Reading 'Capital''s promotion of the Spinozist sources of Marxism has stimulated a series of important studies in several major zones of Marxist theoretical work. A more general reassessment of Spinoza's thought in the project of a 'radical Enlightenement' provides the opportunity to consider critically the contribution of these studies to the elaboration of Marxist political theory. Vittorio Morfino, well known Italian scholar of Spinoza and Althusser, proposes to study Engels's reading of Spinoza in the context of the inheritance of classical (...) German idealism in the Marxist theory of history. He argues that Spinoza provides resources for rethinking Marxist notions of temporality and structure. The result is a theory of conjunctural analysis, in distinction from 'normative' and 'prescriptive' perspectives. (shrink)

Biagio Tassone's study From Psychology to Phenomenology offers an in depth exploration of Brentano's seminal work as an example of a still relevant approach to philosophy of mind.

© 2014 Shapiro, Tassone, Choudhary and Simon.Chromosome 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome is caused by the most common human microdeletion, and it is associated with cognitive impairments across many domains. While impairments in cognitive control have been described in children with 22q11.2DS, the nature and development of these impairments are not clear. Children with 22q11.2DS and typically developing children were tested on four well-validated tasks aimed at measuring specific foundational components of cognitive control: response inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and working memory. Molecular (...) assays were also conducted in order to examine genotype of catechol-O-methyltransferase, a gene located within the deleted region in 22q11.2DS and hypothesized to play a role in cognitive control. Mixed model regression analyses were used to examine group differences, as well as age-related effects on cognitive control component processes in a cross-sectional analysis. Regression models with COMT genotype were also conducted in order to examine potential effects of the different variants of the gene. Response inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and working memory were impaired in children with 22q11.2DS relative to TD children, even after accounting for global intellectual functioning. When compared with TD individuals, children with 22q11.2DS demonstrated atypical age-related patterns of response inhibition and cognitive flexibility. Both groups demonstrated typical age-related associations with working memory. The results of this cross-sectional analysis suggest a specific aberration in the development of systems mediating response inhibition in a sub-set of children with 22q11.2DS. It will be important to follow up with longitudinal analyses to directly examine these developmental trajectories, and correlate neurocognitive variables with clinical and adaptive outcome measures. (shrink)

© 2015 Wong,Tassone,Rivera and Simon.Carriers of the fragile X premutation allele have an expanded CGG trinucleotide repeat size within the FMR1 gene and are at increased risk of developing fragile x-associated tremor/ataxia syndrome. Previous research has shown that male fXPCs with FXTAS exhibit cognitive decline, predominantly in executive functions such as inhibitory control and working memory. Recent evidence suggests fXPCs may also exhibit impairments in processing temporal information. The attentional blink task is often used to examine the dynamics of (...) attentional selection, but disagreements exist as to whether the AB is due to excessive or insufficient attentional control. In this study, we used a variant of the AB task and neuropsychological testing to explore the dynamics of attentional selection, relate AB performance to attentional control, and determine whether fXPCs exhibited temporal and/or attentional control impairments. Participants were adult male fXPCs, aged 18–48 years and asymptomatic for FXTAS and age-matched male controls. We found that fXPCs did not differ from controls in the AB task, indicating that the temporal dynamics of attentional selection were intact. However, they were impaired in the letter-number sequencing task, a test of executive working memory. In the combined fXPC and control group, letter-number sequencing performance correlated positively with AB magnitude. This finding supports models that posit the AB is due to excess attentional control. In our two-pronged analysis approach, in control participants we replicated a previously observed effect and demonstrated that it persists under more stringent theoretical constraints, and we enhance our understanding of fXPCs by demonstrating that at least some aspects of temporal processing may be spared. (shrink)

