This chapter explores some of the similarities and differences in the philosophical methods of five philosophers often considered existentialists: Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir and Marcel. The relationship between existentialism and phenomenological methods, as well as transcendental reasoning in general, is examined.

The Continuum Companion to Existentialism offers the definitive guide to a key area of modern European philosophy. The book covers the fundamental questions asked by existentialism, providing valuable guidance for students and researchers to some of the many important and enduring contributions of existentialist thinkers. Eighteen specially commissioned essays from an international team of experts explore existentialism’s relationship to philosophical method; ontology; politics; psychoanalysis; ethics; religion; literature; emotion; feminism and sexuality; cognitive science; authenticity and the self; its significance in Latin (...) American culture; and its contribution to the development of Poststructuralism. In addition, five short chapters summarise the status of canonical figures Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and de Beauvoir, delineating the historical approach to their work, while pointing to new directions such research is now taking. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools (A to Z of terms, concepts and thinkers; timeline of existentialism; list of resources and an annotated guide to further reading), this Companion is an essential tool to help the new reader navigate through the heart of Existentialism and modern European philosophy. (shrink)

This fully revised and updated 2nd edition provides a comprehensive reference guide to existentialism, featuring key chapters on key existentialist thinkers, as well as chapters applying existentialism to subject areas ranging across politics, literature, feminism, religion, the emotions, cognitive science, and poststructuralism. Contemporary developments in the field of existentialism that speak to issues of identity and exclusion are explored in 4 new chapters on race, gender, disability, and technology, whilst the 5th new chapter new chapter outlines analytic philosophy's complicated relationship (...) to existentialism. Presenting the field of existentialism beyond the European tradition, this edition also includes a new key thinker chapter on Frantz Fanon, alongside Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and de Beauvoir, as well as new engagement with the work of scholars on race and existentialism, including Lewis R. Gordon, George Yancy, and Richard Wright. The resources section at the end of the book includes an updated A to Z glossary, and timeline of key events, texts and thinkers in existentialism, as well as a list of relevant organisations, and an annotated guide to further reading, making this 2nd edition an invaluable text for scholars and students alike. (shrink)

