focus on economic justice as a goal in Marxism. What poststructuralists like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard offer instead is a political philosophy that can be called tactical: it emphasizes that power emerges from many (...) different sources and operates along many different registers. This approach has roots in traditional anarchist thought, which sees the social and political field as a network of intertwined practices with overlapping political effects. The poststructuralist approach, however, eschews two questionable assumptions of anarchism, that human beings have an essence and that power is always repressive, never productive. After positioning poststructuralist political thought against the background of Marxism and the traditional anarchism of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Proudhon, Todd May shows what a tactical political philosophy like anarchism looks like shorn of its humanist commitments—namely, a poststructuralist anarchism. The book concludes with a defense, _contra_ Habermas and Critical Theory, of poststructuralist political thought as having a metaethical structure allowing for positive ethical commitments. (shrink)

This book offers a readable and compelling introduction to the work of one of the twentieth century's most important and elusive thinkers. Other books have tried to explain Deleuze in general terms. Todd May organizes his book around a central question at the heart of Deleuze's philosophy: how might we live? The author then goes on to explain how Deleuze offers a view of the cosmos as a living thing that provides ways of conducting our lives that we may (...) not have dreamed of. Through this approach the full range of Deleuze's philosophy is covered. Offering a lucid account of a highly technical philosophy, Todd May's introduction will be widely read amongst those in philosophy, political science, cultural studies and French studies. (shrink)

This book examines the political perspective of French thinker and historian Jacques Ranci&ère. Ranci&ère argues that a democratic politics emerges out of people&’s acting under the presupposition of their own equality with those better situated in the social hierarchy. Todd May examines and extends this presupposition, offering a normative framework for understanding it, placing it in the current political context, and showing how it challenges traditional political philosophy and opens up neglected political paths. He demonstrates that the presupposition (...) of equality orients political action around those who act on their own behalf&—and those who act in solidarity with them&—rather than, as with the political theories of John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Amartya Sen, those who distribute the social goods. As May argues, Ranci&ère&’s view offers both hope and perspective for those who seek to think about and engage in progressive political action. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Life and Works Civil Toleration Metaphysics Problem of Evil Skepticism and Fideism Influence.

Despite the way we think of saints as belonging to a certain historical period and confronting specific historical obstacles, we tend to see their acts as being universally meaningful, and therefore, that these acts are practices which should be imitated in some manner. However this understanding carries with it a significant difficulty: namely, there is a risk of interpreting the lives and actions of saints as providing rules of conduct to be followed, as if their enactment was an end in-itself. (...) In other words, a simplistic notion of imitation can lead to the problem of voluntarism, where the intention to imitate an action is viewed to be sufficient or equal to actualizing goodness or piety. But there is a further, perhaps more significant problem with this understanding, and this involves how we tend to conflate the performance (or doing) of actions with their meaning. Does an action, especially that of a saint, have a meaning that is identical to its effect? Or, does the action itself produce a sense of meaning that outruns its effect? If the answer to this last question is affirmative, then the actions of a saint can be said to predicate an emergent meaning, that is, a meaning that has not yet been articulated, let alone realized. A saint would therefore be less a figure of convention and more a figure of innovation. In this chapter, I employ Paul Ricoeur’s theory of symbol to show how, beyond the historical specificity of the lives of saints, their actions can be understood to offer new ways of understanding the possibility for being, which I will unapologetically link to the Christian notion of “the New Being.” My discussion will first include a summary of Ricoeur’s theory of symbol, turning next to an application of this theory to saints and the contrasting context of the Prophet in the Hebrew Bible. The chapter will conclude with an elaboration of a symbolic understanding of action in relation to the New Being. (shrink)

According to phenomenal particularism, external particulars are sometimes part of the phenomenal character of experience. Mehta criticizes this view, and French and Gomes :451–460, 2016) have attempted to show that phenomenal particularists have the resources to respond to Mehta’s criticisms. We argue that French and Gomes have failed to appreciate the force of Mehta’s original arguments. When properly interpreted, Mehta’s arguments provide a strong case in favor of phenomenal generalism, the view that external particulars are never part of (...) phenomenal character. (shrink)

