This collection, born of a 2017 conference at the University of Vienna, is ambitious from the outset, with editors Vladimir Biti, Joep Leerssen, and Vivian Liska declaring the work an attempt to un...

We report on the small-scale (0.5 13 h - 1M, a large-scale bias of ~2.0 and a satellite fraction of 12 ± 2 per cent. Thus, these galaxies occupy haloes with average masses in between those of the higher redshift BOSS CMASS sample and the original SDSS I/II luminous red galaxy sample © 2012 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society © doi:10.1093/mnras/sts314.

_From Romanticism to Critical Theory_ explores the philosophical origins of literary theory via the tradition of German philosophy that began with the Romantic reaction to Kant. It traces the continuation of the Romantic tradition of Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel and Schleiermacher, in Heidegger's approaches to art and thruth, and in the Critical Theory of Benjamin and Adorno. Andrew Bowie argues, against many current assumptions, that the key aspect of literary theory is not the demonstration of how meaning can be (...) deconstructed, but rather the relevation of how questions of language and literature change modern philosophical conceptions of thruth. He shows how the dialogue between literary theory, hermeneutics and analytical philosophy can profit from a re-examination of the understanding of language, thruth and literature in modern German philosophy. _From Romanticism to Critical Theory_ will provide a vital new introduction to central theoretical questions for students of philosophy, literature, German studies, cultural and social theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Willing and DecidingHegel on Irony, Evil, and the Sovereign ExceptionAndrew NorrisIf political decisionism is the claim that the most important political decisions cannot be regulated by rational norms and instead require a confrontation with the exception, Carl Schmitt remains its most notorious advocate. While Schmitt distanced himself from decisionism when he joined the Nazi party in the 1930s, his critics insist that his role in the events leading to (...) Hitler’s assumption of power and his own membership in the party were only attempts “to put... into practice” his earlier theoretical attack on legal positivism and what he vaguely termed “liberalism.”1 Even for those who reject such sweeping claims, the teaching laid out in his 1922 Political Theology remains deeply disturbing. On Schmitt’s account, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” [Political Theology 5]. This decision is not a matter of recognizing an exception that already exists; rather it has a performative quality whereby the sovereign decision that names a given event to be an exception is the necessary precondition for the existence of the exception as such—as well as, by extension, the legal system from which it is excepted or removed. The exception is, as it were, called into being by the sovereign, whose decision on it is unregulated by the standards of law or, indeed, of normal life itself.The exception is that which cannot be subsumed; it defies general codification, but it simultaneously reveals a specifically juristic element—the decision in its absolute purity. The exception appears in its absolute form when a situation in which legal prescriptions can be valid must first be brought about. Every general norm demands a normal, everyday frame of life to which it can be factually applied and which is subjected to its regulations. The norm requires a homogenous medium.... For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitively decides whether this normal situation actually exists.[Political Theology 13]2 [End Page 135]As the ability to decide on the exception (and hence the norm and the normal) in this sense is what defines the sovereign, sovereignty only appears in its “absolute purity” in the act of naming the exception. Schmitt’s sovereign is a creature of the border: “although he stands outside the normally valid legal system, he nevertheless belongs to it, for it is he who decides when the constitution needs to be suspended in its entirety” [Political Theology 7].3 But while the sovereign’s decision on the exception seems to range back and forth over the borders of the legal order, this movement is in fact the oscillation of the borders themselves—an oscillation that bears the two names sovereignty and exception. Though it makes sense in one way to speak of the sovereign overstepping the limits he lays down, in a deeper sense he, as the moment of decision, is himself the limit. On this account, George W. Bush was more accurate than he could have known in his recent halting suggestion that he is not just the nation’s “decider,” but also himself “a decision.” Or, as he more regularly if quietly maintains, an exception.4While Schmitt’s celebratory analysis of the exception is the best-known today, he is hardly the inventor of this problematic: as he himself emphasizes in Political Romanticism (1919), the question of the decision lies at the heart of nineteenth-century Continental Romanticism, which celebrated an “occasionalism” derived from Malebranche in which the self and its whims take precedence over any substantive commitments that self might take up.5 Karl Löwith has demonstrated that Schmitt’s 1920s decisionism is, rather ironically, open in many aspects to his earlier attack upon this Romantic occasionalism [see Löwith]. Löwith was perhaps as attuned to this as he was on account of being a keen student of Hegel, as well as of Heidegger. Indeed, many features of Schmitt’s own attack upon the Romantics are anticipated in Hegel’s fierce critique of this movement and, in particular, his attack upon Friedrich Schlegel’s role in it. But if Hegel’s critique of Schlegel casts... (shrink)

Recent interest in early German Romantic philosophy can be linked to other approaches, such as that of John Dewey, which are critical of the dominant direction of modern philosophy. The Romantics rethink the relationship between philosophy and art as a way of questioning modern philosophy’s focus on epistemology and scepticism that leads to a lack of attention to the diverse other ways in which human beings make sense of things.

The book also highlights the ideas of early German Romantic philosophy, including the works of Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Schleirmacher, and Schelling, ...

In his Notes on Philosophy , which he began writing in 1796, Friedrich Schlegel asserts that ‘The fact that one person understands the other is philosophically incomprehensible, but it is certainly magical.’ In the interim a large amount of philosophical effort has been expended on trying to refute Schlegel's first claim. The fact is, though, that what Michael Dummett calls a ‘fullblooded theory of meaning’ is now looking less and less like a really feasible philosophical enterprise, so (...) class='Hi'>Schlegel may have actually been right. Dummett maintains that a ‘full-blooded theory of meaning’ ‘must give an explicit account, not only of what anyone must know in order to know the meaning of any given expression, but of what constitutes having such knowledge’. However, as I shall try to show via aspects of the hermeneutic tradition, it is precisely this way of talking about meaning and understanding that renders them incomprehensible. The differences between approaching the issue of understanding from the hermeneutic tradition and approaching it from the analytical tradition can, I want to suggest, tell us something important about the state of philosophy today. My aim is eventually to suggest that we need to understand the analytical version of the ‘linguistic turn’ in modern philosophy as a perhaps rather questionable aspect of a much more important ‘hermeneutic turn’, whose implications are now becoming apparent in more and more diverse areas of contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

This paper pursues the way the terms exhaustion and inexhaustibility play a central role in Werner Hamacher’s critical encounter with philosophy. The argument is developed via an engagement with aspects of Hamacher’s interpretation of Friedrich Schlegel’s Fragments. The limitations of Hamacher’s own position become an opening. What is opened up is the possibility of philosophy having become exhausted as a result of its identification with calculation and instrumentality.

