In _Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines_, Marian Hobson gives us a thorough and elegant analysis of this controversial and seminal contemporary thinker. Looking closely at the language and the construction of some of Derrida's philosophy, Hobson suggests the way he writes, indeed the fact he writes in another language, affects how he can be understood by English speakers. This superb study on the question of language will make illuminating reading for anyone studying or engaged with Derrida's philosophy.

Marian Hobson's work has made a seminal contribution to our understanding of the European Enlightenment, and of Diderot and Rousseau in particular. This book presents her most important articles in a single volume, translated into English for the first time. Hobson's distinctive approach is to take a given text or problématique and position it within its intellectual, historical and polemical context. From close analysis of the underlying conceptual structures of literary texts, she offers a unique insight into (...) the vibrant networks of people and ideas at work throughout Europe, and across disciplinary boundaries as diverse as literature and mathematics, medicine and music. In their translations of Hobson's essays, Kate Tunstall and Caroline Warman present the primary sources in both the original eighteenth-century French and modern English, making the detail of these debates accessible to everyone, from the specialist to the student, whatever their academic discipline or interest. (shrink)

This book explores the language and arguments Jacques Derrida uses in his writings, and how this is at the core of his work. Marian Hobson explores the French language in which Derrida's philosophy is written in, and the ways his ideas are organized, to suggest that this has an overriding affect on how his translated work affects our understanding of his thought.

Are works of art imitations? If so, what exactly do they imitate? Should an artist remind his audience that what it is perceiving is in fact artifice, or should he try above all to persuade it to accept the illusion as reality? Questions such as these, which have dominated aesthetic theory since the Greeks, were debated with extraordinary vigour and ingenuity in eighteenth-century France. In this book Dr Hobson analyses these debates, focusing in turn on painting, the novel, drama, (...) poetry and music. In each case she relates theory to contemporary works of art by Watteau, Chardin, Diderot, Beaumarchais, Gluck and many others. She shows that disputes within the theory of each art centred upon the nature of the perceiver's attention. Dr Hobson provides a method of mapping the changes in artistic style which took place as the century advanced. In discussing such conceptual transformations Dr Hobson opens an important perspective for the study of Romanticism and Realism. (shrink)

Derrida thematises his writing through a change of perspective which moves from very detailed examination of an argument to more general statements. This paper is a consideration of how Derrida anchors his close attention to the detail of an argument in a wider philosophical-historical and indeed social framework. In this paper, the word in question is ‘freedom’, discussed with the philosopher and psychoanalyst Elisabeth Roudinesco; this paper moves back chronologically to Force of Law, and finally to a passage in Of (...) Grammatology to demonstrate that in Derrida's work from early to late there is a web of reflection about freedom. (shrink)

Derrida, for reasons which he never made clear publicly, published his mémoire for the diplôme d'études supérieures only in 1990, some thirty-five years after it had been written. Had it been published much earlier, some of the dispiritingly ill-informed remarks about his work might have been avoided. The mémoire, entitled The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy, reveals that he is, when required, perfectly able to write a standard thesis in straightforward French. And that, in particular, he is aware of (...) the work of the great logician Gottlob Frege in its relation to Husserl. (shrink)

A major adjustment to the British calendar occurred in 1752. This was the passage from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian, inaugurated in the sixteenth century by command of Pope Gregory XIII in...

This piece asks a simple question, one simply obvious after the New York Times obituary of Jacques Derrida: how is it, why is it, that his work has been attacked in act and in words? And why more violently than the other great contemporaries of that period, of whom only Kristeva is still alive: Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, Lacan? It tries out various possibilities: envy, power struggles among various intellectual groupings of the same generation, the location of philosophy in the present (...) tree of knowledge, to conclude that the particularizing feature of his work which sparked such aggressivity may be his use of language. (shrink)

The article begins by examining two arguments used by Derrida in work published in 1967. The first claims against Lévi-Strauss that an empirical pattern of events cannot be injected into or superimposed onto an historical pattern claiming universality, for then there can be no disconfirmation of what is said. (This argument is used against Marxian history by some who write in the wake of Existentialism, Paul Roubiczek for instance.) The second claims against Foucault that he does not distinguish between reason (...) as part of thinking and language and reason as an empirical historical structure capable of modification along time. The article then discusses the use of very similar if not identical arguments in Derrida’s much more recent work on laws, Force of law. The intelligibility, the interpretability, of laws and their history comes after the laws, not before, and is thus not fully universalisable. (shrink)