At T 1.2.2.3 Hume offers an argument against the infinite divisibility of finite extension, which he ascribes to "Mons. Malezieu." Scholars have long been aware that the ultimate source of the argument is the Élémens de Géométrie de Monseigneur le Duc de Bourgogne, first published in 1705. Although the argument has figured prominently in several recent discussions of Hume's metaphysics, there exists as yet no adequate English translation of Malezieu's text. Furthermore, very little is known about Hume's immediate sources for (...) the argument. In this article, I provide the original French text with translation. I then inquire into Hume's knowledge of the text. Drawing on evidence internal to the Treatise passage itself, I consider two plausible sources: a contemporary review of Malezieu's work in the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres and a critical discussion of the argument in Le Gendre's Traité de l'opinion (1735). Based on the available evidence, I suggest that the latter was most likely Hume's source. (shrink)

From Ricoeur to Action engages with the thinking of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) in order to propose innovative responses to 21st-century problems actively contributing to global conflict. Ricoeur's ability to draw from a diverse field of philosophers and theologians and to provide mediation to seemingly irreconcilable views often has both explicit and implicit practical application to socio-political questions. Here an international team of leading Ricoeur scholars develop critical yet productive responses through the development of Ricoeur's thought with (...) respect to such topics as race, environmental ethics, technology, political utopia and reinterpreting religion. Representing a new generation of Ricoeur scholarship that attempts to move beyond an exegetical engagement with his philosophy, this collection of original essays examines key problems in the 21st-century and the ways in which Ricoeur's philosophy understands the subtleties of these problems and is able to offer a productive response. As such it presents an elucidation of the practical significance of Ricoeur's thinking and an innovative contribution to resolving socio-political conflicts in the 21st century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bob Dylan’s “Highway Shoes” The Hobo-Hero’s Road through ModernityTodd Kennedy (bio)In the final verse of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” (1963), the speaker proclaims, “I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road, babe / where I’m bound, I can’t tell.” With no destination in sight, he seems content to remain on a perpetual, isolated journey on what he terms “the dark side of the road.” Such an ethos (...) of movement, which permeates Dylan’s corpus, mirrors a dissident strain of American culture that seeks to find a Jeffersonian, individualistic freedom via movement through space outside of mainstream society. As early as Bringing It All Back Home (1965), peaking with Blood on the Tracks (1975), and persisting into his most recent work, Dylan has consistently merged aspects of blues, country, and literary traditions, to invoke images of mobility that examine individual freedom in a world where technology, fragmentation, and homogeneity seem to result in a destructive dehumanizing of individuals. In so doing, Dylan uses an intensely innovative aesthetic as he ambivalently romanticizes uprooted wandering in a manner that both mirrors and expands upon what I term an ontology of the hobo-hero that permeates American letters from Walt Whitman to John Dos Passos (and beyond) as it glorifies those who remain in constant motion in order to maintain a sense of integrated self in the face of crushing modernity.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari similarly identify such an ontology within American culture when they, in A Thousand Plateaus, declare America a “special case” defined by its ceaseless search for a “rhizome,” or a “space in which two things that have nothing to do with one another form a parallel constructed by the mind. It is not imitation or resemblance, but becoming” (10). For Deleuze, Guattari, and, as I argue, Bob Dylan, the rhizome occupies a singular place within American letters. In other words, Deleuze and Guattari admit that America “is not immune from [...] the search for roots” in its “quest for a national identity or even for a European ancestry or genealogy (Kerouac going off in search for his ancestors),” yet they adamantly assert,every thing important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome [...]. American books are different from European books, even when Americans set off in search of trees. The conception of the book is different. Leaves of Grass. And directions in America are different: the search for arborescence and the return to the Old World occur in the East. But there is the rhizomatic West, with its Indians without ancestry, its ever-receding limit, its shifting and displaced frontiers.(19) [End Page 37]Such an assertion should come as no surprise, I would argue, since, beginning with the earliest attempts to define “America,” Americans have seen their identity linked to mobility. In fact, the lone commonality that Americans share is descent from immigrants who came to the United States from a “home” or “homeland” where cultural identity was not far removed from national identity. It would stand to reason, therefore, that a group of uprooted individuals thrust into a self-declared melting pot would begin to define themselves by their dislocation. For instance, eighteenth-century French immigrant J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur claimed that, within the American continent, “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men” (44) as America represents, for Crèvecœur, an “asylum” in which “the poor of Europe have by some means met together” (42). Crèvecœur proceeded to privilege those people, such as farmers, who planted “roots” as they helped to build and improve their society, but Crèvecœur’s assertion that we are united by our mutual uprootedness proves indicative of what critic Robert James Butler has observed as a recurrent American “quest for pure motion” (80, emphasis in original). Or, one encounters what the novelist John Steinbeck claimed he perceived in “nearly every American”: a “burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here” (10). It is such an attempt for perennial rebirth through movement, a rhizomatic selfhood, that... (shrink)

