La dimension spatiale du monde social commence à être mieux explorée dans sa double dimension : les spatialités comme agir et les espaces comme environnements. On découvre à quel point le spatial résonne avec le politique. D’abord parce que la géographie du politique s’est fait une place majeure dans le paysage du débat public. Ensuite parce que les enjeux de justice sont le plus souvent des enjeux géographiques et que ceux-ci nous aident à comprendre la dynamique générale de l’idée de (...) justice. Enfin et surtout parce qu’habiter, c’est toujours aussi co-habiter. (shrink)

Since Kant, philosophy has been obsessed with epistemological questions pertaining to the relationship between mind and world and human access to objects. In The Democracy of Objects Bryant proposes that we break with this tradition and once again initiate the project of ontology as first philosophy. Drawing on the object-oriented ontology of Graham Harman, as well as the thought Roy Bhaskar, Gilles Deleuze, Niklas Luhman, Aristotle, Jacques Lacan, Bruno Latour and the developmental systems theorists, Bryant develops a realist ontology (...) that he calls “onticology”. This ontology argues that being is composed entirely of objects, properties, and relations such that subjects themselves are a variant of objects. By way of systems theory and cybernetics, Bryant argues that objects are dynamic systems that relate to the world under conditions of operational closure. In this way, he integrates the most vital discoveries of the anti-realists within a realist ontology that does justice to both the material and cultural. Onticology proposes a flat ontology where objects of all sorts and at different scales equally exist without being reducible to other objects and where there are no transcendent entities such as eternal essences outside of dynamic interactions among objects. This work will be of great interest to Continental philosophers, ecologists, cultural theorists, media theorists, and those following recent developments in the thought of speculative realists. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.2 (2000) 113-126 [Access article in PDF] Dissenting Words:A Conversation with Jacques Rancière 1 Davide Panagia:In your writings you highlight the political efficacy of words. In The Names of History, for instance, this emphasis is discussed most vividly in terms of what you refer to as an "excess of words" that marks the rise of democratic movements in the seventeenth century. Similarly, in On The Shores of (...) Politics, you begin your discussion with an excursus on the end of politics as the end of the promise. Finally, in Dis-agreement you speak of "the part of those who have no-part" as voicing a "wrong" for the sake of equality.In each of these instances, however, your treatment of words (and language more generally) is very different from those thinkers of the "linguistic turn" in political philosophy who expound on an ethics of deliberation as the first virtue of modern democracies. For that matter, your approach is quite different from those thinkers who focus on the aporias of language as such.Could you discuss this thematic of the proliferation of words in your thinking about democratic politics?Would it be fair to characterize your research on and exposition of democratic thinking as a "poetics of politics"?Rancière's Reply:In order to address your question adequately, it would be wise to enlarge the sense of "linguistic turn" you invoke. In its most generally accepted sense, the linguistic turn in philosophy consists in ascribing to linguistic processes certain phenomena and specifiable modes of relating objects attributed, in a previous instance, either to factual processes or lines of thought. This approach is not limited to the two figures you invoke in your question. The linguistic turn also has two stages of development that, from my experience, have been more noticeable in France than in the United States. The first phase, then, emerged with Lévi-Strauss and his structural approach to social relations founded on a linguistic model of relationality, subsequently reprised in Lacan's psychoanalytic notion that "the unconscious is structured like a language" that, in its turn, conjoins the energetic mental processes Freud discusses to linguistic practices. The primacy of "the linguistic" thus granted language all the properties of the Freudian unconscious [End Page 113] along with those of a Marxist notion of infrastructure. The Saussurian opposition between langue and parole provided a privileged status to a linguistic model whose role was that of a general law that unconsciously structures the behavior of individuals and societies. It is on the basis of these parameters that the structuralist moment of the linguistic turn was constituted. At one and the same time, the analysis of speech acts became first and foremost a "symptomatic" analysis of those procedures of misrecognition that linguistically structured both the behavior of individuals and social relations. When we "read" Le Capital with Althusser, the interpretive and methodological schema for linguistic phenomena operated like a kind of "policing of the enunciated": that is, a search for those unsuccessful (i.e., inadequate) modes of expression that exemplify such symptomatic procedures of misrecognition.The second phase of the linguistic turn constituted itself more ambiguously. For those who shared intellectual experiences similar to my own, this version involved a critique of the langue/infrastructure model; that is, a further and more favorable consideration of the value of the political and the linguistic games therein that, according to the Althusserian/Marxist model (and, indeed, with structuralism more generally), were to be treated as ideological artifacts. In a very real sense, it all began with the May '68 assertion that "we are all German Jews"--an entirely ideological statement, the validity of which, if analyzed at the level of its content, one finds to rest entirely on the capacity to overturn the political relationship between the order of designations and that of events by emphasizing the gap that separates subject and predicate. From there, an entire field of understanding speech acts as political gestures opened up: a field that reconfigured the division between words and things while rearranging the distinction between legitimate... (shrink)

