The Institute of Social Research, from which the Frankfurt School developed, was founded in the early years of the Weimar Republic. It survived the Nazi era in exile, to become an important centre of social theory in the postwar era. Early members of the school, such as Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, developed a form of Marxist theory known as Critical Theory, which became influential in the study of class, politics, culture and ideology. The work of more recent members, and in (...) particular Habermas, has received wide attention throughout Europe and North America. Tom Bottomore's study takes a new and controversial look at the contributions of the Frankfurt School to modern sociology, examining several issues not previously discussed elsewhere. He discusses the neglect of history and political economy by the critical theorists, and considers the relationship of the later Frankfurt School to the radical movements of the 1960s and the present time. His critical analysis makes the school's writers accessible, through an assessment of their work and an exploration of the relationship of Critical Theory to other forms of sociological thought, especially positivism and structuralism. (shrink)

First published in 1985, _Theories of Modern Capitalism _provides a succinct study of Marxist and non-Marxist theories of Capitalism, its recent development, and the prospects of a transition to socialism. The study begins with a critical examination and comparison of four major theories of capitalism, in the works of Marx, Weber, Schumpeter and Hayek. This is followed by an analysis of the most recent phase of capitalism which has been conceptualised by Marxists thinkers in various ways as 'organised capitalism'', 'state (...) monopoly', or 'late capitalism'. Finally, Bottomore considers the question of a 'transition to socialism' in the diverse interpretations which have been offered by Marxists on one side, and by Weber, Schumpeter and Hayek on the other. _Theories of Modern Capitalism_ will be valuable in a wide range of courses in social and political theory, and will also have an appeal to a broader readership concerned with issues of social and economic policy. (shrink)

The Institute of Social Research, from which the Frankfurt School developed, was founded in the early years of the Weimar Republic. It survived the Nazi era in exile, to become an important centre of social theory in the postwar era. Early members of the school, such as Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, developed a form of Marxist theory known as Critical Theory, which became influential in the study of class, politics, culture and ideology. The work of more recent members, and in (...) particular Habermas, has received wide attention throughout Europe and North America. Tom Bottomore's study takes a new and controversial look at the contributions of the Frankfurt School to modern sociology, examining several issues not previously discussed elsewhere. He discusses the neglect of history and political economy by the critical theorists, and considers the relationship of the later Frankfurt School to the radical movements of the 1960s and the present time. His critical analysis makes the school's writers accessible, through an assessment of their work and an exploration of the relationship of Critical Theory to other forms of sociological thought, especially positivism and structuralism. (shrink)

This collection of essays addresses some of the central issues in modern social and political thought, such as: the revival of Marxism and its relevance to the social sciences; the analysis of social and political structures and social movements; and the future of advanced capitalist societies.

RIVALRY AND CENTRAL PLANNING: THE SOCIALIST CALCULATION DEBATE RECONSIDERED by Don Lavoie. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 208 pp., $34.95.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Many-Headed Muse: Tradition and Innovation in Late Classical Greek Lyric Poetry by Pauline A. LeVenTom PhillipsPauline A. LeVen. The Many-Headed Muse: Tradition and Innovation in Late Classical Greek Lyric Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. x + 377 pp. Cloth, $99.The “New Music” of the late fifth and early fourth centuries b.c.e. has been subject to a revival of interest in recent years. Most (...) scholarship, however, has tended to focus either on socio-historical aspects of performance culture or on the philological problems posed by texts such as Timotheus’ Persians. The corpus of fourth-century hymns by authors such as Aristonous and Philodamus has likewise been a minority pursuit, addressed in the main by historians of religion and epigraphers rather than literary critics. This monograph provides a welcome change in emphasis. Resolutely literary in her approach, LeVen elaborates readings that challenge assumptions about a qualitative decline in late classical literature, arguing instead for reading these texts in terms of their particular interpretative demands and situating them in a continuum of literary developments. The New Musicians emerge not as vapidly showy musical and dramatic virtuosos, but as composers of considerable verbal sophistication who developed and extended traditional poetic techniques while also demanding new kinds of emotional and interpretative engagement from audiences. The textual strategies at work in the hymnic corpus are also brought into sharper relief, particularly as regards the effects created by the interplay of performance and material inscription. The result is a valuable contribution to scholarship: as well as situating the New Music in relation to earlier song culture, LeVen shows how some of the strategies [End Page 357] employed by Timotheus and his contemporaries anticipate literary developments in the Hellenistic period. As such, this book will be of interest to all students of ancient Greek poetry.The book begins with an overview of poetic activity in the late classical period, including a useful set of tables that present the literary and epigraphic sources grouped by type. LeVen also surveys developments in scholarship on the New Music, recapitulating the case for caution when assessing the evidence of ancient critics and comedians, and making a strong case for the importance of engaging with the poems’ “dynamics of allusion, emulation, and intertextuality” (69). The rest of the book consists of case studies concerned with individual authors and corpora, and thematic chapters discussing the New Musicians’ linguistic innovations. The first group includes a chapter on Philoxenus of Cythera (chap. 3), a discussion of the Dinner Party attributed to Philoxenus (chap. 6), and readings of the inscribed hymns (chap. 7). The discussion of Philoxenus of Cythera focuses mainly on the anecdotes about his life preserved by Athenaeus, Machon, and other later authors. LeVen explores these texts’ persistent concern with the interrelated issues of food, xenia, and poetry, and their varying figurations of Philoxenus’ character. She also argues convincingly that the Dinner Party (PMG 836) should be attributed to Philoxenus of Cythera (114–18), and a good part of chapter 6 is devoted to an analysis of this text. Her readings emphasize the poem’s creation of an interpretative dialogue: the speaker presents not just an ekphrasis but also an “appeal to his own feelings and to those of his internal addressee” which underlines the “social dimension” of dining (257). More controversially, she also argues that it was performed as a dithyramb: as a text performed on the public stage, its detailed descriptions of fine dining “collaps[e] the distinction between... the public competitions at festivals and sacrifices and the private elegant home” (261).In her concluding remarks about the role played by the symposium in fourth-century poetic culture, LeVen sees the distinctiveness of the period not in poems being performed in multiple locations but in “the open traffic” between public and private performance settings, “the symposium importing passages from the dramatic stage and exporting some of its traditional motives and forms of expression to more public settings, dramatic and beyond” (268). The remainder of chapter 6 is concerned with the hymns to Virtue and Health of Aristotle and Ariphron, while chapter 7 deals with inscribed hymns such as the Erythrean paeans, Aristonous’ Hymn... (shrink)

