Pub Date : 2011-11-01DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201171614
P. Redding
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who was born in 1646 just before the end of the Thirty Years War and who died 1716, is surely one of the most bizarre and interesting of the early modern philosophers. He was an astonishing polymath, and responsible for some of the most advanced work in the sciences of his day--he was, for instance, the co-inventor along with Newton, of differential calculus, and is generally recognized as the greatest logician of the early modern period, responsible for advances in logic not rivaled until the mid-nineteenth century. But this progressive aspect of Leibniz's thought is paired by one that was more backward looking, deeply engaged with pre-modern forms of thinking that referred back through Medieval culture to the philosophy of ancient times. And alongside of his scientific advances, he is known for having created one of the most baroque and puzzling metaphysical systems in the history of philosophy--the so-called "Monadology". For much of his life he was also absorbed in theological disputes that have now been long been forgotten, and generally thought of as alien to modern scientific modes of thought. But it is easy to fall into anachronistic assumptions here. First, historians of the early modern period point to the degree that scientific and theological issues were virtually inseparable during much of this period. Even in the case of Newton, it would seem, he was forced to trade in ideas of very questionable provenance in order to come up with his revolutionary achievements in natural science. But if we further concentrate not on the development within formal or empirical sciences but on questions of a distinctly philosophical nature, Leibniz seems to further complicate assumptions about the unidirectional nature of intellectual progress. While many of his contemporaries saw progress as involving a break with the past, and especially the Aristotelianism that came from the scholastic period, Leibniz did not see the task as one of breaking with ancient philosophical thought, but as integrating it with modern scientific advances. Today I would like to attempt to bring some of the ways in which Leibniz's scientific, philosophical and theological views were bound up with each other by briefly examining his roles within two apparently different disputes in the late 17th and early 18th centuries: first his dispute with Newton over the nature of space and time; and next his dispute with the "Socinian" followers of Faustus Socinus (1539-1604), (a religious movement that later came to be called "Unitarianism"), over the doctrine of the trinity. (1) These may seem to be unrelated, but they might be connected in interesting ways. First, Leibniz's dispute with Newton over space and time had, as we will see, overtly theological aspects. Furthermore, as we now know, Newton had himself been a secret critic of the doctrine of the Trinity. (2) We might then wonder if there is a relation between Leibniz's attitude to Newton on the issue
戈特弗里德·威廉·莱布尼茨(Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz)出生于1646年，就在三十年战争结束前，于1716年去世。他无疑是早期现代哲学家中最离奇、最有趣的人之一。他是一个惊人的博学家，在他那个时代的科学中，他做出了一些最先进的工作——例如，他与牛顿共同发明了微分学，被普遍认为是近代早期最伟大的逻辑学家，他在逻辑学方面取得的进步直到19世纪中叶才被人匹敌。但是莱布尼茨思想中进步的一面与另一方面相辅相成的是更向后看的一面，与前现代的思想形式密切相关，这些思想形式可以追溯到中世纪文化和古代哲学。除了科学上的进步，他还创造了哲学史上最巴洛克、最令人费解的形而上学体系之一——所谓的“一元论”。在他一生的大部分时间里，他还专注于神学争论，这些争论现在早已被人遗忘，而且通常被认为与现代科学思维模式格格不入。但在这里很容易陷入时代错误的假设。首先，早期现代历史学家指出，在这一时期的大部分时间里，科学问题和神学问题实际上是不可分割的。即使是牛顿，为了在自然科学领域取得革命性的成就，他似乎也被迫放弃了一些来源非常可疑的想法。但是，如果我们不再关注形式科学或经验科学内部的发展，而是关注具有明显哲学性质的问题，莱布尼茨似乎将有关智力进步单向性的假设进一步复杂化。