Human rights are in crisis today. Everywhere one looks, there is violence, deprivation, and oppression, which human rights norms seem powerless to prevent. This book investigates the roots of the current crisis through the thought of Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben. Human rights theory and practice must come to grips with key problems identified by Agamben "e; the violence of the sovereign state of exception and the reduction of humanity to 'bare' life. Any renewal of human rights today must involve breaking (...) decisively with the traditional coordinates of Western political thought and instead affirm a new understanding of life and political action. (shrink)

This innovative introductory text not only clearly explains Kristeva's most difficult ideas, but also provides new insights into her work.

The key theme in this essay is the rethinking of the human, as inspired by the work of Giorgio Agamben and Hannah Arendt. The human here is not a model or concept to be realised, just as community to which the human is linked is not an ideal, but a ‘community to come’. This is revealed only by paying close attention to modes of bearing witness to the human, as instanced, for example, by Agamben’s text, Remnants of Auschwitz. Current notions (...) of political community and the human thus need to be reassessed. Only by doing this will it be possible to address the crucial issues that currently confront human rights—issues such as the tension between the principle of universal human rights and that of state sovereignty, the growing problem of statelessness, and the reduction of human rights to biopolitical humanitarianism. (shrink)

Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers surveys the most important figures who have influenced post-war thought. The reader is guided through structuralism, semiotics, post-Marxism and Annales history, on to modernity and postmodernity. With its comprehensive biographical and bibliographical information, this book provides a vital reference work of the last fifty years.

This article aims to reveal aspects of the relation between the image and the victim in Georges Bataille’s writing, certainly as this applies to writings on art, but more particularly as it applies to Bataille’s relation to the victim of torture in the photographs of Chinese lingchi punishment, which entails physical dismemberment. It will be shown that Bataille does not have a ‘media specific’ approach to the image but reflects Sartre’s notion of the image. Critiques of Bataille’s relation to the (...) lingchi photos will be addressed, so as to clarify what is at stake in the relation between image and victim. (shrink)

_Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers_ surveys the most important figures who have influenced post-war thought. The reader is guided through structuralism, semiotics, post-Marxism and Annales history, on to modernity and postmodernity. With its comprehensive biographical and bibliographical information, this book provides a vital reference work of the last fifty years.

This article examines the issues surrounding transcendence, the Other and base materialism in relation to Georges Bataille’s heterology and Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the face of the Other as infinity and transcendence. The article concludes that there is no facet of human existence – including work and the economy – which is not touched by transcendence, and that the idea that there are societies based in subsistence and in nothing but a ‘struggle for existence’ is a prejudice of modernity.

Review of: How Photography Changed Philosophy, Daniel Rubinstein (2023) New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 122 pp., ISBN 978-0-36769-422-7, h/bk, GBP 130.00.

This revised second edition from our bestselling _Key Guides_ includes brand new entries on some of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth- and twenty-first century: Zizek, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Butler and Haraway. With a new introduction by the author, sections on phenomenology and the post-human, full cross-referencing and up-to-date guides to major primary and secondary texts, this is an essential resource to contemporary critical thought for undergraduates and the interested reader.

Genealogy and ontology (paradigms) -- The image in photography and cinema and its digital future.

This article is a further philosophical engagement with the human-animal relation. The argument presented is that neither animals nor humans can be reduced to a biological essence characterised as ‘bare life,’ but live according to the call of a way of life. Heidegger’s thinking on the polis in terms of the animal-human relation is addressed in order to show how he reduces animality to a biological sub-stratum, while the human becomes the privileged bearer of the word. Heidegger’s deep-seated humanism is (...) thus exposed, as is that of Bataille. The latter’s Hegelian stance on animality and humanity is revealed as the embodiment of the dialectic of necessity and freedom. The article is a critique of the view that freedom and transcendence can only be arrived after so-called basic biological needs (the needs of ‘bare life,’ or necessity) have been satisfied. (shrink)