This article examines the way in which Paul Ricoeur's philosophy of metaphor can help to rehabilitate the traditional reduction of work to an activity of mere necessity.

In many countries, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a period of lockdown that impacted individuals’ lifestyles, in both professional and personal spheres. New problems and challenges arose, as well as opportunities. Numerous studies have examined the negative effects of lockdown measures, but few have attempted to shine light on the potential positive effects that may come out of these measures. We focused on one particular positive outcome that might have emerged from lockdown: creativity. To this end, this paper compared self-reported (...) professional creativity and everyday creativity before and during lockdown, using a questionnaire-based study conducted on a French sample. We expected participants to be more creative during than prior to lockdown, in both professional and everyday spheres. Regarding Pro-C, we did not see any significant differences between the two comparison points, before and during lockdown. Regarding everyday creativity, we observed a significant increase during lockdown. Furthermore, our results suggest that participants with a lower baseline creativity benefited more from the situation than those with a higher initial baseline creativity. Our results provide new insights on the impact of lockdown and its positive outcomes. These measures may have inarguably negative consequences on the physical and mental health of many, but their positive impact exists as well. (shrink)

Translated by Anthony Bower With an Introduction by Oliver Todd 'A conscience with style' V.S. Pritchett The Rebel (1951) is Camus's 'attempt to understand the time I live in' and a brilliant essay on the nature of human revolt. Here he makes a daring critique of communism - how it had gone wrong behind the Iron Curtain and the resulting totalitarian regimes. And he questions two events held sacred by the left wing - the French Revolution of 1789 (...) and the Russian Revolution of 1917 - that had resulted, he believed, in the use of terrorism as a political instrument. In this towering intellectual document, Camus argues that hope for the future lies in revolt with revolution - a chance to achieve change without losing our freedom. 'The last French intellectual to take the side of humanity and talk its language... a figure of immense moral stature' Sunday Times Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. (shrink)

The French philosopher Jacques Rancière has influenced disciplines from history and philosophy to political theory, literature, art history, and film studies. His research into nineteenth-century workers’ archives, reflections on political equality, critique of the traditional division between intellectual and manual labor, and analysis of the place of literature, film, and art in modern society have all constituted major contributions to contemporary thought. In this collection, leading scholars in the fields of philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism engage Rancière’s work, (...) illuminating its originality, breadth, and rigor, as well as its place in current debates. They also explore the relationships between Rancière and the various authors and artists he has analyzed, ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Flaubert, Rossellini, Auerbach, Bourdieu, and Deleuze. The contributors to this collection do not simply elucidate Rancière’s project; they also critically respond to it from their own perspectives. They consider the theorist’s engagement with the writing of history, with institutional and narrative constructions of time, and with the ways that individuals and communities can disturb or reconfigure what he has called the “distribution of the sensible.” They examine his unique conception of politics as the disruption of the established distribution of bodies and roles in the social order, and they elucidate his novel account of the relationship between aesthetics and politics by exploring his astute analyses of literature and the visual arts. In the collection’s final essay, Rancière addresses some of the questions raised by the other contributors and returns to his early work to provide a retrospective account of the fundamental stakes of his project. _Contributors_. Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Bruno Bosteels, Yves Citton, Tom Conley, Solange Guénoun, Peter Hallward, Todd May, Eric Méchoulan, Giuseppina Mecchia, Jean-Luc Nancy, Andrew Parker, Jacques Rancière, Gabriel Rockhill, Kristin Ross, James Swenson, Rajeshwari Vallury, Philip Watts. (shrink)

