This article discusses implicit conceptions of reticence in the early philosophical writings of Mikhail Bakhtin. Contrary to the image of Bakhtin as a thinker of dialogue, polyphony, and voice, it finds a strand in Bakhtin's thought that suggests that there might be good reasons for remaining silent and not stepping into the world in speech: in reticence, the human being avoids both judgment and being judged, eludes the risk of the addressee's absence or unreliability, and resists the finality of utterance (...) that shares in the finality of death. This essay makes a case for a Bakhtinian apology for quietism and seeks to contribute to recent work in Common Knowledge on that subject. Bakhtin's conception of reticence is usefully understood with reference to threshold situations: in withholding a future word, a human being hovers on the borders of nonbeing and being, on the borders of the present, future, and past. In this sense, reticence is allied to conceptions of fuzziness and blur that have also been concerns of this journal in recent years. In making these claims, the essay relates Bakhtin's thought to a Russian literary tradition of thinking about silence (Tiutchev's and Mandelstam's Silentium poems), as well as to a more broadly European intellectual context (Arendt and Heidegger, for example), where thinkers understand being in terms of becoming and understand disclosure through speech. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 28.2 (2004) 324-341 [Access article in PDF] Charles Lamb: Professor of Indifference Tim Milnes University of Edinburgh Nothing puzzles me more than time and space, and yet nothing puzzles me less, for I never think about them.1 I The name of Charles Lamb—essayist, poet, and notorious punster—does not loom large in studies of the philosophy of the English Romantics. The reasons for this initially unsurprising (...) fact range from the personal and obvious to the cultural and curious. Tied for most of his adult life to a clerk's desk at the East India Company, and to the care of his mentally ill sister at home, Lamb was rarely permitted the leisure even to dally in the expansive visionary landscapes explored in the epic works of consciousness of his friends Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Robert Southey. And yet, as the 1810 quip to Manning recorded above suggests, his reluctance to engage with philosophy is not merely attributable to the straitened life of the journeyman scribe. Such a remark is quite typical of Lamb's conscious attempt, in the face of a culture increasingly driven by the dissemination of knowledge, to cultivate an imaginative space the reverse of the knowing or "philosophical." It is this attitude that makes him more, not less, interesting alike for the intellectual historian and the philosopher.Lamb's avowed carelessness about matters philosophical is as familiar to his readers as the persona of "Elia" adopted for the essays he wrote for the London Magazine in the early 1820s. It is also just as beguiling and intriguing. Lamb's resistance to philosophy and his epistemic insouciance both trade on the suggestion that the desirable mind is the [End Page 324] ironic mind, reflecting—or, perhaps, refracting—a transitional and forever "imperfect" subjectivity. Correspondingly, his essays frequently invoke figures of liminality, of being in two or more states at once: whether between dreams and consciousness in "Witches, and other Night Fears" (1821); past and present in "Distant Correspondents" (1822); truth and lies in "Imperfect Sympathies" (1821); or literal and figurative selves in the imponderable relationship between "Lamb" of "On Christ's Hospital" (1813) and "Elia" of "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago" (1820).2 Moreover, this self-styled figure of the writer as always between alternate and often contrary conditions, beliefs and identities—what Lamb termed his "bi-parted nature"—has itself become a stock descriptor among Lamb's commentators.3 It is not difficult, for example, to detect its presence in Coleridge's portrayal of his friend as "one hovering between earth and heaven,"4 as well as De Quincey's depiction of a sleeping Lamb as "the image of repose midway between life and death, like the repose of a sculpture."5 More recently, it has shaped Jane Aaron's exploration of his proclaimed "double singleness"6 and Seamus Perry's characterisation of his "borderland," "serious-non-seriousness."7Understandably, critics of a certain bent have sought to link these features of Lamb's work, arguing that the centrifugal properties of his writing display an aversion to categorical "difference" that is directly related to his suspicion of the dualisms of systematic belief-systems. Gerald Monsman, for example, argues that insofar as Lamb's essays undermine "all transcendental reconciliations or definitive closures," they "appear to be sly critiques of the central dogmas of romanticism."8 However, to class Lamb's writing as radically decentred or self-deconstructing is to miss the profound nostalgia it evinces at critical moments for a neutral ground and a sense of belonging. Lamb's indifference to knowledge, and to philosophy as the pursuit of certain knowledge, is constantly challenged by his fear of imaginative dissolution. Correspondingly, Lamb/Elia's indifferent location between the real and the fictive never quite manages completely to repress the desire for truth. And yet, "indifference," quite apart from being a term that both fascinated and repelled Lamb himself, aptly characterises both his attitude to philosophy and knowledge on one hand, and the liminal properties of his prose on the other. Freud provides a... (shrink)

This is a comment to Graham Harman’s 2019 response to an article by Þóra Pétursdóttir and Bjørnar Olsen (2018) in which they propose that a materially grounded, archaeological perspective might complement Harman’s historical approach in Immaterialism (2016). Harman responds that his book is indeed already more archaeological than historical, stipulating that history is the study of media with a high density of information, whereas archaeology studies media with a low density of information. History, Harman holds, ends up in too (...) much detail, while archaeology has the advantage of lending itself to the imagination. Hence, his reading of history had the aim of tempering the historical information overload, in effect making the book a work of archaeology. In this comment, I want to do three things: (1) critique the idea that archaeological and historical media are inherently different with regard to their densities of information, (2) discuss how archaeology and history approach their media, and (3) reflect on conceptualisations of “archaeology” outside the discipline itself. (shrink)

