Hui Tzu said to Chuang Tzu, “. . .Your words ... are too big and useless, and so everyone alike spurns them!”Chuang Tzu said, “Maybe you’ve never seen a wildcat or a weasel. It crouches down and hides, watching for something to come along. It leaps and races east and west, not hesitating to go high or low—until it falls into the trap and dies in the net. Then again there’s the yak, big as a cloud covering the sky. It (...) certainly knows how to be big, though it doesn’t know how to catch rats.” 1 One could perhaps understand, if not empathize with, Hui Tzu’s impatience in the dialogue above. Hui Tzu, after all, is not alone in finding Chuang Tzu’s philosophy, which would be the thinking of the Way .. (shrink)

In _The Deconstruction of Sex_, Jean-Luc Nancy and Irving Goh discuss how a deconstructive approach to sex helps us negotiate discourses about sex and foster a better understanding of how sex complicates our everyday existence in the age of #MeToo. Throughout their conversation, Nancy and Goh engage with topics ranging from relation, penetration, and subjection to touch, erotics, and jouissance. They show how despite its entrenchment in social norms and centrality to our being-in-the-world, sex lacks a clearly defined essence. (...) At the same time, they point to the potentiality of literature to inscribe the senses of sex. In so doing, Nancy and Goh prompt us to reconsider our relations with ourselves and others through sex in more sensitive, respectful, and humble ways without bracketing the troubling aspects of sex. (shrink)

This volume focuses on the relational aspect of Jean-Luc Nancy's thinking. As Nancy himself showed, thinking might be a solitary activity but it is never singular in its dimension. Building on or breaking away from other thoughts, especially those by thinkers who had come before, thinking is always plural, relational. This "singular plural" dimension of thought in Nancy's philosophical writings demands explication. In this book, some of today's leading scholars in the theoretical humanities shed light on how Nancy's thought both (...) shares with and departs from Descartes, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Weil, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, and Lyotard, elucidating "the sharing of voices," in Nancy's phrase, between Nancy and these thinkers. Contributors: Georges Van Den Abbeele, Emily Apter, Rodolphe Gasché, Werner Hamacher, Eleanor Kaufman, Marie-Eve Morin, Timothy Murray, Jean-Luc Nancy, and John H. Smith. (shrink)

At first glance, Clarice Lispector’s An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures (1969) might read like a regression from her earlier feminist and anti-Hegelian Passion According to G.H. (1964), given the female protagonist Lóri’s deference in large part to the male character Ulisses. I argue in this essay that any suspicion of such a philosophical letdown can be easily dispelled if we attend to Lóri’s attunement to affects and her immersion in them. As will be explicated in this essay, such (...) an affective investment signals, on the one hand, a return to Spinoza’s philosophy, thus suggesting a resistance toward the claim of a Hegelian philosophical system to surpass Spinoza; on the other hand, this investment, which exceeds the parameters of Spinoza’s philosophy as well, allows Lóri to put into practice an affective philosophy that is not only feminist but also nonanthropocentric. (shrink)

This collection presents a sort of counter-history or counter-genealogy of the globalization of French thought from the point of view of scholars working in the UK. While the dominating discourse would attribute the US as the source of that globalization, particularly through the 1966 conference on the Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man at Johns Hopkins University, this volume of essays serves as a reminder that the UK has also been a principal motor of that globalization. The essays (...) take into account how French thought and literary theory have institutionally taken shape in the UK from the 70s to today, highlight aspects of French thought that have been of particular pertinence or importance for scholars there, and outline how researchers in the UK today are bringing French thought further in terms of teaching and research in this twenty-first century. In short, this volume traces how the country has been behind the reception and development of French thought in Anglophone worlds from the late 70s to the present. (shrink)

