Reviews the book, Relational being: Beyond self and community by Kenneth J. Gergen . The primary plea of the book is that psychology consider a relational rather than individual conception of its phenomena. Gergen encourages us to "treat what we take to be the individual units as derivative of relational process" . This notion of a fundamentally relational subject is one that the reader is invited to explore and to test against other, more traditional, ways of constructing being. It is (...) a proposition entertained and evaluated in terms of its implications but it is not presented as the real, true, or most factual account of human experience. Throughout the text, Gergen attempts to replace the individual or monological expositional style with a more dialogical, plural kind of textual negotiation. The book is constantly questioning and coming to terms with itself, its critics, and its limitations. The book is, as Bakhtin might have it, multivocal. Gergen invokes his own authorial voice, but also his voice as an embedded, historical being. Each chapter is peppered with anecdotes and personal reflections woven into the overall narrative as concrete counterpoint to the abstractions of theoretical argument. In the process, Gergen is surprisingly intimate, personal, and generous with his private life and history. The book also becomes something more human, narrative, and funny than is usual in theoretical exegesis. This style is quite inviting, partly because it is rooted in everyday life but also because it explicitly invites, and even voices, the critic, the question, and the doubt. Ultimately, what is compelling in the pages of Relational Being is what is fundamentally compelling about relationalism itself—namely, the way that it displaces abstract system as the core of meaning and replaces it with embodied relation. This displacement has the potential to redress some of the essential distortions at the heart of Enlightenment reason—particularly that venerable tradition of riding one’s chosen theoretical hobby horse into the face of concrete, lived experience . Relational practice moves us away from the distortions that inevitably come when we make everything we encounter instrumental to some idea that we cherish . Relational practice asks us, instead, to continually return to the lived relation and so continually rupture and remake the narratives by which we understand it. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Place and the "Spatial Turn" in Geography and in HistoryCharles W. J. WithersI. IntroductionA few years ago, British Telecom ran a newspaper advertisement in the British press about the benefits—and consequences—of advances in communications technology. Featuring a remote settlement in the north-west Highlands of Scotland, and with the clear implication that such "out-of-the-way places" were now connected to the wider world (as if they had not been before), the (...) advert proclaimed "Geography is History." What the advert signalled to as the "end" of geography in the sense of the social gradients associated with space and distance is what is known, variously, as "time-space convergence" and "time-space distanciation."1 The terms embrace not just the "collapse" of geographical space given technical advances (in travel time and in communications—consequences of what Castells calls "the information age" and "the network society"2), but also the idea that the modern world has become [End Page 637] more homogenized. One place is now much the same as another. Further, given the likelihood of such technical and cultural changes continuing into the future, geographical distinctiveness, evident in the particularity of place, would be a thing of the past: geography would indeed be history. There is, of course, much evidence to the contrary: that, in the face of "globalisation," questions of locality, sense of place and of identity in place matter now more than ever. Even, then, as Francis Fukuyama cautioned against the "death" of liberal democratic politics as The End of History,3 geography—that is, geography understood as questions to do with place, and questions to do with where you are in the world as part of questions about how you are and who you are in the world—has had considerably heightened significance and for some places and people more than others.4These notions of place—as a particular location, and the character or sense of place—are only part of the meanings associated with place in geographical and in historical work. Like space, its regular epistemic dancing partner in geographical ubiquity and metaphysical imprecision, place is a widespread yet complex term. What follows is historiographical in focus and, of necessity, partial in range. I offer a historiographical survey of the term place, principally but not alone within recent work in geography. In more detail, and with reference to one of the strong senses in which place is used, namely that of locale, "the local," or localness, I trace here the connections between place, space, and the idea of the local as evident in recent work in history and in geography, especially within the history and the geography of science. Particular attention is paid in this context to the distinctive features of what we may think of as the "spatial turn" in the history of science by looking at the idea of place and space in recent work in Enlightenment studies. My argument is three-fold. Notions of place and space, much debated by geographers, have been as central a concern for intellectual historians and historians of science as for philosophers and others, but they have been differently expressed. There is, I shall argue, value in looking at these different views in order to understand that whilst place is a commonplace term it is not agreed upon: working with imprecision has been both opportunity and restriction. In relation to work within the history of science and in Enlightenment studies, consideration of the so-called "spatial turn," of place [End Page 638] as social practice and of placing as a process in accounting for the uneven movement of ideas over space and time may help provide some precision and strengthen connections between geography and history.II. Place (In Geography): A Partial HistoriographyPlace is one of the most fundamental concepts in human geography. It is also one of the most problematic.5 Place, or small-scale regional space, features as a subdivision within the Classical tripartite division of cosmography (the earth in relation to other planetary bodies), geography (the earth as a whole) and chorography (parts of the earth or regional geography). So, too, does the distinction between chorography and chronology as... (shrink)