This essay, by the editor of Common Knowledge, introduces the sixth and final installment of “Fuzzy Studies,” the journal's “Symposium on the Consequence of Blur.” Suggesting that “Fuzzy Studies” should be understood in the context of a desultory campaign against zeal conducted in the journal for almost twenty years, he explains that the editors' assumption has been that any authentic case for the less adamant modes of thinking, or the less focused ways of seeing, needs to be unenthusiastic and carefully (...) ramified. To establish the distinction between overenthused and unemphatic approaches to blur, he contrasts the ecstatically amorphous “Blur building” with examples of classical Chinese landscape painting. Elizabeth Diller and Richard Scofidio, in their book blur: the making of nothing, chronicle the development of their plans for the Blur building and, in the process, inadvertently show that, to overbear various negative associations of blur and fog, the authors/architects grew self-contradictorily emphatic about the need to produce de-emphasis in architecture and in modern life. Perl shows how this self-contradiction appears also in phenomenology-inflected writings on blur by T. J. Clark, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Kraus, J.-P. Sartre, and Georges Bataille, but not in the work of the phenomenologist François Jullien, whose book The Great Image Has No Form analyzes the role of blur in classical Chinese art theory and practice. Where traditional Western painting, Jullien argues, calls for voyeuristically intense focus, traditional Chinese painting stimulates “dé-tente, relaxation or ‘untensing’.” Intense focus on a blur is still, Perl observes, an intense focus. In describing a painting by the Yuan Dynasty master Ni Zan, Perl concludes that the only way to be un-self-contradictorily positive about fuzziness, whether in logic or aesthetics, is to de-reify and de-differentiate with the aim of achieving blandness. (shrink)

Introduction: Archaeology and Post-Structuralism Ian Bapty and Tim Yates i If it recedes one day, leaving behind its works and signs on the shores of our ...

Zbigniew Herbert studied philosophy at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń in the years 1949–1951 and attended seminars conducted by prof. Henryk Elzenberg, whose philosophical stance had a relevant impact on the poet’s oeuvre. This work analyses Stoic heritage present in the works of both the Philosopher and the Poet, as well as presents the axiological system of Elzenberg and its meaning for the attitude of “Mr. Cogito”. Elzenberg, following Seneca, divided values into the utilitarian and perfect ones, where the (...) latter possessed the quality of dignitas (“nobleness”). The perfect values referred to the Greek notion of kalokagathia and they were of primary importance in the creation of high culture that constituted the sphere of human dignity and freedom as opposed to the existential dread, indifference of nature or historical necessity. Herbert shared his Master’s stand on the meaning of culture and the table of values in human life, which is depicted, inter alia, in the poem dedicated to the Professor To Henryk Elzenberg on the Centenary of His Birth. Elzenberg claimed that axiologization the the world equals its substantialization. Finally, the acme of his axiology became natural mysticism and the source of perfect value the “transempirical” reality which Elzenberg used to call “the Undefined”. The Professor was distanced and sceptical towards the world and society. Herbert, on the other hand, remained faithful to the Christian heritage with its confirmation of the world as it is, as well as the everyday human reality, which he treated with sympathy and uderstanding, according to the idea of Christian agape. (shrink)

What does imagination do for our perception of the world? Why should reality be broken off from our imagining of it? It was not always thus, and in these essays, Tim Ingold sets out to heal the break between reality and imagination at the heart of modern thought and science. Imagining for Real joins with a lifeworld ever in creation, attending to its formative processes, corresponding with the lives of its human and nonhuman inhabitants. Building on his two previous essay (...) collections, The Perception of the Environment and Being Alive, this book rounds off the extraordinary intellectual project of one of the world's most renowned anthropologists. Offering hope in troubled times, these essays speak to coming generations in a language that surpasses disciplinary divisions. They will be essential reading not only to for anthropologists but also for students in fields ranging from art, aesthetics, architecture and archaeology to philosophy, psychology, human geography, comparative literature and theology. (shrink)

It is difficult to overestimate the impact, beginning in the 1960s, which Gombrich’s discussion of visual representation made on a good number of theorists in an entire generation of thinking about art and—even more—about literary art. For literary theory and criticism were at least as affected by his work as were theory and criticism in the plastic arts. Art and Illusion radically undermined the terms which had controlled discussion of how art represented “reality”—or, rather, how viewers or members of the (...) audience perceived that representation and related it to their versions of “reality.” And, for those who accompanied or followed him—from Rosalie Colie to Wolfgang Iser—Gombrich helped transform for good the meaning of a long revered term like “imitation” as it could be applied to both the visual and verbal arts. I believe he must, then, be seen as responsible for some of the most provocative turns that art theory, literary theory, and aesthetics have taken in the last two decades.In much of his work since the 1960s, however, Gombrich has appeared more and more anxious to dissociate himself from those who have treated his earlier books and essays as leading to the theoretical innovations which have claimed support from them. In The Image and the Eye, the statements which put distance between himself and such followers seem utterly unambiguous. And against the charge that his work has become more conservative with the passing years, I suspect Gombrich would argue that any claim of difference between, say, Art and Illusion and The Image and the Eye is a result of an original misreading, that the recent work is only more explicitly defending a traditional position which was quietly there all along, though supposedly friendly theorists wrongly saw him as subverting it in the earlier work. Thus Gombrich is now self-consciously committed to undoing what he sees as our errors of reading rather than his own errors of writing. Murray Krieger is University Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of, among other works, The Tragic Vision, The Classic Vision, Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and Its System, Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical History and Theory, and, most recently, Arts on the Level. He is presently working on Ekphrasis: Space, Time, and Illusion in Literary Theory . His latest contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor,” appeared in the Summer 1979 issue. (shrink)