This essay recognizes the insistent force of Jean-Luc Nancy: not only his life force or his physical and mental fortitude in living through a heart transplant and other illnesses, but also his force of thought or his influence on generations of thinkers. The optimistic and resilient spirit of this force oftentimes finds itself reaffirmed in Nancy’s writings especially on freedom, community, the world, sense, love, and existence, as Nancy insistently asserts their always possible new re-beginnings despite their apparent closures at (...) certain times. Yet, as this essay underscores, the other aspect of force must be acknowledged too: force that is waning, weakening, sliding into entropy, if not atrophy. This is force that is more pessimistic, not unlike a negative affect, which can be found in Nancy’s “L’Intrus” and “Dialogue Under the Ribs.” This essay argues that it is important to elucidate this other force because it allows us to take into account the fragile or precarious dimension of existence, or the undeniable pain and fatigue of existence, all of which insist no less in existence. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Nancy stands as one of the great French theorists of "deconstruction." His writings on philosophy, politics, aesthetics, and religion have significantly contributed to the development of contemporary French thought and helped shape and transform the field of continental philosophy. Through Nancy's immense oeuvre, which covers a wide range of topics such as community, freedom, existence, sense/ touch, democracy, Christianity, the visual arts and music, and writing itself, we have learned to take stock of the world in a more nuanced (...) fashion. In this collection, contemporaries of Nancy and eminent scholars of continental philosophy, including Giorgio Agamben, Étienne Balibar, Ginette Michaud, Georges Van Den Abbeele, Gregg Lambert and Ian James, have been invited to reflect on the force of Nancy's "deconstruction" and how it has affected, or will affect, the ways we approach many of the most pertinent topics in contemporary philosophy. The collection also includes Jean-Luc Nancy's previously unpublished 'Dialogue Beneath the Ribs', where he reflects, twenty years after, on his heart transplant. Nancy Now will be of critical interest not only to scholars working on or with Nancy's philosophy, but also to those interested in the development and future of French thought. (shrink)

It is rare these days to read a book as ambitious as Irving Goh's The Reject. Taking up the question that Jean-Luc Nancy posed in 1988—"Who comes after the subject?"—Goh's study proposes a theory of "the reject" as a crucial figure through which to reconceptualize modern critical and political theory's reliance on the centrality of the subject. Engaging in a reading that charts this figure through a range of contemporary French philosophers, the study simultaneously attempts to articulate how "the (...) reject" might help to posit, as Goh puts it, "another ethics, another 'religion without religion,' and another politics, all 'without the subject'". Not content merely to articulate a coherent theory of "the reject,"... (shrink)

Auditory perception is traditionally conceived as the perception of sounds — a friend’s voice, a clap of thunder, a minor chord. However, daily life also seems to present us with experiences characterized by the absence of sound — a moment of silence, a gap between thunderclaps, the hush after a musical performance. In these cases, do we positively hear silence? Or do we just fail to hear, and merely judge or infer that it is silent? This longstanding question remains controversial (...) in both the philosophy and science of perception, with prominent theories holding that sounds are the only objects of auditory experience and thus that our encounter with silence is cognitive, not perceptual. However, this debate has largely remained theoretical, without a key empirical test. Here, we introduce a novel empirical approach, presenting experimental evidence that silence can be genuinely perceived (not just cognitively inferred). We ask whether silences can ‘substitute’ for sounds in event-based auditory illusions — empirical signatures of auditory event representation in which auditory events distort perceived duration. Seven experiments introduce three new ‘silence illusions’ — the one-silence-is-more illusion, silence-based warping, and the oddball-silence illusion — each adapted from a prominent perceptual illusion previously thought to arise only from sounds. Subjects were immersed in ambient noise interrupted by silences structurally identical to the sounds in the original illusions. In all cases, silences elicited temporal distortions perfectly analogous to the illusions produced by sounds. Our results suggest that silence is truly heard, not merely inferred, introducing a general approach for studying absence perception. (shrink)

Preface to the Irving Singer library edition -- Preface -- Introduction: Nature and spirit -- Schopenhauer's pendulum : is happiness possible? -- Beyond the suffering in life -- The nature and content of happiness -- Play and mere existence -- Living in nature -- Imagination and idealization -- Harmonization through art -- Art and spirituality -- The continuum of ends and means -- Aesthetic foundations of ethics and religion -- Conclusion: Love, meaning, happiness.

Introduction to Logic is a proven textbook that has been honed through the collaborative efforts of many scholars over the last five decades. Its scrupulous attention to detail and precision in exposition and explanation is matched by the greatest accuracy in all associated detail. In addition, it continues to capture student interest through its personalized human setting and current examples. The 14th Edition of Introduction to Logic, written by Copi, Cohen & McMahon, is dedicated to the many thousands of students (...) and their teachers - at hundreds of universities in the United States and around the world - who have used its fundamental methods and techniques of correct reasoning in their everyday lives. (shrink)

... Press for their editorial perspicacity, to the National Institutes of Health for the partial financial support they gave me while I was writing some of the chapters, and to Donald Michie for suggesting the title Good Thinking.