Hoop residuation algebras are the {, 1}-subreducts of hoops; they include Hilbert algebras and the {, 1}-reducts of MV-algebras (also known as Wajsberg algebras). The paper investigates the structure and cardinality of finitely generated free algebras in varieties of k-potent hoop residuation algebras. The assumption of k-potency guarantees local finiteness of the varieties considered. It is shown that the free algebra on n generators in any of these varieties can be represented as a union of n subalgebras, each of which (...) is a copy of the {, 1}-reduct of the same finite MV-algebra, i.e., of the same finite product of linearly ordered (simple) algebras. The cardinality of the product can be determined in principle, and an inclusion-exclusion type argument yields the cardinality of the free algebra. The methods are illustrated by applying them to various cases, both known (varieties generated by a finite linearly ordered Hilbert algebra) and new (residuation reducts of MV-algebras and of hoops). (shrink)

The Enlightenment was the age in which the world became modern, challenging tradition in favor of reason, freedom, and critical inquiry. While many aspects of the Enlightenment have been rigorously scrutinized—its origins and motivations, its principal characters and defining features, its legacy and modern relevance—the geographical dimensions of the era have until now largely been ignored. Placing the Enlightenment contends that the Age of Reason was not only a period of pioneering geographical investigation but also an age with spatial dimensions (...) to its content and concerns. Investigating the role space and location played in the creation and reception of Enlightenment ideas, Charles W. J. Withers draws from the fields of art, science, history, geography, politics, and religion to explore the legacies of Enlightenment national identity, navigation, discovery, and knowledge. Ultimately, geography is revealed to be the source of much of the raw material from which philosophers fashioned theories of the human condition. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, Placing the Enlightenment will interest Enlightenment specialists from across the disciplines as well as any scholar curious about the role geography has played in the making of the modern world. (shrink)

Responds to the reviews by K. O'Doherty and J. W. Clegg of the current author's book, Relational being: Beyond self and community . One of my chief reactions to the resistances represented in these reviews is that the volume failed to make clear a vision of how we might go on together in the academic world where different viewpoints dominate. To elaborate: both reviewers take issue with my relational account in terms of its seeming dismissal or eradication of cherished (...) concepts—including for Clegg, personal experience, genuine selfknowledge, and independent moral agency; and for O’Doherty, individual awareness, agency, and causality. In a certain sense their resistances are justified. My account raises critical concerns with such concepts, and in certain cases offers a radical reconceptualization. Both reviewers also suggest that these are questions of fundamental ontology, and offer arguments against what they see as my faulty foundations. However, as I tried to explain in the work, I approach theory development from a social constructionist perspective. This means replacing the traditional goal of the theorist to “tell the truth” about the world, with the attempt to generate an intelligibility that may foster different—and possibly more viable—forms of life. In effect, I am not attempting to articulate a final philosophy; I neither propose nor wish to argue ontology. From a constructionist perspective such arguments are futile; on what grounds other than those we construct could we settle such differences? Now to be fair, both Clegg and O’Doherty recognize this constructionist background, and my attempt to avoid eliminating alternative traditions or conceptions. However, this recognition does not deter them from returning to questions of fundamentals; they seem to want a knock-down conflict in which “justified true belief” will win out. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Most of what has been written about Buber and education tend to be studies of two kinds: theoretical studies of his philosophical views on education, and specific case studies that aim at putting theory into practice. The perspective taken has always been to hold a dialogue with Buber's works in order to identify and analyse critically Buber's views and, in some cases, to put them into practice; that is, commentators dialogue with the text. In this article our aims are of (...) a different kind. First and fundamentally, we demonstrate the political and social ontological basis of Buber's thought; that is, we show that Buber, the philosopher of dialogue, held an authentic dialogue with his time, and demonstrate that Buber's work, in this case I and Thou, holds a dialogue with its Zeitgeist; that is the text dialogues with its Zeitgeist. This approach leads us to our second aim, which is to demonstrate that Buber's thought remains relevant to our times, particularly when it serves as a dialogical educational tool with which to resolve conflict of all types and to aid dialogue towards peace in inter‐community relations. (shrink)