We hear a lot about bubbles and echo chambers these days. People talk only to others who have similar ideas to themselves. Supporters of political parties, believers in conspiracy theories (such as QAnon), members of many other groups continually talk to fellow believers, and seldom seriously consider what outsiders say. However, we need to acknowledge that we ourselves also exist within bubbles. While perhaps not in the same league as the examples above, philosophy for/with children (P4/wC) advocates and researchers can (...) also fall into the trap of listening only to others within our field. In many ways, this is understandable. Over more than 50 years, the P4/wC literature has ballooned, and it is unlikely that any one person has had the time to be able to read it all, let alone chasing down other literature. Yet we are not the only people who are interested in classroom discussions. For example, when I was doing my PhD, I read a fascinating and informative book by JT Dillon—Using Discussion in Classrooms—which I have never seen referenced in the P4/wC literature. The book under review here is another example. Published in the Ed Psych Insights series by Routledge, it is edited by P Karen Murphy, the Harry and Marion Royer Eberly Faculty Fellow and Professor of Education at The Pennsylvania State University. Of the eight other contributors to this book, seven are doctoral students, and one a post-doc, at either The Pennsylvania State University or the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This is quite a tight little bubble: the Quality Talk bubble. Quality Talk (QT) is the name of the approach to classroom discussions devised by Murphy and her collaborators. (shrink)

Our usual view of the Renaissance poetic, as we derive it from the explicit statements which we normally cite, sees it primarily as a rhetorical theory which is essentially Platonic in the universal meanings behind individual words, images, or fictions. Accordingly, poetic words, images, or fictions are taken to be purely allegorical, functioning as arbitrary or at most as conventional signs: each word, image, or fiction is seen as thoroughly dispensable, indeed interchangeable with others, to be used just so long (...) as we can get beyond it to the ultimate meaning which it presumably signifies. This rather simple—if not simplistic—semiology leaves the body of poetry as empty as modern post-Saussurean linguistics often leaves the body of language. By treating all poetic devices as transparent elements through which various universal "truths" are revealed, the rhetorical/allegorical theory converts all the poet's dispositions of words into devices of persuasion on the service of a function higher than that of poetry. Such is the way that, for example, a conservative, widely influential theorist like Scaliger clearly formulated the principle. And for as careful a commentator on Renaissance imagery as Rosemund Tuve, these are the farthest reaches of the Renaissance poetic; she argues that any more subtle a claim is merely the consequence of the modern mind trying anachronistically to sophisticate an older tradition. Her examination of explicit statements by major Renaissance writers on poetics finds reinforcement in the logic of Petrus Ramus as she extends it to a total stylistics, or even to a linguistics.1 · 1. Rosemund Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics . Murray Krieger, University Professor of English and director of The Irvine School of Criticism and Theory at the University of California at Irvine, is the author of, among other works, The Tragic Vision, The Classic Vision, and, most recently, Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and its System. The present essay is part of his book, Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical History and Theory. "Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality," his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Winter 1974 issue. (shrink)

The global dispersal of prehistoric ancient humans from Africa to North America, and the existence of artistic innovation evidenced in the Late Pleistocene are, by now, parts of a familiar and fascinating story. But the explanation of how our human career was possible cries out for clarification. In this chapter, I argue that dual process theory can provide the needed explanation. My claim will be that the advent of System-2 reasoning running offline, aided by executive cognitive control and language, and (...) facilitated by neural plasticity, made possible the remarkable human dispersal from Africa to North America by way of the Middle East and Asia. System-1 modular adaptations, together with System-2 reasoning, gave rise to the flexible, culturally-informed, mental operations that were essential to shape the psychologically modern mind. The result was, inter alia, the surprising Late Pleistocene dispersal of ancient humans to North America. (shrink)

Is the Holocaust Vanishing? explores the ramifications of the passing of survivors for Holocaust studies, the removal of the Jew from Holocaust studies, and what all of this means for Jewish identity after the Holocaust. The book consists of years of reflection and wrestling with these issues on the part of a man who is a Holocaust survivor, a rabbi, and a professor of Holocaust studies.

I begin by asking an engagingly naive question that a layman would have every right to put to us - and often has. Why should we interest ourselves seriously in the once-upon-a-time worlds of fiction - these unreal stories about unreal individuals? It has been a persistent question in the history of criticism - ever since Plato called the poet a liar - and it is a question at once obvious and embarrassing. It is obvious because, for the apologist for (...) imaginative literature, it becomes a prolegomenon to all further questions; and it is embarrassing because merely to ask it threatens to put literature out of business and, with it, all those who treat it as a serious and world-affecting art. Why, then, should we interest ourselves seriously in fictions? However elementary, it is a question that is more easily asked than answered. Murray Krieger is the author of The Tragic Vision and The Classic Vision, which have recently been reprinted in the two-volume paperback Visions of Extremity in Modern Literature. He is University Professor of English and director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California at Irvine. "Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor," another contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Winter 1974 issue. See also: "The Dismantling of a Marionette Theater; or, Psychology and the Misinterpretation of Literature" by Erich Heller in Vol. 4, No. 3. (shrink)

