_A penetrating and provocative exploration of human mortality, from Epicurus to Joan Didion_ For those who don’t believe in an afterlife, the wisdom of the ages offers four great consolations for mortality: that death is benign and good; that mortal life provides its own kind of immortality; that true immortality would be awful; and that we experience the kinds of losses in life that we will eventually face in death. Can any of these consolations honestly reconcile us to our (...) inevitable demise? In this timely book, Andrew Stark tests the psychological truth of these consolations and searches our collective literary, philosophical, and cultural traditions for answers to the question of how we, in the twenty-first century, might accept our mortal condition. Ranging from Epicurus and Heidegger to bucket lists, the flaming out of rock stars, and the retiring of sports jerseys, Stark’s poignant and learned exploration shows how these consolations, taken together, reveal death as a blessing no matter how much we may love life. (shrink)

_A penetrating and provocative exploration of human mortality, from Epicurus to Joan Didion_ For those who don’t believe in an afterlife, the wisdom of the ages offers four great consolations for mortality: that death is benign and good; that mortal life provides its own kind of immortality; that true immortality would be awful; and that we experience the kinds of losses in life that we will eventually face in death. Can any of these consolations honestly reconcile us to our (...) inevitable demise? In this timely book, Andrew Stark tests the psychological truth of these consolations and searches our collective literary, philosophical, and cultural traditions for answers to the question of how we, in the twenty-first century, might accept our mortal condition. Ranging from Epicurus and Heidegger to bucket lists, the flaming out of rock stars, and the retiring of sports jerseys, Stark’s poignant and learned exploration shows how these consolations, taken together, reveal death as a blessing no matter how much we may love life. (shrink)

From all of the evidence, Joan of Arc was a conventionally pious Catholic and a patriotic Frenchman. Yet she was tried as a heretic and executed as a traitor. She unnerved both her friends and her enemies in the church and the state with her zeal. And she continues to fascinate. Almost six centuries after she was burned at the stake, her body still has life. This essay uses Kantorowicz's reading of the historical development of the legal fiction of (...) the king's two bodies to re-focus our attention on what Joan of Arc accomplished as a political actor. (shrink)

There is little fear that the concept of motivational bias as proposed by Mele is likely to dampen the current academic ferment (see Mele's Introduction) with respect to self-deception for several reasons: (a) like philosophy, science has more recently abandoned the heuristic of a rational human mind; (b) the concept is parsimonious, applicable to many research topics other than self-deception, and, therefore, scientifically serviceable; (c) as a proximal mechanism it addresses process rather than function, that is, how rather than why (...) questions; (d) it is not as interesting a question as why there is a high prevalence of “real” self-deception (i.e., “garden-variety self-deception” as described by Mele, see sect. 6); and (e) a more penetrating issue is whether “real” self-deception is adaptive. (shrink)

Reviewing one of Derrida's books necessarily entails steering a path that avoids two sirens--the Scylla of oversimplifying or reducing, when confronted with a movement of thought which evolves deliberately in order to subvert categories, or the Charybdis of being merely mimetic and repetitive, fossilizing the strategies and gestures that have become identified with a signature that has achieved a peculiar singularity and currency. Such a path perhaps begins with the acknowledgement that Derrida is a philosopher who poses philosophical questions to (...) texts, wherever they come from, and to textuality as such. (shrink)

Reviewing one of Derrida's books necessarily entails steering a path that avoids two sirens--the Scylla of oversimplifying or reducing, when confronted with a movement of thought which evolves deliberately in order to subvert categories, or the Charybdis of being merely mimetic and repetitive, fossilizing the strategies and gestures that have become identified with a signature that has achieved a peculiar singularity and currency. Such a path perhaps begins with the acknowledgement that Derrida is a philosopher who poses philosophical questions to (...) texts, wherever they come from, and to textuality as such. (shrink)

Inside Notes From the Outside wrestles with issues that have loomed over anyone who has had to come to terms with concrete, pragmatic questions regarding identity within the interacting spheres of race, gender, class, and power. Based on the premise that discourse regarding these issues tend to be cast into a relationship of powerful vs. powerless, the author contends that power is not a fixed thing, but a subtle, complex matrix that shifts over time. A thoughtful approach toward issues of (...) cultural difference, Inside Notes From the Outside provides a sincere and uniquely interior perspective on identity formation. (shrink)

Book-carrying styles of 1,133 school-age children (kindergarten through high school) were observed, and anatomical measurements (hips, waist, and underarm) of the space between the trunk and fall line of the arm in 735 of the students was recorded. With the exception of handedness, the results replicated those of earlier studies of sexual differences in bookcarrying styles and implicated the protrusion of female hips as instrumental in this phenomenon.

Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

These posthumous essays by Joan Kelly, a founder of women's studies, represent a profound synthesis of feminist theory and historical analysis and require a realignment of perspectives on women in society from the Middle Ages to the present.