This paper pursues the way the terms exhaustion and inexhaustibility play a central role in Werner Hamacher’s critical encounter with philosophy. The argument is developed via an engagement with aspects of Hamacher’s interpretation of Friedrich Schlegel’s Fragments. The limitations of Hamacher’s own position become an opening. What is opened up is the possibility of philosophy having become exhausted as a result of its identification with calculation and instrumentality.

ABSTRACTMiranda Fricker has characterized epistemic injustice as “a kind of injustice in which someone is wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower” (2007, Epistemic injustice: Power & the e...

ABSTRACT Miranda Fricker has characterized epistemic injustice as “a kind of injustice in which someone is wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower” (2007, Epistemic injustice: Power & the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 20). Gaslighting, where one agent seeks to gain control over another by undermining the other’s conception of herself as an independent locus of judgment and deliberation, would thus seem to be a paradigm example. Yet, in the most thorough analysis of gaslighting to date (...) (Abramson, K. 2014. “Turning up the lights on gaslighting.” Philosophical Perspectives 28, Ethics: 1–30), the idea that gaslighting has crucial epistemic dimensions is rather roundly rejected on grounds that gaslighting works by means of a strategy of assertion and manipulation that is not properly understood in epistemic terms. I argue that Abramson’s focus on the gaslighter and on the moral wrongness of his actions leads her to downplay ways in which gaslighters nevertheless deploy genuinely epistemic strategies, and to devote less attention to the standpoint and reasoning processes of the victim, for whom the experience of gaslighting has substantial and essential epistemic features. Taking these features into account reveals that all gaslighting has epistemic dimensions and helps to clarify what resistance to gaslighting might look like. (shrink)

Recent literature on epistemic innocence develops the idea that a defective cognitive process may nevertheless merit special consideration insofar as it confers an epistemic benefit that would not otherwise be available. For example, confabulation may be epistemically innocent when it makes a subject more likely to form future true beliefs or helps her maintain a coherent self-concept. I consider the role of confabulation in typical cases of interpersonal gaslighting, and argue that confabulation will not be epistemically innocent in such cases (...) even if it does preserve a coherent self-concept or belief-set for the subject. Analyzing the role of confabulation in gaslighting illustrates its role in on-going interpersonal relationships, and augments already growing evidence that confabulation may be quite widespread. The role of confabulation in gaslighting shows that whether confabulation confers epistemic benefits will depend greatly on the interpersonal context in which it is deployed, while whether a coherent self-concept is epistemically beneficial will depend to a great extent on the content of that self-concept. This shows that the notion of an epistemically harmful or beneficial feature of a cognitive process can and should be further clarified, and that doing so has both theoretical and practical advantages in understanding epistemic innocence itself. (shrink)

The notion of function is indispensable to our understanding of distinctions such as that between being broken and being in working order (for artifacts) and between being diseased and being healthy (for organisms). A clear account of the ontology of functions and functioning is thus an important desideratum for any top-level ontology intended for application to domains such as engineering or medicine. The benefit of using top-level ontologies in applied ontology can only be realized when each of the categories identified (...) and defined by a top-level ontology is integrated with the others in a coherent fashion. Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) has from the beginning included function as one of its categories, exploiting a version of the etiological account of function that is framed at a level of generality sufficient to accommodate both biological and artifactual functions. This account has been subjected to a series of criticisms and refinements. We here articulate BFO’s account of function, provide some reasons for favoring it over competing views, and defend it against objections. (shrink)

Recent literature on epistemic innocence develops the idea that a defective cognitive process may nevertheless merit special consideration insofar as it confers an epistemic benefit that would not otherwise be available. For example, confabulation may be epistemically innocent when it makes a subject more likely to form future true beliefs or helps her maintain a coherent self-concept. I consider the role of confabulation in typical cases of interpersonal gaslighting, and argue that confabulation will not be epistemically innocent in such cases (...) even if it does preserve a coherent self-concept or belief-set for the subject. Analyzing the role of confabulation in gaslighting illustrates its role in on-going interpersonal relationships, and augments already growing evidence that confabulation may be quite widespread. The role of confabulation in gaslighting shows that whether confabulation confers epistemic benefits will depend greatly on the interpersonal context in which it is deployed, while whether a coherent self-concept is epistemically beneficial will depend to a great extent on the content of that self-concept. This shows that the notion of an epistemically harmful or beneficial feature of a cognitive process can and should be further clarified, and that doing so has both theoretical and practical advantages in understanding epistemic innocence itself. (shrink)

I discuss three elements of Dennis Schulting’s new book on the transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding, or categories. First, that Schulting gives a detailed account of the role of each individual category. Second, Schulting’s insistence that the categories nevertheless apply ‘en bloc’. Third, Schulting’s defence of Kant’s so-called reciprocity thesis that subjective unity of consciousness and objectivity in the sense of cognition’s objective purport are necessary conditions for the possibility of one another. I endorse these fascinating (...) but unfashionable claims and sketch my own version of what they amount to, which is quite different to Schulting’s own construal. I point to some fundamental limitations and problems for Schulting’s position and argue that his project needs to be reshaped or at least reconceived in the face of them. Even if Schulting’s argument is sound, it does not provide a deduction, properly speaking, of the categories. (shrink)

Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue presented a reinterpretation of Aristotelian virtue ethics that is contrasted with the emotivism of modern moral discourse, and provides a moral scheme that can enable a rediscovery and reimagination of a more coherent morality. Since After Virtue’s publication, this scheme has been applied to a variety of activities and occupations, and has been influential in the development of research in accounting ethics. Through a ‘close’ reading of Chaps. 14 and 15 of AV, this paper considers and (...) applies the key concepts of practices, institutions, internal and external goods, the narrative unity of a human life and tradition, and the virtues associated with these concepts. It contributes, firstly, by providing a more accurate and comprehensive application of MacIntyre’s scheme to accounting than that available in the existing literature. Secondly, it identifies areas in which MacIntyre’s scheme supports the existing approach to professional accounting ethics as articulated by the various International Federation of Accountants pronouncements as well as areas in which it provides a critique and challenge to this approach. The application ultimately provides an alternative philosophical perspective through which accounting can be examined and further research into accounting ethics pursued. (shrink)

In this book, Andrew Inkpin considers the disclosive function of language—what language does in revealing or disclosing the world. His approach to this question is a phenomenological one, centering on the need to accord with the various experiences speakers can have of language. With this aim in mind, he develops a phenomenological conception of language with important implications for both the philosophy of language and recent work in the embodied-embedded-enactive-extended tradition of cognitive science. -/- Inkpin draws extensively on the (...) work of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, showing how their respective conceptions of language can be combined to complement each other within a unified view. From the early Heidegger, Inkpin extracts a basic framework for a phenomenological conception of language, comprising both a general picture of the role of language and a specific model of the function of words. Merleau-Ponty’s views are used to explicate the generic “pointing out”—or presentational—function of linguistic signs in more detail, while the late Wittgenstein is interpreted as providing versatile means to describe their many pragmatic uses. Having developed this unified phenomenological view, Inkpin explores its broader significance. He argues that it goes beyond the conventional realism/idealism opposition, that it challenges standard assumptions in mainstream post-Fregean philosophy of language, and that it makes a significant contribution not only to the philosophical understanding of language but also to 4e cognitive science. (shrink)