I am troubled by the temper of E. H. Gombrich’s response, “Representation and Misrepresentation” , to my “Ambiguities of Representation and Illusion: An E. H. Gombrich Retrospective” and by his preferring not to sense the profound admiration—indeed, the homage—intended by my essay, both for his contributions to recent theory and for their influence upon its recent developments. But I am more troubled by the confusions his remarks may cause in the interpretation of his own work as well as in the (...) judgment of mine. There are important issues at stake, I feel, especially as regards the relation between scientific and aesthetic inquiry.The very irritated tone of his reaction helps make what I see as my major point: his work has contained a conflict between two Gombrichs—one, the skeptical humanist and, the other, the positive scientist—and with the passing years the second has increasingly sought to obliterate signs of the first, becoming increasingly impatient with any attempt to revive those signs or remind us of their existence. On the other side, since the line of literary criticism with which I associate myself has drawn strength from the first Gombrich, this development in his work and in his attitudes has caused some disappointment. Murray Krieger is University Professor of English at the University of California. He is the author of many works, including The Tragic Vision, The Classic Vision, Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and its System, Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical History and Theory, and Arts on the Level. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality” , “Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor” , and “The Ambiguities of Representation and Illusion: An E. H. Gombrich Retrospective”. (shrink)

This initial volume in a series of new translations of Plato’s works includes a general introduction and interpretive comments for the dialogues translated: the _Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Gorgias, _and _Menexenus. _ _ _“Allen’s work is very impressive. The translations are readable, lucid, and highly accurate. The general introduction is succinct and extremely clear. The discussion of the dating of the dialogues is enormously useful; there has previously been no brief account of these issues to which one could refer the (...) student. Finally, the particular introductions are first rate: fine jobs of clear philosophical and historical explanation—succinct and yet sophisticated, both close to the text and philosophically incisive.”—Martha Nussbaum, _Brown University_ “This is an important work that deserves our respect and attention.”—_Ethics _ _ _“This and the promised succeeding volumes will probably become the standard English version of the complete dialogues…. The commentaries take advantage of the best scholarship, judge judiciously between divergent views, and often introduce new and brilliant interpretations. This is true both in the area of philosophy and in that of literary criticism.”—Anthony C. Daly, S.J., _Modern Schoolman_ _ _“Allen is a superb translator, whose elegantly simple yet precise language gives access to Plato both as a philosopher and as a literary artist.”—_Library Journal__ _ “An important event in the world of scholarship.”—_London Review of Books_ _ _R.E. Allen is professor of classics and philosophy at Northwestern University. (shrink)