This thesis proposes a new philosophical reading of the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. In particular, it is argued that it is Lacan's concept of the 'Real', one ofhis three registers of the Real, Symbolic and the Imaginary, that provides the crucial conceptual horizon for La can' s work, early and late, against those who would locate the emergence of the centrality of the Real only late in Lacan's teaching. The thesis sets out to establish the (...) conceptual genesis and multiple instantiations of the concept of the Real in both Lacan's articles and seminars, arguing that, far from being a hypostatized 'outside' to the Symbolic and Imaginary, the Real is to be understood as immanent to both. Further, Lacan's theory of language is highlighted as revealing the particularity of the Real, especially through the concept of the material signifier. In developing a novel typology of the 'signifier-in-relation' and the 'signifier-in-isolation', the thesis underscores the singularity of Lacan's theory of language and its transcendence of its roots in Saussure's linguistics. Finally, the Real is shown to have a central pertinence to the novel theory of the body proposed in Lacan' s final seminars, a theory of the body that is itself shown to be intimately connected to Lacan' s theory of language, and to his revision of Freud's theories of primary narcissism. (shrink)

Fyodor Dostoevsky is renowned as one of the greatest psychologists in world literature, but what we know about the origins and the workings of the human mind has changed drasti­cally since the late nineteenth century. If Dostoevsky was such a sensitive reader of the human condition, do his insights hold up to modern research? To judge just by the issue of the psychology of confession, the answer appears to be: yes. The work of Michael Tomasel­lo indicates that the human (...) conscience evolved in order to make people obey group norms. From this I draw the proposition that confession should be best directed to the group as a whole, and not to an individual. Judging by Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment and an assortment of characters in The Brothers Karamazov, this appears to be exactly how confes­sion works in Dostoevsky’s novels: sin is against all, so forgiveness must be from all. (shrink)

This article illustrates the important scientific role that a systems approach might play within the social sciences and humanities, above all through its contribution to a common language, shared conceptualizations, and theoretical integration in the face of the extreme (and growing) fragmentation among the social sciences (and between the social sciences and the natural sciences). The article outlines a systems theoretic approach, actor-system-dynamics (ASD), whose authors have strived to re-establish systems theorizing in the social sciences (after a period of marginalization (...) since the late 1960s). This is done, in part, by showing how key social science concepts are readily incorporated and applied in social system analysis. (shrink)

: Boston Personalism began with Borden Parker Bowne at Boston University in the late nineteenth century and was developed and enriched by Bowne's student, Edgar Sheffield Brightman, and by Brightman's student, Peter Anthony Bertocci. Philosophers working in the Boston Personalist tradition wrote in the major areas of philosophy, but mostly in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of religion. Their thinking was animated by the insight that personal categories must be taken seriously by anyone attempting to develop an adequate philosophy. (...) At the core of that vision is person and its significance for an adequate metaphysics. (shrink)

Principles that provide general normative frameworks in bioethics have been criticized since the late 1980s, when several different methods and types of moral philosophy began to be proposed as alternatives or substitutes. Several accounts have emerged in recent years, including: (1) Impartial Rule Theory (supported in this issue by K. Danner Clouser), (2) Casuistry (supported in this issue by Albert Jonsen), and (3) Virtue Ethics (supported in this issue by Edmund D. Pellegrino). Although often presented as rival methods or (...) theories, these approaches are consistent with and should not be considered adversaries of a principle-based account. (shrink)

In the summer of 1997 one could scarcely enter a bookstore in Beijing without encountering Wang Xiaobo's pensive and defiant look on the cover of dozens of books displayed at the entrance. Wang had suddenly died in the spring of that year at the age of forty-five. Born in Beijing in 1952 to a family of intellectuals, he remained attached to China's capital despite periods of separation, such as during the Cultural Revolution, when he was sent to Yunnan to "learn (...) from the peasants" and taught in a "people-run-school" in Shandong, and also during the 1980s, when he studied in the United States . Wang always returned to Beijing, in the late 1970s to study economy and business at the People's University and in the late 1980s to teach there. After retiring in 1993, he devoted his time to writing: poetry, novels, essays, non-fiction, and a movie script. (shrink)

In this chapter, the author's unplanned venture into public philosophy began in the mid‐to‐late 1980s, just as Ronald Reagan was insisting that a certain famous wall be torn down. Various European thinkers and political philosophers in America, along with a few people working in the author's own tradition, like Robert Nozick and Peter Singer, had already begun to work in the nascent movement of “applied philosophy,” and in a public way. The author's early work in philosophy had been solidly (...) within the analytical tradition, with a special interest in religion, focused mainly on metaphysics and, secondarily, epistemological issues. Public philosophy can be rekindled in our time by any number of means and across a wide variety of topics. Many of the philosophers who had the biggest public impact in their own time and into our own have been good storytellers, and some have used the power of humor well. (shrink)

Slavoj Zizek’s criticism of Western Buddhism (2014) for being a late capitalist opiate of the people is partly unwarranted and partly of undeniable relevance. His implicit assumption is that Buddhism is an internalist path that only looks into the individual inner world, leaving harmful societal systems in peace. This article offers a response to Zizek’s analysis, by interpreting the chariot simile in the Buddhist Pali Canon. Even though Pali chariot similes indeed support an internalist perspective, some of them also (...) allow for a reading that opens up to two “externalist” complements: the social outer world and the technological environment. In this way, while acknowledging Zizek’s criticism, we point at Buddhist philosophy’s inherent potential for developing a social-technological critical stance, for instance by linking it to mediation theory. (shrink)