I agree with Mele that self-deception is not intentional deception; but I do believe that self-deception involves intentional biasing, primarily for two reasons: (1) There is a Bayesian model of self-deception that explains why the biasing is rational. (2) It is implausible that the observed behavior of self- deceivers could be generated by Mele's “blind” mechanisms.

What precisely, W. J. T. Mitchell asks, are pictures (and theories of pictures) doing now, in the late twentieth century, when the power of the visual is said to be greater than ever before, and the "pictorial turn" supplants the "linguistic turn" in the study of culture? This book by one of America's leading theorists of visual representation offers a rich account of the interplay between the visible and the readable across culture, from literature to visual art to the mass (...) media. (shrink)

W. J. Mander presents the first ever synoptic history of British Idealism, the school of thought which dominated English-language philosophy from the 1860s to the early 20th century. He restores to its proper place this neglected period of philosophy, introducing the exponents of Idealism and explaining its distinctive concepts and doctrines.

F. H. Bradley did not write extensively or systematically on the philosophy of religion, and much of what he did write has the character of either tentative speculation or the pre-emptive rebuttal of potential misinterpretations that might threaten his general philosophical position. ‘I admit that on this subject I never had much to say’ he warns. But such a remark should not discourage us from considering his views on this topic, since the disclaimer is typically Bradleian, and more reflective of (...) his high standards for what is required in order to claim to have something to say about some matter than of any genuine lack of opinion. On closer inspection we find that he has, scattered throughout his work, a great many important things to say about this subject. (shrink)

Courts are sometimes called upon to review a law or some other official act of government to determine its constitutionality, its reasonableness, rationality, or its compatibility with fundamental principles of justice. In some jurisdictions, this power of judicial review includes the ability to ‘strike down’ or nullify a law duly passed by a legislature body. This article examines this practice and various criticisms of it, including the charge that it is fundamentally undemocratic. The focus is on the powerful critique mounted (...) by Jeremy Waldron, the foremost philosophical opponent of judicial review. (shrink)

These notebooks were written during the years that F. W. J. Schelling spent as a student at the Tübinger Stift (1790–1795). From dates written by Schelling in the margins, we can surmise that the first portion (AA II/4: 15–28) was begun in August of 1792, and the latter portion (AA II/5: 133–142) was written in early 1794. To this latter portion is appended a substantial work, Schelling’s Timaeus-commentary, which is not included in the present translation. It appeared as “Timaeus (1794)” (...) (translated by Adam Arola, Jena Jolissaint, Peter Warnek) in Epoché 12: 2. These notebooks offer a window into Schelling’s philosophical development and proclivities, in light of his engagement with various Platonic dialogues, most notably the Ion, Theaetetus, Meno, Timaeus, and Philebus. They include discussions of divine power, rapture, and genius, especially as these relate to poetry, prophecy, and ordinary forms of human knowledge. These topics are discussed in the first portion (AA II/4: 15–25). In the latter portion, Schelling discusses myth, its function and relation to human greatness, Socrates’s daimonion, and the authority of tradition (AA II/4: 25–28; II/5: 133–142). (shrink)

