This book addresses key Whiteheadian texts and secondary interpretations of Whitehead.

there is something else to which we are witness, and which we might describe as an insurrection of subjugated knowledges. (Foucault, 2L, 81)a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, . . . . (82)What emerges out of this is something one might call a genealogy, or rather a multiplicity of genealogical researches, a painstaking rediscovery of struggles together with the rude memory of their conflicts. (83)Let us give the (...) term genealogy to the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today. (83)If we were to characterise it in two terms, then “archaeology” would be the appropriate methodology of this analysis of local discursivities, and “genealogy” would be the tactics whereby, on the basis of the descriptions of these local discursivities, the subjected knowledges which were thus released would be brought into play. (85). (shrink)

Subjects and Simulations presents essays focused on suffering and sublimity, representation and subjectivity, and the relation of truth and appearance through engagement with the legacies of Jean Baudrillard and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.

This anthology has been significantly expanded for this edition to include a wider range of contemporary issues.

The four parts of this anthology comprise a remarkably wide array of positions on the nature and importance of art in human experience. Part I, from the history of philosophy, includes selections by the essential writers: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche. Part II contains significant selections from Dewey, Langer, Goodman, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. The major selections in Part III are from Hirsch and Gadamer on the nature of interpretation, supplemented by selections from Pepper, Derrida, and Foucault. Selections in Part IV (...) sharpen the issues that emerge from the more theoretical discussions in the preceding sections. Significantly revised for this second edition, Part IV now presents discussions of major contemporary importance. In recognition of the increasing influence of Bakhtin and his notion of linguistic multiplicity, materials from The Dialogic Imagination are included. A new section on postmodernism presents some of Lyotard’s definitions of the phenomenon. The Frankfurt School is more adequately represented with the addition of the essays by Benjamin and Adorno to the selection from Marcuse. Perhaps the most important additions are the essays by Gottner-Abendroth, Cixous, and Owens. Crucial contributions to the contemporary discourse, these writings from feminist theory represent a mode of thought that questions male-centered structures of authority and expression. These changes result in a more provocative and representive second edition. (shrink)

This anthology has been significantly expanded for this edition to include a wider range of contemporary issues.

The general theory of art and aesthetic value developed in this book is based on the notions of inexhaustibility and contrast and has important forebears in Kant, Coleridge, and Whitehead.

Explores how we might think and live in the enchantment of the secular, modern world.

_Explores how we might think and live in the enchantment of the secular, modern world._.

LOCALITY AND JUDGMENT THE GENERAL THEMES OF THE VIEW OF PRACTICE I will develop here are expressed in the triangle of locality, inexhaustibility, ...

This book addresses the nature and injustice of authority, retracing the ideas of reason and law from ancient Greece to the present, pursuing a line of thought begun with Anaximander, who speaks of the ordinance of time as restitution for ...

This work completes Ross 's trilogy examining the inexhaustible complexity of the world and our relation to our surroundings.

Traces the history of the idea of art as an ethical movement, interpreting the good as nature's abundance, giving rise to an ethics of inclusion, expressed in art.

Explores the human propensity for owning and having.

Explores themes of dispossession, shattering, and fragmentation that arise in contemporary writings from the point of view of the selves whose subjectivities and practices are said to be fragmented, shattered, and dispossessed.

The Limits of Language concerns itself with the nature and limits of language at a time when our understanding of the world and of ourselves is intimately related to what we understand of language.

Ross (philosophy and comparative literature, State U. of New York, Binghamton) explores how it might be possible to represent representation. Interpretations of a wide range of modern philosophical works combine with original contributions.

