The conversation seeks to extend and complicate Charles Taylor’s (2004) account of three constitutive formations of modern social imaginaries: market, the public sphere, and the nation-state based on popular sovereignty in two critical respects. First, it seeks to show how these key imaginaries, especially the market imaginary, are not contained and sealed within autonomous spheres. They are portable and they often leak into domains beyond the ones in which they originate. Second, it seeks to identify and explore the new (...) incipient and/or emergent imaginaries vying for recognition and demanding consideration in the constitution (as well as analysis) of contemporary social life, such as the risk-reward entrepreneurial culture. (shrink)

This essay begins by exploring the extent to which the narrative of secularization presented in Charles Taylor's A Secular Age might be complicated or otherwise challenged by taking account of parallel processes within Islamic thought and practice. It then considers whether Taylor's argument might nevertheless be applicable to, or illuminative of, contemporary struggles with modernity in the Muslim world.

How a Post-Materialist Social Order Can Solve the Challenges of Modern Life and Insure Our Survival.

This article departs from the consideration that global communication is not only a reality but also a challenge. This is because most of our communication does not involve dialogue but remains mere communication without achieving the creativity implied in true conversation. Departing from Gordon Pask’s warning, in 1980, that too much togetherness would be hazardous in future information environments, this article proposes a playful displacement of images – from network to lacework. The aim is to help us refine our gaze (...) into the interconnectedness of the world, or at least, into the intricacies of our contemporary culture and its global communication. The idea is that by using lace as an inspirational image we may go beyond the hazards of uniformity and triviality of our excessive togetherness. By doing so, we would allow space for a variety of local patterns of dialogues, articulated around unspoken tensions and thus, allowing the emergency of genuine conversation. (shrink)

If you really could have a conversation with God--it might sound like this!

Martin Heidegger is one of the most important as well as one of the most difficult thinkers of the last century. Raymond Tallis, who has been arguing with Heidegger for over thirty years, illuminates his fundamental ideas through an imaginary conversation, which is both relaxed and rigorous, witty and profound.

First published in German in 1995, volume 77 of Heidegger's Complete Works consists of three imaginary conversations written as World War II was coming to an end. Composed at a crucial moment in history and in Heidegger's own thinking, these conversations present meditations on science and technology; the devastation of nature, the war, and evil; and the possibility of release from representational thinking into a more authentic relation with being and the world. The first conversation involves a (...) scientist, a scholar, and a guide walking together on a country path; the second takes place between a teacher and a tower-warden, and the third features a younger man and an older man in a prisoner-of-war camp in Russia, where Heidegger's two sons were missing in action. Unique because of their conversational style, the lucid and precise translation of these texts offers insight into the issues that engaged Heidegger's wartime and postwar thinking. (shrink)

First published in German in 1995, volume 77 of Heidegger’s Complete Works consists of three imaginary conversations written as World War II was coming to an end. Composed at a crucial moment in history and in Heidegger's own thinking, these conversations present meditations on science and technology; the devastation of nature, the war, and evil; and the possibility of release from representational thinking into a more authentic relation with being and the world. The first conversation involves a (...) scientist, a scholar, and a guide walking together on a country path; the second takes place between a teacher and a tower-warden, and the third features a younger man and an older man in a prisoner-of-war camp in Russia, where Heidegger’s two sons were missing in action. Unique because of their conversational style, the lucid and precise translation of these texts offers insight into the issues that engaged Heidegger’s wartime and postwar thinking. (shrink)

This volume combines rigorous empirical and theoretical analyses with political engagement to look beyond reductive short-hands that ignore the historical evolution and varieties of Islamic doctrine and that deny the complexities of Muslim societies' encounters with modernity itself. Are Islam and democracy compatible? Can we shed the language of 'Islam vs. the West' for new political imaginaries? The authors analyze struggles over political legitimacy since the Arab Spring and the rise of Al Qaeda and ISIS in their historical and political (...) complexity across the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region. Distinguishing multiculturalism from interculturalism and understanding multiple modernities, philosophers in the volume tease out the complexities of civilizational encounters. The volume also shows how the Paris massacres or the Danish caricature controversy do not remain confined to Europe but influence struggles and confrontations within Muslim societies. Gender and Islam are addressed from a comparative perspective bringing into conversation not only the experience of different Muslim countries with Islamic law but also by analysing Jewish family law. (shrink)