It is argued that there is no simple or single reason for the riots caused by pantomimes in early imperial Rome, and especially in 14 and 15 A.D. Theatrical passion has been suggested as the main cause, but other factors must be considered: the meaning of the theater as a symbol of order, the peculiar importance of the equestrian order in the architecture of the theater; the position of the main Roman theaters in their relation to the exercise grounds of (...) the iuvenes; the complex relationships of the equestrian iuvenes with the pantomime artists. It is pointed out that it is not always easy to define a pantomime, or to know the nature of the program; but competition was certainly involved. It is argued that the policies of Tiberius toward the theater and the iuvenes were particularly productive of discontent, which led to repeated legislation to control it. The role of Drusus is probably crucial. A central role is also played by the theater claques, and the acclamations of the equestrians, the theater being their principal venue. Various connections between the equestrian iuvenes and the theater are considered. One key is the physical training of Roman youth, which had become affected by Greek concepts of gymnasium dancing, perhaps under the influence of rhetoric. This in turn made it possible for young Romans to develop quasi-pantomime skills, which they could demonstrate in their iuvenalia. Second, it is suggested that the Baths of Agrippa and their decoration can be seen as an indication of such a change in official policy, and their position next to the theaters is stressed. Third, the personal relations between pantomimes and the nobility is documented, and the importance of the private stage in Rome. Finally, the legislation of the Tabula Larinas is considered, as it affected nobles on the stage or in the arena, and other legal implications of this conflict between the senate and the youth are sketched. (shrink)

This paper is based on Lectures 1, 2 and 4 in the series of ten lectures titled “Algebraic Structures for Logic” that Professor Blok and I presented at the Twenty Third Holiday Mathematics Symposium held at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico, January 8-12, 1999. These three lectures presented a new approach to the algebraization of deductive systems, and after the symposium we made plans to publish a joint paper, to be written by Blok, further developing these (...) ideas. That project was still incomplete when Blok died. In fact, there is no indication that he had prepared a draft of the paper, and we do not know what new material he intended to include. I am therefore not in a position to complete the project as he had envisioned it. So, I have settled for the more limited objective of presenting the material from the three lectures, leaving to others the task of adapting the techniques used there to more general situations. (shrink)

W. J. Mander provides a brief introduction to and critical assessment of the thought of the greatest of the British Idealist philosophers, F. H. Bradley (1846-1924), whose work has been largely neglected in this century. After a general introduction to Bradley's metaphysics and its logical foundations, Mander shows that much of Bradley's philosophy has been seriously misunderstood. Mander argues that any adequate treatment of Bradley's thought must take full account of his unique dual inheritance from the traditions of British empiricism (...) and Hegelian rationalism. The scholarship of recent years is assessed, and new interpretations are offered of Bradley's views about truth, predication, and relations, and of his arguments for idealism. (shrink)

There exist important deductive systems, such as the non-normal modal logics, that are not proper subjects of classical algebraic logic in the sense that their metatheory cannot be reduced to the equational metatheory of any particular class of algebras. Nevertheless, most of these systems are amenable to the methods of universal algebra when applied to the matrix models of the system. In the present paper we consider a wide class of deductive systems of this kind called protoalgebraic logics. These include (...) almost all (non-pathological) systems of prepositional logic that have occurred in the literature. The relationship between the metatheory of a protoalgebraic logic and its matrix models is studied. The following results are obtained for any finite matrix model U of a filter-distributive protoalgebraic logic : (I) The extension U of is finitely axiomatized (provided has only finitely many inference rules); (II) U has only finitely many extensions. (shrink)

"[Mitchell] undertakes to explore the nature of images by comparing them with words, or, more precisely, by looking at them from the viewpoint of verbal language.... The most lucid exposition of the subject I have ever read."—Rudolf Arnheim, _Times Literary Supplement_.

