The always vexed relationships between philosophy, theory, methodology, empirical work and their representations and legitimations have been thrown into chaos with the belated acknowledgement of the Anthropocene. Unsurprisingly, traditional Western thought may have been complicit, given its underlying anthropocentric assumptions and humanist commitments in education philosophy, theory and practice. The postcritical knowledge ecology developed here is applied to both a modest and responsible form of methodological inquiry in an ethnographic study of nature experience. Our contextualised experiment adds to the (...) nascent literature of an environmentally oriented education now demanded in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Michael Polanyi names Augustine as inaugurates of his “postcritical”philosophy. To understand what this means by exploring creation in the Confessions will clarify complex problems in Augustine and articulate theological implications in Polanyi. Specifically, it will show why an autobiographical account of conversion ends speaking of creation; how creation can thus be understood as “personal” language; how creation can be recovered in a time preoccupied with conversion; how conversion and creation are linked with incarnation, hermeneutics, and confessional rhetoric; and it (...) will suggest a contemporary use of creation language that connects the scientific and the religious. (shrink)

Although Freud launches a devastating critique of religion, he makes significant contributions to religious maturity. On the “manifest” level, he attacks religion as illusion; on the “latent” level, however, he is preoccupied with religion as mystery deep in the psyche. This difference is between religion as “critical” or as “postcritical” (Polanyi)—as dualistically split from, or emergent within, the psyche. Postcritical religion appears in Freud as mystery, unity, feeling, meaning, and creative agency. We see why, for Freud, the mother (...) as matrix keeps disappearing and what religious maturity is for “honest smallholders on this earth” who live within matrix as mystery. (shrink)

This article examines how the critical tradition initiated by Nietzsche and pursued through poststructuralism might be compatible with what is currently being described as postcritique. It does so by looking at the example of critical discourse analysis (CDA). The first section gives some indications about the state of the methodology currently known as critical discourse analysis and introduces what a ‘postcritical’ reaction could look like. The second section focuses on a concrete example and presents the main critical literature about (...) the student well-being discourse, showing that it generally limits itself to a debunking attitude. The third section explores how the affirmative and creative dimension of critique, its ‘postcritical’ dimension, has been and could be put forward to contribute to what could be called a postcritical discourse analysis methodology. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:Taking Yanis Varoufakis’s novel Another Now as a case study, this article introduces and makes an argument for a new concept in utopian studies: the postcritical utopia. It begins by making four claims: (1) that Varoufakis has written a utopian socialist novel; (2) that this represents a retrieval of a historical form of literature; (3) that the utopia at its center takes the form of a utopian blueprint; and (4) that two objections to this utopia, posed by one of (...) its main characters, complicate our understanding of Another Now, with implications for how we ought to classify it. It is then argued that Another Now’s combination of a systematic utopian blueprint with insights drawn from the tradition of the critical utopia qualifies it as a postcritical utopia. The latter concept is then considered in the context of utopian studies scholarship. (shrink)

Paul Tillich and Michael Polanyi had their only face-to-face meeting in Berkeley, in February, 1963. The author reports the circumstances of this conversation, which he arranged and in which he participated, and, on the basis of his participation, offers refelections on the postcritical and fiduciary dimensions in the work of Polanyi and Tillich as a means of identifying similarities and differences in the thought of each.

This book is the first of its kind to offer a new definition of contemporary management. It uses Michel Henry’s philosophy and takes the real, sensitive and pathetic subjectivity of individuals as the starting point of the analysis as opposed to the usual large categories of representations; resources; images; and discourses. This book thus proposes to rethink management by insisting on the dialectic of strength and vulnerability; its power of constraint, imitation and imagination; and finally its framework of action situated (...) in a fourfold concern for the self, for people, for institutions and for the environment. These different notions are useful in order to experience a deeper understanding of management that is free from the obsolescence of the distant recommendations of ancient protomanagement and the outdated and dubious prescriptions of the so-called “scientific management”. (shrink)

This paper argues for a postcritical praxis in global citizenship education (GCE) and peace education (PE). The paper begins by critiquing the interlocking fields of GCE and PE as problematically framed around the three key pillars of liberal peace. Then, drawing on postabyssal thinking the paper illustrates that the Western-centricity of liberal peacebuilding is not only colonialist/imperialist but that it is an erasure of the other. The paper argues that in light of this realization epistemological pluralism as a transformative (...) response is wanting. Instead new responses must focus on other ontological possibilities grounded in a postcritical response to postabyssal thought. Before concluding, the paper offers some pedagogic possibilities integrating the ontological for a new postcritical GCE and PE. (shrink)

This is a book review of Postcritical Management Studies, by Ghislain Deslandes, published in 2023 by Springer.