In "'Chinese Philosophy' at European Universities," Professor Defoort criticizes the institutional "place" of Chinese and "non-Western" studies at European universities. In order to demonstrate the problem, she describes the situation at the KU Leuven Department of History and its Institute of Philosophy. Regarding many of the important issues Defoort raises, I do not feel sufficiently competent to respond. For I am caught in Schwitzgebel's vicious circle : completely ignorant about non-Western philosophy and lacking the required language skills, I cannot (...) engage, as a philosopher, with non-Western texts. At the end of her article, however, Defoort... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Compelling ReasonsTim Thornton, MA, MPhil, PhD, DLitt (bio)There are many compelling reasons to have an interest in the philosophy of/and psychiatry. In 1994, when persuaded by Bill Fulford to walk down the corridor at Warwick University to join in his teaching of what seemed a newly developing subject—against my protestations that I knew nothing about mental health care—my main interest was in the irreducibility of meaning to the 'realm (...) of [natural scientific] law,' in Sellars's phrase. This had the bonus of complementing Bill's championing of the irreducibility and centrality of values in psychiatry. (It was only later we realized we disagreed about the not inconsequential issue of whether norms and values were subjective preferences or objective features of the world.) It seemed plausible to me that the irreducibility of the space of reasons to the realm of law might have interesting consequences for psychiatry. But mine was a purely disinterested academic interest. This is perhaps the usual approach to what is in part a professionalized academic subject with its formal rules for publication and dissemination of research.It has only been in the last decade that I have experienced things in a more personal way, following what I would term, though psychiatry would not, a nervous breakdown. My image of a breakdown came from reading Saul Bellow's novel Herzog. The titular Herzog has been left by his wife, cruelly, and retires from academic life to write letters. For example, to Heidegger. "Dear Doktor Professor Heidegger, I should like to know what you mean by the expression 'the fall into the quotidian.' When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?" I thought I would be able to maintain some sort of inquiring mind and write experientially grounded philosophy of psychiatry as a catharsis. I could study my own illness. This immediately proved a ridiculous hope.As a philosopher with a cognitivist bent—language, thought, and intentionality being guiding interests—I had always assumed that madness was only really a matter of what Jaspers calls 'primary delusions,' belief-like states that strain their belief-status, are hard for others to make sense of, and occur only with particularly severe forms of mental illness. But madness is also a matter of doing, saying and feeling as well as pure reasoning. What I would, previously and disinterestedly, have described as a dysregulation of emotional reactions turned out to transform my entire experience of the world and my ability to think rationally about it. I lost the ability to put my experiences into words. In truth, I lost all interest in that project. Only when not distressed could I take a view on my loss of world. Distressed, I did not understand myself.This is a neat illustration of epistemic disjunctivism. But it also highlights a challenge for, and some of the brilliance in those who have contributed to, the philosophy of mental health care, through their expertise by experience. While experience may be a necessary condition for particular forms of expertise, my own case reveals that it is not sufficient. Further, even an everyday and familiar mental illness (like my own) can render the articulation of experience, in a way that makes sense to others, very much harder. Hence the fact [End Page 11] that there is a thriving mental health service and patient movement, making their own experiences available to others combining first-person narratives with conceptual and phenomenological insight is both admirable and helps to set a part of PPP's future agenda: bringing first-person experience within a philosophically and clinically informed discipline. [End Page 12]Tim Thornton Tim Thornton, MA, MPhil, PhD, DLitt, is Professor of Philosophy and Mental Health and Mental Health and Deputy Head for Research in the School of Nursing at the University of Central Lancashire. As well as contemporary philosophy of thought and language, his research concerns conceptual issues at the heart of mental health care. He has published research papers on clinical judgement, idiographic and narrative understanding, the interpretation of psychopathology and reductionism and social constructionism in psychiatry.Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art as Symptom:Žižek and the Ethics of Psychoanalytic CriticismTim Dean (bio)This paper tackles a problem that is exemplified by, but not restricted to, Slavoj Žižek's work: the tendency to treat aesthetic artifacts as symptoms of the culture in which they were produced. Whether or not one employs the vocabulary and methods of psychoanalysis to do so, this approach to aesthetics has become so widespread in the humanities that it (...) qualifies as a contemporary critical norm. As a norm, it may be subject to debate and even contestation. Today it is normative to read literature, film, and other cultural texts primarily as evidence about the societies that made them—evidence that necessarily requires our hermeneutic labor in order to yield its significance. This methodological protocol remains in place whether one inhabits critical perspectives as ostensibly disparate as historicist, materialist, or psychoanalytic modes of thinking; it is also a grounding assumption of cultural studies, irrespective of how one defines that critical practice. Indeed, the issue I want to address is quite as much a Marxist problem as it is a psychoanalytic one, and therefore the way in which Žižek articulates Lacan with Marx makes his work especially fertile terrain on which to engage this matter. As Žižek reminds us in The Sublime Object of Ideology, Lacan claimed that Marx invented the symptom [SO 11]—an observation that Žižek has been keen to exploit from the very beginning of his work.Žižek's combining psychoanalysis with Marxism in novel ways has helped make Lacan more palatable to contemporary critical sensibilities by politicizing psychoanalysis, demonstrating how it offers less an account of the individual than of society and culture. In Žižek's hands psychoanalytic theory appears less vulnerable to the standard criticisms that it is ahistorical and apolitical. While a number of critiques of Žižek have reiterated these common objections, nevertheless his politicizing of psychoanalysis has been particularly important during a period that witnessed the rise of new historicism, the institutionalization of cultural studies, and the escalating importance of "the political" as a sign—perhaps the sign—of humanities professors' seriousness.1 Žižek's work has gone a long way toward making Lacan seem indispensable to cultural studies, just as Juliet Mitchell's and Jacqueline Rose's work a decade earlier made Lacan seem indispensable to theoretically rigorous feminism. At a moment when the poststructuralist variant of Lacanian theory was being displaced by historicist modes of thought, Žižek emerged on the scene to revivify psychoanalysis and make it exciting again. Thus his work's appeal has an historical basis quite apart from Žižek's own personal charisma and his remarkable productivity. It is his politicizing of psychoanalysis, as much as his [End Page 21] rendering Lacan newly accessible, that has made Žižek popular. I want to argue, however, that his style of politicizing psychoanalysis carries a significant ethical cost, one that follows partly as a consequence of Žižek's failure to work through his theoretical relation to Althusser, from whom he derives the practice of symptomatic reading while claiming to displace the latter's version of psychoanalytic Marxism. Thus I shall be arguing for a significant distinction between a political and an ethical psychoanalysis, suggesting that we have been cultivating the former at the expense of the latter.Spaghetti PsychoanalysisThe notion of the symptom is central to Žižek's thinking about politics and culture. Although in his work and in psychoanalytic theory more generally the term symptom carries a range of conceptual meanings, symptomatology remains the governing trope of Žižek's oeuvre. Following Lacan, who continued to modify the concept of the symptom throughout his career, Žižek argues that just about anything can be understood as symptomatic:[I]n the final years of Lacan's teaching we find a kind of universalization of the symptom: almost everything that is becomes in a way symptom, so that finally even woman is determined as the symptom of man. We can even say that "symptom" is Lacan's final answer to the eternal philosophical question "Why is there something instead of nothing?"—this "something" which "is... (shrink)

Parental reading to young children is well-established as being positively associated with child cognitive development, particularly their language development. Research indicates that a particular, “intersubjective,” form of using books with children, “Dialogic Book-sharing”, is especially beneficial to infants and pre-school aged children, particularly when using picture books. The work on DBS to date has paid little attention to the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of the approach. Here, we address the question of what processes taking place during DBS confer benefits to (...) child development, and why these processes are beneficial. In a novel integration of evidence, ranging from non-human primate communication through iconic gestures and pointing, archaeological data on Pre-hominid and early human art, to experimental and naturalistic studies of infant attention, cognitive processing, and language, we argue that DBS entails core characteristics that make it a privileged intersubjective space for the promotion of child cognitive and language development. This analysis, together with the findings of DBS intervention studies, provides a powerful intellectual basis for the wide-scale promotion of DBS, especially in disadvantaged populations. (shrink)