W. J. Mander presents a history of metaphysics in nineteenth-century Britain. He traces the story of the development and interplay of three great schools of thought, the agnostics, the empiricists, and the idealists, and their different responses to the idea of an ultimate but unknowable way that things really are in themselves.

Although the notion of spatiality has always lurked in the background of discussions of literary form, the self-conscious use of the term as a critical concept is generally traced to Joseph Frank's seminal essay of 1945, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature."1 Frank's basic argument is that modernist literary works are "spatial" insofar as they replace history and narrative sequence with a sense of mythic simultaneity and disrupt the normal continuities of English prose with disjunctive syntactic arrangements. This argument has been (...) attacked on several fronts. An almost universal objection is that spatial form is a "mere metaphor" which has been given misplaced concreteness and that it denies the essentially temporal nature of literature. Some critics will concede that the metaphor contains a half-truth, but one which is likely to distract attention from more important features of the reading experience. The most polemical attacks have come from those who regard spatial form as an actual, but highly regrettable, characteristic of modern literature and who have linked it with antihistorical and even fascist ideologies.2 Advocates of Frank's position, on the other hand, have generally been content to extrapolate his premises rather than criticize them, and have compiled an ever-mounting list of modernist texts which can be seen, in some sense, as "antitemporal." The whole debate can best be advanced, in my view, not by some patchwork compromise among the conflicting claims but by a radical, even outrageous statement of the basic hypothesis in its most general form. I propose, therefore, that far from being a unique phenomenon of some modern literature, and far from being restricted to the features which Frank identifies in those works , spatial form is a crucial aspect of the experience and interpretation of literature in all ages and cultures. The burden of proof, in other words, is not on Frank to show that some works have spatial form but on his critics to provide an example of any work that does not. · 1. Frank's essay first appeared in Sewanee Review 53 and was revised in his The Widening Gyre . Frank's basic argument has not changed essentially even in his most avante-garde statements; he still regards spatial form "as a particular phenomenon of modern avante-garde writing." See "Spatial Form: An Answer to Critics," Critical Inquiry 4 : 231-52. A useful bibliography, "Space and Spatial Form in Narrative," is being complied by Jeffrey Smitten .· 2. This charge generally links the notion of spatial form with Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, the imagist movement, the "irrationality" and pessimistic antihistoricism of modernism, and the conservative Romantic tradition. Frank discusses the complex motives behind these associations in the work of Robert Weimann and Frank Kermode in his "Answer to Critics," pp. 238-48. W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry, is the author of Blake's Composite Art, and The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon. The present essay is part of Iconology: The Image in Literature and the Visual Arts. "Diagrammatology" appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. Leon Surette responds to the current essay in "‘Rational Form in Literature’". (shrink)

Schelling's 1806 polemic against Fichte, and his last major work on the philosophy of nature. The heat of anger can concentrate the mind. Convinced that he had been betrayed by his former collaborator and colleague, Schelling attempts in this polemic to reach a final reckoning with Fichte. Employing the format of a book review, Schelling directs withering scorn at three of Fichte’s recent publications, at one point likening them to the hell, purgatory, and would-be paradise of Fichtean philosophy. The central (...) bone of contention is the understanding of nature: Fichte sees it as lifeless matter in motion, sheer opposition to be overcome, while Schelling waxes poetic in his defense of a living, organic nature of which humanity is a vital part. Indeed, we do not know ourselves without understanding our connection to nature, argues Schelling, anticipating many thinkers in contemporary environmental ethics. Dale E. Snow’s introduction sets the stage and explains the larger context of the conflict, which was already visible in the correspondence of the two philosophers, which broke off by 1802. Notes are included throughout the text, providing background information and identifying the many references to Fichte. Dale E. Snow is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University of Maryland and the author of Schelling and the End of Idealism, also published by SUNY Press. (shrink)