You ask if metaphysics is possible after modernity, or after Barth and Wittgenstein and Derrida and the critique of foundationalism? May I invite you, by way of response, to listen in on a conversation? It is a dialogue between what I will call a postcritical philosopher ("P") and a postcritical scriptural theologian —— I'll label the latter a "textualist" ("T"). What I mean by "postcritical" would be displayed as the pattern of inquiry traced by this dialogue. I (...) take the term "postcritical" from George Lindbeck, whose theological work is described by his commentators as more properly "textualist" rather than "philosophic." I believe my usage is, however, true to Lindbeck's discourse. This means that one of the arguments of this essay is that there is a mode of philosophic inquiry proper to the postcritical orientation in theology that we may associate with such Christian theologians as Hans Frei, etc., as well as Lindbeck. A second argument, offered indirectly, is that there is a family of Jewish thinkers whose work may also be labeled "postcritical" on the model of these Christian thinkers, and that this Jewish postcritical theology would also be displayed in dialogues between philosophic and textualist tendencies. A third argument is that, if we listen in on the philosophic side of any of these dialogues, we will hear a postcritical philosophy. By philosophy, I mean primarily logic, defined as an inquiry that examines problematic rules of reasoning and recommends testable ways of correcting them. Secondarily, philosophy includes metaphysics, defined as an inquiry that, for the sake of assuring people about the reliability of a given logic, constructs pictures of the world whose existence would warrant this logic. We need not assume either that logic and metaphysics can be conducted only in the manner of modern and scholastic foundationalism, or that non-foundationalist theology must be "textualist" in a manner that excludes any philosophic generalization. I will argue that there are, indeed, non-foundationalist ways of conceiving of both logical and metaphysical inquiry and that these ways contribute to the dialogic activity of postcritical inquiry. (shrink)

Is contemporary continental philosophy making a break with Kant? The structures of knowledge, taken for granted since Kants Critique of Pure Reason, are now being called into question: the finitude of the subject, the phenomenal given, a priori synthesis. Relinquish the transcendental: such is the imperative of postcritical thinking in the 21st century. Questions that we no longer thought it possible to ask now reemerge with renewed vigor: can Kant really maintain the difference between a priori and innate? Can (...) he deduce, rather than impose, the categories, or justify the necessity of nature? Recent research into brain development aggravates these suspicions, which measure transcendental idealism against the thesis of a biological origin for cognitive processes. In her important new book Catherine Malabou lays out Kants response to his posterity. True to its subject, the book evolves as an epigenesis – the differentiated growth of the embryo – for, as those who know how to read critical philosophy affirm, this is the very life of the transcendental and contains the promise of its transformation. (shrink)

Why ask ‘what after post-modernism’? This question implies that postmodernism, as a grand narrative, recently withered away, that this is an event educators should be concerned with, and that it ca...

Few philosophers have thought as long and as deeply as Kant about the nature of philosophy. His reflections on this topic did not come to an end with the Critique of Pure Reason. In what follows I am going to argue that in his Opus postumum, Kant came to realize that the conception of philosophy presented in the first Critique cannot be upheld. I will suggest that Kant’s numerous attempts in the first fascicle of the Opus postumum to redefine transcendental (...) philosophy reflect this insight. These attempts are thus not to be interpreted as signs of senility, as has usually been done, but as indicative of a new and heightened level of reflection. In this sense one can, I suggest, speak of a “postcritical” phase in Kant’s thinking, comparable to the so-called critical and precritical phases. This does not, however, mean that after 1790 Kant returned to a form of dogmatism, but that in his last work a conception of philosophy emerges that differs as much from that developed in the first Critique as the latter does from the one to be found in his precritical writings. I shall look at all three conceptions in turn. I begin with the precritical one. (shrink)