莱布尼茨同时代的许多人认为进步是与过去的决裂，尤其是与来自经院时期的亚里士多德主义决裂，但莱布尼茨并不认为这是与古代哲学思想决裂的任务之一，而是将其与现代科学进步相结合。今天，我想通过简要考察莱布尼茨在17世纪末和18世纪初两场明显不同的争论中所扮演的角色，来介绍莱布尼茨的科学、哲学和神学观点是如何相互联系在一起的:首先，他与牛顿关于空间和时间本质的争论;其次是他与浮士德·索西纳斯(1539-1604)的“索西尼派”追随者(一种后来被称为“一神论”的宗教运动)在三位一体教义上的争论。这些可能看起来毫无关联，但它们可能以有趣的方式联系在一起。首先，莱布尼茨与牛顿关于空间和时间的争论，我们将会看到，带有明显的神学色彩。此外，正如我们现在所知，牛顿自己也曾秘密地批评过三位一体学说。(2)那么，我们也许会想，莱布尼茨在空间和时间问题上对牛顿的态度，与他在三位一体问题上对社会主义者的态度，两者之间是否有某种关系。我认为这两者之间确实存在联系，这种联系与心智的对立概念及其在两种争论中隐含的运作有关。莱布尼茨对牛顿和社会主义者共同的上帝观的批判标志着对主流的神性观念的挑战，毕竟，人类是按照上帝的形象被创造出来的，神性观念的变化将会反映在人类的观念中。但这是一个面向过去的挑战，吸引了更老的观念。尽管如此，我相信，在莱布尼茨的思想中，我们可以看到一些后来的，更进步的思想描述，就像在费希特和黑格尔等后康德唯心主义者中发现的那样。这些描述是为了超越现代早期标准的“非唯物主义”和“唯物主义”替代方案，采取人类思想的方法。…
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Pub Date : 2011-11-01DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201171612
J. Drucker
Few works of poetry have made a more dramatic case for the poem and/as book as a diagrammatic expression than Stephane Mallarme's renowned Un Coup de Des. (1) Initially issued in the May 1897 issue of the British publication, Cosmopolis, the work was produced in a second edition by the Nouvelle Revue Francaise in 1914. That later edition is considered by most Mallarme scholars to more closely resemble the manuscript and instructions conceived by the poet in advance of his death in 1898. Paul Valery saw those manuscripts, lying on a window sill at the house in which he visited the aging poet. (2) Valery left a suggestive, rather than detailed, description of those papers covered with calligraphic glyphs anticipating the typographic treatment Mallarme envisioned for the work. Photocopies have been published of the marked up manuscript, itself in the collection of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, but even that is still an unreliable testimonial for editorial events that might have followed had the poet lived to see the project finished. An edition created by Michael Pierson and published in 2004 by Ptyx attempts a most faithful rendering of the edition originally planned by Ambrose Vollard. Discussions of the poem are always subject to qualification, therefore, since the work does not exist in any form authorized by Mallarme or produced under his final supervision. Further and final changes or alterations to either the textual composition or its graphical expression could have entered in the process, and so we have to qualify all critical discussion by an understanding that the "poem" in question is only tentatively the work Mallarme imagined. Such reservations are more appropriate to this poem than to many others, however, since its fundamental tensions are dynamic ones that circle around questions of being and nothing, chance and constellationary order, and the human "master" who struggles to mediate sense within the ongoing conflicts of these conditions. Because the poem is so completely about this process, as well as embodying and expressing it, the character of self-referentiality implodes in a state of dynamic incompleteness that is only further sustained by the fact that we are engaging in a state of the poem that is neither final nor definitive. The Cosmopolis and N.R.F. editions of 1897 and 1914 offer points of departure. The spatial drama of the work is evident in all its iterations, and the intention on the part of the author to articulate the poem within and across the spaces of a book is clear. And it is that specific attention to spatial and graphical articulation that makes Un Coup de Des the unique example that proves a significant point: that poems are, by their nature, structure, and expression, diagrammatic works par excellence. They are literary works whose meaning depends upon the spatialized relations of embodied in their texts and whose spatial relations are rendered meaningful by their graphical expression. Rather than co