Slavoj Zizek's (2014) criticism of Western Buddhism for being a late capitalist opiate of the people is partly unwarranted and partly of undeniable relevance. His implicit assumption is that Buddhism is an internalist path that only looks into in the individual inner world, leaving harmful societal systems in peace. This paper offers a response to Zizek's analysis, by interpreting the chariot simile in the Buddhist Pali Canon. Even though Pali chariot similes indeed support an internalist perspective, some of them (...) also allow for a reading that opens up to two 'externalist' complements: the social outer world and the technological environment. In this way, while acknowledging Zizek's criticism, we point at Buddhist philosophy's inherent potential for developing a social-technological critical stance, for instance by linking it to mediation theory. (shrink)

European Vision and the South Pacific, first published in 1960, is the most acclaimed of all Bernard Smith’s many texts on art history and cultural theory. In conjunction with its 1992 companion-piece, Imagining the Pacific, and supported by collations of art and cartography from Cook’s and other voyages, this work also established his reputation as a major presence in Pacific-centred research. Likewise, the ongoing influence of European Vision and the South Pacific has seen Smith claimed as a foundational figure in (...) post-colonial scholarship, as one who ‘anticipated’ aspects of Edward Said’s late-1970s analysis of orientalism. But while there are important parallels and overlaps in the thinking of this pair, their differences and divergences are at least as significant. Above all, Smith’s Pacific-centred writings need to be understood as the unique intellectual achievements they undeniably are. (shrink)

The central question in this paper is the following: how does Nietzsche use history in his critique of morality? The answer, in sum: interestingly, not how you (i.e. most Nietzsche scholars) think, and not well enough. My focus is on The Antichrist, not his Genealogy of Morality, which is more commonly used to answer this question. And I look, in particular, at Nietzsche’s use of good, contemporary scholarship on the origins of Judaism. The chapter also examines the so-called 'genetic fallacy', (...) arguing that Nietzsche has a provisional response to it, but that this response leads to further complications. (shrink)

Equity is clearly central to Hobbes’s theory of the laws of nature, and it has an important place in his doctrine of the duties and exercise of sovereignty. It is also prominent in his general theory of law, especially as it is articulated in the late Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England. Still, it is not more central to Hobbes’s ethics, politics and legal philosophy than his concept of justice, or even as (...) central. On the contrary, his theory of justice is presupposed by his views about equity – in the sense that fidelity to a social contract is a condition of adjudication and definitive interpretation of law. Nor does equity contribute to a genuinely anti-authoritarian strand in Hobbes’s political philosophy. It is not as if, between the lines of that philosophy, Hobbes is a liberal. He does not think that the sovereign should exercise self-restraint because liberty and autonomy are good and sovereign self-restraint creates a space for both. Rather, he thinks that heavy-handed rule saps initiative, wealth and other resources from the people, making them less able to participate in or finance military action or internal state security. In other words, heavy-handed rule can make it harder for the sovereign to discharge the principal duty of sovereignty – ensuring public safety. (shrink)

This paper presents affirmation as the central normative category of Nietzsche’s positive ethics. The paper argues in particular for two interpretive claims: first, that from Beyond Good and Evil onwards, we find a new variety of Nietzschean affirmation (‘natural affirmation’), which is crucial to the strategy of his later works; and second, for reasons internal to his own philosophical aims, Nietzsche’s new variety of affirmation is seriously flawed. The author argues for the second claim on the basis that Nietzsche himself (...) requires that affirmation not perform exactly the role he requires that it perform. The author contends that we are thus faced with a major challenge to Nietzsche’s late philosophical project—that (late) Nietzschean affirmation fails by Nietzsche’s own standards. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace StevensTom McBrideThings Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, by Simon Critchley. 137 pp. New York: Routledge, 2005; $22.50.This book—a brief meditation on the poetry of Wallace Stevens and an even shorter one on the cinema of Terrence Malick—might have been a disaster. The author, a philosopher, is sometimes in worried denial that Stevens is an "anti-realist" (...) or a "transcendental realist," and one occasionally senses that in the ancient tension between philosophy and poetry, herding the poets into the philosopher's pen is a bullying way to resolve the conflict. But the book isn't a catastrophe at all; it's a lucid, ruminative, and personable reading of Stevens (and Malick) that even offers a good general guide to the reading of poetry in what Critchley calls "the wake of romanticism" (motto: "God is dead; therefore I am").Critchley's major idea is twofold: that poetry is a therapeutic art form because it slows us down and encourages, about countless subjects, "the whole voluptuousness of looking"; and that Stevens's poetry is informed by a contest between a poetry of "supreme fictions" (in which phenomena come under the [End Page 503] dominion of a potent imagination) and a poetry of "antipodes" (in which phenomena resist the imagination—they "merely are"—and thus reduce the imagination to impotence). Here Critchley affirms a usual view of Stevens as a poet of the weather—another way of saying that he is a modernist with strong roots in the Romantic movement—and he notes that the supreme fiction poems often tend to be set in summer, when the imagination seems especially yeasty, while the antipodean poems tend to be set in winter, when the miserly realness of things seems to rule the earth. In his sensitive and astute reading, however, Critchley remarks upon something else: that in his late poems Stevens seems more overtly metaphysical (Critchely says Stevens is the most philosophically interesting poet of the twentieth century) and that his later poems are set more and more in the seasons of transition (late autumn/early spring). Late in Stevens's career the battle between supreme fictions and antipodes is therefore played out in the same, often overtly philosophical poems. Here Critchley's commentary is at its most astute. Occasional lovers of Wallace Stevens's poetry will remember why they adore his work, and have a better idea why.However, lest readers get the wrong idea, some careful qualifications about the dialectic between Stevens's summer and winter poems are in order. For one thing, the poems of supreme fictions always leave phenomena with their particularity, their ordinariness, their concreteness. To cite one such poem, "Anecdote of the Jar," although the poet imaginatively places "a jar in Tennessee" that makes "the lovely wilderness / Surround that hill," the wilderness' birds and bushes, even the jar itself, remain birds and bushes and jars ("gray and bare"). Here Critchley reinterprets Samuel Taylor Coleridge's distinction between "fancy" and "imagination." Fancy dreams of what does not exist, while imagination transfigures what does. Stevens's poems of supreme fiction are always imaginative, never fanciful.A second qualification: Critchley argues that for Stevens (as well as for a number of philosophers) human ways of knowing are always informed, sooner or later, by the conceptual imagination. In that sense a rose is never just a rose, although we need not become overly fanciful about what a cigar might be. And this leads us to a third one: When readers get to the wintry, antipodean poems—the poems of "anti-poetry"—they will find Stevens suggesting that the only way to view objects without imagination is to imagine what that would be like. Even earlier in his career Stevens became interested in this paradox, as in "The Snow Man" where he muses:One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter [End Page 504] Of the January sun; and not... (shrink)