John McDowell is one of the most widely read philosophers in recent years. His engagement with a philosophy of language, mind and ethics and with philosophers ranging from Aristotle and Wittgenstein to Hegel and Gadamer make him one of the most original and outstanding philosophical thinkers of the post-war period. In this clear and engaging book Tim Thornton introduces and examines the full range of McDowell's thought. After a helpful introduction setting out McDowell's general view of philosophy Thornton introduces and (...) explains the following topics: • Wittgenstein on philosophy, normativity and understanding • value judgements • theories of meaning and sense • singular thought and Cartesianism • experience, knowledge and openness to the world • Mind and World and idealism • action and the debate with Hubert Dreyfus on conceptual content and skilled coping. This second edition has been significantly revised and expanded to include new sections on: McDowell's work on disjunctivism and criticisms of it; a new chapter on McDowell's modification of his account of perceptual experience and conceptual content and criticisms by Charles Travis; and a new chapter on action and McDowell's engagement with Hubert Dreyfus and the debate concerning skilled coping and mindedness. The addition of a glossary makes John McDowell, second edition essential reading for those studying McDowell, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, ethics and epistemology, as well as for students of the recent history of analytical philosophy generally. Tim Thornton is Professor of Philosophy and Mental Health at University of Central Lancashire, UK. He is author of Essential Philosophy of Psychiatry (2007), Wittgenstein on Language and Thought (1998), co-author of the Oxford Textbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry (2006), and Tacit Knowledge (2013) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry (2013). (shrink)

Under the balmy Mediterranean skies of Santa Margherita Ligure on the beautiful Italian Riviera, forty Hegelian scholars from nine countries put their heads together on the theme “Hegel’s Philosophie des subjectiven Geistes” at the Conference of the Internationale Hegel-Vereinigung, May 24–27, 1973. Enjoying the generosity of the Italian Government and the official hospitality of the Municipality of Santa Margherita, the participants heard and discussed four papers by German scholars, two each by Italians and Americans, and one each by a Dutch (...) and a French scholar. Professor Valerio Verra of the University of Rome served as host, and Professor Dieter Henrich, President of the Internationale Hegel-Vereinigung, introduced the theme of the Conference and officiated the proceedings. Chairing individual sessions and participating in the discussions were such internationally known figures as Hans-Georg Gadamer of Germany, Eric Weil and Marcel Régnier of France, W. H. Walsh and Anthony Kenny of Great Britain, and Enrico de Negri of Italy. (shrink)

It is a pleasure to all of us to hold forth upon subjects about which we know very little. It is particularly a temptation to university professors to get away from the subjects of their own chairs and lecture as dogmatically as their nature demands on subjects of other people's chairs. That is why I am speaking to-night about Psychology. As to Vice, the case is a little different. Even if my own experience is regrettably limited, I have for some (...) years studied the Chairman, and I bring my observations before a society full of persons whose range and profundity of knowledge will be sufficient to correct any hasty generalizations on my part. (shrink)

It is a thankless task to have to reply to Professor Murray Krieger’s “Retrospective.” Qui s’excuse, s’accuse, and since I cannot ask my readers to embark on their own retrospective of my writings and test them for consistency, I have little chance of restoring my reputation in their eyes. Hence I would have been happier to leave Professor Krieger to his agonizing, if he did not present himself the “spokesman” for a significant body of theorists who appear (...) to have acclaimed my book on Art and Illusion without ever having read it. The followers of this school of criticism—of which Professor Krieger is a prominent member—had apparently convinced themselves that the book lent support to an aesthetics in which the notions of reality and of nature had no place. They thought that I had subverted the old idea of mimesis and that all that remained were different systems of conventional signs which were made to stand for an unknowable reality. True, professor Krieger admits that I never endorsed such an interpretation of my views, and he even concedes that there are passages in Art and Illusion which contradict such an out-and-out relativism, but he wants to convince his readers that these contradictions lead precisely to the ambiguities he now proposes to analyse.If he were right that the book encourages such a misreading, all I could do would be to express my regrets for having failed to make myself sufficiently clear. Luckily I can draw comfort from the fact that unlike these literary critics, the leading archaeologist of this country, Professor Stuart Piggott, had no difficulty at all in discerning my meaning and profiting from my arguments. In his Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture of 1978, entitled Antiquity Depicted: Aspects of Archaeological Illustration, the author did me the honour of taking a statement from my book as his starting point. It is the passage at the end of part I in which I recapitulate the content of the first two chapters:What matters to us is that the correct portrait, like the useful map, is an end product on a long road through schema and correction. It is not a faithful record of a visual experience but the faithful construction of a relational mode.Neither the subjectivity of vision nor the sway of conventions need lead us to deny that such a model can be constructed to any required degree of accuracy. What is decisive here is clearly the word “required.” The form of a representation cannot be divorced from its purpose and the requirements of the society in which the given visual language gains currency.1 1. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1956 , p. 90. E. H. Gombrich was director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition at the University of London from 1959 to 1976. His many influential works include The Story of Art, Art and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, The Sense of Order, Ideals and Idols, The Image and the Eye, and, most recently, Tributes. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry include “The Museum: Past, Present and Future and “Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image and the Moving Eye”. (shrink)

This is the first volume to address directly the question of the speciation of modern Homo sapiens. The subject raises profound questions about the nature of the species, our defining characteristic (it is suggested it is language), and the brain changes and their genetic basis that make us distinct. The British Academy and the Academy of Medical Sciences have brought together experts from palaeontology, archaeology, linguistics, psychology, genetics and evolutionary theory to present evidence and theories at the cutting edge (...) of our understanding of these issues. Palaeontological and genetic work suggests that the transition from a precursor hominid species to modern man took place between 100,000 and 150,000 years ago. Some contributors discuss what is most characteristic of the species, focussing on language and its possible basis in brain lateralization. This work is placed in the context of speciation theory, which has remained a subject of considerable debate since the evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian theory. The timing of specific transitions in hominid evolution is discussed, as also is the question of the neural basis of language. Other contributors address the possible genetic nature of the transition, with reference to changes on the X and Y chromosomes that may account for sex differences in lateralization and verbal ability. These differences are discussed in terms of the theory of sexual selection, and with reference to the mechanisms of speciation. These essays will be vital reading for anyone interested in the nature and origins of the species, and specifically human abilities. (shrink)