En 1974 Jacques Rancière examinait la leçon de marxisme donné par le philosophe Louis Althusser à un collègue anglais et en faisait l'occasion d'un bilan sur l'althussérisme lui-même. Althusser avait imposé dans les années 1960 l'idée d'un retour à la vraie pensée de Marx, en phase avec les formes nouvelles de la pensée structuraliste (ethnologie de Lévi-Strauss, psychanalyse lacanienne, archéologie du savoir de Foucault) mais aussi avec les nouveaux espoirs révolutionnaires qui secouaient la planète à l'heure des luttes de (...) décolonisation et de la révolution culturelle chinoise. Or les événements de 1968 avaient montré le total décalage de ce marxisme renouvelé par rapport aux aspirations portées par les mouvements de la jeunesse et aux formes prises par la mobilisation populaire. La pensée du renouveau théorique et politique s'était transformée en pensée de l'ordre. Mais aussi, dans le contexte de l'après-68, cette pensée de l'ordre ne pouvait trouver son efficacité qu'en s'exprimant dans le langage de la subversion. La Leçon d'Althusser s'attachait à dégager les conditions de ce renversement en examinant le coeur politique de la philosophie althussérienne, l'opposition de la science et de l'idéologie, à la lumière de l'histoire récente mais aussi à celle de la tradition ouvrière et révolutionnaire. Ce texte devenu introuvable est aujourd'hui réédité avec une préface de l'auteur qui en souligne l'actualité : le destin de cette pensée de la subversion devenue une justification de l'ordre existant n'est que le premier épisode d'un mouvement politique et intellectuel bien plus vaste. Des années 1970 jusqu'à notre présent nous avons été témoins d'une vaste contre-révolution politique et intellectuelle dirigée contre tous les acquis des mouvements populaires d'un siècle et contre toute idée d'émancipation. Or cette contre-révolution a continuellement recyclé à son profit tous les thèmes de la pensée marxiste et critique d'hier. La Leçon d'Althusser mettait en lumière le mécanisme fondamental de ce processus et anticipait en ce sens le travail poursuivi par Jacques Rancière jusque dans des livres récents comme La Haine de la démocratie et Le Spectateur émancipé. Ce travail est donc propre à aider à la compréhension du présent et à la reformulation d'une pensée de l'émancipation. (shrink)

Dans ses Moralia, Jacques Almain (v. 1480-1515) aborde la question du fondement des interdits moraux : tout péché est-il péché parce qu’il est interdit? Il présente comme étant la plus probable l’opinion des maîtres qui ont affirmé qu’il existe bien des actes intrinsèquement mauvais, c’est-à-dire des actes dont Dieu lui-même ne peut faire qu’il soit au pouvoir de l’homme de les accomplir sans par là pécher. Pour exposer cette opinion, Almain reprend la thèse de Grégoire de Rimini selon laquelle (...) il existe, en amont des « interdits impératifs » essentiellement contingents, des « interdits indicatifs » issus de la droite raison, plus fondamentaux que les premiers, par lesquels les actions peccamineuses sont nécessairement proscrites. Mais la relecture de Grégoire par Almain place au centre de l’analyse métaéthique de ces interdits nécessaires l’activité législatrice d’une droite raison souveraine. Car les jugements de la droite raison ne semblent fondés sur aucune objectivité antécédente au jugement lui-même – ce qui anticipe à certains égards la révolution kantienne. (shrink)