This dissertation argues that the desire satisfaction theory, arguably the dominant theory of well-being at present, fails to explain why depression is bad for a person. People with clinical depression desire almost nothing, but the few desires they do have are almost all satisfied. So it appears the theory must say these people are relatively well-off. A number of possible responses on behalf of the theory are considered, and I argue that each response either fails outright, or requires modifications to (...) the desire satisfaction theory which make the theory unattractive for other reasons. Advisors: Joseph Mendola and John Brunero. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 29–35. Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "Politieke Poëzie: Enige aantekeningen, Poëtica bij N30 (versie 2006)." In Weerstandbeleid: Nieuwe kritiek . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. L’égalité veut d’autres lois . —Eugène Pottier The modern poem does not have form but consistency (that is sensed), no content but a problem (that is developed). Consistency + problem = composition. The problem of modern poetry is capitalism. Capitalism—which has no (...) image: the unrepresentable Idea of “everything.” The problem is that a poem cannot be justified. There is no excuse for it. Political poetry— pure poetry—has to be problematic, though not in a mannerist way. Yes, its problem is first its own problem—poetry’s existence in the same world as the newspaper—but therefore also always everybody’s problem (the problem of any world at all). The cult of the sublime points at a suspect desire for transcendence, nostalgia for paradise lost (the womb?). Melancholia of the post-. But a problem neither sorrows nor mourns, it is alive, and the fact that it is alive is the problem—the problem for death (rigidity, the status quo). Our symbols and ideologies do not hide any god: symbolic = state; imaginary = human; real = money. Problem: the possibility of communal speech (poetry) in the absence of a “we.” Or: what is a “we” that is not a collective subject (or in any case is not a volonté générale )? What is a universal history that is not a History? This work was started in the shade of the anti-globalization protests at the end of November 1999. I considered N30 to be the closure of the nineties, of my adolescence, and of the a seemingly total extinction of social desire. From the beginning I was skeptical about the alterglobalization movement as the avant-garde of a new politics, but something was happening . Maybe this event did not show that, as the slogan would have it, “another world” is possible, but for me it indicated that such possibility was at least still possible. That naked possibility is carrying forward. And if the fundamental tone of this work sounds more desperate than utopian, this is not caused by the catastrophic sequence that since 1999 has plunged us ever deeper into the right-wing nightmare—a nightmare that this work also gives an account for—but because my hope as yet remains empty. Composition . Composition is no design, but the production of an autonomous block of affects (i.e. a POEM), rhythmically subtracted from the language of a community. A poem does something. Is something. New Sentence . Choosing the non sequitur as compositional unit has the advantage that an abstract composition is subjected to the stress of concrete, social references. Where there is a sentence, there is always a world. (This does not hold necessarily for words on their own.) And where sentences collide, something akin to a textual civil war takes place. It is not about “undermining” whatever, or de-scribing the raging global civil war, but about writing social (or even: ontological) antagonism -- including all its catastrophic and utopian possibilities. Minor resistance. Why would poetry be the no protest zone par excellence? It is nothing but protest, not simply qua “content,” but in its most fundamental essence: rhythm. Rhythm is resistance against language, time, and space, and the basis of (what we will continue to call) autonomy. Rhythm starts with the anti-rhythmic caesura as Hölderlin remarked about Sophocles, a disruption of the quotidian drone. The destruction of everything that is dead inside of us. The noise of the avant-garde has never been the representation of the noise of (post)modernity (from the television or shopping mall), but the sober noise of the systematic exchange of an unbearable worldview. The poet does not describe, but looks for a way out: There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, tis translucent & has many Angles But he who finds it will find Oothoons palace, for within Opening into Beulah every angle is a lovely heaven William Blake was not mad. And there has always been only one poetry: the poetry of paradise. The principle is that there is something in art (the essentially creative element) that is disgusted by that which, unlike art, does not aim for the supreme. Wonder is not supreme, tranquility is not supreme, beauty is not supreme. Even amusement is not supreme! The supreme is supremely open, “das Einfache,/ Das Schwer zu machen ist” 1 : paradise. That is abstract. Literally. For me it is not about a concrete imagination, an idyll or utopia. There is no doubt a need for that, but it is not so much the supposed lack of imagination or ideals (human rights are ideals), but a fundamental lack of desire (human rights are no desires) that we suffer from, and from which we do not need to remove Nietzsche’s label of “nihilism.” “We.” George Oppen: “ Of Being Numerous asks the question whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually exists.” What is less actual than humanity? Nowadays it appears as a lifeless ideology of cynical power politics. Or as what makes one think. It is a shame to be human. The event is the caesura that defines rhythm. Writing toward the event is not the description of the event, but marking an abstract and intense space in which the event may unfold and keep itself. It is a task. “Remember that thou blesseth the day on which I seized thee, because such is thy obligation.” The event is a contraction (or a series of contractions) with its own rhythm and unique qualities. It is more than an explosion or demonstration. But at the same time less. The endless repetition of images and stories in the media points to a fear for the indeterminate and indeterminable void of the event. In the end there is nothing to see. We do not live in disaster’s shade or miracle’s light, but rather in the rhythm, which is contracted time, having little to do with omnipresent representations. For this book I did not intend a rhythm of evental representations (a narrative rhythm), but a rhythm which would be an event itself , because it draws the border between artwork and history. My desire for a direct engagement with the “extra-textual reality” has nothing to do with the representation of “rumor in the streets.” (What has less street cred than representation?) Naturally, a poem is no historical event and does not change anything. But a poem is a part of history that wants to be repeated forever, constructed in such a way that it is worthy of repetition. It is a part of desire (composition) made consistent (durable). The “historical event” flares up and burns down, and has to burn down to be effective. The leftovers are images and stories (representations), History—no event. The artwork—that is the ambition— remains event (though monumental and inefficient/inoperable). (No wonder that a historical singularity, a revolution, reminds us of a work of art; the resurrection yearns for a judgment, an affirmation; everything depends on it.) Hence the title does not summarize the book, let alone contract its “content” into a quasi-transcendental signifier. The title is juxtaposed to the book, like everything else inside the book, and in that relation it precisely forms a part of it. The ideal work is an open whole, lacking nothing but to which everything may be added. I have been interested in this “everything,” the world, or as I said above: capitalism. “Everything” is not the space for “wonder”—a code word, a shibboleth for petty bourgeois imagination (I recognize myself in the strangest things, a speaking dog, a canal, a pond standing straight—oh my god). No. The world is a social world, not YOUR world, poet. Power is number one. I will call “Dutch,” or “shitty,” whatever denies this power. That hurts, but this pain is an expression of the desire in the world to write another world, or as Blanchot says, “the other of all worlds” 2 : the world. Not as what “is there,” but rather as that which urges for an escape from what “is.” This is a testament of how radical reality has become, for me—or rather, a writing body—in a having-been-written. I am not interested in the problem of “meaning” as misunderstood by literary scholarsi: “order” in “chaos,” “symbolization.” Bullshit. What is there, hop, hope, now: the meaning of the taste in my mouth. Bullshit. I am not interested in the frustration of interpretation; I am writing for readers who do not want to interpret. I do not know how many “professional readers” will hear the music of a paragraph like: Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I hope more than I would think. There is a suggestion (or rather, an actual production) of speed and infinitive owing to the absence of plosives, i.e. articulations such as /k/, /t/, or /p/. Can you hear the slick suaveness? Driving car dark, vocal chiaroscuro of the word “sushi.” The unstressed /i/ stands in the middle of dark vowels and thus acquires its own special out of focus , like a momentary flash or brilliance—an obscure light. It is not about recognizing a story, but about avoiding any story whatsoever: the car disappears in the glow, cars and raw fish have nothing in common except their articulation in a language that brings them together, blurring them. A world appears in its disappearance. For a moment, light is a metaphor for language, though it cannot be reduced to tenor. It is not necessary to be a linguist or philosopher to hear this—a “difficult” poem all too often becomes an allegory of its own impenetrable being-language. The only demand: leave your hermeneutical fetish at home. This was no interpretation. Most shit has been stolen etcetera. That is no longer interesting. You cannot shoot the body with information and let your lawyers reclaim the bullets. So every sentence has been stolen. Also the ones “out” “of” “my” “head.” Why would I be allowed to steal from myself and not from others? Man takes what he needs to move forward. Whatever he encounters, finds in front of him, “occurs” to him. The writer as text editor, or singing pirate. Nothing new here. Important difference with for example Sybren Polet’s 4 montage technique: anti-thematicism. Most of the time ferocious citation from whatever I was reading, listening to, ended up in, and so on. I wrote chapter 12 on my laptop while watching CNN. On the air instead of en plein air . I often employed search engines to generate material. Chapter 20 offers the purest example of this. Often I stop recognizing a particular citation after some time. It is not uncommon for a stolen sentence to conform itself to the paragraph in which it finds itself. Sometimes I nearly arbitrarily replace words. Arbitrariness as a guarantee for absolute democracy. It is a poetics of the non sequitur : a conclusion that does not follow from the premises, the strange element in the discourse. A discourse of strangers. No logical, narrative, thematic unity. There is unity in speed/flight. It has to be read linearly, but not necessarily (not preferably) from beginning to end. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but this line precedes every point. The middle, the acceleration, comes first. A point occurs where two lines cross. It has been written from up close, at the level of the tension between sentences. Nothing to be seen from a distance: no form except the exchange of form, no geometrical or mythical meaning. You have to get in, “groping toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again” (Stein). 