This article is a further philosophical engagement with the human-animal relation. The argument presented is that neither animals nor humans can be reduced to a biological essence characterised as ‘bare life,’ but live according to the call of a way of life. Heidegger’s thinking on the polis in terms of the animal-human relation is addressed in order to show how he reduces animality to a biological sub-stratum, while the human becomes the privileged bearer of the word. Heidegger’s deep-seated humanism is (...) thus exposed, as is that of Bataille. The latter’s Hegelian stance on animality and humanity is revealed as the embodiment of the dialectic of necessity and freedom. The article is a critique of the view that freedom and transcendence can only be arrived after so-called basic biological needs have been satisfied. (shrink)

Taking a largely thematic approach, this reflection aims to demonstrate the richness of Julia Kristeva’s theoretical work in relation to questions of justice and injustice. Injustice becomes primary because a definition of justice continues to be open to debate, whereas injustice as incarnate in the scapegoat as depicted by René Girard is far less so, if at all. Through her analyses of the work of Mallarmé and the Paris of the Dreyfus affair, Céline and abjection and anti-Semitism, the ‘need to (...) believe’ as a key component of subjectivity, the foreigner as the other in ourselves, Dostoyevsky and forgiveness, a vista is opened up onto injustice and how it might be combatted. (shrink)

Review of: Photography from the Turin Shroud to the Turing Machine, Yanai Toister (2020)Bristol and Chicago, IL: Intellect, p/bk, 215 pp.,ISBN 978-1-78938-156-6, p/bk, £37.

If genuine political activity can only be undertaken by citizens in the public sphere in a nation-state, what of stateless people today – asylum seekers and refugees cut adrift on the high seas? This is what is at stake in Hannah Arendt’s political theory of necessity. This article reconsiders Arendt’s notion of the Greek oikos as the sphere of necessity with the aim of challenging the idea that there is a condition of necessity or mere subsistence, where life is reduced (...) to satisfying basic biological needs. For Arendt, the Greek oikos is the model that provides the inspiration for her theory because necessity activities were kept quite separate from action in the polis. The ordinary and the undistinguished happen in the oikos and its equivalent, with the polis being reserved for extraordinary acts done for glory without any regard for life. The exclusionary nature of this theory of the polis as action has, at best, been treated with kid gloves by Arendt’s commentators. With reference to Heidegger on the polis and Agamben’s notion of oikonomia, I endeavour to show that the so-called ordinary is embedded in a way of life that is extraordinary and the key to grasping humanness. (shrink)

Examines the concept of analytical and synthetic processes in cinema. Distinction between analytic and synthetic processes; Implications of analytic and synthetic processes for cinema; Doubts about cinema being analytical or synthetic.

Taking the Face of Sydney – which is a digital composite image – as its point of departure this article begins an investigation into the relation between August Sander’s Weimar facial typologies and the digital Face of Sydney. This leads on to a reflection on the nature of the photographic image in relation to knowledge, technology and time. The conclusion proposed is that the photographic image has to be understood as an entity that is quite distinct from the forms of (...) technicity that allow it to appear. Indeed, in following Roland Barthes, I argue that the photographic image, like the image in general, is uncoded and thus unnamed. The question raised in light of this is: what is the nature of the human in the context of such an approach to the image? (shrink)

The thought of Heidegger and Bataille has rarely been placed in proximity. However, the notion of the `ecstatic' unconsciously draws them together. Its fundamental ramifications in each thinker's oeuvre should prompt serious reflection, particularly in the age of calculation and cybernetics. The non-utilitarian aspects of the gift, exchange, sacrifice and the sacred also bring the two thinkers closer to each other in a challenge to the dominance of what Bataille calls the `restricted economy' of balanced accounts and equilibrium at all (...) costs. To allow the thought of Heidegger and Bataille to communicate is to demarcate a point of resistance to an uncritical acceptance of the postmodern age. However, this must be tempered by the recognition that the situation is immensely complex, and that there is always a risk of political regression in every essentialist orientation - as the example of Heidegger shows. (shrink)