Vers la fin de sa vie, Claude Lévi-Strauss pensait que l'espèce humaine s'était condamnée elle-même par sa propre voracité ; il nous comparait à des vers à farine dans un bocal. Oui! Nous sommes bien aujourd'hui à un tournant non pas seulement de notre civilisation, niais de l'histoire humaine. Globalement, pour la grande majorité d'entre nous notre monde est devenu insupportable par une minorité prête à tout pour accroître ses gains et son pouvoir. Il est clair que si nous persistons (...) dans cette voie nous ne pourrons plus sortir de ce processus d'autodestruction ou de suicide collectif. Il nous est peut-être encore temps d'envisager une autre manière d'être humain, de faire homme, comme disait Montaigne. Mais pour cela, tout doit être réexaminé, réévalué, rien ne doit rester tabou. C'est l'ensemble des fondements sur lesquels nous avons construit notre monde que nous devons réinterroger et réévaluer. Nous devons pour cela apprendre à trouver une totale liberté de penser, sans préjugés, et en nous appuyant sur ce que nous avons inventé et acquis progressivement de phis précieux : le respect universel des droits humains. En n'oubliant jamais le vieux mot de Terence : "Rien d'humain ne m'est étranger". Nous devrions alors être capables d'apprendre à dépasser les notions de nation, de culture, de religion, de moeurs, de coutumes. Non pour les nier mais pour qu'elles soient, avant tout, le bagage que chacun apporte dans la fondation d'un vivre ensemble humain. C'est ce qu'il nous faudrait dès maintenant envisager et construire. Renonçons à tout espoir et commençons par agir, si nous en sommes capables... (shrink)

In this collection of previously unpublished essays Jean-Jacques Nattiez applies his theoretical foundations of musical semiotics to theorists such as Levi-Strauss, Hanslick, and Brailoiu; novelists such as Proust; and poets such as Baudelaire. The author treats problems which musicologists and music lovers alike need to address: the artistic product in music of oral tradition, the nature of musical facts, and questions of fidelity and authenticity in performance practice. Nattiez tackles these perennial issues with an originality born out of his (...) focus on the status of time in the works considered. This approach allows him to take sides, sometimes in a provocative manner, in the ongoing debates which pit adherents of modernity against apologists of postmodernism. (shrink)

The thesis that republicanism was only suited for small states was given its decisive eighteenth-century formulation by Montesquieu, who emphasized not only republics' need for homogeneity and virtue but also the difficulty of constraining military and executive power in large republics. Hume and Publius famously replaced small republics' virtue and homogeneity with large republics' plurality of contending factions. Even those who shared this turn to modern liberty, commerce and the accompanying heterogeneity of interests, however, did not all agree with or (...) know about Publius' institutional responses to the problems of executive and military power. Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and on both sides of the Atlantic, it remained a live question whether large states could be stable moderate republics, with responses ranging from embraces of Montesquieuian limited monarchy, to denials that there was any real large-republic problem at all, with a variety of institutional solutions in between for those who thought there was a real but soluble large-republic problem. (shrink)

"Dans les années 1960, Gilbert Durand, marqué par Gaston Bachelard, a développé une conception globale, complexe, transdisciplinaire de l'imagination, centrée sur le mythe langagier et les langages visuels. Parallèlement à Claude Lévi-Strauss, qui mettait en avant la notion de structure mythique et d'enracinement neuronal de la culture, G. Durand opta pour un "structuralisme figuratif" où la signification des images, tout en s'enracinant dans le biologique, relevait aussi d'une symbolisation, plus proche des psychanalyses et de G. Bachelard que de la sémiotique. (...) L'imagination et ses œuvres individuelles et collectives sont la résultante d'un "trajet anthropologique" qui s'étend des soubassements neurobiologiques aux matrices des mythes sociaux et religieux et vice versa. Plus de cinquante ans après, les avancées des sciences physiques et biologiques, neurologiques et cognitives permettent de jeter un regard nouveau sur l'ensemble des fonctions mentales, ainsi que sur les théories modernes du vivant et du cerveau. En quoi ces savoirs nouveaux éclairent-ils l'imagination et l'imaginaire, dans quelle mesure viennent-ils converger avec les références anciennes de G. Durand, quelle nouvelle anthropologie post-durandienne de l'imaginaire peut-on voir émerger?"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Cette édition numérique a été réalisée à partir d'un support physique, parfois ancien, conservé au sein du dépôt légal de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, conformément à la loi n° 2012-287 du 1er mars 2012 relative à l'exploitation des Livres indisponibles du XXe siècle. Pages de début I - Le problème du sens II - La non-négation III - Le sens du sens IV - Lévi-Strauss, Deleuze, Serres, Derrida V - Échec et sens VI - Des signes VII - Vector (...) et concept?s VIII -L'intotalisable Conclusion Pages de fin. (shrink)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was hailed by Claude Lévi-Strauss as the founder of the sciences of man. This collection of fourteen classic papers devoted to his work addresses the points of intersection between the moral and the political, the personal and the social. The volume is divided into five parts: The Critique of Progress and the Speculative Anthropology, The Naturalizing of Natural Law, The General Will and Totalitarianism, Anticipations of Game Theory and Strategies of Redemption. The articles are accompanied by an (...) extensive, detailed introduction by the editor along with a selective bibliography. (shrink)