This Introduction has three sections, on "logical fatalism," "theological fatalism," and the problem of future contingents, respectively. In the first two sections, we focus on the crucial idea of "dependence" and the role it plays it fatalistic arguments. Arguably, the primary response to the problems of logical and theological fatalism invokes the claim that the relevant past truths or divine beliefs depend on what we do, and therefore needn't be held fixed when evaluating what we can do. We call the (...) sort of dependence needed for this response to be successful "dependence with a capital 'd'": Dependence. We consider different accounts of Dependence, especially the account implicit in the so-called "Ockhamist" response to the fatalistic arguments. Finally, we present the problem of future contingents: what could "ground" truths about the undetermined future? On the other hand, how could all such propositions fail to be true? (shrink)

While theories of rationality and decision making typically adopt either a single-powertool perspective or a bag-of-tricks mentality, the research program of ecological rationality bridges these with a theoretically-driven account of when different heuristic decision mechanisms will work well. Here we described two ways to study how heuristics match their ecological setting: The bottom-up approach starts with psychologically plausible building blocks that are combined to create simple heuristics that fit specific environments. The top-down approach starts from the statistical problem facing the (...) organism and a set of principles, such as the bias– variance tradeoff, that can explain when and why heuristics work in uncertain environments, and then shows how effective heuristics can be built by biasing and simplifying more complex models. We conclude with challenges these approaches face in developing a psychologically realistic perspective on human rationality. (shrink)

This article offers a reading of the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Theravada Buddhism across and through their differences in order to rethink an education that is committed to ‘negative capability’ and the sensibility to uncertainty that this entails. In fleshing this out, I first explore Buddhist ideas of impermanence, suffering and non-self, known as the three marks of existence, from the perspective of Theravada Buddhism. I explore in particular vipassana meditation's insistence on openness to the transient nature of experience (...) and self, and the notion of ‘encounter’ that is implied therein. I then interweave this with Levinas's notion of an ethics of alterity. I argue that taken in tandem, both provide the condition through which another kind of ethical sensibility can be developed—that is, one that is attuned to our encounters with the world. In conclusion, the article reflects on how this sensibility as ‘negative capability’ can re-inform an ethics of educational practices, which are by nature themselves necessarily involved with change and uncertainty. (shrink)

We analyze the logical form of the domain knowledge that grounds analogical inferences and generalizations from a single instance. The form of the assumptions which justify analogies is given schematically as the "determination rule", so called because it expresses the relation of one set of variables determining the values of another set. The determination relation is a logical generalization of the different types of dependency relations defined in database theory. Specifically, we define determination as a relation between schemata of first (...) order logic that have two kinds of free variables: (1) object variables and (2) what we call "polar" variables, which hold the place of truth values. Determination rules facilitate sound rule inference and valid conclusions projected by analogy from single instances, without implying what the conclusion should be prior to an inspection of the instance. They also provide a way to specify what information is sufficiently relevant to decide a question, prior to knowledge of the answer to the question. (shrink)