La définition du beau en termes de « perception des rapports » obéit-elle à une raison simplement contextuelle – l’expression est à la mode en cette première moitié du XVIIIe siècle – ou répond-elle à une exigence proprement philosophique? Elle doit être resituée dans le contexte du débat entre Rameau et Rousseau sur l’origine du plaisir esthétique dans le domaine musical. Par l’idée de « perception des rapports », Diderot veut maintenir une objectivité du beau tout en prenant en considération (...) son contexte de perception. Contrairement aux apparences, ce thème de la « perception des rapports » n’est pas abandonné lorsque Diderot aborde le plaisir esthétique dans le domaine pictural. Le passage de la musique à la peinture justifie le passage d’une théorie des rapports à la théorie des proportions – ne rendant toutefois pas caduque la définition du beau par le jeune Diderot des années 1740-1750. (shrink)

De son vivant comme après sa mort, Diderot a été accusé de manque de suite dans les idées. Jean-Claude Bourdin, refusant de lui accorder l’épithète de ‘sceptique’, a suggéré que l’insécurité et le questionnement ne seraient pas la marque de sa philosophie, qui est matérialiste, mais tiendraient à sa manière d’écrire. Pourtant ces caractéristiques portent également une signification philosophique parfaitement cohérente : le temps serait irréel, au sens philosophique ; nous ne pourrions jamais justifier un propos sur le passé sans (...) comprendre ce qui le justifie dans notre présent ; quant à l’avenir, ce propos est perpétuellement incomplet. Dès lors, tout est toujours susceptible de corrections. Ainsi, le « scepticisme » de Diderot est à comprendre comme anti-réaliste, en s'appuyant sur les travaux de Dummett et de Bourdin.Both during his life and after his death, Diderot was accused of being illogical. Jean-Claude Bourdin refuses to call him a « sceptic » and suggests that the hesitations and questionings that have given rise to this epithet characterize in fact only his manner of writing, and not the content of his philosophy, which is materialist. However, these characteristics have a philosophical meaning which is not at all illogical : time is unreal, in the philosophical sense ; we can never justify a statement about the past without understanding what there is in our present which justifies it ; and our statements about the future are perpetually incomplete and hence always subject to revision. Thus, the « scepticism » of Diderot needs to be understood in the light of the work of Dummett and Bourdin and as an anti-realism. (shrink)

Starting with a very brief account of the way language's relation to music was conceived before the nineteenth century, Malcolm Bowie's relation to music is considered by close textual analysis of two passages from his work on Mallarmé. I argue that it is through reference to music that Bowie is able to suggest non-closure even in Mallarmé’s use of the archetypal closed form, the sonnet; and through reference to music that Mallarmé’s non-trivial triviality can be handled in a new way. (...) Bowie doesn't posture or postulate through a dialectics, nor stay still by stationary even-handedness. In his way of writing, the reader is neither fired up nor sedated: he or she has to react to muted mini-dramas, which break out in each sentence but which are contained in a clearly directed tone of scholarly criticism. (shrink)

Malcolm MacNaughtan Bowie, a Fellow of the British Academy, was appointed from an assistant lectureship at the University of East Anglia to one in the University of Cambridge in 1969. At Cambridge, he worked as a specialist in difficult poets in French beginning with ‘M’, particularly Henri Michaux and Stephane Mallarmé. These are writers of involuted complexity, to read whom both a sensitivity to how word play plays and to how French prosody in poetry or prose works were essential. These (...) studies by Bowie were followed by work on mind-altering psychoanalysis: on Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. He was the first director of the Romance Languages Institute, ran its vigorous seminar programme, and gave this a strong international profile by his invitations. At the University of Oxford, Bowie set up the European Humanities Research Centre, followed by an associated publishing venture, Legenda. (shrink)