This article focuses on possible convergences between phenomenology and anthropology and underlines their contributions to the analysis of a specific topic. In its reconstructive dimension it departs from Edmund Husserl’s positions in the letter he addressed to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl in 1935, in particular on the relationship between humanity and the surrounding word (Umwelt) and on the opposition between historical societies and primitive ahistorical societies. After having noted some critical points emerging from Husserl’s considerations, this text retraces some of its (...) repercussions on the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Derrida, whose diverging interpretations open up different ways of examining the relationship between the respective phenomenological and anthropological perspectives. Finally, with the aim of rethinking the contributions of these two fields to address the problem of the co-participation and the differentiations between the archaic and the current in descripted social structures by Lévy-Bruhl, this text turns to the specific temporality of totemic presentifications, which should become phenomenologically more detailed. (shrink)

A number of claims made by Derrida concerning Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Husserl will be carefully considered and evaluated here. First, Derrida’s claim that Merleau-Ponty’s mis-interprets Husserl’s letter to Lévy-Bruhl will be challenged. Secondly, Derrida’s claim that his criticism of Husserl’s phenomenology can be applied just as well to Merleau-Ponty’s will be challenged. Thirdly, it is a careful consideration of textual evidence that will be used to support these challenges. Finally, Merleau-Ponty’s late lectures will take us back to the (...) class='Hi'>Lévy-Bruhl letter and finally to Merleau-Ponty’s own phenomenology of language, one that integrates perception and language and yet that still privileges not eidetic essences or linguistic expression but perception as its primary term. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Flowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction by Mark PayneAihua ChenFlowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction, by Mark Payne; 192 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.Mark Payne's Flowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction contributes significantly to the nascent scholarship on the ever-increasing corpus of postapocalyptic fiction by reading this genre philosophically and interrogating how it imagines new forms of life beyond the confines of a particular kind of world (...) and outside the polis walls. Payne's claim is that postapocalyptic fiction is "political theory in fiction form" and "shows what it would be like to live that life" (p. 2). Moreover, he posits that postapocalyptic fiction "imagines forms of human freedom, sociality, and capability outside the discourse of normative theory" (pp. 2–3). This monograph, framed by the great thinkers such as Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, and many others, provides a cogent and incisive analysis of the themes of occupation, ontology, and the anthropological horizon in postapocalyptic fiction. It offers a comprehensive study of the genre, ranging in the context of philosophical and political ideas from Mary Shelley's The Last Man to Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy. The readings include a well-developed introduction, three analytical chapters, and a conclusion.In his extensive introduction, Payne provides a rich background for his study of postapocalyptic fiction and perspicuously outlines his theoretical framework and research scope. Payne first traces the literary lineage of postapocalyptic fiction to the biblical tale of Noah, and Hesiod's Works and Days. He offers a helpful delineation of the salient differences between apocalyptic fiction and postapocalyptic fiction, and thus narrows his research scope to postapocalyptic fictions that commit themselves to "staging human beings living on after the catastrophe, and to showing why catastrophe is necessary for the new forms of human sociality they envision" (p. 18), which accounts for his omission of some famous postapocalyptic novels, such as Will Self's The Book of Dave and Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven.After acknowledging his indebtedness to earlier research, Payne argues that although some critical readings of postapocalyptic fiction "have rightly identified its commitment to starting over, they have generally mischaracterized it by beginning at the macrosocial level, with the social contract and other large-scale forms of social organization, rather than the single human being and their body." He further suggests that "postapocalyptic fiction advances a strand of political thought that is as ancient as Aristotle's student Dicaearchus, who argued, against his teacher, that the polis is not the best form of life for the realization of human potential" (p. 21).Therefore, his research addresses this gap by focusing on individualism, small-scale sociality, and forms of freedom and regeneration outside the polis wall. Payne points out that "the form of freedom staged in postapocalyptic fiction is [End Page 499] marronage" (p. 26). Especially noteworthy is that Payne gives a detailed explication of the theory of marronage, the relationship between occupation and mentation to which he frequently refers in subsequent chapters to expound how survivors after the apocalyptic event can adapt themselves to the altered world and have new forms of mental life through their new occupations.The first chapter, "The Apocalyptic Cosmos," examines how cosmic forces transform human beings' physical existence and forms of life in the works of Hesiod, Shelley, and Olaf Stapledon, and how these writers engage with the immediacy of relationship between occupation and mentation. Payne first engages in illuminating exploration of how Shelley draws on Works and Days for her vision of postapocalyptic fiction. He argues that The Last Man looks to Works and Days "for its vision of human victimization at the hands of a whimsical cosmos" (p. 37). For Shelley, primitive agriculture is the ideal form of life, in which "the relationship between occupation and mentation is the most satisfying to human beings because it affords them the idea that personal, small-scale, local divinities care about human beings in the same way that human beings care for them" (p. 44). In the latter part of the chapter, Payne illustrates how Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker reveal... (shrink)