After beginning by situating the author's (possible) relation to Derrida's expression, ‘democracy to come’, the article proceeds from the position that Derrida's phrase is to be understood as part of a political intervention. Indeed, the inseparability of democracy and deconstruction confirms this. After setting out some of the pertinent features of ‘democracy to come’ – seen, in part, in the General Will – the notion of political community in the thought of Hannah Arendt is brought into question, if not deconstructed. (...) Political community as presented by Arendt is seen to limit the inclusiveness of democracy. In the final section, the article suggests that Agamben's critique of the very structure of the nation-state opens the way for a renewal of the notion of the human in the ‘community to come’. (shrink)

Reviews : Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology ; Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture.

The esteemed psychologist and thinker John Dewey headed for previously unexplored philosophical territory with this influential work. Written shortly after World War I, it embodies Dewey's system of pragmatic humanism and maintains that individuals can attain "a more ordered and intelligent happiness" by reconsidering the ultimate effects of their deepest beliefs and feelings. With its promise of achieving an understanding of the past and attaining a brighter future, Reconstruction in Philosophy remains ever relevant. "A modern classic." — Philosophy and (...) Phenomenological Research. (shrink)

With precision and profundity born of 30 years of devoted study, John Boyle offers an essential introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas on Scripture, shedding helpful light on the goals, methods, and commitments that animate the Angelic Doctor's engagement with the sacred page. Because the genius of St. Thomas's approach to the Bible lies not so much in its novelty but rather in the fidelity and clarity with which he recapitulates the riches of the preceding interpretive Tradition, this initiation into (...) St. Thomas's vision of Scripture is itself an orientation to the Church's vision of Scripture, from the Fathers through and beyond the Middle Ages. St. Thomas's embeddedness within the Church's Tradition and his own historical context is integral to his approach to Scripture, yet it sets him at some distance from modern readers, for whom his interpretive vision may seem perplexing or even impenetrable. In this Primer, Boyle first provides an acclimation to this medieval context through a survey and explanation of pertinent technical terminology used by St. Thomas and characteristic of the scholastic theology of the time. With an eye to the medieval practice of considering Scripture according to the fourfold division of causes, Boyle builds on this initial foundation by exploring in turn St. Thomas's accounts of the end or use of Scripture (final cause), its divine and human authorship (efficient cause), its order and division (material cause), and its literary styles or genres (formal cause). Drawing on writings from across St. Thomas's corpus, but especially his work On the Commendation and Division of Sacred Scripture and the prologues to his biblical commentaries, Boyle masterfully elucidates both the hermeneutical principles and deep wisdom of the Angelic Doctor's approach to Scripture, imparting invaluable guidance not only for reading and understanding St. Thomas and other great masters of the Tradition, but also-and ultimately-for understanding Scripture in light of this Tradition and reading it with greater benefit and joy. (shrink)

Despite recurring efforts, a gap exists across a variety of contexts between the protection of patients' safety in theory and in practice. This timely Research Handbook highlights these critical issues and suggests both legal and policy changes are necessary to better protect patients' safety. Multidisciplinary in nature, this Research Handbook features contributions from eminent academics, policy makers and medical practitioners from the Global North and South, discussing the essential facets concerning patient safety and the law. It highlights how the role (...) of legislation and case law has the potential to influence, both positively and negatively, medical practice and the quality of care. Chapters explore patient safety and the global health agenda; physiotherapy; 'non-therapeutic' clinical research with children; patient safety awareness in healthcare education; and the increasing use of robotics and artificial intelligence in healthcare. Outlining a wide range of international perspectives on patient safety and the law, this Research Handbook will appeal to academics and researchers specialising in health and medical law, human rights and healthcare regulation. It will also serve as a valuable resource for legal and medical practitioners alike, as well as clinicians and professionals working in healthcare governance. (shrink)