This article explores the pedagogical, transformative aspects of education as a relation, viewing such transformation as occurring in the liminal space between body and spirit. In order to explore this liminal space more thoroughly, the article first outlines a case for why liminality is of educational and not only of pedagogical concern, building on James Conroy's notion of the liminal imagination and his emphasis on the importance of metaphor for calling our attention to the ontological spaces that make up educational (...) practice. I then use this metaphor both substantively and methodologically, offering a reading of Clarice Lispector's novel The Stream of Life as a performance of the liminal imagination in its attempt to put into focus the embodied and transcendent aspects of becoming, both of which I see as central to defining what is pedagogical about human existence. The article then turns to developing how different metaphors may be mobilised to signify the particularly relational quality of becoming, drawing on Luce Irigaray's work to explore more closely the corporeal and spiritual aspects of becoming in relation. I then turn my attention to a more fulsome discussion of the significance of approaching pedagogical relationships in education in this way and what this signifies for the teacher-student encounter in particular. (shrink)

This paper explores how touch is key to understanding education—not as an achievement or an instrument of acquisition, but as a process through which one becomes a subject capable of both living and leading a life that matters for ourselves and others. As a process, it is concerned with how we encounter things and others in the world and not solely with what we encounter. In particular, it argues that the dynamics of touch-as both a touching and being touched by-are (...) central for understanding educational encounters as sensory landscapes of contact. This paper turns first to Aristotle’s understanding of touch as central to life itself in order to contemplate how it is not merely one of the senses but signifies as the primary mode of all bodily contact with the world. This vital aspect will then be examined in relation to the specific ways bodies experience contact, through their membranes, morphological make up and their movements. Here, I draw on a number of philosophers and theorists, such as Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Juhani Pallasmaa and Erin Manning, and a recent art installation The Boarding School by Sisters Hope to demonstrate how bodies matter to the very practices of education. I conclude with some thoughts on what morphologies, membranes and movements can specifically offer to a sensuous understanding of education. (shrink)

In “Bioethics and the Moral Authority of Experience,” Ryan Nelson et al. (2022) argue that personal experience can simultaneously be an asset and a liability in the practice of bioethics and medici...

In this paper I will argue that Professor Goodman was correct in thinking that there is a problem concerning counterfactual conditionals, but that it is somewhat different from the problem he thought it to be, and is one that is even more basic. I will also try to show that this problem is distinct from Hume's "problem" of induction, and that additional assumptions have to be made for counterfactual induction beyond those required for other kinds of induction.

Film and the Emotions explores the complicated relationship between filmed entertainment, such as movies and television shows, and our capacity to feel emotions. This volume of The Midwest Studies in Philosophy covers topics such as the role of imagination in our capacity to respond emotionally to films, how emotions felt in response to films relate to emotions felt about real events, and the moral implications of responding emotionally to fictions, among others. This collection includes nineteen original articles from experts on (...) film and emotion, including Noel Carroll, Gregory Currie, Susan Feagin, Stacie Friend, Robert Hopkins, Peter Lamarque and Peter Goldie, Derek Matravers, Carl Plantinga, and Murray Smith. (shrink)

_Philosophy and Poetry_ is the 33rd volume in the _Midwest Studies in Philosophy_ series. It begins with contributions in verse from two world class poets, JohnAshbery and Stephen Dunn, and an article by Dunn on the creative processthat issued in his poem. The volume features new work from an internationalcollection of philosophers exploring central philosophical issues pertinent topoetry as well as the connections between the two domains.

This volume in the Midwest Studies in Philosophy series contains 18 essays which discuss the range of of religious traditions which inform the discussion of contemporary issues.

I suggest that part of the reason the on-going debate in the West between the liberal democrats and the communitarians about the future and/or the ills of democracy is futile because both sides are committed to conceptually different accounts of democracy. The roots of communitarianism in the Athenian polis and that of liberalism in the atomistic individualism of the Enlightenment are contrasted in order to discern the motivating visions and overarching structures of both. Whereas communitarian democracy is willdominated, liberal democracy (...) is choice-dominated. My purpose here is not to argue for the supremacy of one over the other, but to call attention to the distinctions between the two that are often blurred in contemporary discussion about democracy. (shrink)