5 In Dutch, experimental poetry has been mainly dense: a small rectangular form filled with a maximum amount of poetic possibility. But at the moment the poem starts to relax, the anecdotical content seems to increase. This is what is called “epic”: long, narrative. I believe that an epic is more than that, in fact something completely different. An epic is “a poem including history,” 6 a long poem tied up with the life of community, that as a whole does not need to be narrative. The American poets of the twentieth century (Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Oppen, Olson, Silliman) have put the epic back on the map by interpreting the poem itself as a map, and writing it as navigation. They have invented the experimental epic, a genre that has generated little original following in “our” poetry. N30 is the middle part—“always start in the middle”—of a trilogy, the contours of which remain as of yet unclear, although each episode investigates one of the three “ecstasies of time”—past, present, future—concerning society X. N30 concerns itself with the PRESENT: not with the description of actual facts but of the rhythm and the intense depth in which facts appear to us. Where are we? We are camping in the desert. Sometimes we are looking at the stars. As opposed to maximum density and minimal tension (a characteristic of most (post-)experimental lyricism), I have sought a minimal density and maximum tension in this book, considered as a long non-narrative prose poem. On the one hand, the minimal density is obtained by the inherent formlessness of prose, on the other hand by the conscious refusal of any active (formal, non-rhythmic) synthesis: the poem tells nothing, shows nothing, has no theme. I did not seek maximum tension either by loading the quotidian with epiphanic radioactivity (“wonder,” confirmation from above), or by means of the intensity of the linguistic structure. I want an abstract tension, but social in its abstraction, in other words, not neutralized by and subjected to Form. Instead of form (transcendent): composition (immanent). The concept is series. Ideal: every unit is necessary for the efficacy of the others and the whole, their relation is purely linear, i.e. non-hierarchic, non-syllogistic, non-discursive, non-narrative. Sentence related to sentence like paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter; the whole means nothing and represents nothing. Inside the sentence: syntax (Chomsky’s tree, a type of parallel circuit), outside: parataxis (coordination, an asyntactic line through language and world). I consider duration—the energy of duration (rhythm)—to be the fundament of a poem, the temporal inclination to delimit a “space.” Being as consistency, its consistency. A spatial part of time is not merely a metaphor for an inevitable trajectory, an inescapable time, something like “our time.” Not merely—because rhythm comes from language and is not projected onto it; the poem derives from the world like a scent and a color and a life from a flower. A series, a sequence: nothing potential, but truly infinite—the movement of an infinitude. The infinite series = everything minus totality. That means that there is no container—no Form, no Self, no Image, no Structure, not even a Fragment—just “the prose of the world.” No representation, but also no staging of the impossibility of representation (the postmodern sublime). These are no fragments, no image of a fragmented world or personality, no cautious incantations around the Void. It does not exist. It is a movement. Buying bread, a flock of birds, a bomb falling—they do not depict or represent anything, not literally, not metaphorically. There is an Idea, which is however nothing more than a rhythm, in the same way that capitalism is nothing more than a pure function. Parataxis: the white space between two sentences stresses, which is nevertheless always there, also between words, even between letters: the out of focus of idle talk, the gutter, the irreducible Mallarméan mist which renders even the seemingly most transparent text legible. The white space suggests a neutral medium for free signification, a substance of language. A non sequitur is an element from a foreign discourse, which stresses the white space as space, and problematizes freedom for supra-sentential signification. I start by withdrawing material, leaving the initiative to the sentences. In general a word presupposes less often a discourse than a sentence. What discourse is presupposed by “dog”? We could think of several, but why would we? It is more probable that, when faced with the naked word, we think of its naked (dictionary) meaning, of its denotative signified. By means of two simple interventions we may also write the word as sentence: Dog. In no way this suggests the discourse from which this sentence originates, but in any case we’re presupposing one. This is shown by questions like: “Whose dog? Who’s a dog? What kind of dog?” Etc. (Sentences are question marks.) A sentence implies/is a microcosm—a subject, a verb, an object, and so on. Even an incomplete or ungrammatical sentence does so. My main fascination while writing this book is the worldly and social aspect of language, an aspect that often becomes invisible, or rather, transparent in narrativity—the stretching of sentences into stories. Narrativity organizes a new discourse and a new world, and places a sometimes all too dispersing relation of transparence in between. The conventional novel is the brothel of being. I do not intend to prohibit brothels, and I have certainly not intended to write an anti-novel (THIS IS A POEM), but I do consider narrativity (in general, in poetry, in the news, in daily life) to be ontologically secondary with regard to an immediate being in the world through sentences, also if the latter have been withdrawn from a narrative or otherwise externally structured discourse (which in that case would therefore be chronologically primary ). Naturally, two or more sentences are always in danger of telling stories or arguing, just like the world is always in danger of becoming an objective representation, facing us, strangers. That is why need to wage war—against representation and against the interface, against interaction. AGAINST THE “READER.” To the extent that a sentence is worldly, writing is a condensed global war, and in so far as there is ultimately only one world and one open continuum of languages, it is a global civil war. Nice subject for an epic. The elaboration of a singular problem—prose as the outside of poetry, the form of the novel as purely prosodic composition scheme—“expresses” the universal problem: capitalism as Idea of the world vs. poetry as language of an (im)possible community. The paragraphs are blocks of rhythmically contracted social material. By choosing the sentence as the basic compositional component, an abstract whole may contain social sounds, without telling a story or showing an image. Composition is subrepresentative —a rhythmic, passive synthesis, or rather: a synthesis of syntheses. I never write large blocks of prose in one sitting, because there is no obvious organizational vector —plot, theme, conscience—outside the inherent qualities of the material itself. Usually I write down one sentence, sometimes two, but rarely more than three. Those sentences are usually placed in the text which I am editing at the time. In fact, there is no original composition, new chapters split off from chapters which became too long during the editing process. (Revision mainly consists of adding and inserting, displacing and dividing; only during the last phase, when the text has gained enough consistency, there may be subtraction to tighten the composition; each chapter requires a season of daily revision). This constant revision, accompanied by a continuous influx of collective background noise (to speak with Van Bastelaere), 7 makes every chapter a block condensed (“historical” and “personal”) time. The block itself is a-personal and a-historic; it is ontologically autonomous. If there is such a thing as a spirit of the times, I do not try to offer an image of it, but rather to cancel something of it by erecting a monument of its own excrement within its own boundaries. Tuning and dis-tuning , “in de taal der neerslachtigen een eigen geluid doen klinken,” 8 in other words, desiring in an Elysian way. In this sense I have intended to be able to write a political poetry. The ultimate political poem is the epic, “the tale of the tribe.” I consider N30 to be a prolegomenon to a future epic (of which it in the end will form a part a structural moment, as introduction-in-the-middle), an extended pile on top of an epic as narrative, a question of the tribe and question of its history. I was burdened by too much satire, too much bullshit. But: satire willy-nilly = the only justifiable satire. Against the abstract universalism of the market (“globalism”): concrete disgust, a positive way of saying “No.” Moreover, disgust is a specifically total attitude, which ultimately concerns the world as a whole. I hate this or that, but I am disgusted by EVERYTHING (when I am disgusted), and so it appears that satire is in fact related to the epic, in so far as it concerns society, the cosmos, history. Maybe it is no coincidence that the Dutch literary canon knows no great poet of disgust; what could be more fearful to us than society, the cosmos, and history? The T-tendency (T from Tollens 9 ) clearly points into the direction of the small, friendly, ironic, melancholic, acquiescent, wondrous, and so on. The anti-political, anti-cosmic, anti-historical. (Why am I so philosophical? To scare away the Dutchies.) And most of all: the “poetical” (the pseudo-mysticism from the backyard). Yes, the N in N30 also stands for the Netherlands (just like 30 indicates the number of chapters). I was not in Seattle, I do not live in Iraq. But is not the whole world bleeding to death on Dutch paving stones? Let’s hope that we mowed away something with this total satire, also “in myself.” The arrogant stupidity that definitely thinks to know the essence of freedom (the free development of esthetic needs inside the void), that cannot take anything serious, only believes in the disciplined bestiality of the individual (“norms and values”) and the mere functioning of a social factory which finds no justification whatsoever outside its functioning (“get to work”)… Who knows. A certain aimed destruction leaves grooves and craters, mapping out a next adventure. Pound’s periplum : sailing while mapping the coasts. Immanent orientation. The terrain changes with the map, history changes with the poem. Maps never merely organize the chaos, transcendent schemes imposed on a formless Ding-an-sich . They organize from within, surfing. But they are most of all routes back into the chaos or forward to paradise (final identity of chaos and paradise; Schlegel: “ Nur diejenige Verworrenheit ist ein Chaos aus der eine Welt entspringen kann ”10). A poem is not only a piece of history, it is also a flight from history. Maps give chaos to the form of reality , open escape routes, break through representations, make us shivery and dazed. Paradise is immanent to a fleeting desire. History is the history of labor—this is Adam’s curse—and the poet works too: For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, school masters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world 11 But: the poet works in paradise. The paradox of the artwork, the work that is no work, the piece of history that cannot be reduced to History—this is explained by The Space of Literature , a virtual space, an autonomous rhythm, not outside, but in the midst of the noise, a piece of paradise in hell, a postcard from the vale of tears addressed to paradise, to X. Political poetry means: a poetry that dares to think about itself, about its language and about its world and about the problematic relation between both, which is this relation as problem. A poetry that thinks at all, articulates its problem. It has nothing to do with journalism or morality or debate, let alone the law or the state. It has nothing to do with “criticism” if this means the replacement of incorrect representations by other, more correct representations. It has something to do with ethics in the sense of learning to live. It has something to do with the community and the language of the community (whichever that may be) and the role of the poet regarding the community. It concerns justice without judgement or measure. In the end the just word is just a word , to paraphrase Godard: it is from a future that is unimaginable. It Is no rational engagement, but an aversion against everything that obstructs life, and love for everything what is worthy of having been loved. The world is engaged with me, not the other way round. First Exodus, then Sinai. A desire does not start with an agenda. To answer the question whether I am really so naive as to want to change the world: “We only want the world.” Justice is the world appealing to us to liberate it from all possible chains, from each organization and inequality, to be it, smooth, equal, under a clear sky—a desert and a people in a desert. That moment between Egypt and the Law. It is not a revolution, but the sky above the revolution. Poetry = the science of escape. There is no art that we already know. The weakness of modernistic epic poetry seems to me to be the unwillingness to completely abandon narrative as a structural principle, in favor of a composition “around” or from an event. The China Cantos and Adams Cantos are the low point, and the Pisan Cantos the high point of Pound’s poetry. Two types of research: archival representation of the past vs. ontology of the present (which virtually presupposes the entire history). Presupposing an event means that it is impossible for the poet to stage his own absence, but in no way makes the work personal. An event is the unknown, the new invading into the business as usual, so also the personal. The question heading this research is not: “Who am I?” but “What is happening?” The book is as little illegible as Mondrian’s work is invisible. Form is of interest only to the extent that it empowers liberation. Ron Silliman So no formalism, but what it means to live in this world and to have a future in it. I want something that holds together that’s not smooth. Bruce Andrews The past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech— William Carlos Williams If my confreres wanted to write a work with all history in its maw, I wished, from the beginning to start all over again, attempting to know nothing but a will to create, and matter at hand. Ronald Johnson NOTES 1) “The easy thing/ that is difficult to make.” Bertold Brecht, Lob des Kommunismus . (All footnotes are the translator’s) 2) Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature , trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press (1989), 75. 3) Mettes uses the word “Neerlandicus,” which refers to scholars of Dutch language and literature. 4) Dutch poet. 5) Gertrude Stein. “Composition as Explanation.” A Stein Reader . Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (1993), 495-503. 6) Ezra Pound. 7) Flemish poet. 8) “Resounding an original sound in the language of the despondent.” A. Roland Holst, De afspraak . 9) Dutch poet. 10) “Only such a confusion is a chaos which can give rise to a world.” 11) W.B. Yeats, “Adam’s Curse.&rdquo. (shrink)