On the basis of his acquaintance with theoretical elementary particle physics, and following the lead of Thomas Torrance, John Polkinghorne maintains that the data upon which a science is based, and the method by which it treats those data, must respect the idiosyncratic nature of the object with which the science is concerned. Polkinghorne calls this the "accommodation" (or "conformity") of a discipline to its object. The question then arises: What should we expect religious experience and theological method to be (...) like if they are accommodated to the idiosyncratic nature of God? Polkinghorne's methodological program is typical of postcritical positions in the theology-science dialogue in holding that the fiduciary element in theological method is simply a species of the fiduciary element that is a de facto part of all knowing—in other words, theological method does not differ in fundamental kind from the methods of the natural sciences. But this program may contain the seeds of an alienation of theological method from the transcendence of God similar to the double self-alienation of theology described by Michael Buckley in At the Origins of Modern Atheism. I contend that something like Bernard Lonergan's position on how the method of faith seeking understanding is related to the methods of the natural sciences is exactly the sort of thing that one should expect on the supposition of Polkinghorne's principle of accommodation, at least if the God who is the object of theological science is transcendent. The way in which the divine differs from all other objects ought to be disclosed or reflected in religious experience and theological method. Polkinghorne charts the course for an accommodated theology, but it seems to be Lonergan who is more intent on following it. (shrink)

Polanyi and Transhumanism both place technologies in pivotal roles in bringing about Homo sapiens ’ species transitions. The question is asked whether Polanyi’s emphasis on the role of technology in Homo sapiens’ rise out of mute beasthood indicates that he might have been inclined to embrace the Transhumanist vision of Homo sapiens’ technological evolution into a postbiological, techno-cyber species. To answer this question, some of the core commitments of both Transhumanism and Polanyi’s postcritical philosophy are examined, especially as they (...) bear on Homo sapiens’ species transitions. The conclusion reached is that rather than being the next step dictated by the inner logic of Polanyi’s thought, Transhumanism is actually the final conclusion of epistemological ideals he spent most of his career denouncing. (shrink)

This is a conversation with Ghislain Deslandes, author of a dozen books addressing various issues in the field of the philosophy of management. Our dialogue traces his intellectual journey, starting with the interpretation of antiphilosophy and further exploring how it is applied in organizations and management practice. The conversation concludes with a discussion of his latest book about postcritical management studies.