This article investigates how the turn to affect within the humanities and social sciences re-imagines the relationship between cultural theory and science. We focus on how the writings of two neuroscientists (Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux) and one developmental psychologist (Daniel Stern) are used in order to ground certain claims about affect within cultural theory. We examine the motifs at play in cultural theories of affect, the models of (neuro)biology with which they work, and some fascinating missteps characterizing the (...) taking up of scientific literature. While neuroscience frames the affective as part of a system of regulation that makes both self and social coherence possible, in cultural theory’s narratives, by contrast, affectivity becomes a placeholder for the inherent dynamism and mutability of matter. The article interrogates the consequences of cultural theory’s strange borrowings from neuroscience and developmental psychology in their institution of a model of subjectivity preoccupied with a lived present in excess of the hold of habit and embodied history. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Betrayal's FelicityJudith Butler (bio)In translation, there is always the question of fidelity and betrayal, and even Benjamin seemed to understand that fidelity, in its literalness, was one dimension of translation, a dimension, he said, that tended to make translations bad. He thought that in addition to literalness, there was the necessity of "license" understood as "the freedom of faithful reproduction." For him, license is not precisely betrayal, but another (...) kind of faithfulness. But from the point of view of fidelity, understood as being bound to the literal text, it may well be that that other order of faithfulness, the one associated with freedom and license, can only be read as betrayal.Barbara Johnson's reflections on translation carry many affective tones derived from this ambiguous scene in which faithfulness quarrels with fidelity. In fact, it is unclear whether translations can ever be other than "bad" or, at least, have some badness in them, since the original has to be crossed, if not partially mutilated, with the emergence of the translation itself. In a way, her inquiry into translation becomes, in Mother Tongues, an occasion in which an array of human emotional predicaments are explored as linguistic predicaments. One can discern in her discussion several ways in which translation operates emotionally: it can constitute a slander, a calmuny, and so an accusation. It can become bound up with a nostalgia for a lost wholeness, and so with a problematic of grief. It can refuse the idealizations of the past, and so, in its de-idealizations, release the present as a field of play; it can work the felicities of the arbitrariness of language, and so sidestep a pathos that might bind one to an elusive original. It also brings up questions of pain and damage, whether reparation is possible, and whether it should even be sought. And finally, it establishes a relationship to damage itself, as necessary, even as the means by which the afterlife of any given text is secured.Johnson introduces her discussion of translation in Mother Tongues by asking whether translation comes after, and is dependent upon, the original. She cites Kafka's The Trial, a book she happened to pick up while thinking about this question. That book begins with the following line: "Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning." Johnson registers her amusement and surprise: "Traduced"? She writes, "This is an English word I see only in lame attempts to translate the Italian traduttore, traditore, or the French traduire, trahir. To translate is to traduce—the betrayal of the original in the process of transmitting it is inherent in translation. In other words, 'traduce' is a bad translation of a pun on the inevitable badness of translations. Joseph K. had been betrayed in exactly the same way" [15].Johnson goes on to remind us that in the German, traduced is translated as verleumdet, implying the idea that this is a false accusation, a calumny, a slander. But Johnson is clear that to have traduced someone conveys something different from "telling lies about" someone. If the text were to read, "someone had been telling lies about Josef K.," then it would follow that there is a truth that could and should be told about him, a truth that is not being told, a truth that would, in fact, exonerate him. Traduce, however, does not allow us to set up that opposition between truth and falsehood. If the translation had read (as some do), "someone had been telling lies about him," then, according to Johnson, the translator would be "making more sense of the arrest, [and] [End Page 82] destroying its senselessness" [16]. It seems clear that someone has said something damaging about Josef K., and this damaging sort of saying is conveyed not only by the word traduced, but by the resonance that traduce maintains with translation itself. Thus Johnson writes, "only translation can betray without necessarily instating the polarity from which it deviates" [16]. The point here is not that translation must betray to communicate well, but that "the act of arresting Joseph K. cannot be better figured than by translation" [16... (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 book offers a provocative account of interdisciplinary research across the neurosciences, social sciences and humanities. Setting itself against standard accounts of interdisciplinary 'integration,' and rooting itself in the authors' own experiences, the book establishes a radical agenda for collaboration across these disciplines. Rethinking Interdisciplinarity does not merely advocate interdisciplinary research, but attends to the hitherto tacit pragmatics, affects, power dynamics, and spatial logics in which that research is enfolded. Understanding the complex relationships between brains, minds, and environments requires a (...) delicate, playful and genuinely experimental interdisciplinarity, and this book shows us how it can be done. This book is open access under a CC-BY license and funded by The Wellcome Trust. (shrink)

Topics covered in Discrete Mathematics have become essential tools in many areas of studies in recent years. This is primarily due to the revolution in technology, communications, and cyber security. The book treats major themes in a typical introductory modern Discrete Mathematics course: Propositional and predicate logic, proof techniques, set theory (including Boolean algebra, functions and relations), introduction to number theory, combinatorics and graph theory. An accessible, precise, and comprehensive approach is adopted in the treatment of each topic. The ability (...) of abstract thinking and the art of writing valid arguments are emphasized through detailed proof of (almost) every result. Developing the ability to think abstractly and roguishly is key in any areas of science, information technology and engineering. Every result presented in the book is followed by examples and applications to consolidate its comprehension. The hope is that the reader ends up developing both the abstract reasoning as well as acquiring practical skills. All efforts are made to write the book at a level accessible to first-year students and to present each topic in a way that facilitates self-directed learning. Each chapter starts with basic concepts of the subject at hand and progresses gradually to cover more ground on the subject. Chapters are divided into sections and subsections to facilitate readings. Each section ends with its own carefully chosen set of practice exercises to reenforce comprehension and to challenge and stimulate readers. As an introduction to Discrete Mathematics, the book is written with the smallest set of prerequisites possible. Familiarity with basic mathematical concepts (usually acquired in high school) is sufficient for most chapters. However, some mathematical maturity comes in handy to grasp some harder concepts presented in the book. (shrink)