Some preliminary observations must be made concerning the nature and purpose of this study. What I have attempted here is an essay in the metaphysics of science, and not the "philosophy of science. " Rather than concentrating on the details of theory-construction and the for mal structure of scientific systems, I have treated science as an enter prise, a developing process within human experience. I have used such an approach in order to analyze science in its relationship to other human (...) enterprises, such as art and philosophy, and to clarify its unique goals and characteristics. Often the concepts employed in descriptions of scientific methods are conceived too narrowly; by broadening the focus of attention I have attempted to characterize in a fairly general fashion the goals and methods of science. This has led to formulations which may seem at first glance to depart radically from some "well established" distinctions of the philosophy of science. I hope that it will be clear, however, that such formulations arise at a different level of analysis and concern very different problems from those of the logic of science. In particular, I am concerned with the general goals of science. These must not be confused with the narrower principles of method employed in science at any given time. (shrink)

This book presents the principles and categories of an ordinal metaphysics in relation to the metaphysical tradition and contemporary issues. It represents the only current systematic and metaphysical effort to resolve the difficulties that have made metaphysics suspect through most of the twentieth century. Ross begins with a summary of Justus Buchler’s Metaphysics of Natural Complexes, where the theory was first formulated, and then expands and develops Buchler’s ideas in important new directions. He seeks to replace the “cosmological view” that (...) reality is single-valued and wholly determinate with a plural, functional, and ordinal ontology that avoids the major deficiencies of the metaphysical tradition and resolves many contemporary issues. (shrink)

Introduction: The forgotten -- Re-calling -- Re-membering -- Unremembering -- Enlightenment -- History -- Counter-memory -- Body and image -- Past and future -- Everyday life -- Diachrony -- Inheritance -- Pain -- Disaster.

pt. 1. The image in abundance -- pt. 2. The wonder of the earth.

The ownership condemned with such rigor by the mystics, and often called impurity, is only the search for one's own solace and one's own interest in the jouissance of the gifts of God, at the expense of the jealousy of the pure love that wants everything for God and nothing for the creature .... Ownership, of course, is nothing but self-love or pride, which is the love of one's own excellence insofar as it is one's own, and which, instead of (...) coming back completely and uniquely to God, still to a small extent brings the gifts of God back to the self so that it can takepleasure in them. (Fénelon: quoted in Nancy, SL, 94)Love defines itself as the absolute opposite and as the destruction of self-love. Self-love is not simply the love of the self; .... One can love oneself with a real love, and it might even be that one must do so .... But self-love, understood according to the signification the spiritual authors gave to it, .... is the love (which, from this moment on, is no longer one) of possession. It is the love of the self as property. (pp. 94-5). (shrink)

Quantum aesthetics fosters what might be called a general thesis of metaphysical intimacy. There is no place left, even in nature, where uninterpreted events can hide. With regard to the work of Niels Bohr and Heisenberg, this condition of unavoidable interpretation is referred to as the “indivisibility of the quantum action.” Accordingly, talking about any privileged or pristine considerations involves contradictions that, according to advocates of quantum aesthetics, must be overcome. Now, every facet of existence has a voice that has (...) a human origin and must be correctly deciphered. Even nature is not simply confronted, but must be explored in terms of its cultural nuances. (Caro and Murphy, eds., WQC, 182). (shrink)

I wish to take up the subject ... in relation to a set of practices in late antiquity. Among the Greeks, these practices took the form of a precept: epimeleisthai sautou, "to take care of yourself," to take "care of the self," "to be concerned, to take care of yourself."The precept of the "care of the self" [souci de soi] was, for the Greeks, one of the main principles of cities, one of the main rules for social and personal conduct (...) and for the art of life. For us now, this notion is rather obscure and faded. (Foucault, TS, 19). (shrink)