This excellent study of the theme of polemos shows a detailed grasp of the entire range of Heidegger’s writings and relevant parts of the huge and rapidly growing secondary literature. This work is based on recent efforts to understand the link between Heidegger’s philosophical theories and his politics. In Fried’s opinion, efforts by Heidegger or his more uncritical fans to deny his Nazi proclivities are not only fallacious but also obscure his theories. Fried is concerned to grasp Heidegger’s theories within (...) his times and as they relate to our times without reducing one to the other. In following polemos throughout Heidegger’s writings, he casts genuine light on the position as a whole. Fried focuses mainly on the middle period, when Heidegger is explicitly concerned with polemos. He shows that this concept links together Heidegger’s writings, early and late. (shrink)

Although Foucault was clearly a critical thinker, his approach also provides for the possibility of a genealogy of critique. Such an approach problematizes critique, and I trace the emergent problematization of critique in Foucault’s later works, and briefly in Latour and Boltanski. From this I move on to the ‘critical problematic’, that is, how critique operates as a form of power/knowledge, as a discourse that creates subjects through a critical regime of truth and critical truth-games. Specifically, I argue that critique (...) is a discourse which transforms and unmasks other ‘truth-claims’, replacing them with a starker vision of reality, which in the end is also a specific cultural vision. To elaborate this view, I return to Foucault’s discussion of Kant, his late lectures on Cynicism and also on ordo-liberalism. The wider circulation of critical discourses is demonstrated through an analysis of ‘cool’ or critical consumerism. In conclusion, the relationship between critique, crisis and modernity is considered. (shrink)

This chapter looks at Nietzsche's notion of the affirmation of life. It begins with the origins of the concept in Schopenhauer and in the Schopenhauerian philosophy known to Nietzsche. It then examines affirmation in three phases of Nietzsche's writing: early, middle and late. It relates affirmation to other key Nietzschean concepts like the Apollonian and the Dionysian, eternal recurrence, amor fati and will to power.

A formalist approach to literature, one that bears witness to the movements of distinct levels of form as they compel one another to a kind of infra-literary psychoanalysis, helps move us beyond the critical dichotomies — text vs. context, history vs. form, realism vs. the avant-garde — that have sometimes hampered recognition of the topologically complex and uneven fashion in which literature intervenes in the world. This article argues that it is the particular modes of constriction, isolation and textual withdrawal (...) that literature induces which paradoxically reveal literature’s psychoanalytic approach to its outsides. The article begins by close-reading a few short passages from Lacan, passages which when reframed offer the initial ingredients of a psychoanalytically informed materialist literary-critical formalism. It then turns to Paul de Man’s late reflections on literary form and materiality, before concluding with a reading of the poetry of Geoffrey G. O’Brien. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article engages Bhaskar's category of absence and Foucault's notion of problematization in the context of explaining an example of the historical emergence of political activism. Specifically, it considers the emergence of the ‘psychiatric survivors’ social movement in the UK, with a focus on the ‘politics of self-harm’. The politics of self-harm refers to acts of self-injurious behaviour, such as drug over-dosage or self-laceration, which do not result in death and which bring individuals to the attention of psychiatric services. For (...) many years survivors have protested about the harmful treatment they receive from such services and have campaigned for their reform and for new, non-psychiatric understandings of the meaning of self-harm. The article explains how such activism emerged in the late 1980s. Its contribution is at the interface of critical realism and social movement studies. (shrink)

Animal research has long been a source of biomedical aspirations and moral concern. Examples of both hope and concern are abundant today. In recent months, as is common practice, monkeys have served as test subjects in promising preclinical trials for an Ebola vaccine or treatment 1 , 2 , 3 and in controversial maternal deprivation studies. 4 The unresolved tension between the noble aspirations of animal research and the ethical controversies it often generates motivates the present issue of the Cambridge (...) Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. As editors of this special section, we hope that these original and timely articles will push the professional discussion of animal research ethics in a positive direction that will benefi t research scientists and others interested in moral problems in animal research. We also look forward to a day when animal research will genuinely meet both appropriate scientifi c and appropriate ethical criteria—criteria that themselves can be improved by critical scrutiny. Animal research—that is, the use of live animals as experimental subjects in biomedical and behavioral fi elds of learning—has been deeply entrenched for well over half a century. One signal development was the enactment in the late 1930s of federal product safety legislation in the United States and other nations that required animal testing of food, drugs, and medical devices prior to use by human subjects or consumers. 5 Another development was the publication of codes of research ethics that called for animal research prior to human research. The Nuremberg Code, published by an American military tribunal in 1947–48 after scrutiny of Nazi medical atrocities, stated that experiments involving the use of human subjects should be " based on the results of animal experimentation. " 6 The Declaration of Helsinki, fi rst published in 1964, reaffi rmed this assumption and added, rather imprecisely, that " the welfare of animals used for research must be respected. " 7 Against the background of such statements, the institutionalization and widespread acceptance of animal research in the twentieth century rested on two basic assumptions, one factual and one moral. The factual assumption was that animal research is suffi ciently reliable as a basis for predicting the effects of drugs, products, and other materials on human beings that animal trials can be expected to yield signifi cant scientifi c conclusions and medical benefi ts to humanity. (shrink)

