In this highly original study, Jerome Christensen reconstructs the career of a representative Enlightenment man of letters, David Hume. In doing so, Christensen develops a prototype for a post-structuralist biography. Christensen motivates the interplay between Hume’s texts as arguments and as symbolic acts by conceiving of Hume’s literary career as an adaptive discursive practice, the projected and performed narrative of his social life. Students and scholars of eighteenth-century English and French literature, feminist studies, political theory and (...) history, philosophy, and intellectual history will welcome this unprecedented and challenging view of David Hume and his times. (shrink)

[W. J. T.] Mitchell focuses on the exemplary status of the Wall of Fame in Sal’s Pizzeria, “an array of signed publicity photos of Italian-American stars in sports, movies, and popular music” . He argues that the Wall “exemplifies the central contradictions of public art” . “The Wall,” he writes, “is important to Sal not just because it displays famous Italians but because they are famous Americans … who have made it possible for Italians to think of themselves as Americans, (...) full-fledged members of the general public sphere” . For Buggin’ Out, the young black customer who angrily objects to the absence of photos of black people, the Wall “signifies exclusion from the public sphere” . Although the streets are saturated with images of “African-American heroes,” those “tokens of self-respect” are not enough for Buggin’ Out, who wants “the respect of whites, the acknowledgment that African-Americans are hyphenated Americans, too, just like Italians” . Mitchell astutely interprets the desired integration of the Wall as merely a symptom of a larger struggle for “full economic participation. As long as blacks do not own private property in this society,” he states, “they remain in something like the status of public art, mere ornaments to the public place, entertaining statues and abstract caricatures rather than full human beings” . By foregrounding the economic implications of the film, Mitchell has surely engaged one of the dominant goals of the man who formed Forty Acres and a Mule Productions and who recently opened the store called Spike’s Joint in New York City. Yet Mitchell’s sympathetic account belies the countercurrents that trouble the ostensible progressiveness of Spike Lee’s ambitious art. Jerome Christensen teaches in the English department at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of books on Coleridge and Hume and one forthcoming on Byron. Currently, he is completing a study of the continued pertinence of the romantic turn of mind called Romantic Theory, Romantic Practice. (shrink)

If you are anything like me, you may feel yourself unsure of what, as a critic these days, you ought to be talking about—whether literature qua literature, literature as rhetoric, literature as politics or as history, whether about the persistence of romanticism or the waxing of postmodernism, the decline of Yale or the rise of Duke. If, like me, you are puzzled by what we now ought to be about, you may also be like Paul de Man, who bespoke a (...) similar concern: “In a manner that is more acute for theoreticians of literature than for theoreticians of the natural or the social world, it can be said that they do not quite know what it is they are talking about, … that, whenever one is supposed to speak of literature, one speaks of anything under the sun except literature. The need for determination,” de Man concludes, “thus becomes all the stronger as a way to safeguard a discipline which constantly threatens to degenerate into gossip, trivia or self-obsession,”1De Man’s wishes are rarely fulfilled, and this instance is no exception. Despite the critic’s determinations, theory, it turns out, is the story of the failure of safeguards to do the job for which they are designed. There is no better instance of that ironic truth than the career of Paul de Man. No critic has fallen farther despite his determination; from a paragon of analytical rigor, he has become the most gossiped about critic of the late 1980s 1. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory , p. 29; hereafter abbreviated RT. Jerome Christensen teaches English at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of language and Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career . This essay is part of a work in progress entitled Prefigurations: Romantic Theory and Romantic Practice. (shrink)