In this work we investigate the Weihrauch degree of the problem Decreasing Sequence of finding an infinite descending sequence through a given ill-founded linear order, which is shared by the problem Bad Sequence of finding a bad sequence through a given non-well quasi-order. We show that $\mathsf {DS}$, despite being hard to solve, is rather weak in terms of uniform computational strength. To make the latter precise, we introduce the notion of the deterministic part of a Weihrauch degree. We then (...) generalize $\mathsf {DS}$ and $\mathsf {BS}$ by considering $\boldsymbol {\Gamma }$ -presented orders, where $\boldsymbol {\Gamma }$ is a Borel pointclass or $\boldsymbol {\Delta }^1_1$, $\boldsymbol {\Sigma }^1_1$, $\boldsymbol {\Pi }^1_1$. We study the obtained $\mathsf {DS}$ -hierarchy and $\mathsf {BS}$ -hierarchy of problems in comparison with the Baire hierarchy and show that they do not collapse at any finite level. (shrink)

The Politics of Constructionism presents a broadranging and critical overview of the many themes of social constructionism and its relevance to contemporary social and political issues. Clearly structured and bringing together leading international contributors from across the social sciences, it offers an invaluable may through this rich body of literature. Major questions and topics explored in its critique and application of constructionist ideas include the theory and practice of scientific method, the development of social and political policy, the use of (...) social science statistical methods, self-identity and the politics of collective identities, and technological advances in reproductive medicine. Drawing on insights from psychology, sociology, politics, philosophy, cultural, gender, and social studies, The Politics of Constructionism links the discourse of constructionism to the wider social and political world and offers much to suggest that, contrary to the final impoverishment claimed by some of postmodernism, social science is witnessing the beginning of a new enrichment. It will be essential reading for all students and academics interested in social constructionism and contemporary issues and debates across the social sciences. (shrink)

There are obvious benefits to be gained from the study of logic: heightened ability to express ideas clearly and concisely, increased skill in defining one's terms, enlarged capacity to formulate arguments rigorously and to analyze them critically. But the greatest benefit, in my judgment, is the recognition that reason can be applied in every aspect of human affairs.

For more than six decades, and for thousands of students, Introduction to Logic has been the gold standard in introductory logic texts. In this 15th Edition, Carl Cohen and Victor Rodych update Irving M. Copi's classic text, improving on its many strengths and introducing new and helpful material that will greatly assist both students and instructors.

Alvin Plantinga has famously responded to the logical problem of evil by appealing to the intrinsic value of significant free will. A problem, however, arises because traditional theists believe that both God and the redeemed who go to heaven cannot do wrong acts. This entails that both God and the redeemed in heaven lack significant freedom. If significant freedom is indeed valuable, then God and the redeemed in heaven would lack something intrinsically valuable. However, if significant freedom is not intrinsically (...) valuable, then Plantinga’s reply to the logical problem of evil fails. In this paper, we assess three contemporary solutions to the dilemma above. The first is the love solution, which proposes that significant freedom is necessary for agents to love, and loving others is intrinsically good. The second is the soul-making solution, which argues that significant freedom is necessary for self-developing one’s moral character, and having a self-developed moral character is intrinsically good. The third is the derivative free will solution, which argues that significant freedom is necessary for derivative free will in heaven, and derivative free will is intrinsically good. We raise problems against all three solutions and instead defend a fourth solution – the ultimate responsibility solution. That is, significant freedom is instrumentally valuable as it gives agents ultimate responsibility with regards to morally significant acts. Finally, we defend the ultimate responsibility solution against two major objections. (shrink)

My purpose here is purely historical. It is not an attempt to resolve the question as to whether Russell did or did not countenance nonclassical logics, and if so, which nonclassical logics, and still less to demonstrate whether he himself contributed, in any manner, to the development of nonclassical logic. Rather, I want merely to explore and insofar as possible document, whether, and to what extent, if any, Russell interacted with the various, either the various candidates or their, ideas that (...) Dejnožka and others have proposed as potentially influential in Russell’s intellectual reactions to nonclassical logic or to the philosophical concepts that might contribute to his reactions to nonclassical logics. (shrink)

Our paper serves as an introduction to a budding field: the philosophy of mind-wandering. We begin with a philosophical critique of the standard psychological definitions of mind-wandering as task-unrelated or stimulus-independent. Although these definitions have helped bring mind-wandering research onto centre stage in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, they have substantial limitations that researchers must overcome to move forward. Specifically, the standard definitions do not account for (i) the dynamics of mind wandering, (ii) task-unrelated thought that does not qualify as mind-wandering, (...) and (iii) the ways that mind-wandering can be task-related. We then survey three philosophical accounts that improve upon the current psychological definitions. We first present our account of mind-wandering as “unguided thinking”. Next we review Thomas Metzinger’s view that mind-wandering can be defined as thought lacking meta-awareness and cognitive agency, as well as Peter Carruthers’s and Fabian Dorsch’s definitions of mind-wandering as disunified thinking. We argue that these latter views are inadequate, and we show that our definition of mind-wandering as unguided thinking is not only conceptually and phenomenologically precise but also can be operationalized in a principled way for empirical research. (shrink)