This Special Issue commemorates the 60th anniversary of Business & Society with nine rigorous literature reviews that address important societal problems and provide opportunities for theory development in the business and society field; in this introduction we present an overview of the Special Issue. With the theme “Building on Its Past,” the nine articles address a host of contemporary issues, including climate change, wicked problems, business and human rights, human health, certifications standards, the governance of artificial intelligence, stakeholder engagement, stakeholder (...) theory, and corporate political activity. Together, these reviews offer a wealth of suggested themes, theories and approaches that can drive our research forward for the next decades in business and society research and practice. Using the lens of a miner-prospector continuum to categorize the diversity of articles within this special issue, a common theme emerges across the portfolio of reviews: they all call for a more systemic and integrative perspective toward studying the complex interactions that link business and society actors and issues. Building on these findings, we encourage future scholars to fill long-standing researched gaps through a more open systems approach, which supports both contextually sensitive and multi-level and multi-disciplinary approaches to address grand societal challenges. We conclude with specific suggestions as to how business and society scholars might use an open systems approach, including embracing methodologies to address complex causal pathways, theorizing with a view towards spanning external and internal elements of an organization, and reflecting on the temporal and spatial dynamics of complex systems. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Thomas Donaldson’s framework for dealing with value-conflicts between a manager’s home and host country distinguishes between a “conflict of relative [economic] development”—conflicting norms that arise because home and host are at two different stages of economic development—and a “conflict of culture,” which arises because the home and host’s different cultures generate conflicting norms on the issue the manager faces. My question here is a thought experiment. What different insights might emerge if we flipped Donaldson’s framework around? Specifically: What if we (...) viewed the kinds of conflicts that fall under Donaldson’s “conflicts of culture” as arising not because the home and host exhibit a “fundamental” conflict in cultural norms, but because they are at two different stages ofculturaldevelopment? And what if we viewed “conflicts of relative economic development” as conflicts that occur not because home and host are at two different stages of economic development but, simply, because their economies contemporaneously interact with each other in ways that generate normative conflict: call them “conflicts of economy”? (shrink)