In the wave of critical theory's recent turn to ethics, Karatani's transcritique and Eagleton's ethics of agape have emerged as two of the most outstanding attempts to reinstate morality at the centre of Marx's analysis of capitalist society. This article argues that, in spite of their merits in repositioning the normative generalizations of the moral discourse within the context of Marx's political economy, both theories share certain fundamental flaws which are inherent in the very meaning of the possibility of moral (...) action in a wrong society. By taking Karatani's transcritique as a sample of what Christoph Menke names `rational morality' and Eagleton's revival of classical morality as a variant of `virtue ethics', it is shown that they are both amenable to Adorno's charge that wrong life cannot be lived rightly. Finally, it is contended that what Adorno's criticism indicates is that, when it most matters in real situations, morality always reveals its political overdetermination. Key Words: Theodor Adorno • critical theory • dialectics • Terry Eagleton • Kojin Karatani • rational morality • totality • transcendental • transcritique • virtue ethics. (shrink)

Reading 'Capital''s promotion of the Spinozist sources of Marxism has stimulated a series of important studies in several major zones of Marxist theoretical work. A more general reassessment of Spinoza's thought in the project of a 'radical Enlightenement' provides the opportunity to consider critically the contribution of these studies to the elaboration of Marxist political theory. Vittorio Morfino, well known Italian scholar of Spinoza and Althusser, proposes to study Engels's reading of Spinoza in the context of the inheritance of classical (...) German idealism in the Marxist theory of history. He argues that Spinoza provides resources for rethinking Marxist notions of temporality and structure. The result is a theory of conjunctural analysis, in distinction from 'normative' and 'prescriptive' perspectives. (shrink)

This paper critically examines the philosophical foundations of Colin Wilson’s New Existentialism. I will show how Wilson’s writings promoted a phenomenological strategy for understanding states of ecstatic affirmation within so-called ‘peak experiences’. Wilson subsequently attempted to use the life affirming insights bestowed by peak states to establish an ontological ground for values to serve as a foundation for his New Existentialism. Because of its psychological focus however, I argue that Wilson’s New Existentialism contains an ambivalent framework for establishing ontological categories, (...) which leads his thought into theoretical difficulties. More precisely, Wilson’s strategy runs into problems in coherently integrating its explicitly psychological interpretation of Husserl’s theory of intentionality within a broader, and philosophically coherent, phenomenological framework. Wilson’s psychological reading of Husserl’s transcendental reduction, for example, manifests tensions in how it reconciles the empirical basis of acts of transcendence with an essentialist conception of the self as a transcendental ego. The above tensions, I argue, ultimately render the New Existentialism susceptible to criticism from a Husserlian-transcendental perspective. After outlining a Husserlian critique of Wilson’s position, I end the paper by suggesting how some of the central insights of the New Existentialism might help to bridge the gap that persists between pure phenomenological description and metaphysics. (shrink)

The hypothesis underlying this article is that any narrative of the emergence of modernity—as the one developed by Blumenberg, for example—that leaves behind the eschatological component is incomplete, since it removes from the tradition of modernity a great deal of the Protestant religious experience which shows deep obsession with the thought of the end of the world. Through a confrontation between Adorno and Bloch, the article argues that the notions of utopia and human liberation imply logically the idea of immortality. (...) For Adorno and Bloch the dream of immortality is the dream of matter; both of them believe that the act of human transcendence must cling on to the bodily stuff out of which we are made. Yet, whereas Bloch postulates the positive existence of a transcendent space, Adorno eschews any ontological commitment. The article argues in favour of Adorno's negative approach, showing that, after Auschwitz, what both philosophers take as the truth‐content of theology cannot be automatically transferred into dialectical materialism. (shrink)

Since September 11 the discourse of good and evil has gained a new popularity. All of a sudden, the world appears to be sharply divided between perpetrators of horrible crimes and their helpless victims. Or, by way of a Hegelian speculative mirroring, between geopolitical projections of the axis of evil and anachronistic remnants of evil infidels. Yet, despite its escalating proliferation, the renewed currency of the political rhetoric of evil is rather surprising if one considers that it goes against the (...) grain of the entire tradition of modern philosophy. Evil was always the concern of theologians who wrestled to reconcile…. (shrink)