In an urbane and persuasive tract for our time, the distinguished Catholic theologian combines a comprehensive metaphysics with a sensitivity to contemporary existentialist thought. Father Murray traces the “problem of God” from its origins in the Old Testament, through its development in the Christian Fathers and the definitive statement by Aquinas, to its denial by modern materialism. Students and nonspecialist intellectuals may both benefit by the book, which illuminates the problem of development of doctrine that is now, even more (...) than in the days of Newman, a fundamental issue between Roman Catholic and Protestant, theologians and nonspecialst intellectuals alike will find the subject of vital interest. As a challenge to the ecumenical dialogue, the question is raised whether, in the course of its development through different phases, the problem of God has come back to its original position. Father Murray is Ordinary professor of theology at Woodstock College, Woodstock, Maryland. St. Thomas More Lectures, 1. "A gem of a book—lucid, illuminating, brilliantly written. A fine contribution to the current Catholic theological renaissance."—Paul Weiss. (shrink)

This essay examines the variety of ways that historians have engaged with material culture in their work over the last few decades. Although textual records from the archive remain privileged sources, the diversity of historiographical approach has led to a range of historiographical practices including a material turn. Two major approaches to objects have dominated. Dubbed ‘object driven’ and ‘object centred’, these variously use objects as evidence for a very wide range of research questions, and focus on past material cultures (...) respectively. Focusing on a case study of Holocaust historiography, the essay identifies the challenges for contemporary archaeology generated by these two historiographical traditions, as well as by the self-reflectivity over narrating material pasts/past materialities that characterizes historical practice. (shrink)

Originally published in 1937, this book presents the philosophy of James Ward, the Professor of Mental Philosophy and Logic at the University of Cambridge. Ward was primarily concerned with the perceived antagonism between science and philosophy or religion, and Murray supplies a psychological background to Ward's thinking that helps to explain his interest in this topic. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Ward or the duality of faith and reason.

Other Greek novels open in poleis, before swiftly shunting their protagonists out of them and into the adventure world. Why does Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon open in a house , and stay there for almost one quarter of the novel? This article explores the cultural, psychological, and metaliterary role of the house in Achilles, reading it as a site of conflict between the dominant, patriarchal ideology of the father and the subversive intent of the young lovers. If the house (...) principally embodies the authoritarian will of the father to order and control, it nevertheless provides the lovers with opportunities to re-encode space opportunistically as erotic. The house cannot be reconstructed archaeologically , but it is nevertheless clearly divided into different qualitative zones—diningroom, bedrooms, garden—each of which has its own psychosocial and emotional texture, its own challenges, and its own resources. Achilles' modelling of the house may reflect Roman ideas of domestic aristocratic display, and perhaps even the influence of Roman literature. (shrink)

The following paper was written in 1999, as the opening speech at the Hobart FAPCA National Conference. I was, at the time, Chair of FAPCA. The keynote speaker at the conference was Professor Gareth Matthews from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and author of, among other books, The Philosophy of Childhood. As the paper was written as a speech, and not as an academic article, I did not cite all the points made in full academic mode. Rather, for (...) publication in Critical and Creative Thinking, I added a list of further reading which gives details for all the articles and books mentioned in the speech. At the time, I had just completed my PhD, and taken up the position of International Baccalaureate Coordinator at The Friends’ School in Hobart. Subsequently in 2001, a revised and abridged version of the thesis was published by Routledge under the title Philosophical Discussion in Moral Education, and readers who are interested in following up some of my points made in the paper can find more detail there. (shrink)