Few automated legal reasoning systems have been developed in domains of law in which a judicial decision maker has extensive discretion in the exercise of his or her powers. Discretionary domains challenge existing artificial intelligence paradigms because models of judicial reasoning are difficult, if not impossible to specify. We argue that judicial discretion adds to the characterisation of law as open textured in a way which has not been addressed by artificial intelligence and law researchers in depth. We demonstrate that (...) systems for reasoning with this form of open texture can be built by integrating rule sets with neural networks trained with data collected from standard past cases. The obstacles to this approach include difficulties in generating explanations once conclusions have been inferred, difficulties associated with the collection of sufficient data from past cases and difficulties associated with integrating two vastly different paradigms. A knowledge representation scheme based on the structure of arguments proposed by Toulmin has been used to overcome these obstacles. The system, known as Split Up, predicts judicial decisions in property proceedings within family law in Australia. Predictions from the system have been compared to those from a group of lawyers with favourable results. (shrink)

We conduct an experiment with 459 nonprofessional investors to examine whether they evaluate companies differently based on management’s stated purpose for undertaking corporate social responsibility activities in the presence versus absence of a company-specific negative event. Specifically, we vary whether or not management intends to achieve financial returns from CSR activities in addition to promoting social good. We address investors’ decision processes by investigating whether their judgments are mediated by perceptions of future cash flows and/or the underlying ethical culture of (...) the company. Results show that absent a negative event, investment judgments are stronger when CSR activities are intended to achieve financial returns, through expectations of higher future cash flows. However, when a negative event occurs, we find a moderating effect of independent assurance of CSR disclosures. When disclosures are not assured, investors prefer CSR undertaken only for societal benefit, mediated by perceptions of a stronger ethical culture. However, when disclosures are assured, ethical culture is viewed similarly regardless of management’s intention to achieve financial returns from CSR activities. This suggests that management’s willingness to obtain independent assurance on disclosures is viewed as a positive ethical signal. Thus, assurance complements disclosure of CSR activities by contributing to protection against the impact of negative events. (shrink)

Many explanations in physics rely on idealized models of physical systems. These explanations fail to satisfy the conditions of standard normative accounts of explanation. Recently, some philosophers have claimed that idealizations can be used to underwrite explanation nonetheless, but only when they are what have variously been called representational, Galilean, controllable or harmless idealizations. This paper argues that such a half-measure is untenable and that idealizations not of this sort can have explanatory capacities.

Formed in the wake of May 1968, the Prisons Information Group (GIP) was a radical resistance movement active in France in the early 1970's. Theorist Michel Foucault was heavily involved. This book collects interdisciplinary essays that explore the GIP's resources both for Foucault studies and for prison activism today.

Kriegel described the problem of intentional inexistence as one of the ‘perennial problems of philosophy’, 307–340, 2007: 307). In the same paper, Kriegel alluded to a modal realist solution to the problem of intentional inexistence. However, Kriegel does not state by name who defends the kind of modal realist solution he has in mind. Kriegel also points out that even what he believes to be the strongest version of modal realism does not pass the ‘principle of representation’ and thus modal (...) realism is not an adequate solution to the problem of intentional inexistence. In this paper, I respond to Kriegel by defending a modal realist solution that he did not consider in 2007, called ‘extended modal realism’. EMR is a version of modal realism where possible worlds are not completely isolated as they are under the Lewisian model. Rather, under EMR worlds are, in a way, spatiotemporally related. The fact EMR worlds are related allows EMR to sufficiently pass the principle of representation and thus can be deemed a legitimate solution to the problem of intentional inexistence. I conclude that either EMR can pass the principle of representation in some cases or, and I think the more sensible option, we give up on the principle of representation altogether. (shrink)

The authors critique C. A. Bowers' argument that education for sustainability must be inspired by the practices of pre-modern cultures, and cannot be promoted through the postmodern pragmatism of Richard Rorty. Environmental education must rather be grounded in contemporary cultural practice. Although Rorty, like many other postmodernists, has shown little concern for the ecological crisis, his approach is potentially applicable to it. What is required is a broadening of focus: the ecological crisis is a crisis of post-Enlightenment humanism as well (...) as of other aspects of modernity. (shrink)

The techniques that some large multinational corporations use to reduce their tax liability have come under increasing public scrutiny in recent years, alongside governmental investigations and international commitments aimed at curbing opportunities for tax avoidance. Although discussion of tax avoidance activities, and their regulatory responses, is often conducted with reference to moral concepts, philosophical analysis of the ethics of multinational tax avoidance remains limited. In particular, the virtue ethics tradition that emphasises the agent and the performance of specific roles has (...) not been considered in detail. This paper examines how the contemporary virtue ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre can be applied to the issue of multinational tax avoidance, and considers the role that accountants play in these activities. It argues, firstly, that MacIntyre’s approach provides a more useful philosophical analysis of the issue and, secondly, that the main parties involved are likely to agree with the main tenets of this approach. The paper also contributes by reconceptualising, using MacIntyre’s scheme, the issue of tax avoidance in relation to Donald Cressey’s ‘fraud triangle’. (shrink)