很少有诗歌作品比斯蒂芬·马拉美著名的《一场政变》(Un Coup de Des)更具戏剧性地将这首诗和/或一本书作为一种生动的表达方式。(1)这部作品最初发表在1897年5月的英国出版物《大都会》(cosmopolitan)上，1914年由法国新评论社(Nouvelle Revue Francaise)再版。大多数马拉美学者认为，后来的版本更接近于这位诗人在1898年去世前构思的手稿和指示。保罗·瓦莱里(Paul Valery)在他拜访这位年迈诗人的房子里看到了这些手稿，它们躺在窗台上。(2)瓦莱里留下了一个暗示性的，而不是详细的描述，这些纸上覆盖着书法字形，预示着马拉美为这部作品设想的排版处理。已经出版了带有标记的手稿的影印本，它本身在巴黎国家图书馆的收藏中，但即使如此，对于编辑事件来说，如果诗人活着看到这个项目完成，这仍然是一个不可靠的证据。由迈克尔·皮尔森(Michael Pierson)创作并于2004年由Ptyx出版的版本试图最忠实地呈现安布罗斯·沃拉德(Ambrose Vollard)最初计划的版本。因此，对这首诗的讨论总是受到限制的，因为这部作品不是以马拉梅授权的任何形式存在的，也不是在他的最终监督下创作的。在这个过程中，对文本构成或图形表达的进一步和最终的改变或改变可能已经进入，因此，我们必须通过这样一种理解来限定所有的批判性讨论，即所讨论的“诗”只是马拉美想象的作品。然而，这种保留更适合这首诗，因为它的基本张力是动态的，围绕着存在与虚无、机会和星座秩序的问题，以及在这些条件下持续冲突中努力调解感觉的人类“主人”。因为这首诗完全是关于这个过程的，同时也体现和表达了这个过程，自我指涉的特征在一种动态的不完整状态中内爆了，这种不完整状态只有在我们参与到一种既不是最终的也不是决定性的诗歌状态中这一事实才会进一步得到维持。1897年版的《大都会》和1914年版的《自然科学基金会》提供了出发点。作品的空间戏剧性在其所有的迭代中都是显而易见的，作者想要在书的空间内或跨空间表达这首诗的意图是明确的。正是这种对空间和图形表达的特别关注，使《一场政变》成为一个独特的例子，证明了一个重要的观点:诗歌，就其性质、结构和表达而言，都是卓越的图解作品。它们是文学作品，其意义取决于其文本中体现的空间关系，其空间关系通过其图形表达而变得有意义。我不认为《政变》是诗歌作品历史上的一个反常现象，而是认为它的图解特征证明了它的典范性，明确地展示了通常在诗歌作品讨论中隐含的东西——一首诗是一部空间作品，其操作是图解的。《妙手一击》中的短语分布并不遵循严格的线性规则。诗歌的特点是强调语言元素在空间上的衔接，即使是一条接一条地排列，诗歌作品的特点也是如此。押韵、格律和文本在内容、意义、联想价值或诗歌创作功能的任何一种方式上的呼应，将诗歌的元素置于相互关联的多种构型中。这是散文和诗歌之间的基本区别之一，即使散文话语管理这种空间联系的方式与交响乐作品一样——通过主题和变化、短语、叙事、情绪等. ...
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Pub Date : 2011-11-01DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201171620
Vernon W. Cisney
Nathan Jun and Daniel W. Smith, Deleuze and Ethics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), Page229, ISBN: 978-0748641161. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] What, one might ask, has Gilles Deleuze to contribute to ethical discourse, given its current infatuation with rule-based problem-posing? Deleuze's critics on this score are found, not only in so-called mainstream contemporary ethics, but also among thinkers who claim explicitly to be working in Deleuze's shadow. He who found an affinity with and precursor in those very ethicists-Spinoza and Nietzsche-ostracized and marginalized by mainstream ethics today; he who praised Nietzsche's amor fati, and found exuberance in the Stoics, claiming that one must "make chance into an object of affirmation;" (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 60) he who defined ethics, as "not to be unworthy of what happens to us"(149)--what has he to offer in the way of an ethics? This is the question taken up in Deleuze and Ethics (2011)--the most recent addition to Edinburgh's "Deleuze Connections" series. Edited by Nathan Jun and Daniel W. Smith, the contents of this important work, in the spirit of Deleuze himself pursue various lines of flight, stemming from the questions surrounding a Deleuzian ethics, which faces two specific fundamental challenges: (1) It rejects the comfortable transcendent principles of evaluation of post-Enlightenment theories of ethics, comfortable because they reassure us that at the end of the day, there is a fact of the matter about right and wrong, and justice will prevail; (2) Correlatively, Deleuze's ontology forbids the absolute freedom of the subject. Constituted within a field of differential relations, a subject can never be an autonomous or purely rational agent who dispassionately chooses from among its various options. Freedom in contemporary ethics allows us to render judgments about how agents choose, and thus allows us to declare these choices as right or wrong, and their agents as good or evil. Moreover, without freedom, what possibility is there for action at all? Lacking freedom in the absolute sense, are we to resign