Zen-Buddhist nothingness is the nowhere is there something that is I, or conversely: the I that is the nowhere is there something. (Hisamatsu, FN, 25-26; quoted and trans. in Stambaugh, FS, 76)... it is empty of being. That means that it is beyond all measure ....... it is empty without emptiness. That means that it does not cling to itself.... it possesses nothing. That means that it doesn't possess and also cannot be possessed. (Hisamatsu, FN, 31; quoted and trans. in (...) Stambaugh, FS, 77-8)The emptiness of what is called "emptiness" is referred to as "the emptiness of emptiness" (ʼsūnyatāʼsūnyatā), and it is explained in this way for the purpose of controverting any understanding of emptiness as a[n ontological reference to] "being." (Candrakīrti, EMW, 180)A skillful Zen student will strive to be awakened to an identity with all phenomena, the student him- or herself emptyand continually changing as the phenomena come forth. (Codiga, ZPSP, 108)Zen practice is a means for the enlightenment of bushes and grasses, an activity that has no beginning or end in the vastness of any empty universe. (p. 110). (shrink)

the face summons me, calls for me, begs for me, ... calls me into question. (Levinas, EFP, 83)we are difference, ... our selves the difference of masks. (Foucault, AK, 130-1)There are no parts, moments, types, or stages of love. There is only an infinity of shatters. (Nancy, SL, 101)Only the body fulfills the concept of the words "exposition," "being exposed." And since the body is not a concept ... there is no "body." (Nancy, BP, 205)Sense is the singularity of all (...) the singular ones, in all senses simultaneously.The originary sharing [partager] of the world is the sharing of Being, and the Being of the Dasein is nothing other than the Being of this sharing. (Nancy, SL, 103)Dasein is first of all thrown. (Derrida, EW, 269)Starting at "birth," and possibly even prior to it, being thrown re-appropriates itself or rather ex-appropriates itself informs that are not yet those of the subject or the project. (p. 270). (shrink)

wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. He was not a bad genealogist who said that Iris [the messenger of heaven] is the child of Thaumas [wonder].1 (Plato,Theaetetus, 155d)When our first encounter with some object surprises us and we find it novel, or very different from what we formerly knew or from what we supposed it ought to be, this causes us to wonder and to be astonished at it. . . . I regard wonder (...) as the first of all the passions. (Descartes, PS, 350)Wonder . . . is the passion of that which is already born and not yet reenveloped in love. . . . It is the passion of the first encounter. And of perpetual rebirth? . . . the place of incidence and junction of body and spirit, which has been covered over again and again, hardened through repetitions that hamper growth and flourishing (croissance et épanouissement [unfolding, blossoming])? . . . A third dimension. An intermediary. Neither the one nor the other. Which is not to say neutral or neuter. The forgotten ground of our condition between mortal and immortal, men andgods, creatures and creators. In us and among us. (Irigaray, ESD, 81–2). (shrink)

When one is asked "What is the most important moral principle in ancient philosophy?" the immediate answer is not "Take care of oneself" but the Delphic principle gnōthi sauton ("Know thyself"). (Foucault, TS, 19)I can't as yet "know myself," as the inscription at Delphi enjoins, and so long as that ignorance remains it seems to me ridiculous to inquire into extraneous matters. (Plato, Phaedrus, 230a)I certainly do not yet know myself, but whithersoever the wind, as it were, of the argument (...) blows, there lies our course. (Plato, Republic, 394d). (shrink)

Memory is, therefore, neither perception nor conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time. As already observed, there is no such thing as memory of the present while present; for the present is object only of perception, and the future, of expectation, but the object of memory is the past. All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals which perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is also (...) that whereby they remember. (Aristotle, OM, 449b24–30). (shrink)

The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in opposite values. . . .For one may doubt, first, whether there are any opposites at all, and secondly whether these popular valuations and opposite values on which the metaphysicians put their seal, are not perhaps merely foreground estimates, only provisional perspectives, perhaps even from some nook, perhaps from below, frog perspectives, as it were, to borrow an expression painters use. For all the value that the true, the truthful, the selfless (...) may deserve, it wouldstill be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life might have to be ascribed to deception, selfishness, and lust. . . .Maybe! (Nietzsche, BGE, #2). (shrink)