Human beings talk to themselves; sometimes out-loud, other times in inner speech. In this paper, I present a resolution to the following dilemma that arises from self-talk. If self-talk exists then either, we know what we are going to say and self-talk serves no communicative purpose, and must serve some other purpose, or we don’t know what we are going to say, and self-talk does serve a communicative purpose, namely, it is an instance of us communicating with ourselves. Adopting was (...) the strategy taken by Bart Geurts, who claims that the primary purpose of self-talk is to entrain commitments, and is not communicative. While accepting that self-talk can usefully play this role, I criticise the view that entraining commitments is self-talk’s fundamental role. I argue that adopting the view that we are self-blind, at least to a significant degree, means that we can accept that self-talk does play a communicative role. (shrink)

This paper explores how metaphorical thinking might contribute to an aetiology of florid delusions in psychosis. We argue that this approach helps to account for the path from experience to the delusional assertion, which, though relatively straightforward for monothematic delusions like the Capgras delusion, has always been difficult to account for in florid delusions in psychosis. Our account also helps to account for double book-keeping and the relative agential inertia of the belief.

Giorgio Prodi was an important Italian scientist who developed an original philosophy based on two basic assumptions: 1. life is mainly a semiotic phenomenon; 2. matter is somewhat a semiotic phenomenon. Prodi applies Peirce's cenopythagorean categories to all phenomena of life and matter: Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. They are interconnected meaning that the very ontology of the world, according to Prodi, is somewhat semiotic. In fact, when one describes matter as “made of” Firstness and Secondness, this means that matter ‘intrinsically’ (...) implies semiotics. At the very heart of Prodi’s theory lies a metaphysical hypothesis which is an ambitious theoretical gesture that places Prodi in an awkward position with respect to the customary philosophical tradition. In fact, his own ontology is neither dualistic nor monistic. Such a conclusion is unusual and weird, but much less unusual in present time than it was when it was first introduced. The actual resurgence of various “realisms” make Prodi’s semiotic realism much more interesting than when he first proposed his philosophical approach. What is uncommon, in Prodi perspective, is that he never separated semiotics from the materiality of the world. Prodi does not agree with the “standard” structuralist view of semiosis as an artificial and unnatural activity. On the contrary, Prodi believed semiosis lies at the very bottom of life. On one hand, Prodi maintains a strong realist stance; on the other, a realism that includes semiosis as ‘natural’ phenomena. This last view is very unusual because all forms, more or less, of realism exclude semiosis from nature but they frequently “reduce” semiosis to non-semiotic elements. According to Prodi, semiosis is a completely natural phenomenon. (shrink)

This essay develops the concept of the “social body” as a metaphorical representation of hierarchical relationships in Thailand, as well as the physical embodiment of social, religious, and political structures. To do so, I trace the symbolic coordinates of groups that correspond to conceptions of individual bodies, along with the habituated means of perceiving as part of a collective. I argue that conventional Thai social interactions involve active attention to and care of the “social body,” in which differential roles are (...) necessary for group functioning. Ethnographic descriptions of social interactions in public and semi-private arenas depict the spontaneous and embodied root of moral action in these contexts. The values thus enacted, however, challenge normative ideals of distributive justice and open up questions about “care” for a social body that validates unequal power and resource distribution. (shrink)

Drawing on a wide range of texts - from philosophical ethology to classical texts, and from continental philosophy to literature - Cimatti creates a dialogue with Flaubert, Derrida, Temple Grandin, Heidegger as well as Malaparte and Landolfi explores what human animality looks like, with a particular focus on the work of Gilles Deleuze.