This essay is one of three published in response to Casper Bruun Jensen's article “Experiments in Good Faith and Hopefulness: Toward a Postcritical Social Science”, which concerns the “postcritical” work of Helen Verran, Richard Rottenburg, and Hirokazu Miyazaki. Verran's response clarifies the stance that she takes in her work, and especially in her book Science and an African Logic, toward critique. Here she argues that critique involves grasping the difference between entities in the here-and-now, while conventional analysis in (...) the social sciences explains away difference in the here-and-now by relocating it to an ideal realm. She explains that the method she has developed is a form of infra critique — a way of “doing difference” that keeps it present, particular, and localized. Her essay concludes that the shift to infra critique requires that the “good faith analyst” make her own ontological commitments explicit and accept responsibility for making judgments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Where's the Rhetoric? Imagining a Unified Field by S. Scott GrahamJoshua HananWhere's the Rhetoric? Imagining a Unified Field. By S. Scott Graham. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020. 194 pp. Paperback $29.95. ISBN: 978-0-8142-5771-5.The proliferation of materialist perspectives in rhetorical studies has generated feelings of disciplinary crisis and fragmentation. Early materialist formulations of rhetoric, such as those put forward by Michael Calvin McGee and Raymie McKerrow, conceptualized materiality (...) discursively and, thus, maintained continuity with more traditional accounts of rhetoric as a practice of "symbolic action." However, beginning with texts such as Ronald Walter Greene's "Another Materialist Rhetoric" and Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley's edited collection Rhetorical Bodies, scholars began emphasizing the ontological and embodied rhetoricity of physical contexts and environments over discursive and ideological conceptions of materiality. This turn toward the ontological and embodied has rapidly expanded over the past twenty years, with numerous scholars now offering new materialist, postcritical, ecological, computational, and digital perspectives on rhetoric that privilege concepts such as affect, circulation, and assemblage over more traditional rhetorical terminology.It is in response to this tension between standard rhetorical perspectives and materialist rhetorical approaches that we can appreciate the interventions of S. Scott Graham's recent book, Where's the Rhetoric? Imagining a Unified Field. Rejecting the view that the materialist turns in rhetorical studies (particularly rhetorical new materialisms [hereafter referred to as RNM] and computational rhetoric) have left the discipline more fragmented and less capable of defending a unified perspective on rhetoric, Graham believes it is possible to generate a new unified theory that can affirm the lines of scholarly influence that have given rise to RNM (what Graham calls modern rhetoric's "right branch") as well as the more [End Page 218] traditional lines of scholarly influence that have led to a formulation of rhetoric as "symbolic action" (what Graham calls modern rhetoric's "left branch"). To accomplish this task, Graham argues that we should avoid the tendency to view RNM as "other" to traditional narratives about rhetoric and, instead, consider how these latter perspectives are compatible with the former. Much like unified field theories in physics that seek to bridge older perspectives on general relativity with newer perspectives on quantum mechanics (e.g., string theory and quantum loop gravity), Graham believes it is possible to achieve similar results in rhetorical studies by approaching standard rhetorical perspectives from the ontological viewpoints enabled by RNM.What makes Graham's angle on this claim particularly unique is his premise that a proto-new materialist perspective has underpinned some of the most influential left branch approaches to rhetoric all along. While most rhetoricians start from the present when introducing concepts associated with RNM, Graham, following historically informed thinkers such as Scot Barnett, Debra Hawhee, and Thomas Rickert, demonstrates that there is a line of thinking about "symbolic action" as "situated action" that goes back to the relational approach to metaphysics put forward by philosopher Henri Bergson in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, as Graham argues, if we begin with Bergson's relational ontology, rather than the postmodernist and social constructivist philosophies that (explicitly and implicitly) shaped interpretations of rhetoric's left branch during the second half of the twentieth century, we do not "need to re-engineer rhetoric" to fit the latest trends of RNM (41). From Graham's perspective, many standard rhetorical perspectives have been hospitable toward new materialism from the outset. To appreciate this fact, we simply need to recuperate the Bergsonian legacy that informs this tradition.To make a case for this Bergsonian approach to rhetoric, the first main chapter of Graham's book (chapter 2) engages in detail with the work of Kenneth Burke. As a crucial founder of the symbolic action paradigm, Graham believes that if he can show the influence of Bergson on Burke's thought, he can, in turn, demonstrate how scholarship informed by Burke is also influenced by Bergson. To trace the influence of Bergson on Burke's thinking, Graham focuses on Burke's early work, especially Permanence and Change. In contrast to Burke's later writings (e.g., A Grammar of Motives, A... (shrink)

The human sensory system is continuously engaged in experiencing and interpreting every interaction with other living beings, objects, and the environment. The purpose of this article is to describe the impact limited opportunities for rich sensory experiences have on students with severe disabilities in two middle school classrooms situated in a public separate school in the southeastern USA. The study employed a postcritical ethnographic approach and grounded theory thematic analysis of fieldnotes gathered over a two-year period. Three major themes (...) supported by the data are presented and discussed in depth. They are: students are afforded limited sensory rich experiences, everyday routines make students passive recipients to school, and instructional approaches result in little interaction with extended periods of waiting. The implications of the findings for improved sensory experiences and possible future directions are described. (shrink)

The author argues that Kant was working out a theory of society in his postcritical work, and that he intentionally, and studiously, kept the 1st Critique sociology-free.

A characteristic of the modern mind is a disdain for tradition. Polanyi argues that neglecting the role of tradition leads to philosophical incoherence as well as moral and political chaos. Polanyi’s postcritical philosophy represents an attempt to show how tradition plays a vital role in the process of discovery. Ultimately, a coherent account of the sciences, as well as the humanities, is only possible when tradition is acknowledged as indispensable.