Neil Levy presents a new theory of freedom and responsibility. He defends a particular account of consciousness--the global workspace view--and argues that consciousness plays an especially important role in action. There are good reasons to think that the naïve assumption, that consciousness is needed for moral responsibility, is in fact true.

This article aims to draw a portrait of the influence of cybernetics on soft science. To this end, structuralism, post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy will be successively analyzed in a perspective based on importing concepts stemming from the cybernetic paradigm. By focusing more specifically on the American postwar context, we intend to remind the audience that many soft science specialists were involved in the elaboration of this ‘new science’. We will then retrace the influence of the cybernetic paradigm on structuralism. Starting (...) with the historic meeting between Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss, we will illustrate that structural phonology is directly inspired by discoveries stemming from the informational model. In the same perspective, the conceptual borrowings of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan from cybernetics will be identified and analyzed. Then, we will address the matter of the relationship between postmodern theories and the cybernetic paradigm. The philosophical movement towards deconstruction, as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, will be analyzed based on how they relate to this paradigm. We will also insist on the fact that the philosophy of Jean- François Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne is fully in line with the epistemological revolution launched by cybernetics. (shrink)

The rational design of theoretical minimal RNA rings predetermines AUG as the universal start codon. This design maximizes coded amino acid diversity over minimal sequence length, defining in silico theoretical minimal RNA rings, candidate ancestral genes. RNA rings code for 21 amino acids and a stop codon after three consecutive translation rounds, and form a degradation‐delaying stem‐loop hairpin. Twenty‐five RNA rings match these constraints, ten start with the universal initiation codon AUG. No first codon bias exists among remaining RNA rings. (...) RNA ring design predetermines AUG as initiation codon. This is the only explanation yet for AUG as start codon. RNA ring design determines additional RNA ring gene‐ and tRNA‐like properties described previously, because it presumably mimics constraints on life's primordial RNAs. (shrink)

_Criticism and Conviction_ offers a rare opportunity to share personally in the intellectual life and journey of the eminent philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Internationally known for his influential works in hermeneutics, theology, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics, until now, Ricoeur has been conspicuously silent on the subject of himself. In this book--a conversation about his life and work with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay--Ricoeur reflects on a variety of philosophical, social, religious, and cultural topics, from the paradoxes of political power to the (...) relationship between life and art, and life and death. In the first of eight conversations, Ricoeur traces the trajectory of his life, recounting the origins of his convictions and the development of his intellect against the tragic events of the twentieth century. Declaring himself the "son of a victim of the First World War," Ricoeur, an orphan, sketches his early years in the house of stern but loving grandparents, and the molding of his intellect under the tutelage of Roland Dalbiez, Gabriel Marcel, and André Philip. Ricoeur tells the intriguing story of his capture and five-year imprisonment by the Germans during World War II, where he and his compatriots fashioned an intellectual life complete with a library and lectures, and where he, amazingly, was able to continue his dissertation research. Elegantly interweaving anecdotal with philosophical meditations, Ricoeur recounts his relationships with some of the twentieth century's greatest figures, such as Heidegger, Jaspers, and Eliade. He also shares his views on French philosophers and explains his tumultuous relationship with Jacques Lacan. And while expressing his deepest respect for the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel Foucault, Ricoeur reserves his greatest admiration for the narratologist Algirdas Julien Greimas. Ricoeur also explores the relationship between the philosophical and religious domains, attempting to reconcile the two poles in his thought. And readers who have struggled with Ricoeur's work will be grateful for these illuminating discussions that provide an invaluable key to his writings on language and narrative, especially those on metaphor and time. Spontaneous and lively, _Criticism and Conviction_ is a passionate confirmation of Ricoeur's eloquence, lucidity, and intellectual rigor, and affirms his position as one of this century's greatest thinkers. It is an essential book for anyone interested in philosophy and literary criticism. (shrink)