First published in German in 1995, volume 77 of Heidegger’s Complete Works consists of three imaginary conversations written as World War II was coming to an end. Composed at a crucial moment in history and in Heidegger's own thinking, these conversations present meditations on science and technology; the devastation of nature, the war, and evil; and the possibility of release from representational thinking into a more authentic relation with being and the world. The first conversation involves a (...) scientist, a scholar, and a guide walking together on a country path; the second takes place between a teacher and a tower-warden, and the third features a younger man and an older man in a prisoner-of-war camp in Russia, where Heidegger’s two sons were missing in action. Unique because of their conversational style, the lucid and precise translation of these texts offers insight into the issues that engaged Heidegger’s wartime and postwar thinking. (shrink)

This paper argues that debates regarding legal protections to preserve the privacy of data subjects, such as those involving the European Union’s right to be forgotten, have tended to overlook group-level forms of epistemic asymmetry and their impact on members of historically oppressed groups. In response, I develop what I consider an abolitionist approach to issues of digital justice. I begin by exploring international debates regarding digital privacy and the right to be forgotten. Then, I turn to the long history (...) of informational asymmetries impacting racialized populations in the United States. Such asymmetries, I argue, comprise epistemic injustices that are also implicated within the patterns of racialized incarceration in the United States. The final section brings together questions regarding the impact of such epistemic injustices on incarcerated peoples and focuses specifically on the public availability of criminal histories in online search databases as a fundamental issue within conversations regarding digital justice. I thus conclude by building from the work of contemporary abolitionist writers to argue that the underlying concerns of an individualized right to be forgotten should be transformed into a collective effort to undermine societal carceral imaginaries. (shrink)

The work argues that engaging Africa's cultural and epistemic resources as social imaginaries, and not as metaphysical or ontological “essences,” could help practitioners of African philosophy overcome the cluster of shortcomings and undesirable features associated with “ethnophilosophy.” A number of points are outlined to buttress this claim. First, the framework of social imaginaries does not operate with the false assumption that Africa's cultural forms and epistemic resources are static and immutable. Second, this framework does not lend itself to sweeping generalizations (...) about Africa or large swathes of it. Third, the framework of social imaginaries remedies ethnophilosophy's problem of collectivism. Fourth, unlike ethnophilosophy, it does not romanticize and canonize a supposedly “idyllic” African past, which militates against a realistic and forward‐looking philosophizing. Finally, with the framework of social imaginaries, Africa's indigenous cultural and epistemic resources become amenable to being engaged with critical philosophical rigor. This not only enhances their potential for cross‐cultural philosophical conversation but also enhances their usefulness for addressing current sociopolitical issues affecting Africa. The discussion in this paper somewhat touches upon the question of method in African philosophy, using the ethnophilosophy problem to navigate the vast gamut of issues involved. (shrink)

What do Social Networking Sites (SNS) ‘do to us’: are they a damning threat or an emancipating force? Recent publications on the impact of “Web 2.0” proclaim very opposite evaluative positions. With the aim of finding a middle ground, this paper develops a pragmatist approach to SNS based on the work of Richard Rorty. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, we analyze SNS as conversational practices. Second, we outline, in the form of an imaginary conversation between Rorty and (...) Heidegger, a positive and negative ‘conversational’ view on SNS. Third, we deploy a reflection, again using Rortian notions, on that evaluation, starting from the concept of ‘self-reflectivity.’ Finally, the relations between these three steps are more detailedly investigated. By way of the sketched technique, we can interrelate the two opposing sides of the recent debates—hope and threat—and judge SNS in all their ambiguity. (shrink)

In recent years, Richard Kearney has emerged as a leading figure in the field of continental philosophy, widely recognized for his work in the areas of philosophical and religious hermeneutics, theory and practice of the imagination, and political thought. This much-anticipated--and long overdue--study is the first to reflect the full range and impact of Kearney's extensive contributions to contemporary philosophy. The book opens with Kearney's own "prelude" in which he traces his intellectual itinerary as it traverses the three imaginaries explored (...) in the volume: the dialogical, the political, and the narrative. The interviews that follow the first section allow readers to listen in on conversations between Kearney and some of the most interesting and respected thinkers of our time--Noam Chomsky, Charles Taylor, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricouer, and Martha Nussbaum--as they reveal new and unexpected aspects of their thought on stories and mourning, ethics and narrative, terror and religion, intellectuals and ideology. The next section, on the political imaginary, looks at Kearney's distinctive contribution to the political situation in Ireland and in Europe more generally; and in the last, on narrative, writers including David Wood, Terry Eagleton, and Mark Dooley focus on Kearney's novels as instances of narrative theory put into literary practice. Concluding with Kearney's postscript, an essay on "Traversals and Epiphanies in Joyce and Proust," the volume comes full circle, encompassing the full extent of Richard Kearney's engagement and offerings as a philosopher. (shrink)