In his recent book Criticism and Social Change Frank Lentricchia melodramatically pits his critical hero Kenneth Burke, advocate of the intellect’s intervention in social life, against the villainous Paul de Man, “undisputed master in the United States of what is called deconstruction.” Lentricchia charges that “the insidious effect of [de Man’s] work is not the proliferating replication of his way of reading … but the paralysis of praxis itself: an effect that traditionalism, with its liberal view of the division of (...) culture and political power, should only applaud.”1 He goes on to prophesy thatThe deconstruction of deconstruction will reveal, against apparent intention, a tacit political agenda after all, one that can only embarrass deconstruction, particularly its younger proponents whose activist experiences within the socially wrenching upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s will surely not permit them easily to relax, without guilt and self-hatred, into resignation and ivory tower despair. [CSC, p. 40]Such is Lentricchia’s strenuous conjuration of a historical moment in which he can forcefully intervene—a summons fraught with the pathos excited by any reference to the heady days of political enthusiasm during the war in Vietnam. Lentricchia ominously figures a scene of rueful solitude where de Manian lucidity breaks into the big chill. And maybe it will. But Lentricchia furnishes no good reason why it should. De Manian deconstruction is “deconstructed” by Lentricchia to reveal “against apparent intention, a tacit political agenda.” And this revelation is advertised as a sure embarrassment to the younger practitioners of deconstruction—sweepingly characterized as erstwhile political activists who have, wide-eyed, opted for a critical approach that magically entangles its proponents in the soul-destroying delights of rhetoric and reaction. Left unexamined in Lentricchia’s story, however, is the basis for the initial rapport between radicalism and deconstruction. Why should collegiate activists have turned into deconstructionsists? Is not that, in Lentricchia’s terms, the same question as asking why political activists should have turned to literary criticism at all? If we suppose this original turn to be intentional, how could the initiates of this critical approach ever be genuinely betrayed into embarrassment by time or by its herald, Frank Lentricchia? On the face of it, the traducement of a secret intention would be unlikely to come as a surprise, since deconstructing deconstruction is not only the enterprise of Marxist critics like Lentricchia but also of Jacques Derrida, archdeconstructor, who unashamedly identified the embarrassment of intention as constitutive of the deconstructive method. If deconstruction is at once a natural outlet for activists and the first step on a slippery slope that ends in apostasy , it suggests a phenomenon with contours more suggestively intricate, if not less diabolically seductive, than the program Lentricchia outlines. And it is a phenomenon as worrisomely affiliative as it is bafflingly intricate. We need to know whether the relations between deconstruction and radical politics, between deconstruction and apostasy between deconstruction and criticism, and between apostasy and criticism are necessary or contingent, or neither and both at once. 1. Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change , p. 38; all further references to this work, abbreviated CSC, will be included in the text. Jerome Christensen, professor of English at the Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Language and the forthcoming Hume’s Practice: The Career of an Enlightenment Man of Letters. He is currently at work on a study of Byron and the issue of strong romanticism. (shrink)

Argues that educators should help students piece together authentic narratives about themselves and about society, and not to focus so much on teaching students to process information.

This paper concentrates on a particular sort of case where it’s plausible that epistemic requirements can conflict: cases where an agent’s higher-order evidence supports doubting her reliability in reacting to her ordinary evidence. Conflicting epistemic requirements can be seen as generating epistemic dilemmas. The paper examines two ways that people have sought to recognize conflicting requirements without allowing them to generate epistemic dilemmas: separating epistemic norms into two different varieties, and positing rational indeterminacy in cases where principles conflict. It argues (...) that these views incur costs, and that the sense in which they avoid dilemmas does not gain them an advantage over a view that simply recognizes dilemmas as a natural outgrowth of agents’ rational reflection on their own thinking. (shrink)

Second, this collection of cognitive programs evolved in the Pleistocene to solve the adaptive problems regularly faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors-...

How should one react when one has a belief, but knows that other people—who have roughly the same evidence as one has, and seem roughly as likely to react to it correctly—disagree? This paper argues that the disagreement of other competent inquirers often requires one to be much less confident in one’s opinions than one would otherwise be.