This essay is one of three responses to Casper Bruun Jensen's article “Experiments in Good Faith and Hopefulness: Toward a Postcritical Social Science,” published in the Spring 2014 issue of Common Knowledge. Jensen suggested that the postcritical mode of knowledge production should focus on a continuous and persistent analytical effort to resist despair by “insisting properly.” This commentary, by one of three authors on whom the original article focused, contrasts Jensen's emphasis on insistence with the idea of ethnography (...) as response. The reconceptualization of ethnographic work as response can have various and divergent consequences, some of which are explored here with reference to the author's own ethnographic research on indigenous Fijian gift-giving and Japanese financial trading. While his immediate interest here is to expose differences in the kinds of openness that insistence and response afford, he concludes that willingness to respond is more basic to anthropology than the ethnographer's cultivation of the internal strength required to keep anthropology going as an enterprise. (shrink)

The 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis sponsored both an International Congress of Arts and Sciences aimed at unity of knowledge and an anthropology exhibit of diverse peoples. Jointly these represented a quest for unifying knowledge in a diverse world that was fractured by isolated specializations and segregated peoples. In historical perspective, the Congress's quest for knowledge is overshadowed by Ota Benga who was part of the anthropology exhibit. The 1904 World's Fair can be viewed as a Euro-American ritual, a (...) global pilgrimage, which sought to celebrate the advances and resolve the challenges of modernity and human diversity. Three years later Afropentecostalism dealt with these same issues with different methods and rituals. This ritual system became the most culturally diverse and fastest growing religious movement of the twentieth century. I suggest that the anthropological method of Frank Hamilton Cushing, the postcritical epistemology of Michael Polanyi, and the Afropente-costal ritual movement initiated by William J. Seymour are all attempts to develop a postmodern epistemology that is simultaneously constructive, focused on discerning reality, and broad enough to allow for human consciousness and diverse human communities. I explore this confluence of scientific and participatory epistemology through six theses. (shrink)

Reading Hegel retrieves Hegelian speculative experience for literary theory. The relationship between Hegel and literary theory has for a long time been both contested and paradoxical. On the one hand, "theory" is often skeptical of all that Hegel ostensibly stood for: idealism, systematicity, and identity at the expense of difference. Yet, in spite of itself, literary theory is taken to owe a profound debt to Hegel's philosophy. Robert Lucas Scott's book complicates this account and argues that literary theory has made (...) the mistake of abstracting Hegel's thought from its more dynamic presentation in Hegel's writings, reducing "Hegel" to a series of propositions or positions. Literary theory, Scott argues, misses what is perhaps the greatest innovation of Hegel's philosophy: a presentation of experience that begins precisely by setting aside all preconceptions or prior assumptions. It is on this point that Hegel's philosophy itself approaches literature: its content cannot be simply abstracted from the singular experience of reading it. Only through a mode of reading alive to speculative experience can literary theory become truly Hegelian. Scott's exposition of Hegel offers a model of reading with relevance beyond philosophy: one that is critical without pretensions of mastery and detachment and that honors the singularity of the reading experience without succumbing to the subjectivism of the "postcritical." The book also includes engagements with the work of Luther, Kant, Marx, Gillian Rose, Fredric Jameson, Robert Brandom, Catherine Malabou, and more in its recovery of Hegel's thought for a critical understanding of our time. (shrink)

This essay critiques Rita Felski’s employment of Axel Honneth’s theorisation of “recognition” for a postcritical literary theory and, in turn, Honneth’s own appropriation of recognition from Hegel. In her article “Recognizing Class,” Felski uses Honneth’s concept of recognition to read Didier Eribon’s memoir Returning to Reims, and to argue for the importance of lived experience in analyses of class and its literary representation. This leads her to indict Marxism for its ideal of a classless society. Why should we will (...) the abolition of class when many workers experience their class as a source of pride and belonging? What workers need is not emancipation from their class, but adequate recognition. By drawing upon Gillian Rose’s Hegelian account of recognition, this essay contends that by assuming recognition in advance as an ideal, Felski and Honneth overlook that without emancipation from bourgeois property and class relations, the recognition they presuppose remains an impossibility. (shrink)