The human primate is a deeply cultural species, our cognition being shaped by culture, and cultural transmission amounting to an “epidemic of mental representations” (Sperber, 1996). The architecture of this aspect of human cognition has been shaped by our evolutionary past in ways that we can now begin to discern through comparative studies of other primates. Processes of social learning (learning from others) are important for cognitive science to understand because they are cognitively complex and take many interrelated forms; they (...) shape traditions, cultures and nonsocial aspects of cognition; and in turn they may be shaped by their cultural context. The study of primate social learning and culture has in recent years enjoyed a renaissance, providing a wealth of new findings, key aspects of which are reviewed. The focus is on cognitive issues, including learning about the consequences, sequential structure and hierarchical organization of actions; relating stored knowledge to the assimilation of new social knowledge; feedback guiding the construction of imitations; conceptual grasp of imitation; and the reciprocal relationship between social learning and culture. (shrink)

I propose that the emphasis on "authentic" norms in the ISCT literature does not encompass the possibility of community norms that facilitate and maintain corrupt behavior. To fill this gap, I build on the normalization of corruption literature to present a typology of community norms that distinguishes between authentic, behavioral, and aspirational norm types as well as between illegitimate, authentic norms and illegitimate, behavioral norms. By refining the terminology used to evaluate community norms, I propose that ISCT can be more (...) easily applied to cases of systemic corruption. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 77-99 [Access article in PDF] Malebranche's Distinction Between General and Particular Volitions Andrew Pessin "God needs no instruments to act," Malebranche writes in Search; "it suffices that He wills in order that a thing be, because it is a contradiction that He should will and that what He wills should not happen. Therefore, His power is His will." 1 God (...) acts by willing; so much is clear. But Malebranche goes further, especially in his Treatise, by asserting that (i) only in miracles and the initial creation does God act by "particular volitions," while (ii) God ordinarily acts in nature via laws or "general volitions." This distinction between general and particular volitions is central to Malebranche's theories of divine activity, theodicy, and occasionalism. Nevertheless, I will argue, it has been almost universally misunderstood.The two standard interpretations of Malebranche's expressions "general volition" and "particular volition" are these: (GC) A "general volition" for Malebranche is one whose content is general; a "particular volition" is one whose content is particular. [End Page 77](PC) All divine volitions have particular contents; but a "general volition" is one which is in accord with general laws, while a "particular volition" is one not in accord with general laws. 2Andrew Black offers the following two schemata for volition contents, where (B) also provides the general form of laws of nature: A: Let c be F at t. B: For all created substances x and y and for every time t1, if x is G at t1and x bears relation R to y then there is a time t2 such that t2 bears relation T to t1 and y is F at t2. 3(A) is "particular" insofar as it represents a particular state of affairs, involving a particular substance in a mode at a time; (B) is general in making no such reference. According to (GC), then, when Malebranche's God acts by "general volitions," He has volitions whose content is of the form of (B) (specifically, a law of nature); when He acts by particular volitions His volitions are of the form of (A). According to (PC), both general and particular volitions are of the form of (A), while the former are in accord with laws of nature and the latter aren't.To simplify matters, I will focus on God's activity in the material world; the laws of nature in question will usually be the laws of motion. Further, to avoid terminological confusion, I will refer to volitions of the form of (A) as "particular content volitions," and those of (B) as "general content volitions." The issue before us then is: When Malebranche's God acts by "general volitions," are these general content volitions or particular content volitions? Proponents of (GC) support the former; those of (PC) the latter.Unhappily, almost everything Malebranche says directly on the subject can be interpreted either way. 4 (I'll speculate why at the end.) And admittedly, what Malebranche says more broadly about natural laws and divine volitions is often suggestive of (GC)—so it is no surprise that almost all recent commentators adopt (GC), usually simply assuming it without argument. Still, I shall argue that if one of the interpretations is correct, it is (PC). [End Page 78]My plan in this paper: (1) Offer some prima facie support for (PC); (2) Provide four arguments that (PC) either fits better with, or is alone consistent with, various Malebranchean doctrines; (3) Reply to some recent objections against (PC); (4) Argue that Malebranche's direct reply to Arnauld supports (PC); (5) Offer a conclusion and final thought. 1. Some Prima Facie Support For (PC) Let me first note that Steven Nadler offers various passages which do at least suggest (PC). 5 But that evidence, while strong, is not alone conclusive. For one thing, those passages can perhaps be accommodated by (GC); 6 for another, there are many passages which suggest (GC). So we must go further.Consider, then, Malebranche's primary concern in the Treatise, the... (shrink)

In this article I explore the contribution of ethical analysis and theological reflection to understanding and responding to moral injury of healthcare workers in light of the COVID pandemic. I begin by critically appraising the relevance of moral injury for healthcare contexts, and suggest that the term ‘medical moral injury’ should be used to differentiate it from ‘military moral injury’. I briefly relate medical moral injury to other relevant phenomena, such as moral dilemmas, moral distress, and moral residue, arguing that (...) moral injury in healthcare contexts might take chronic as well as acute forms. I suggest that agent regret might play an important role in understanding medical moral injury. The associated distinction between harms and wrongs, and so regret and remorse, help us identify different kinds of moral injury, and the distinct role that apology plays in each instance. Theological reflection on penitence, forgiveness, and lament also contributes to understanding and responding to potentially morally injurious events. I conclude that while psychological intervention plays an important role in medical moral injury, moral and theological perspectives provide both crucial lenses through which to understand these potentially injurious moral landscapes, and resources to assist healthcare workers in navigating them more safely. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

One of the key achievements of critical realism has been to expose the modernist myth of universal reason, which holds that authentic knowledge claims must be objectively ‘pure’, uncontaminated by the subjectivity of local place, specific time and particular culture. Wright aims to address the lack of any substantial and sustained engagement between critical realism and theological critical realism with particular regard to: (a) the distinctive ontological claims of Christianity; (b) their epistemic warrant and intellectual legitimacy; and (c) scrutiny of (...) the primary source of the ontological claims of Christianity, namely the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. As such, it functions as a prolegomena to a much needed wider debate, guided by the under-labouring services of critical realism, between Christianity and various other religious and secular worldviews. This important new text will help stimulate a debate that has yet to get out of first gear. This book will appeal to academics, graduate and post-graduate students especially, but also Christian clergy, ministers and informed laity, and members of the general public concerned with the nature of religion and its place in contemporary society. (shrink)