There is an obvious distinction between the philosophical meditation on politics and relevance to politics, on the one hand, and the political engagement of philosophers and even philosophy, on the other. At this late date, there can be few people interested in philosophy, and even many uninterested in this ancient discipline, unaware that Martin Heidegger turned to Nazism in the 1930s. Heidegger, who all his life subscribed to the Platonic view of the priority of philosophy over politics, later described (...) his own political turning as “die grösste Dummheit,” in short as an error. This paper will consider recent discussion of this instance of “stupidity,” with special attention to three books: Julian Young, Heidegger, philosophy, Nazism; Miguel de Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political: Dystopias; and Johannes Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time. (shrink)

Research in the social sciences received generous patronage in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Research was widely perceived as providing solutions to emerging social problems. That generosity came under increased contest in the late 1970s. Although these trends held true for all of the social sciences, this essay explores the various ways by which economists in particular reacted to and resisted the patronage cuts that were proposed in the first budgets of the Reagan administration. Economists’ response was (...) three fold: to engage in joint lobbying with other social scientists, to tap into their authority as a respected policy player, and to influence the types of research financed by the patron. With interviews of the former lobbyist for the social scientists, the former director of the Economics program for the National Science Foundation, and a review of the archival records of economists and their scholarly society, we discuss how economists have claimed entitlement to patronage in the closing decades of the twentieth century. We observe a dynamic and productive relationship between politicians and researchers mediated by the National Science Foundation, where civil servants, lobbyist and public minded scientists, and self-serving grantees trade roles. (shrink)

In the Communist Manifesto, in a famous boutade, Marx and Engels claimed that capitalism was in the process of bringing forth its own gravediggers. This assertion may once have been true. But lately it has seemed less likely as a description of contemporary society which, for all its problems, appears surprisingly robust. Although capitalism has its problems, and perhaps cannot be said to exist now in the sense that it was described by Marx and Engels, as a social system it (...) has always exhibited the kind of staying power which cast doubt on the theory which predicted its demise. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that, for numerous reasons which cannot be cited here, in recent years Marxism has been digging its own grave as the results of the theory in practice become more widely known. (shrink)

Since the late nineteenth century ‘Scientific Philosophy’ has become a label ascribed to many research programs. German theoretical philosophy of the early twentieth century was dominated by three different trends—Phenomenology, Neo-Kantianism, and Logical Empiricism: Each trend claimed to represent the ‘Scientific Philosophy’. In this context it is astonishing that we know almost nothing about the relationships between these schools. It is true, all of them rejected the speculative metaphysics found, for example, in German Idealism, but knowledge about other connections (...) is scarce. Starting with the question what exactly ‘Scientific Philosophy’ means and how these meanings relate to each other, a thorough investigation of the connections between all three trends has yet to take place.The main goal of the conference was, therefore, to better understand the relationships of these schools through their notions of ‘Scientific Philosophy’. In this context the works of Edmund Husserl (for Ph .. (shrink)

Clinical trials play a crucial role in generating evidence about healthcare interventions and improving outcomes for current and future patients. For individual trial participants, however, there are inevitably trade‐offs involved in clinical trial participation, given that trials have traditionally been designed to benefit future patient populations rather than to offer personalised care. Failure to understand the distinction between research and clinical care and the likelihood of benefit from participation in clinical trials has been termed the ‘therapeutic misconception’. The evolution of (...) the clinical trials landscape, including greater integration of clinical trials into healthcare and development of novel trial methodologies, may reinforce the significance of the therapeutic misconception and other forms of misunderstanding while at the same time (paradoxically) challenging its salience. Using cancer clinical trials as an exemplar, we describe how methodological changes in early‐ and late‐phase clinical trial designs, as well as changes in the design and delivery of healthcare, impact upon the therapeutic misconception. We suggest that this provides an impetus to re‐examine the ethics of clinical research, particularly in relation to trial access, participant selection, communication and consent, and role delineation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Iambic Poetics in the Roman Empire by Tom HawkinsGideon NisbetTom Hawkins. Iambic Poetics in the Roman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. xi + 334 pp. Cloth, $99.This stimulating and highly readable book explores the ancient afterlife of three famous literary bully-boys: Archilochus, Semonides, and Hipponax, the unholy Trinity of archaic Greek iambus. Tom Hawkins sets out to examine their reception, not among the classical and Hellenistic Greek (...) poets to whom they were living forebears (although the Callimachean intertext is a lively presence, e.g., 40–51, 146–49), or in the literary flourishing that they in turn inspired in late Republican and “golden” Augustan Rome, but amid authors of the Empire and Late Antiquity, extending into a recognizably Christian age. Only one of the six authors chosen (Babrius) adopts an iambic meter, and three—Dio, Lucian, and Julian—do not even compose verse (or not here). Hawkins’ choices are piquant. He has sought out the kinds of text that classicists generally skip: odd, minor works by the less reputable pagans, and by the type of early churchman we tend [End Page 180] gratefully to surrender to our colleagues in theology. Indeed, some are scarcely read at all (qua texts) but merely dipped into as a source of corroborating factoids, at least until now (142, on Gregory Nazianzen). Hawkins contends that an “iambic tradition” of sorts remains culturally alive and vital throughout these early centuries c.e.: a tradition not so much of metrical continuation or even necessarily of working closely with the archaic texts, but nevertheless retaining a definite sense of the constituent elements (e.g., animal-fable, a scruffy narrator) that, variously combined, let the reader or audience know they are in dialogue with an “iambic mode” (terms are defined in the introduction’s first footnote, 2).Authors and readerships of these centuries had at their command much more of the text of the archaic iambicists than is available to us moderns, provided they cared to read it and could understand what they read (28–29 suggests it was often otherwise). Today, Archilochus et al. are mere tattered ghosts, pieced together by editorial ingenuity out of citations and mentions, and latterly read in papyrus fragments gleaned from ancient rubbish heaps (the heroes of this scholarly epic of reconstruction include the late Professor Martin West, news of whose death came shortly before this review went to press). Some of the Imperial poets and prose authors studied by Hawkins envisage an ideal reader to whom archaic iambus is an open book, but the true constant is the ancient biographical tradition about Archilochus in particular (the stories told about the others are often recognizable knock-offs, but all three are names to conjure with; there are grounds for thinking that Archilochus had become literally proverbial for invective abuse even among non-readers, 27). Hawkins is very good at showing how these interwoven life-stories took on a life of their own and continued to grow in the telling (9), all the more so perhaps as actual familiarity with the texts waned. Over several centuries and numerous genres, the malleable myth of iambus—the slighted outsider, embracing abjection to shock a complacent Establishment and shame his nemeses—proved endlessly useful as a temporary vantage point when authors felt like taking a walk on the wild side.The iambic tradition tracked by Hawkins thus has “more to do with the sediment of cultural memory about iambic poets and their poetry than with historical realities, but once we get beyond a fascination with origins, such sediment becomes the only reality worth talking about” (8). In Hawkins’ readings of his chosen texts, this textual-biographical muck is fertile stuff. Iteration and generic migration turn the iambic life-story into a potent and versatile literary trope which usefully combines ironic distance (to be, or even make like Archilochus is an obvious non-starter in such a belated and grown-up age), and thus self-evident deniability, with the implicit threat that traces of iambus’ murderous power may yet remain. For Hawkins, the hint is if anything strengthened by repeated, name-checking recusationes that keep the iambic biopic in the... (shrink)