In this article, an anthropologist examines the question, asked today in diverse forms by an increasing variety of actors: what is the aim or telos of the social sciences? From within the disciplinary communities of the social sciences themselves, the answers given are inseparable from questions of theory and method. This essay engages some recent experimental, postcritical responses as formulated by scholars in the fields of anthropology and STS. Following decades of reflexive debates and changing institutional and disciplinary environments, (...) both anthropology and STS currently experience heightened levels of uncertainty about theories and methods, means and ends. In this context, the emergence and vigor of a number hybrid positions, eschewing traditional separations between facts and values, the conceptual and the empirical, and the descriptive and the performative, are noteworthy. This essay examines three distinctive and novel responses to the question of what comes after critique, found in the writings of the anthropologist Hirokazu Miyazaki, who has defined what he terms a method of hope; in the experimental anthropology of Richard Rottenburg, which offers parables of modern development aid; and in the scholarship of Helen Verran, a philosopher and STS ethnographer who constructs the figure of the good faith analyst. Coming to terms with the challenges, possibilities, tensions, and paradoxes of these and other postcritical responses is the key purpose of the present discussion. (shrink)

I respond to Charles McCoy's criticisms of my view of Niebuhr's theological ethics by arguing that “conversion,” understood as tacit reorientation rather than explicit choice, does accurately depict Niebuhr's 1929 shift in perspective; that “language” emphasized as central to his ethics does in fact hold act and word together; that “praxis,” while not a part of Niebuhr's conscious agenda, is inherent in his idea of response; and that Niebuhr's thought is revolutionary which could and should be developed, but by someone (...) else, into a full-blown postcritical theological ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:It is difficult to do justice to a monumental study such as PJDS in a short review: only time will determine its real significance. We can only offer some preliminary comments, and in spite of anything we have to say, the mere fact that the book contains such a wealth of information justifies for it a permanent place on a bookshelf of a student of medieval thought.The title of (...) PJDS deserves special attention. While we have books on Scotus's theology or particular topics of his thought, there has been no comprehensive study of his "philosophy," seemingly for a good reason: Scotus is clearly a "fundamental" and systematic theologian who simply uses some classic tools of ancient philosophers and some of their texts and ideas as material for his own discussions. So first of all one needs to determine what constitutes "philosophy" in such a case. V. devotes considerable attention to this question, but unfortunately only at the very end of the study, in Part III, which constitutes almost a separate monograph on the historiography of the debate about "medieval philosophy" and Scotus's role in it. Dichotomizing medieval thought into "philosophy" and theology in recent debates comes from the post-Enlightenment habit of seeing "philosophy" , as opposed to "theology," as something positive in itself. In Chapter 14 V. makes a good observation that "philosophy" and "theology" in ancient and medieval thought are simply two systems that can be coherent in themselves but differ fundamentally as far as their premises are concerned. Using the terminology of contemporary hermeneutical-postcritical analysis, one could say that both disciplines are intratextual systems, with their own internal logic but with different "starting points," opened to a conversation ad extra to various degrees. The classification "intratextual system" based on a solid theoretical foundation in the hermeneutical-postcritical tradition would eliminate the unnecessary dichotomy in ancient and medieval thought. Indeed, it is difficult to see why some of Plato's, Aristotle's or Stoic texts should be classified as "philosophy," not to mention those of Plotinus and Proclus that are often clearly "theology." As a whole, V.'s verdict is that Scotus has his own coherent system of thought based on contingency, as opposed to the "necessitarianism" of ancient philosophers. As for the role of "philosophy," V.'s analysis of recent scholarship shows that "medieval philosophy" is often understood as the logical tools in the service of theology: the interpretation that explains the recent interest in the fourteenth-century thought where those tools were best developed.The book in general is quite readable, despite occasional infelicities in the English and some typos. V. employs a variety of styles, from purely scholarly, which includes a straightforward exposition of relevant texts, with some analysis of the diachronic development of issues, to more literary, ornate and emotional. Similarly varied is his presentation of issues: from dry exposition to creating prolonged "mystery plots" that lead to "discoveries." Unfortunately there is also some unevenness in the text flow: from very smooth to abrupt transitions from one statement to another .Although the book will definitely benefit a variety of readers, the exact readership is difficult to pinpoint. Some sections, such as the extended discussion of distinctions and relations in the section on logic, presuppose a very basic audience; often much of the material from previous sections is repeated . Yet other sections presuppose a rather sophisticated reader who is familiar with the context of the discussion and is able not only to follow but also anticipate the author's train of thought.PJDS provides an excellent coverage of Scotus's work, with one notable exception: the Reportatio tradition. Even though the Wolter/Bychkov edition-translation of Rep. I-A appeared perhaps.. (shrink)

Feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and Marxism, among other critical approaches, have undermined traditional notions of aesthetics in recent decades. But questions of aesthetic judgment and pleasure persist, and many critics now seek a "return to aesthetics" or a "return to beauty." Janet Wolff advances a "postcritical" aesthetics grounded in shared values that are negotiated in the context of community. She relates this approach to contemporary debates about a committed politics similarly founded on the abandonment of certainty. Neither universalist nor relativist, (...) the "aesthetics of uncertainty" provides a discourse on beauty that contemporary critics can engage with and offers a basis for judgment that is committed to assigning value to works of art. Wolff explores her position through a range of topics: the question of beauty in relation to feminist critique; the problematic status of twentieth-century English art, visual representations of the Holocaust, Jewish identity as portrayed by the artist R. B. Kitaj, refugee artists and modernism in 1940s Britain, and the nature and appeal of imagistic thinking in sociology. She addresses the desire for certainty and the timeliness of doubt and concludes with a meditation on the intersection of aesthetics and ethics, arguing that ethical issues are very much implicated in aesthetic discourse. (shrink)

This essay is one of three published in response to Casper Bruun Jensen's article “Experiments in Good Faith and Hopefulness: Toward a Postcritical Social Science”, which concerns the “postcritical” work of Richard Rottenburg, Hirokazu Miyazaki, and Helen Verran. Rottenburg's response clarifies the key argument of his book Far-Fetched Facts, situates it in a biographical and political context of despair and hope, and extends it in ways stimulated by Jensen's article and by reading in the sociology of critique that (...) Rottenburg has done since writing the book. He here reformulates the main argument of his book as concerning the indispensable necessity of what Nietzsche calls “legislated language,” along with its performative effects and insurmountable fallibility. By situating that argument in a biographical and political context that the book does not emphasize, and by explaining the “plot” of the book, Rottenburg emphasizes that Far-Fetched Facts was intentionally and principally written from a perspective that does not allow the maintenance of a clear-cut distinction between fact and value and that, therefore, is a contribution toward a methodology of hope. This essay moreover indicates ways in which Far-Fetched Facts is linked to developments in the French pragmatist sociology of critique, which offers a compatible and, at the same time, well-established language to make similar points. This sociology starts from the assumption that practices of ordering depend on the establishment of forms for commensuration, classification, qualification, valuation, and calculation of equivalence that imply reference to realities “out there” and to perceived common goods. A convention is a temporarily established, dynamic, and reflexive material-semantic form that enables interpretation and evaluation. By raising expectations of how things must be done in order to pass as appropriate, valid, and legitimate, conventions facilitate cooperation, yet at some stage in their lives conventions become controversial and need to be replaced. In order to communicate and to coordinate actions, conventions and metacodes are as indispensable as they are fallible, Rottenburg argues, and instead of being replaced by “good faith” and “hope,” conventions and metacodes actually depend on them. (shrink)

