What role do fables play in Cartesian method and psychology? By looking at Descartes’ use of fables, James Griffith suggests there is a fabular logic that runs to the heart of Descartes’ philosophy. First focusing on The World and the Discourse on Method, this volume shows that by writing in fable form, Descartes allowed his readers to break from Scholastic methods of philosophizing. With this fable-structure or -logic in mind, the book reexamines the relationship between analysis, synthesis, and inexact sciences; (...) between metaphysics and ethico-political life; and between the imagination, the will, and the passions. (shrink)

For Foucault, Hobbes is important for the transition from sovereignty to governmentality, but he does not always go into great detail how. In “Society Must Be Defended”, Hobbes’s reactions against the political historicism of his time lead him to an ahistorical foundation to the state. In Security, Territory, Population, his contract is emblematic of the art of government still caught in the logic of sovereignty. Management techniques, one of which being inheritance laws like primogeniture, inducing changes in a population’s milieu (...) so that its interest is properly directed allow the art of government to escape this logic. Hobbes supports primogeniture, but its historical position in the common law makes this support unexpected. This article examines the historical context of primogeniture and the reasoning for Hobbes’s support of it in light of Foucault’s claims about him in order to give more precision to those claims. The result is that primogeniture as a law of nature produces the family as an interested unit of the population. Yet this interest is itself historicized, so Hobbes’s attempt to de-historicize politics did not fully succeed. (shrink)

Dissident circles during the Czechoslovak communist regime were organized in semi-private islands of resistance. They saw themselves as a parallel polis in line with Arendt’s notion of political action by pursuing “life in truth,” authentic experience, and ultimately freedom. The heroes of these circles were that society’s pariahs. In their quest for authenticity, they turned to the past to find meaning, to understand the nature of their communities and the needs for political action towards the future. As such, they sought (...) what Heidegger would label authentic public interpretations. After 1989, these heroes shaped and adapted to the constitutional design of the new polis and often experienced a transformation from pariah to inauthentic hero to at least the potential to become strong man, maintaining varying degrees of authenticity. (shrink)

This article addresses a debate in Descartes scholarship over the mind-dependence or -independence of time by turning to Merleau-Ponty’s "Nature" and "The Visible and the Invisible." In doing so, it shows that both sides of the debate ignore that time for Descartes is a measure of duration in general. The consequences to remembering what time is are that the future is shown to be the invisible of an intertwining of past and future, and that historicity is the invisible of God.

This paper examines the tensions at play in three important documents involved in the ‘war on terror’: the “Application of Treaties” White House Legal Counsel Memo of 2001, the “National Security Strategy” document of 2002, and the 2004 Supreme Court decision Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. Reading these documents, it becomes clear that there is an overarching misunderstanding and confusion of the traditionally separate concepts of ‘criminal’ and ‘enemy’ in the struggle against globalized terrorism.

This essay examines the status of events of 1989 in Czechoslovakia from an Arendtian perspective, focusing on whether they qualify as a revolution or even, precisely speaking, a modern event. For Arendt, revolutions are decidedly modern in that they expand freedom to all equally, an expansion conceivable because history can be thought of as rectilinear and because new ideas can be introduced into the secular world. Leaving aside the importance of violence as a criterion, we find that 1989 in Czechoslovakia (...) does not live up to her other criteria, nor does it make sense to call it either modern or postmodern. We thus claim that it is an ‘immodern’, non-revolutionary event. In concluding, we nd that its immodernity is why it failed to be a revolution. (shrink)

This essay compares Maurice Merleau-Ponty's notion of the flesh with Judith Butler's concept of primary vulnerability in terms of their helpfulness for developing an intersubjective ontology. It compares the flesh with Butler's more recent concept of primary vulnerability insofar as she sees both as useful for intersubjective ontology. The hiatus of the flesh is that which spans between self and world and opens Merleau-Ponty's thought onto an intersubjective ontology. While Butler's discussion of vulnerability as a primary condition of human existence (...) also makes this concept intersubjective, her understanding of violence as articulated through vulnerability makes this a more helpful concept for intersubjective ontology than the flesh. While many discussions of an intersubjective way of life focus almost exclusively on its positive possibilities, almost to the exclusion of violence altogether, the understanding of violence Butler presents through primary vulnerability helps us to discern whether a violation is benign or malign. In turn, this fuller understanding of violence lets primary vulnerability open onto an ethical imperative of reconciliation, but a reconciliation of what is never whole. (shrink)

This article reveals three aspects of victimhood in Bataille’s reading of Sade (of the other, of the self, and Sade’s language) and relates them to some of Bataille’s metaphysical and political notions: the impossible, the general and the restricted economy, sovereignty, and transgression. Doing so shows a progressive simplification of possibilities for transgression from the pre-Christian world to that of popular sovereignty, i.e., the sovereignty of the crowd, the latter leaving open one avenue for transgression: Sadean victimhood. The article then (...) applies these aspects to the pamphlet in Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir, “Frenchmen, Some More Effort If You Wish to Become Republicans,” in relation to a contemporaneous document of popular sovereignty, the preamble to the Constitution of the Year III, titled “Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and Citizen.” Attending to the aspects of Sadean victimhood in “Effort” shows that its system’s very impossibility makes it the Declaration’s logical completion. Finally, that impossibility is revealed as the sovereignty of the masses, distinct from that of the crowd. (shrink)