For the past thirty years, the late Tom Regan bucked the trend among secular animal rights philosophers and spoke patiently and persistently to the best angels of religious ethics in a stream of publications that enjoins religious scholars, clergy, and lay people alike to rediscover the resources within their traditions for articulating and living out an animal ethics that is more consistent with their professed values of love, mercy, and justice. My aim in this article is to showcase some (...) of the wealth of insight offered in this important but under-utilized archive of Regan’s work to those of us, religious or otherwise, who wish to challenge audiences of faith to think and do better by animals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Demystifying the Mystery of Alzheimer's as Late, No Longer Mild Cognitive ImpairmentPeter J. Whitehouse (bio)Keywordsaging, Alzheimer’s disease, deconstruction, mild cognitive impairmentProfessor Tom Kirkwood and Michael Bavidge's comments are welcome additions to our discourse as both emphasize the importance of considering mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) in relationship to the normal biological and cultural processes of aging. Whereas I agree with my colleague and co-author, Atwood (...) Gaines' response, I wish to add my own commentary to update the reader concerning the dynamic political processes at work in the social construction and deconstruction of MCI and AD. I have referred to MCI as autodeconstructing AD because whatever we come to think of the MCI label on the spectrum of cognitive aging should alter our beliefs about the ultimate utility of the concept of AD. Tensions in the field of study of MCI have increased since the project reported in this journal began. The social science and philosophical contributions toward understanding MCI need to inform our debate now; otherwise, we will be less effective at influencing a critical debate for society about its relationships to medicine, science, and modern capitalism.This past year, Ron Petersen, the major proponent of the concept of MCI was awarded the prestigious Potamkin Prize for research in Alzheimer's disease by the American Academy of Neurology. The National Institute on Aging (NIA) placed the discovery of MCI as first on the list of contributions during twenty years of research funded through hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the NIA Alzheimer's Research Centers. Some have even suggested that we relabel MCI of the amnestic type, Petersen syndrome. Yet, John Morris, who was co-awarded the Potamkin Prize, has continued to write that MCI is early AD and most recently has suggested (Morris 2006) that we should revise our diagnostic criteria. He joins me and a growing list of other so-called thought leaders who believe (but do not always state publicly) that the term MCI is not useful clinically. Lon Schneider (2005) has recently joined the camp of critics publicly by suggesting that MCI is [End Page 87] not only confusing clinically but is now possibly retarding research.The proliferation of different kinds of MCI indicates that we are studying heterogeneous processes of brain aging. Whereas, John Morris suggests that we relabel MCI as early AD, I have suggested the converse. For example, in a grand rounds lecture at Johns Hopkins in March 2004, I used the lecture title "LNLMCI (late no longer MCI)" as a synonym for AD.Kirkwood is right to compare the quest for biological therapy for AD to the search to treat aging processes in other organs. He has been an outspoken critic of anti-aging medicine quackery that claims that aging itself is a disease that can be reversed today. But, if AD is brain aging, are we not in fact creating a "disease" category that raises false hopes and expectations?Kirkwood also points out that aging is a lifespan process. To prevent dementia in older individuals, we should prevent damage to neurons in younger individuals. Recently, it has been claimed, for example, that exposure to lead in young animals makes these animals more at risk for amyloid deposition in later life (Basha et al. 2005). Whether or not lead directly affects the pathogenesis of AD, it seems eminently reasonable to try to prevent damage to neurons in young children so that they may have maximum cognitive capacity throughout their lifespan.Almost ten years ago, when I stepped down as the editor of the Alzheimer's Disease and Associated Disorders Journal and as John Morris took over this responsibility, I wrote an editorial calling for the end of AD (Whitehouse 2001). In other words, I argued that thinking through the invention of the term mild cognitive impairment reveals that we are attempting to assign medical categories to what are a heterogeneous set of processes that affect our brains as we age. At the hundredth anniversary of the first case of what we have come to call Alzheimer's disease, perhaps it is time to reflect on the individual and social... (shrink)

"More than any other public figure of the eighteenth century, Tom Paine strikes our times like a trumpet blast from a distant world." So begins John Keane's magnificent and award-winning (the Fraunces Tavern Book Award) biography of one of democracy's greatest champions. Among friends and enemies alike, Paine earned a reputation as a notorious pamphleteer, one of the greatest political figures of his day, and the author of three best-selling books, Common Sense, The Rights of Man, and The Age of (...) Reason. Setting his compelling narrative against a vivid social backdrop of prerevolutionary America and the French Revolution, John Keane melds together the public and the shadowy private sides of Paine's life in a remarkable piece of scholarship. This is the definitive biography of a man whose life and work profoundly shaped the modern age. "Provide[s] an engaging perspective on England, America, and France in the tumultuous years of the late eighteenth century." -- Pauline Maier, The New York Times Book Review "It is hard to imagine this magnificent biography ever being superceded.... It is a stylish, splendidly erudite work." -- Terry Eagleton, The Guardian. (shrink)