All those interested in the field of education will find this book fascinating, instructive, and thought-provoking. Gill presents a comprehensive reflection on learning. Prior to discussing the quality of education in America, or considering issues of pedagogy and curriculum, Gill seeks to develop a philosophy of education that is critically based in an investigation of the nature of human knowing. The first part of the book works to identify a more adequate philosophy of education, one based on a "postcritical" (...) examination of the nature of human knowing. The second part of the book searches out a theory of learning that should inform any philosophy or system of education. The third part renders a model of learning that can suggest appropriate programs, pedagogies, and curriculum. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS The Craft of Theology: From Symbol to System. By AVERY DULLES, S.J. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1992. Pp. x + 228 with index. $22.50 (cloth). The catholicity of Avery Dulles's method in The Craft of Theology is best demonstrated by the broad compass of his self-chosen label, "postcritical theology." Postcritioal theology, he states, puts no un· fair demands on the reader to conform to (...) the spirit of the age nor does it imply that previous approaches (precritical, critical, paracritical) are obsolete. Postcritical theology seeks to make the ecclesial character of theology more recognizable than has most Catholic theology since the Second Vatican Council (viii). Postcritical theology takes its cues from a variety of sources: Polanyi's attention to the tacit dimensions of knowing, Lonergan's understanding of the dynamics of conversion, the "sense of the faithful" in Johann Adam Mohler, the recovery of the tradition in John Henry Newman and Maurice Blondel, and the postliberal theology of Albert Outler and George Lindbeck. Alongside these more traditionally oriented sources, The Craft of Theology also explores the social and symbolic dimension of ·the divine self-com· munication (22). To this end, Dulles employs Ricoeur's theory of the symbol in order to extract " the latent meaning of the classical doctrine of the hypostatic union " and Habermas's notion of an ideal speech situation in his anthropological analysis of the symbolism of sin as "anti-communicative" (27, 33). Dulles's latest work is a carefully structured synthesis of the typologies and constructive proposals which his readers have encountered in previous works. Even though the twelve chapters were originally composed for different occasions, Dulles intends the work " to have greater unity than a simple collection" (ix). The first four chapters are devoted to questions of theological method, including the develop· ment of fundamental theology or apologetics. The next two chapters deal with Scripture and tradition as sources of theology. The seventh chapter specifies the role of the ecclesiastical magisterium in systematic theology and includes a discussion of " the delicate problem of theological dissent." This is followed by two chapters on the relationship of theology to two cognate disciplines, philosophy and physical science. Without calling for a specifically Christian or Catholic philosophy, 513 514 BOOK REVIEWS Dulles nonetheless raises the question of whether " the intimate connection between systematic theology and the type of metaphysical realism that was embodied in scholasticism, both medieval and modern " can ever be adequately surpassed (ix-x, 133). Chapters ten and eleven pick up the thread of chapter seven by addressing the place of university theology in the service of the Church and the question of academic freedom. The final chapter develops the argument that ecumenism -both interreligious and intra-Christian-is best understood not as a separate branch of theology but as a dimension of all good theology. As in Models of Revelation (1983), his fundamental theology derives principally from a theory of symbolic mediation of doctrines. In The Craft of Theology, Dulles is prudent to address the charge of subjectivism commonly made against his theory of symbolic mediation and analysis of models (50-52). His theory of symbolic mediation, he states, is closer to the symbolical theology of Karl Rahner than to the less dialectical " experiential-expressive " theory exemplified by Schleiermacher 's statement that " Christian doctrines are accounts of the religious affections set forth in speech" (18). As with Rahner, symbolic realism for Dulles rests upon a theological anthropology that takes corporeal existence in a historically constituted, communal body as a real, symbolic expression of the human spirit. Dulles's theory of symbolic communication is supposed to accord greater cognitive import to religious symbols than does the view that symbols are merely expressions of the inner sentiments of the faithful (17-18). In Models of Revelation, Dulles defined the cognitive value of the symbol as surpassing the passing mood of the subject and " giving rise to thought" (137, 153). In The Craft of Theology, however, Dulles frequently reverts to a less nuanced position. Sometimes he equates symbolical theology with critical reflection upon a non-discursive human evocation of an interior state: [R] ecognition of the symbolic or evocative character of revelation can... (shrink)

This article is a short response to two reviews of the book Walter Benjamin’s Antifascist Education: From Riddles to Radio by Tyson E. Lewis. It discusses the role of aesthetics and memory in cultivating antifascist potentialities in children.