In this essay I analyse Kant’s view on the regulative role of reason, and in particular on what he describes as the ‘indispensably necessary’ role of ideas qua foci imaginarii in the Appendix. I review two influential readings of what has become known as the ‘transcendental illusion’ and I offer a novel reading that builds on some of the insights of these earlier readings. I argue that ideas of reason act as imaginary standpoints, which are indispensably necessary for scientific (...) knowledge by making inter-conversational agreement possible. Thus, I characterise scientific knowledge as a distinctive kind of perspectival knowledge. This novel reading can illuminate the role of reason in complementing the faculty of understanding and sheds light on the apparent dichotomy between the first and the second part of the Appendix. More to the point, this novel reading takes us right to the heart of what scientific knowledge is, according to Kant, and how it differs from bogus knowledge and opinion. (shrink)

In this paper we focus on conversational thinking to demonstrate the value of public reasoning in building a decent world and true democracies. We shall take into account the views of selected scholars, especially John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, on law and democratic practice, to explain why post-colonial Africa is weighed down by sociopolitical hegemonies that have aversion to their opposition and eliminate room for strong institutions, rule of law and human rights. In light of conversational thinking, this eliminates any (...) chance for “creative struggle,” i.e. a philosophers struggle against the post-colonial imaginary/social agents to dethrone strong individuals and create strong institutions. In the absence of these indices which a conversational orientation may engender, it is difficult to transform bogus democracy into true democracy and thus to create a decent society. Post-colonial Africa mired in social regression, political crisis and economic stagnation urgently needs conversational tonics to overcome the ineffectiveness of bogus democracy. We postulate a thesis about three structural transformations forming what we call Democratic Transformational Programme. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.2 (2000) 203-221 [Access article in PDF] Taste and "the Conversible World" in the Eighteenth Century Rochelle Gurstein In the middle of the nineteenth century a series entitled "Afoot" appeared in the literary magazine Blackwood's (1857), describing an Englishman's travels through Europe. In one installment the narrator tells of meeting a Yankee, who had just come from Florence the beautiful. Our friend approached (...) him warily, and began to ask him what he had seen, what admired. Then, after a little circumlocution, he dashed at once, in medias res, by saying, "Of course, you were in raptures with the Venus de Medici?"--expecting an answer such as he would himself have given. "Well, sir, to tell you the truth, I don't care much about those stone gals," was the answer he received. Our friend collapsed. Had anyone in his presence denied the orthodoxy of St. Augustine, or abjured the Thirty-Nine Articles, there would have been more sorrow in his anger, but scarcely more indignation. The Venus de Medici--a classic chef d'oeuvre--a thing which Praxiteles might have touched with his chisel, or Pericles have looked upon, to be called a "stone gal"! Had he doubted its genuineness, or spoken of it as a specimen of secondary art, he might have been deemed critical, hypercritical; but this was a classic impiety, an irreverence, a profanity. As if that were not enough, the Yankee's words betrayed "uncivism" and "egoism." He was undoubtedly among that type who "under their home influences, and the shadow of their own nationalities... have no aptitude for general civism." 1There is of course much that is familiar in this vignette, especially the contrast between Old World sophistication and American naivete. The unflappable Yankee who is irremediably unaware and proud of it and the overly fastidious, overly aestheticized Englishman were both destined to become stock characters in novels depicting Americans abroad, and here we see an early confrontation [End Page 203] between their rival sensibilities. Even though the Venus de Medici has now completely vanished from the modern imaginary museum of masterpieces, it was once among the most beloved, celebrated, and reproduced statues of antiquity; its repute was far beyond that of the Mona Lisa today, and from the time it was unearthed at the end of sixteenth century through the nineteenth century it was the indisputable exemplar of beauty. So it is no surprise that the Englishman, who, like all cultivated people of his day, was well versed in the world of classical antiquity, was mortified by the American's obliviousness before this "classic chef d'oeuvre"; for it revealed a man so utterly lacking in taste and sensibility that he did not have the wherewithal to know that he had been "irreverent" when he called the Venus de Medici "a stone gal."Where this anecdote moves into less familiar territory, however, is the Englishman's characterization of the Yankee's taste as uncivic and egoistic, as provincial and narrow. His willingness to judge a total stranger, to hold him accountable to a single standard of judgment, could not be in sharper contrast to our contemporary attitudes. Today subjectivity is celebrated in the common saying that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion and taste; what is more, diversity of tastes is regarded as a measure of personal freedom and democracy. Thus, the Englishman's quickness to judge would be evidence of elitism, oppression, even cultural imperialism, and this response no longer belongs to naifs who cannot tell the difference between the most revered sculpture and stone gals; it now belongs to the sophisticated, educated, modern (and postmodern) person. Today the very idea of drawing distinctions--not only between practiced taste and first impressions but also between art and commercial entertainment, art and obscenity, high and popular culture, scholarship and propaganda, let alone between beauty and ugliness, right and wrong, excellence and mediocrity--is suspect. And since the capacity to make precisely these kinds of distinctions was once understood as the essence of... (shrink)