The Australian Labor Party has, until recent years, exercised almost unchallenged hegemony over Australian Left and working-class politics. Tom Bramble and Rick Kuhn have ambitiously crafted the first Marxist history of the party in over 50 years, deploying an analysis of its material constitution as a ‘capitalist workers’ party’ to underpin arguments for a revolutionary socialist alternative. From its emergence in class struggles of the late nineteenth century, to its early electoral successes, to multiple internal crises and splits, and (...) its more recent role in driving neoliberal restructuring, the party’s contradictory character is analysed with clarity. However, despite containing much suggestive material, key issues – including the party’s unparalleled success despite its betrayals, failures and crises; radical challenges from within and without the party; the nature of its appeal to reformist consciousness; the shape of Marxist and Left debates about thealp; and the party’s centrality to a wider sphere of politics in capitalist society – remain thinly theorised, thereby inadvertently weakening the authors’ case for a revolutionary alternative. (shrink)

Child analysis has occupied a special place in the history of psychoanalysis because of the challenges it poses to practitioners and the clashes it has provoked among its advocates. Since the early days in Vienna under Sigmund Freud child psychoanalysts have tried to comprehend and make comprehensible to others the psychosomatic troubles of childhood and to adapt clinical and therapeutic approaches to all the stages of development of the baby, the child, the adolescent and the young adult. Claudine and Pierre (...) Geissmann trace the history and development of child analysis over the last century and assess the contributions made by pioneers of the discipline, whose efforts to expand its theoretical foundations led to conflict between schools of thought, most notably to the rift between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. Now taught and practised widely in Europe, the USA and South America, child and adolescent psychoanalysis is unique in the insight it gives into the psychological aspects of child development, and in the therapeutic benefits it can bring both to the child and its family. (shrink)

Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher and reformer, was at the height of his fame and influence in the 1820s. The 301 letters in this volume, many of which are previously unpublished, contain correspondence with international leaders such as Simn Bolvar, the 'Liberator', and Bernardino Rivadavia of Buenos Aires, British statesmen such as Robert Peel and Henry Brougham, and leading intellectuals such as John Stuart Mill and Sarah Austin.

Tom McLeish’s Music and Poetry of Science adds to along and complex literature looking at the creative powers of human genius. In addition to his own scientific field, McLeish draws on art, poetry, novels, music, and BBC television productions. Although positioned in the line of the ‘two cultures’ debate typically associated with C. P. Snow, McLeish reprises William Beveridge’s earlier contribution to that tradition, perhaps, to be aligned,although this McLeish does not do, with Peter Pesic’s Music and the Making of (...) Modern Science . The task of coordinating music, poetry, and science requires more, such that the material hermeneutics of the late Irish-Belgian physicist and philosopher, Patrick Heelan might have offered a basis for fruitful dialogue, although this,too, was a missed opportunity. Given McLeish’s illustration of the beauty key to mathematics in physics via BBC television, it seems an illustration of technological millenarianism via Andrew MacKendrick’s 1951 film, The Man in the White Sui , updated for today, key in a nano-context, might be helpful in raising issues of material‘instability,’ i.e., environmental detritus, nano-waste and pollution. (shrink)