The notion of proof is central to mathematics yet it is one of the most difficult aspects of the subject to teach and master. In particular, undergraduate mathematics students often experience difficulties in understanding and constructing proofs. Understanding Mathematical Proof describes the nature of mathematical proof, explores the various techniques that mathematicians adopt to prove their results, and offers advice and strategies for constructing proofs. It will improve students’ ability to understand proofs and construct correct proofs of their own. The (...) first chapter of the text introduces the kind of reasoning that mathematicians use when writing their proofs and gives some example proofs to set the scene. The book then describes basic logic to enable an understanding of the structure of both individual mathematical statements and whole mathematical proofs. It also explains the notions of sets and functions and dissects several proofs with a view to exposing some of the underlying features common to most mathematical proofs. The remainder of the book delves further into different types of proof, including direct proof, proof using contrapositive, proof by contradiction, and mathematical induction. The authors also discuss existence and uniqueness proofs and the role of counter examples. (shrink)

This volume of The Subjection of Women provides a reliable text in an inexpensive edition, with explanatory notes but no additional editorial apparatus. -/- .

Parkinsonism (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder of the brain resulting in dopamine deficiency caused by the progressive death of dopaminergic neurons. PD is characterized by a combination of rigidity, poverty of movement, tremor and postural instability. Selegiline is a selective and irreversible propargylamine type B monoamine oxidase (MAO‐B) inhibitor. This drug, which inhibits dopamine metabolism, has been effectively used in the treatment of PD. However, its therapeutic effects are compromised by its many neurotoxic metabolites. To circumvent this obstacle, a novel (...) MAO‐B inhibitor, rasagiline, was developed. Paradoxically, the neuroprotective mechanism of propargylamines in different neuronal models appears to be independent of MAO‐B inhibition. Recent investigations into the neuroprotective mechanism of propargylamines indicate that glyceraldehyde‐3‐phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH), MAO‐B and/or other unknown proteins may represent pivotal proteins in the survival of the injured neurons. Delineation of the mechanism(s) involved in the neuroprotective effects exerted by MAO‐B inhibitors may provide the key to preventive novel therapeutic modalities. BioEssays 26:80–90, 2004. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Theories of discourse bring to realism new ideas about how knowledge develops and how representations of reality are influenced. We gain an understanding of the conceptual aspect of social life and the processes by which meaning is produced. This collection reflects the growing interest realist critics have shown towards forms of discourse theory and deconstruction. The diverse range of contributions address such issues as the work of Derrida and deconstruction, discourse theory, Eurocentrism and poststructuralism. What unites all of the contributions (...) is a sense that it is essential to provide a realist alternative to the hitherto dominance of social constructionism, hermeneutics and postmodernism, over many of the issues discussed. By developing a realist perspective the different authors attempt to embed discourse within the structured nature of the reality of the world. Realism can situate language, discourse and ideology within context specific, or 'causally efficacious' circumstances. Realism can help to uncover issues of power, representation, and subjectivity and how discursive and other social practices produce real effects. This can help us understand the manner in which social structures are reproduced through various forms of ideology and discourse. And by knowing this, we can start to address questions concerning human emancipation and how the world is to be transformed. (shrink)

This vital study offers a new interpretation of Hume's famous "Of Miracles," which notoriously argues against the possibility of miracles. By situating Hume's popular argument in the context of the 18th century debate on miracles, Earman shows Hume's argument to be largely unoriginal and chiefly without merit where it is original. Yet Earman constructively conceives how progress can be made on the issues that Hume's essay so provocatively posed about the ability of eyewitness testimony to establish the credibility of marvelous (...) and miraculous events. (shrink)

Part One reviews some recent history of epistemology, focusing on ways in which the intellectual virtues have been invoked to solve specific epistemological problems. This part gives a sense of the contemporary landscape that has emerged and clarifies some of the disagreements among those who invoke the virtues in epistemology. Part Two explores some problems about knowledge in greater detail, and defends a externalist approach in virtue epistemology.