Is jealousy eliminable? If so, at what cost? What are the connections between pride the sin and the pride insisted on by identity politics? How can one question an individual's understanding of their own happiness or override a society's account of its own rituals? What is wrong with incest? These and other questions about what sustains and threatens our identity are pursued using the resources of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and other disciplines. The discussion throughout is informed and motivated by the Spinozist (...) hope that understanding our lives can help change them, can help make us more free. (shrink)

Henry Sedgewick's The Methods of Ethics challenges comparison, as no other work in moral philosophy, with Aristotle's Ethics in the depth of its understanding of practical rationality, and in its architectural coherence it rivals the work of Kant. In this historical, rather than critical study, Professor Schneewind shows how Sidgewick's arguments and conclusions represent rational developments of the work of Sidgewick's predecessors, and brings out the nature and structure of the reasoning underlying his position.

Within the past ten years, the discussion of the nature of folk psychology and its role in explaining behavior and thought has become central to the philosophy of mind. However, no comprehensive account of the contemporary debate or collection of the works that make up this debate has yet been available. Intending to fill this gap, this volume begins with the crucial background for the contemporary debate and proceeds with a broad range of responses to and developments of these works (...) -- from those who argue that "folk theory" is a misnomer to those who regard folk theory as legitimately explanatory and necessary for any adequate account of human behavior. Intended for courses in the philosophy of mind, psychology, and science, as well as anthropology and social psychology, this anthology is also of great value in courses focusing on folk models, eliminative materialism, explanation, psychological theory, and -- in particular -- intentional psychology. It is accessible to both graduate students and upper-division undergraduate students of philosophy and psychology as well as researchers. As an aid to students, a thorough discussion of the field and the articles in the anthology is provided in the introduction; as an aid to researchers, a complete bibliography is also provided. (shrink)

Mgr Félix Hedde (1879-1960), o.p., est un personnage-clé de la mission des dominicains de Lyon dans le Haut-Tonkin. Son long ministère au Việt Nam (1926-1960) en fit un témoin privilégié d’une période dramatique de l’histoire du pays. Il a connu les années prospères de la colonisation française jusqu’en 1940, les souffrances de ses compatriotes pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale et la guerre d’Indochine, leur humiliation face à la décolonisation forcée, et enfin la persécution ouverte ou larvée des chrétiens sous le (...) régime communiste. Chez Félix Hedde, l’amour pour la mission du Tonkin, le désir d’y implanter l’Église, se conjuguait à sa volonté d’honorer ses traditions familiales et nationales. L’épreuve de l’occupation japonaise, de la guerre d’Indochine, des défaites de l’armée française, autant que le réconfort de la fidélité des chrétiens vietnamiens de la mission dans une situation de plus en plus critique, détachant Mgr Hedde de ses rêves patriotiques, le conduisirent à l’accomplissement de sa vocation missionnaire. Les conditions particulières de son territoire de mission, où les ethnies montagnardes sont très largement majoritaires, l’amenèrent cependant à proposer pour lui succéder le Français André Jacq, privant ainsi d’évêque les chrétiens du lieu, de 1958 à 1990. (shrink)

This chapter discusses wide and narrow definitions of “mystical experience” and of “religious experience”; categories and attributes of mystical experience; perennialism vs. constructivism; on the possibility of experiencing God; epistemology: The doxastic practice approach and the argument from perception; criticisms of the doxastic practice approach and the argument from perception; religious diversity; naturalistic explanations; and mysticism, religious experience, and gender.

Oregon is the only state in the United States where a physician may legally prescribe a lethal dose of barbiturate for a patient intending suicide. The Oregon Death with Dignity Act was passed by voters in 1994 and came into effect after much legal wrangling in October of 1997. At the same time, a cabinetmaker named Pat Matheny was struggling with progressive weakness from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. I met with Pat and his family for a lengthy interview in (...) October 1998 in Coos Bay, Oregon, for a television news report on his decision to get a lethal prescription. Below is an extract from that interview. On the day this introduction was written, 10 March 1999, Pat took the prescribed lethal overdose of barbiturates and died at home. His illness was taking his voice, he could not move his hands or legs, and breathing was becoming very difficult. His mother told me he knew that was for him. (shrink)

Bruner sets forth nothing less than a new agenda for the study of the mind. He examines the irrepressibly human acts of imagination that allow us to make experience meaningful; he calls this side of mental activity the “narrative mode,” and his book makes important advances in the effort to unravel its nature.