In 1959, the Charles Darwin Station and the Galápagos National Park were established, formally inaugurating conservation on the archipelago. In the same year, a utopian colony from the United States arrived. Whereas scholars have dismissed the latter and focused on the former, this essay unveils the science-inspired utopianism common to both enterprises. Investing science with the exclusive role of producing all knowledge and steering politics, leaders of the two initiatives aspired not only to protect nature but also to forge a (...) new humanity. Describing how such ambitions burst along lines of race, class, and nationality, I argue that these enterprises consolidated the current understanding of the Galápagos as “pristine”: a site fit for research and tourism but unhospitable to people. Drawing on archival and historical documents, this essay aims to reinvigorate two conversations: one between science and technology studies and conservation, and the other between STS and utopian studies. If recent attempts at bridging the divide between science and imagination have emphasized how powerful actors shape human society, this essay considers the long-lasting effects of scientific imaginaries on a politics of nature. (shrink)

This article analyzes two video remakes of Pharrell Williams’s hit song “Happy” portraying Za’atari refugeechildren. I discuss the role that the “Happy” tribute video trend had in developing a global imaginary that lends itself to current conversations around humanitarian happiness and “deexceptionalizing” migration and humanitarian space. I look at the videos in relationship to this trend and to the media construction of Za’atari camp as “city.” In the context of this debate and reading the videos through the paradigm (...) of global urbanness such as we also see in the “Happy” craze, I argue that in fact the videos show the limits of the ideology of global belonging when it comes to the refugee camp and of the incommensurability of contemporary humanitarian and global imaginaries, even in an age defined by the sway of new media. (shrink)

Departing from the thought-provoking conversation between David Theo Goldberg and Achille Mbembe on the driving themes in Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason, this commentary elaborates upon three topics that emerge in this conversation: the role of desire and how it is articulated in black abjection, the politics of care, and contemporary practices of repairing the injustices perpetrated in the context of European modernity. It is emphasized that black reason as a practice of repairing and transformation is especially enacted within contemporary (...) movements like the refugee movements organized around the Black Mediterranean and in the lived freedom archives and abolitionist imaginaries of movements where gender and race cross-cut. Characterized by their transnational dimension and a radical openness towards new beginnings, these expressions of black reason imagine and reinvent justice and democracy anew. (shrink)

This study makes a case for the conversational phenomenon the authors have named the comical hypothetical. The CH becomes discursively co-created during ongoing conversation when one or more speakers depart from the normal turn-taking system and engage in the interactional creation of an imaginary world. Data stem from ethnographic observations as well as from spontaneous recordings of social situations in three different locations. Out of 20 hours of taped conversations, 10 recognizable CH segments were analyzed for the present (...) study. The authors present a macro-structure analysis of the comical hypothetical using Hymes's SPEAKING mnemonic, with an emphasis on the act sequence. A second-level micro-analysis uncovers the interactional properties of the CH using a conversation analytic approach. The examination reveals a distinct four-part act sequence of the CH made up of intricate and creative interactional turns. Lastly, the significance and functions of the CH are also discussed. (shrink)

In response to the dozen essays published here, which relate my 1964 paper on “The Nature of Belief Systems in the Mass Publics” to normative requirements of democratic theory, I note, inter alia, a major misinterpretation of my old argument, as well as needed revisions of that argument in the light of intervening data. Then I address the degree to which there may be some long‐term secular change in the parameters that I originally laid out. In the final section, I (...) provide a case study of public understanding of factual trends in federal tax policy in recent decades which seems commendably veridical on average. The preferences of the public thereon add up to a remarkably clear popular mandate. But this mandate seems to disappear rather magically in the voting booth, probably due to a combination of limited contextual information on the public side, and considerable skill on the elite side in manipulating apparent political realities. (shrink)