Grounded in a close reading of the records of Joan's trial and rehabilitation, on the early letters announcing her arrival at Chinon, and on three literary works; Christine de Pizan's Ditié, Martin le Franc's Le Champion des dames, and Alain Chartier's, Traité de l’Esperance, this controversial work argues that serious historians should accept that Joan was trained. It proposes that she was identified and taught how to behave in the expectation of the fulfillment of the Charlemagne Prophecy and (...) other prophecies from the Joachite tradition. It explores the possibility that Christine de Pizan, who had been promoting these prophecies from the beginning of the century, had some hand in the process that resulted in Joan's appearance and demonstrates, at the very least, that there are many links connecting Christine de Pizan to the knights who fought with Joan. (shrink)

Levinas’s Humanism of the Other may be seen as a meditation of King Lear. His philosophy offers what a critique of traditional and modern anti-humanism urgently needs: an ethics that precedes being. It provides a necessary ethical foundation needed to investigate questions of the human and humanity that Shakespeare examines so thoroughly in this powerful tragedy. Prefiguring Levinas’s later philosophy, Shakespeare dramatizes this humanism of the other through the suffering and vulnerability of the body. Lear’s and Gloucester’s parallel journeys are (...) both grounded in this vulnerability of the body and fragility of the mind that lead them to a humanism of the other. Moreover, the ethical good that precedes ontology, the saying, is profoundly staged through the characters of Cordelia and Edgar. This vision of King Lear, therefore, underlies and informs Levinas’s radical critique of traditional humanism and contemporary anti-humanism in his insistence on a humanism of the other. (shrink)

This paper aims to trace the evolution of Bachelard's thought as he gropes toward a concrete formulation of a philosophy of the imagination. Reverie, the creative daydream, occupies the central position in Bachelard's emerging metaphysic, which becomes increasingly “phenomenological” in a manner reminiscent of Husserl. This means that although Bachelard does not use Husserlian terms, he appropriates the following features of (Husserlian) phenomenology: 1. a desire to “embracket” the initial (rationalistic) impulse; and 2. an aspiration to apprehend in its entirety, (...) the creative epiphany of an image. Ultimately, this paper aims to show that there is a sense in which Bachelard's metaphysical concerns in his poetics are an outgrowth of (rather than radical break from) his earlier scientific and epistemological concerns. What results in reverie is an aesthetic intentionality providing a metaphysic of the imagination: the aesthetic object, such as fire or water, is an object only insofar as it enables/calls forth a subject to enter into a receptive, self-aware and cosmic state of being; subject-ness and object-ness are intimately and archetypally intertwined. Bachelard's “new poetics” results from his transplantation/cross-fertilization of the general epistemology of the “new scientific spirit” on to/across his aesthetics. (shrink)

The Strong AI-Thesis. The controversy about the strong AI-thesis was recently revived by two interrelated contributions stemming from J. R. Searle on the one hand and from P. M. and P. S. Churchland on the other hand. It is shown that the strong AI-thesis cannot be defended in the formulation used by the three authors. It violates some well accepted criterions of scientific argumentation, especially the rejection of essentialistic definitions. Moreover, Searle's 'proof' is not conclusive. Though it may be reconstructed (...) in a conclusive manner, the modified proof is trivial. Beyond that, the most interesting aspect is formulated as an axiom that is not justified either. Therefore Searle's criticism of strong AI-thesis fails to be a convincing proof - it can be reduced to an unjustified presupposition. (shrink)

Frege begins Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, the work that introduces the project which was to occupy him for most of his professional career, with the question, 'What is the number one?' It is a question to which even mathematicians, he says, have no satisfactory answer. And given this scandalous situation, he adds, there is small hope that we shall be able to say what number is. Frege intends to rectify the situation by providing definitions of the number one and the (...) concept of number. But what, exactly, is required of a definition? Surely it will not do to stipulate that the number one is Julius Caesar - that would change the subject. It seems reasonable to suppose that an acceptable definition must be a true statement containing a description that picks out the object to which the numeral '1' already refers. And, similarly, that an acceptable definition of the concept of number must contain a description that picks out precisely those objects that are numbers - those objects to which our numerals refer. Yet, while Frege writes a great deal about what criteria his definitions must satisfy, the above criteria are not among those he mentions. Nor does he attempt to convince us that his definitions of '1' and the other numerals are correct by arguing that these definitions pick out objects to which these numerals have always referred. Yet, while Frege writes a great deal about what criteria his definitions must satisfy, the above criteria are not among those he mentions. Nor does he attempt to convince us that his definitions of ‘1’ and the other numerals are correct by arguing that these definitions pick out objects to which these numerals have always referred. There is, as we shall see shortly, a great deal of evidence that Frege’s definitions are not intended to pick out objects to which our numerals already refer. But if this is so, how can these definitions teach us anything about our science of arithmetic? And what criteria must these definitions satisfy? To answer these questions, we need to understand what it is that Frege thinks we need to learn about the science of arithmetic. (shrink)

A psychoanalytic and philosophical exploration of sublimation as a key term in Jacques Lacan's theories of ethics and feminine sexuality.

Examines Dante’s character of Beatrice and contends that, more than simply leading Dante to God, Beatrice allows him to see a feminine side in God, humanity, and himself.