Epicurus’ debt to Democritus’ metaphysics is obvious. Even where Epicurus feels the need to modify Democritus’ metaphysics because of its skeptical or fatalist implications, he is working within Democritus’ general framework. The situation is quite different in ethics. Ancient critics of Epicurus claim that the Cyrenaics’ hedonism is the inspiration for his ethics, and in modern times, Epicurus’ ethics is usually viewed in the context of Aristotle’s eudaimonism.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.4 (2001) 355-363 [Access article in PDF] Plato on Power, Moral Responsibility and the Alleged Neutrality of Gorgias' Art of Rhetoric (Gorgias 456c-457b) James Stuart Murray 1. Introduction You are sitting in your office on a quiet Thursday afternoon when an agitated university administrator enters with news that the students in your "Plato class" have just been interviewed on the city's largest radio station. According (...) to them, their professor claimed that the demise of their university is a direct result of the fact that senior administrative positions are held by a motley assortment of business-oriented, academically cynical, "renewal"-promoting "innovators" whose main preoccupation is "government funding opportunities" in areas of dubious academic importance.Your response might be: "That's not what I taught them." Or perhaps you might say, "That's not exactly what I taught them--I didn't say it was a 'motley' assortment." In either case, you would be relying on some form of what Robert Wardy (170, n.r 20) has dubbed the "blame students, not teachers defence." He asserts, perhaps correctly, that this defense gained the status of topos within the ancient rhetorical tradition. A version of it certainly does seem to show up in Isocrates' Antidosis (250-52) and perhaps in his Nicocles (3-4), and it is suggested by remarks in both Aristotle's Rhetoric (1355b) and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria (II,16,5). On this occasion, however, I am concerned with only one rendition, probably its earliest extant instance in Greek literature. In Plato's Gorgias, the eponymous sophist argues as follows: Imagine someone who after attending wrestling school, 1 getting his body into good shape and becoming a boxer, went on to strike his father and mother or any other family member or friend. By Zeus, that's no reason to hate physical trainers... and to exile them from their cities! For while these people imparted their skills to be used justly against enemies and wrongdoers, and in [End Page 355] defense, not aggression, their pupils pervert their strength and skill and misuse them. So it's not their teachers who are wicked, nor is this a reason why the craft should be a cause of wickedness; the ones who misuse it are supposedly the wicked ones. And the same is true for oratory as well. The orator has the ability to speak against everyone on every subject, so as in gatherings to be more persuasive, in short, about anything he likes, but the fact that he has the ability to rob doctors or other craftsmen of their reputations doesn't give him any more of a reason to do it. He should use oratory justly, as he would any competitive skill. And I suppose that if a person who has become an orator goes on with this ability and this craft to commit wrongdoing, we shouldn't hate his teacher and exile him from our cities. For while the teacher imparted it to be used justly, the pupil is making the opposite use of it. So it's the misuser whom it's just to hate and exile or put to death, not the teacher. (Gorgias 456d, 457a-b) 2Change "exile from our cities" to "fire from our universities" and this makes a good passage to remember when confronted by that agitated administrator mentioned above. Blame the students, not the teachers.Not much comment has been provoked by this defense of Gorgianic rhetoric and its underlying rhetor/boxer analogy, except over the question of whether we should read the passage as an accurate reflection of the words of the historical Gorgias or as a Platonic invention. In a previous generation, E. R. Dodds (212) reckoned that this defense was "probably the standpoint of the historical Gorgias," while E. A. Havelock (195) cautioned that "there is little--very little--that he [i.e., Plato] lets Gorgias say in the Gorgias." In our own day, and on a more general level, Thomas Cole (151) states that "Plato's... (shrink)

Why Agamben? -- Key ideas -- Language and the negativity of being -- Infancy and archaeological method -- Potentiality and the task of the coming philosophy -- Politics : bare life and sovereign power -- The homeland of gesture : art and cinema -- The laboratory of literature -- Bearing witness and messianic time -- After Agamben.

This article constitutes the first part of a larger paper concerning the philosophical provenance of Mr. Cogito, the title character of poems by Zbigniew Herbert, which were published under the same title by “Czytelnik” in 1974. The poet used to study philosophy and corresponded for many years with his Master, Professor Henryk Elzenberg. The first part of the paper presents Mr. Cogito’s polemics with Cartesian apriorism, according to which only rational thinking leads to the knowledge of the truth. Herbert’s (...) lyrical character draws attention to the fallacy of Cartesian methodological reductionism; Mr. Cogito’s knowledge is individual, connected with both his mind and his sense and empirical experience. In the terminology of J.H. Newman, whose philosophy was known to Herbert, there is not merely notional knowledge, based on ratio, but the equally important real knowledge, which stems from the experience of an individual human being. (shrink)

Why is humour so hard to understand? Rather like attempts to explain how music can move us, attempts to explain why things are funny seem doomed from the outset. Discussions of humour typically distinguish three kinds of theory: the incongruity theory (we are amused by the incongruous), the relief theory (humour is an expression of relief in difficult situations) and the superiority theory (we laugh to express our sense of superiority over others). In the face of genuine humour, theories like (...) these can seem pedestrian and unconvincing. F.H. Buckley’s book is, unfortunately, no exception to this rule. Coming from the superiority camp, the book defends two theses about humour. (Professor Buckley’s own word is ‘laughter’, but it is clear that he is really interested in why we laugh rather than laughter itself.) The first is what he calls the ‘Positive’ thesis: that all humour is the expression of a sense of superiority over someone else, whom he names ‘the butt’. The second he calls the ‘Normative’ thesis: that those who laugh really are superior to the butt. (shrink)

It is a pleasure to all of us to hold forth upon subjects about which we know very little. It is particularly a temptation to university professors to get away from the subjects of their own chairs and lecture as dogmatically as their nature demands on subjects of other people's chairs. That is why I am speaking to-night about Psychology. As to Vice, the case is a little different. Even if my own experience is regrettably limited, I have for some (...) years studied the Chairman, and I bring my observations before a society full of persons whose range and profundity of knowledge will be sufficient to correct any hasty generalizations on my part. (shrink)

The impact on Momigliano of being an academic refugee of "the Bund" group at Oxford during the war was profound. It is this experience which turned him from the learned but orthodox Italian ancient historian into the European polymath, who took the whole classical tradition as his domain. A crucial turning-point for Momigliano was his decision to study the history of historiography. From 1951 Momigliano, as Professor of Ancient History at University College London, was a central figure in historical (...) studies. Three grand themes had matured in his mind during his middle period in England: the history of late antiquity, the history of historiography, and the origins of Rome. The first two were to have great impact on English classical scholarship. In 1965 there began a series of seminars at the Warburg Institute in which Momigliano played a significant role, and which focused particularly on the relationship between ancient history and anthropology and the attempt to write a history of Greek biography. In studying Momigliano's life in England, the distinctive quality of his literary style and the continuities in his approach to history become especially clear. (shrink)