In Ludwig Wittgenstein's writings, ethics takes a central place in his thinking. This element investigates his engagement with ethics in both early and later thinking. Starting from the remarks on ethics in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the framing of these remarks, it presents two influential approaches to Tractarian ethics, before it develops a coherent reading of ethics in the early thinking, focusing on ethical silence and the relationship notions of world and the philosophical 'I'. The reading of 'A Lecture on (...) Ethics' focuses on the critique of ethical theory and the personal dimension of ethics, two themes also running through Wittgenstein's later thinking. It considers Wittgenstein's later ethical investigations, of ethical examples, ethically relevant language uses of language and the connections between reflections on ethics and living. It also considers the role of the other in Wittgenstein's later thinking. (shrink)

This book, the product of a lifetime of research by one of the founders of developmental psychology, takes on the powerful assumptions behind these questions- ...

Surely since the Enlightenment, if not before, the study of mind has centered principally on how man achieves a “true” knowledge of the world. Emphasis in this pursuit has varied, of course: empiricists have concentrated on the mind’s interplay with an external world of nature, hoping to find the key in the association of sensations and ideas, while rationalists have looked inward to the powers of mind itself for the principles of right reason. The objective, in either case, has been (...) to discover how we achieve “reality,” that is to say, how we get a reliable fix on the world, a world that is, as it were, assumed to be immutable and, as it were, “there to be observed.”This quest has, of course, had a profound effect on the development of psychology, and the empiricist and rationalist traditions have dominated our conceptions of how the mind grows and how it gets its grasp on the “real world.” Indeed, at midcentury Gestalt theory represented the rationalist wing of this enterprise and American learning theory the empiricist. Both gave accounts of mental development as proceeding in some more or less linear and uniform fashion from an initial incompetence in grasping reality to a final competence, in one case attributing it to the work out of internal processes or mental organization, and in the other to some unspecified principle of reflection by which—whether through reinforcement, association, or conditioning—we came to respond to the world “as it is.” There have always been dissidents who challenged these views, but conjectures about human mental development have been influenced far more by majoritarian rationalism and empiricism than by these dissident voices. Jerome Bruner is research professor of psychology at New York University, where he is also serving as Meyer Visiting Professor of Law. His most recent book, Acts of Meaning, appeared in 1990. In 1987 he received the Balzan Prize for “a lifetime contribution to the study of human psychology.”. (shrink)

Much of our understanding of human thinking is based on probabilistic models. This innovative book by Jerome R. Busemeyer and Peter D. Bruza argues that, actually, the underlying mathematical structures from quantum theory provide a much better account of human thinking than traditional models. They introduce the foundations for modelling probabilistic-dynamic systems using two aspects of quantum theory. The first, 'contextuality', is a way to understand interference effects found with inferences and decisions under conditions of uncertainty. The second, 'quantum (...) entanglement', allows cognitive phenomena to be modeled in non-reductionist ways. Employing these principles drawn from quantum theory allows us to view human cognition and decision in a totally new light. Introducing the basic principles in an easy-to-follow way, this book does not assume a physics background or a quantum brain and comes complete with a tutorial and fully worked-out applications in important areas of cognition and decision. (shrink)

A theory that treats language not as an abstract symbol system but as a function of our brains and experience, integrating recent findings from biology, ...

Does Freud still have something to teach us? The premise of this volume is that he most certainly does. Approaching Freud from not only the philosophical but also historical, psychoanalytical, anthropological, and sociological perspectives, the contributors show us how Freud gave us a new and powerful way to think about human thought and action. They consider the context of Freud's thought and the structure of his arguments to reveal how he made sense of ranges of experience generally neglected or misunderstood. (...) All the central topics of Freud's work, from sexuality and neurosis to morality, art, and culture are covered. (shrink)

Closely related to this is Mr. Bruner's "evolutionary instrumentalism," his conception of instruction as the means of transmitting the tools and skills of a ...

Provability, Computability and Reflection.