This article reveals three aspects of victimhood in Bataille’s reading of Sade (of the other, of the self, and Sade’s language) and relates them to some of Bataille’s metaphysical and political notions: the impossible, the general and the restricted economy, sovereignty, and transgression. Doing so shows a progressive simplification of possibilities for transgression from the pre-Christian world to that of popular sovereignty, i.e., the sovereignty of the crowd, the latter leaving open one avenue for transgression: Sadean victimhood. The article then (...) applies these aspects to the pamphlet in Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir, “Frenchmen, Some More Effort If You Wish to Become Republicans,” in relation to a contemporaneous document of popular sovereignty, the preamble to the Constitution of the Year III, titled “Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and Citizen.” Attending to the aspects of Sadean victimhood in “Effort” shows that its system’s very impossibility makes it the Declaration’s logical completion. Finally, that impossibility is revealed as the sovereignty of the masses, distinct from that of the crowd. (shrink)

This is a review of Marie-Eve Morin's translation of Jean-Luc Nancy's "Ego Sum.".

Hobbes and Butler both conjure images of an abandoned infant in their respective discussions of vulnerability. Leviathan uses this image to discuss original dominion, or natural maternal right over the child, while for Butler rights discourse produces fantasies of invulnerability that derealize other lives. However, Hobbes’s infant in nature has no rights and can only consent to being nourished. Only when able to nourish itself can it claim rights to transfer through the covenant producing a fantasy of individual invulnerability. Vulnerability (...) in the state of nature and the com- monwealth’s fantasy of invulnerability are together a counter-fantasy to the fantasies of invulnerability of Hobbes’s time, through heaven or eternal glory. In question is whether Butler, in her reimagining of community, is, like Hobbes, producing a fantasy, but a meta-fantasy that community can be taken as fantasy without derealizing the fantastic or that fantasizes an honesty about its being fantasy. (shrink)

This is a review of a book by William S. Allen.

This article traces the consequences for Badiou’s political subjectivity if his understanding of the Cartesian subject is incorrect. For Badiou, the faithful subject, political and otherwise, is formed through fidelity to the appearance of an event of truth, and the process of this fidelity creates a world. These truths are immanent to the worlds in which they appear. An obscure subject, however, is faithful to a negation, while a reactive subject denies the appearance of a truth’s event. Badiou’s subject radicalizes (...) Lacan’s radicalization of the Cartesian subject, but for him both Descartes and Lacan consider the subject stable since they are caused by truth rather than by the event of a truth. However, immanent to Descartes’s philosophy is an unstable subject, thanks to the role of the imagination in the discovery of the cogito. Fidelity to this immanent Cartesian subject shows Lacan as an obscure subject and Badiou as reactive. (shrink)

This paper examines the tensions at play in three important documents involved in the ‘war on terror’: the “Application of Treaties” White House Legal Counsel Memo of 2001, the “National Security Strategy” document of 2002, and the 2004 Supreme Court decision Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. Reading these documents, it becomes clear that there is an overarching misunderstanding and confusion of the traditionally separate concepts of ‘criminal’ and ‘enemy’ in the struggle against globalized terrorism.

This is the Introduction to a collected volume.

This is a review of a book edited by Richard Talaska.

This is a review of a book by Richard F. Hassing.

This is a review of a book by Ted H. Miller.

This paper discusses the suitability of using systemic thinking for teaching environmental rehabilitation to undergraduate students at Federal Universityof Viçosa. This is a predominantly agricultural sciences-based institution located in southeast Brazil. Student receptivity is discussed given concurrent campus paradigms of positivism, Marxism, and individualistic utilitarianism. Student projects using causal-loop diagrams to model degradation and land reclamation are presented. Eight archetypes common to systemic thinking are explained in reclamation contexts. Limitations of systemic thinking are discussed, including theoretical modeling problems and practical (...) teaching considerations. (shrink)

This is an entry on Jean-Luc Nancy's understanding of certain important Cartesian concepts, such as the cogito.

The judgement of human ability is ubiquitous, from school admissions to job performance reviews. The exact make-up of ability traits, however, is often narrowly defined and lacks a comprehensive basis. We attempt to simplify the spectrum of human ability, similar to how five personality traits are widely believed to describe most personalities. Finding such a basis for human ability would be invaluable since neuropsychiatric disease diagnoses and symptom severity are commonly related to such differences in performance. Here, we identified four (...) underlying ability traits within the National Institutes of Health Toolbox normative data : Motor-endurance, Emotional processing, Executive and cognitive function, and Social interaction. We used the Human Connectome Project young adult dataset to show that Motor-endurance and Executive and cognitive function were reliably associated with specific brain functional networks, and the biological nature of these ability traits was also shown by calculating their heritability from twin data. (shrink)

This is a review of a book by Andrew Haas.