Derrida's first book-length work, _The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy_, was originally written as a dissertation for his _diplôme d'études supérieures_ in 1953 and 1954. Surveying Husserl's major works on phenomenology, Derrida reveals what he sees as an internal tension in Husserl's central notion of genesis, and gives us our first glimpse into the concerns and frustrations that would later lead Derrida to abandon phenomenology and develop his now famous method of deconstruction. For Derrida, the problem of genesis in (...) Husserl's philosophy is that both temporality and meaning must be generated by prior acts of the transcendental subject, but transcendental subjectivity must itself be constituted by an act of genesis. Hence, the notion of genesis in the phenomenological sense underlies both temporality and atemporality, history and philosophy, resulting in a tension that Derrida sees as ultimately unresolvable yet central to the practice of phenomenology. Ten years later, Derrida moved away from phenomenology entirely, arguing in his introduction to Husserl's posthumously published _Origin of Geometry_ and his own _Speech and Phenomena_ that the phenomenological project has neither resolved this tension nor expressly worked with it. _The Problem of Genesis_ complements these other works, showing the development of Derrida's approach to phenomenology as well as documenting the state of phenomenological thought in France during a particularly fertile period, when Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Tran-Duc-Thao, as well as Derrida, were all working through it. But the book is most important in allowing us to follow Derrida's own development as a philosopher by tracing the roots of his later work in deconstruction to these early critical reflections on Husserl's phenomenology. "A dissertation is not merely a prerequisite for an academic job. It may set the stage for a scholar's life project. So, the doctoral dissertations of Max Weber and Jacques Derrida, never before available in English, may be of more than passing interest. In June, the University of Chicago Press will publish Mr. Derrida's dissertation, _The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy_, which the French philosopher wrote in 1953-54 as a doctoral student, and which did not appear in French until 1990. From the start, Mr Derrida displayed his inventive linguistic style and flouting of convention."—Danny Postel, _Chronicle of Higher Education _. (shrink)

Animal research remains a deeply controversial topic in biomedical science. While a vast amount has been written about the ethical status of laboratory animals, far less academic attention has been devoted to the public and, more specifically, to public opinion. Rather than what the public think, this article considers the role of ‘public opinion’. It draws on a recent empirical study which involved interviews with laboratory scientists who use animals in their research, and with other UK stakeholders. The first section (...) of the paper demonstrates that public opinion has become a kind of resource in the animal research debate. Public opinion polls, in particular, are frequently cited. The second section explores this further and argues that, for all sides, appealing to public opinion is a key way to show legitimacy. Finally, the paper shifts gear to consider whether public opinion should matter, both for ethical reasoning and for science policy. (shrink)

What is animal welfare? Why has it proved so difficult to find a definition that everyone can agree on? This concise and accessible guide is for anyone who is interested in animals and who has wondered how we can assess their welfare scientifically. It defines animal welfare as 'health and animals having what they want', a definition that can be easily understood by scientists and non-scientists alike, expresses in simple words what underlies many existing definitions, and shows what evidence we (...) need to collect to improve animal welfare in practice. Above all, it puts the animal's own point of view at the heart of an assessment of its welfare. But, can we really understand what animals want? A consistent theme running through the book is that not only is it possible to establish what animals want, but that this information is vital in helping us to make sense of the long and often confusing list of welfare measures that are now in use such as 'stress' and 'feel good hormones', expressive sounds and gestures, natural behaviour, cognitive bias, and stereotypies. Defining welfare as 'health and what animals want' allows us to distinguish between measures that are simply what an animal does when it is alert, aroused, or active and those measures that genuinely allow us to distinguish between situations the animals themselves see as positive or negative. Sentience (conscious feelings of pleasure, pain, and suffering) is for many people the essence of what is meant by welfare, but studying consciousness is notoriously difficult, particularly in non-human species. These difficulties are discussed in the context of our current - and as yet incomplete - knowledge of human and animal consciousness. Finally, the book highlights some key ideas in the relationship between animal welfare science and animal ethics and shows how closely the well-being of humans is linked to that of other animals. The Science of Animal Welfare is an ideal companion for undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in animal behaviour and welfare, as well as for professional researchers, practitioners and animal welfare consultants. At the same time, it is easily understandable to non-scientists and anyone without prior knowledge but with an interest in animals and the rapidly evolving science of animal welfare. (shrink)

Consciousness can be studied only if subjective experience is documented and quantified, yet first-person accounts of the effects of brain injury on conscious experience are as rare as they are potentially useful. This report documents the alterations in waking, sleeping, and dreaming caused by a lateral medullary infarct. Total insomnia and the initial suppression of dreaming was followed by the gradual recovery of both functions. A visual hallucinosis during waking that was associated with the initial period of sleep and dream (...) suppression is described in detail. Since the changes in sleep and their recovery are comparable to results of animal experiments, it can be concluded that damage to the medullary brain stem causes extreme but short-lived alterations in conscious state and that substantial recovery occurs even though the damage to the brain stem endures. (shrink)

This book covers the theory of our moral behavior that seems to meander throughout the history of ideas and that led eventually to scientific explanation of human moral behavior with various interpretations of the natural moral law.

Preface.--Introductory.--Standards of welfare.--Ethics in the evolution of economic science.--The ethics of economic life.--Organic reforms of the economic system.--Appendix: Bibliography, questions, and subjects for study (p. [457]-475)--Indes.