To attribute confusion to someone is to take up a paternalistic stance in evaluating his reasoning.

This article is an account of the dynamics of interaction across the social sciences and neurosciences. Against an arid rhetoric of ‘interdisciplinarity’, it calls for a more expansive imaginary of what experiment – as practice and ethos – might offer in this space. Arguing that opportunities for collaboration between social scientists and neuroscientists need to be taken seriously, the article situates itself against existing conceptualizations of these dynamics, grouping them under three rubrics: ‘critique’, ‘ebullience’ and ‘interaction’. Despite their differences, each (...) insists on a distinction between sociocultural and neurobiological knowledge, or does not show how a more entangled field might be realized. The article links this absence to the ‘regime of the inter-’, an ethic of interdisciplinarity that guides interaction between disciplines on the understanding of their pre-existing separateness. The argument of the paper is thus twofold: (1) that, contra the ‘regime of the inter-’, it is no longer practicable to maintain a hygienic separation between sociocultural webs and neurobiological architecture; (2) that the cognitive neuroscientific experiment, as a space of epistemological and ontological excess, offers an opportunity to researchers, from all disciplines, to explore and register this realization. (shrink)

A friend of mine recently lent me a little book entitled What a Young Wife Ought to Know, by Mrs. Emma F. Angell Drake, M.D., of Denver, Colorado. It was published in 1902 and is one of the Self and Sex series of “pure books on avoided subjects.” Its premise is that “Woman [is] fitted by the creator for wifehood and motherhood,” and it has chapters entitled “Home and Dress,” “Marital Relations,” “The Mother the Teacher,” and so on. My friend (...) had come across it in, of all places, the library of a mental hospital where his wife was being treated for postpartum depression. He stole it as a matter of principle. What a Young Wife Ought to Know has its late-medieval equivalent in a poem of around two hundred lines known as “What the Goodwife Taught Her Daughter,” which has been used quite often by medieval historians as evidence for aspects of female behavior in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There are problems with this, though, as a comparison with Mrs. Emma F. Angell Drake's book shows. Historians of the early twentieth century would not, I assume, use What a Young Wife Ought to Know as evidence of social practice; rather, its interest is ideological. The same is true of “What the Goodwife Taught Her Daughter”: it is a poem that speaks for the special interests that have shaped its form and content. (shrink)

This article argues that despite individual Fellows’ interest in artistic practices, and similarities between a philosophical and a connoisseurial appreciation of art, the Royal Society as an institution may have been wary of image-making as a way of conveying knowledge because of the power of images to stir the passions and sway the intellect. Using Robert Hooke as a case study it explores some of the connections between philosophers and makers in Restoration London. It goes on to suggest that some (...) epistemic images were in fact designed to elicit an emotional response in their viewers in order to force them to re-evaluate the subject-matter by presenting it in a new and surprising way. (shrink)

The direct protection of civilians from the violence and harms of armed conflict is most often understood in fixed, identity-centred terms: of what protection is, where it is located, of who provid...

Modal logics support philosophy, providing means to organise information, and to think and act in response to abstract concepts and to real conditions. In its organisation, the modal is generative of the ethics of any given system. Feminist new materialist practices require us to consider ethics when generated by technological rather than theological modalities.

This article investigates the place of trust in learning relations in the classroom, not only between teacher and student, but also between student and student. To do this, it will first examine a pedagogy called community of inquiry, espoused by John Dewey and used in most Philosophy for Children courses in Australia. It will then consider what different forms of trust are involved in other power relations in the classroom, particularly the rational structuralism of R.S Peters, or the experiential philosophy (...) of Maria Montessori. It concludes that a community of inquiry shifts the ethical learning relation in significantly different ways because for educational growth, it values ethical trust more highly than a strategic trust in logical principle, duty, Truth, or cost/benefit analysis. (shrink)