This twelfth volume of Correspondence contains authoritative and fully annotated texts of all known letters sent both to and from Bentham between July 1824 and June 1828. The 301 letters, most of which have never before been published, have been collected from archives, public and private, in Britain, the United States of America, Switzerland, France, Japan, and elsewhere, as well as from the major collections of Bentham Papers at University College London Library and the British Library.In mid-1824 Bentham was still (...) preoccupied with the Greek struggle for independence against Turkey, though his active involvement waned as he became disenchanted with the behaviour of the deputies sent to London by the Greek National Assembly. His international reputation was reflected in his continuing contact with Simón Bolívar and Bernardino Rivadavia in South America, and with John Quincy Adams, John Neal, Henry Wheaton, and others in the United States, and his forging of new contacts in Guatemala, India, and Egypt. In the autumn of 1825 he visited France, where he stayed with Jean Baptiste Say and La Fayette, and was fêted by the French liberals.Bentham made considerable progress drafting material for his pannomion, or complete code of laws, and in particular for his Constitutional and Procedure Codes, while John Stuart Mill edited the massive Rationale of Judicial Evidence. Bentham became increasingly active in the cause of law reform, and exchanged a series of letters on the subject with Robert Peel, the Home Secretary, and Henry Brougham. He maintained his friendships with John and Sarah Austin, George and Harriet Grote, James and John Stuart Mill, John Bowring, Joseph Hume, Francis Burdett, Francis Place, and Joseph Parkes, re-established contact with the third Marquis of Lansdowne, son of his old friend the first Marquis, and made new acquaintances in James Humphreys, Sutton Sharpe, and Albany Fonblanque. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 56–58 Nechvatal, Joseph, Immersion Into Noise , Open Humanities Press, 2011, 267 pp, $23.99 (pbk), ISBN 1-60785-241-1. As someone who’s knowledge of “art” mostly began with the domestic (Western) and Japanese punk and noise scenes of the late 80’s and early 90’s, practices and theories of noise fall rather close to my heart. It is peeking into the esoteric enclaves of weird music and noise that helped me understand what I think I might like art to (...) be: A way of learning about the world through perturbation—exploration by incitement and speculation of possible conditions. What I have always loved about artistic investigations influenced by noisy aesthetics or sensibilities is that they can be simultaneously transcendent and absurd, amusing and revelatory, singular and pluralistic, mindless and intensely penetrating. The provocative friction that noise brings to bear on aesthetic experience, artistic practice, and “the” Art World acts as a kind of impulse response, proposing new energies while revealing underlying structure; noise signals are a simultaneous synthesis and analysis of spaces, subjects and relations. About two weeks prior to Christmas 2011, Joseph Nechvatal was generous enough to spend some time with me at 39 Quai des Grands Augustins, Paris . We each had one glass of red wine, briefly discussed common acquaintances, shared points of interest, and his published writings. We also, I recall, disagreed lightheartedly about how much contemporary relevance the ideas of telematic-artist Roy Ascott have for today’s art-and-technology practitioner (Joseph > Jamie). After the encounter, I read through a PDF version of Immersion Into Noise Joseph was kind enough to send me ( the HTML version is here ). A number of points of entry into cultures of “noise” are available these days. There are the acoustic-spatial approaches of thinkers like Douglas Kahn, Brandon LaBelle and Salome Voegelin; the techno-cultural musicologies of Jonathan Sterne and David Toop; the political writings of Jacques Attali, former adviser to President François Mitterrand, in his Noise: The Political Economy of Music (spoiler alert: It’s not really about music). Enter the new writings of one Joseph Nechvatal, with his invitation of an Immersion Into Noise . Nechvatal has been active for over 20 years in on- and off-line discussions of art, technology, virtuality, as well as his own set of art-theoretical departures and terminologies. A practicing artist, and instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Immersion Into Noise , is Nechvatal’s third published volume. His writings, broadly, address a concern with the possibilities of a synthesis between the biological and the virtual, and the contemporary artistic resonances that these possibilities suggest. Nechvatal’s project is to try to name contemporary currents of artistic practice within our technologized culture. He comes at this through art history, post-modern philosophy, anthropology and consciousness studies. Portions of Immersion Into Noise have appeared in his PhD dissertation, as well as online art publications like Zing Magazine . An open-access publication, and part of the impressive and heartening activities of the Open Humanities Press, Nechvatal’s book is a somewhat unexpected addition to the Critical Climate Change series edited by Tom Cohen of SUNY University and Claire Colebrook of Penn State. Other titles in the series have address themes of post-globalism and cultures of threat. Joseph Nachvetal’s title is the first to focus entirely on art history, art practice and aesthetics. It is awkward to too easily fit Nechvatal’s writings in with the aforementioned burgeoning canon of cultural and artistic practice in, and writings on, noise (Russolo, Schaeffer, Cage and Yves Klein through to Kahn, LaBelle, Voegelin, et. al). Immersion Into Noise is not primarily an examination of sound-noise or phenomenologies of sound, and the relativist, non-objectivist possibilities arising therefrom in social, public, and exhibition art practices. Although Nechvatal makes mention of sonic practice and experience (his own encounter in 1968 with the technological complex was set in motion at a Jimi Hendrix concert at the Chicago Coliseum), he does so only by way of introducing a broader concept of “art-noise.” The noise-scape can envelope various kinds of involvement in all kinds of art, by artists, audiences, and distributed amalgams of all of these. Midway through the book, we are offered characteristics of an “immersive noise vision theory.” This theory, leading to an even more syncretic thinking about the art experience, is sketched out through further reference to the author’s personal observation, as well as his art-historical research and notes. Personal examples take on the reflex of a kind of art-noise-travel-writing, as Nechvatal visits Ryoji Ikeda’s Datamatics [ver 2.0] installation at the Centre Pompidou, Paris), hears Cecil Taylor at Alice Tully Hall in New York, spends time with the cave paintings of Lascaux, France, and explores the Wagner-inspired Venus Grotto of Linderhof, Bavaria, to name a few. These site-events, to varying degrees, are renderings of noise-art’s potential to “place us back into a ritual position by dragging art down into the felt 360° noise-perspective of the enthusiastic and participatory.” (p.103) The arc of the ideas proposed here position immersiveness, saturation and “scopic all-over tension” as most productively foundational to noise art, or art-noise. An itinerary from the most ancient of artistic expressions (cave drawings) to the most digital of presentations is charted (Ikeda’s minimal/maximal bitwise works for synchronized audio and visual projection). The harsh sonic onslaught of Masami Akita (a.k.a. Merzbow), is, under this analysis, not so far from colossal denseness of the churches of the High Baroque (Nechvatal visits the Rosario Chapel in Santo Domingo Church, Puebla, Mexico). And there is much more here, eaten up by noise: A rethinking of the work of Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Nicolas Schöffler (whom Nechvatal names the true “the Father of Cybernetic Art”) and the Happenings of Alan Kaprow, all as art-noise in their own right. Each of these artists and moments demonstrate techniques of destabilization, immersiveness, frame-breaking and “all-over fullness and fervor.” Here is writing on art and art history that is as ambitious as it is promising: “wildly visionary,” Nechvatal states as in conclusion. Self-admittedly far-reaching to the point of verging on totalization, we are asked to consider that the moments, spaces, arts and artists Nechvatal appreciates in the book all derive from an increasingly prevalent “noise consciousness.” Along the way we gain an appreciation of noise as a productive and proactive tension in art, rather than an unwanted signal or unwelcome intrusion. Most promising here for me are Nechvatal’s revealing descriptions of the potential for noise to make manifest the material-perceptual framework of individual and collective art experience. How might we allow what we have been repeatedly taught is our contemporary condition of “information overload” to transform itself into a calm, warm, sympathetic kind of inundation. Treatment of experience in this way, dissolves boundaries between the bodily, informational, material and technical complexes that make up our world, and is the promise of a radical, if momentary, Immersion Into Noise. (shrink)

Many individuals have miserable work lives, in which they must toil away at mind-numbing yet exhausting tasks for hours on end, being ordered about by their superiors, perhaps with few guarantees that this source of income will persist for very long. However, this is only half of the story: what is centrally important is that many of those who endure these conditions are denied a fair wage in return for the burdens that they bear. In this article, I reflect on (...) the significance of this fact in order to argue for the evaporation thesis. This thesis holds that individuals’ claims to particular employment-related protections from their government disappear as their earnings increase. In the course of defending this position, I explore the moral difference an employee's wage offer makes to the work conditions that we can expect her to accept, including why there are limits to the role that cash can play here. (shrink)

This article poses a challenge to Schurz’s proposed metainductive justification of induction. It is argued that Schurz’s argument requires a notion of optimality that can deal with an expanding pool of prediction strategies.

an article written with Tom Imbo for the forthcoming Compendium of Quantum Mechanics.