Poststructuralism--as a name for a mode of thinking, a style of philosophizing, a kind of writing--has exercised a profound influence upon contemporary Western thought and the institution of the university. As a French and predominantly Parisian affair, poststructuralism is inseparable from the intellectual milieu of postwar France, a world dominated by Alexandre Kojève's and Jean Hyppolite's interpretations of Hegel, Jacques Lacan's reading of Freud, Gaston Bachelard's epistemology, George Canguilhem's studies of science, and Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism. It is also inseparable (...) from the structuralist tradition of linguistics based upon the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jacobson, and the structuralist interpretations of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, and the early Michel Foucault. Poststructuralism, considered in terms of contemporary cultural history, can be understood as belonging to the broad movement of European formalism, with explicit historical links to both Formalist and Futurist linguistics and poetics, and with aspects of the European avant-garde, especially André Breton's surrealism. Each essay in this unique collection by and for educators is devoted to the work and educational significance of one of ten major poststructuralist philosophers. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 52, Issue 4, Page 536-553, Winter 2021.

Health metaphors are commonly used in a variety of contexts. While war metaphors are common in medicine, there are also other conceptualizations and other metaphors employed in different contexts. In policies, metaphors can play an important role in framing thought and discourse, and have an important effect, and even more so in educational policy. In this article, we analyze the two South African policies regarding HIV and AIDS in the educational context – the first policy from 1999, and the one (...) that replaced it in 2017. The focus is on identifying and categorizing the metaphors directly related to HIV and AIDS. We identified 29 such metaphors in policy 1, and 71 in policy 2, using the principles from the MIPVU, and thematic discourse analysis was used to categorize the metaphors into themes. The most prominent changes in the metaphors from policy 1 to policy 2 regard the focus of the imagery, as well as the conceptualization of HIV itself. These are then interpreted in the Southern African context. (shrink)

First published in 1967, _Writing and Difference_, a collection of Jacques Derrida's essays written between 1959 and 1966, has become a landmark of contemporary French thought. In it we find Derrida at work on his systematic deconstruction of Western metaphysics. The book's first half, which includes the celebrated essay on Descartes and Foucault, shows the development of Derrida's method of deconstruction. In these essays, Derrida demonstrates the traditional nature of some purportedly nontraditional currents of modern thought—one of his main (...) targets being the way in which "structuralism" unwittingly repeats metaphysical concepts in its use of linguistic models. The second half of the book contains some of Derrida's most compelling analyses of why and how metaphysical thinking must exclude writing from its conception of language, finally showing metaphysics to be constituted by this exclusion. These essays on Artaud, Freud, Bataille, Hegel, and Lévi-Strauss have served as introductions to Derrida's notions of writing and _différence_—the untranslatable formulation of a nonmetaphysical "concept" that does not exclude writing—for almost a generation of students of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. _Writing and Difference_ reveals the unacknowledged program that makes thought itself possible. In analyzing the contradictions inherent in this program, Derrida foes on to develop new ways of thinking, reading, and writing,—new ways based on the most complete and rigorous understanding of the old ways. Scholars and students from all disciplines will find _Writing and Difference_ an excellent introduction to perhaps the most challenging of contemporary French thinkers—challenging because Derrida questions thought as we know it. (shrink)

Provides an overview of the theories of Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida.

Design thinking in general, and optimality modeling in particular, have traditionally been associated with adaptationism—a research agenda that gives pride of place to natural selection in shaping biological characters. Our goal is to evaluate the role of design thinking in non-evolutionary analyses. Specifically, we focus on research into abstract design principles that underpin the functional organization of extant organisms. Drawing on case studies from engineering-inspired approaches in biology we show how optimality analysis, and other design-related methods, play a specific methodological (...) role that is tangential to the study of adaptation. To account for the role of these reasoning strategies in contemporary biology, we therefore suggest a reevaluation of the connection between design thinking and adaptationism. (shrink)