ourselves to passive acceptance? In his chapter, Smith outlines a critique of transcendent values, centered precisely around their inhibitive nature: "What an ethics of immanence will criticize, then, is anything that separates a mode of existence from its power of acting--and what separates us from our power of acting is, ultimately, the illusions of transcendence"(125). The transcendencies of God, Self, and Moral Law prescribe ideals to which a world of becoming can never attain, thus casting a pallor of deficiency over all of life. Dictating to the body how it ought to be, but can never be, they serve a limiting and inhibitive role to desire. Explicating Nietzsche's theory of the drives, in parallel with Leibniz's discussion of freedom in The New Essays Concerning Human Understanding (odd bedfellows, at least on the surface), Smith points the way to a Deleuzian th
Nathan Jun, Daniel W. Smith，《德勒兹与伦理学》(爱丁堡:爱丁堡大学出版社，2011)，第229页，ISBN: 978-0748641161。有人可能会问，鉴于目前对基于规则的问题提出的迷恋，吉尔·德勒兹(Gilles Deleuze)对伦理话语有什么贡献?德勒兹在这方面的批评者，不仅存在于所谓的主流当代伦理学中，也存在于那些明确宣称在德勒兹的阴影下工作的思想家中。他在伦理学家斯宾诺莎和尼采身上找到了亲缘关系，并成为他们的先驱，他们被今天的主流伦理学所排斥和边缘化;他赞扬尼采的命运之爱，并在斯多葛派中发现了旺盛的生命力，声称人必须“把机会变成肯定的对象”;(德勒兹，《理性的逻辑》，第60页)他把伦理学定义为“不要对发生在我们身上的事情毫无价值”(149页)——他在伦理学的道路上提供了什么?这是《德勒兹与伦理学》(2011)中提出的问题——爱丁堡“德勒兹联系”系列的最新新作。由内森·君和丹尼尔·w·史密斯编辑，这本重要著作的内容，本着德勒兹本人的精神，追求各种各样的飞行路线，源于围绕德勒兹伦理的问题，它面临着两个具体的基本挑战:(1)它拒绝了后启蒙时代伦理学理论的舒适的超越原则，舒适是因为它们向我们保证，在一天结束的时候，有一个关于对与错的事实，正义将占上风;(2)相对而言，德勒兹的本体论禁止主体的绝对自由。主体在不同关系的领域中构成，永远不可能是一个自主的或纯粹理性的主体，在各种选择中冷静地做出选择。当代伦理学中的自由允许我们对行为人如何选择做出判断，从而允许我们宣布这些选择是对还是错，以及他们的行为人是善还是恶。此外，没有自由，行动又有什么可能呢?缺乏绝对意义上的自由，我们是否要让自己被动地接受?在这一章中，史密斯概述了对超越性价值的批判，其核心正是超越性价值的抑制性质:“那么，内在性伦理将批判的是任何将存在模式与其行动能力分开的东西——而将我们与我们的行动能力分开的东西，最终是超越性的幻觉”(125)。上帝、自我和道德法则的超越性规定了理想，而这些理想是一个正在形成的世界永远无法达到的，因此在整个生命中蒙上了一层缺陷的苍白。它们规定身体应该如何，但永远不能如何，它们对欲望起着限制和抑制的作用。解释尼采的驱力理论，与莱布尼茨在《关于人类理解的新论文》中对自由的讨论(至少在表面上是奇怪的同床异语)相平行，史密斯指出了德勒兹的欲望理论的道路，它提供了人类如何渴望超越道德的局限性的解释，同时也向一种方式移动，在这种方式中，欲望可能创造“生产新事物的条件”。(139)由此开启了自由的问题，真正的内在起源。．．．
{"title":"Toward a Deleuzian Ethics: Value without Transcendence","authors":"Vernon W. Cisney","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201171620","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201171620","url":null,"abstract":"Nathan Jun and Daniel W. Smith, Deleuze and Ethics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), Page229, ISBN: 978-0748641161. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] What, one might ask, has Gilles Deleuze to contribute to ethical discourse, given its current infatuation with rule-based problem-posing? Deleuze's critics on this score are found, not only in so-called mainstream contemporary ethics, but also among thinkers who claim explicitly to be working in Deleuze's shadow. He who found an affinity with and precursor in those very ethicists-Spinoza and Nietzsche-ostracized and marginalized by mainstream ethics today; he who praised Nietzsche's amor fati, and found exuberance in the Stoics, claiming that one must \"make chance into an object of affirmation;\" (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 60) he who defined ethics, as \"not to be unworthy of what happens to us\"(149)--what has he to offer in the way of an ethics? This is the question taken up in Deleuze and Ethics (2011)--the most recent addition to Edinburgh's \"Deleuze Connections\" series. Edited by Nathan Jun and Daniel W. Smith, the contents of this important work, in the spirit of Deleuze himself pursue various lines of flight, stemming from the questions surrounding a Deleuzian ethics, which faces two specific fundamental challenges: (1) It rejects the comfortable transcendent principles of evaluation of post-Enlightenment theories of ethics, comfortable because they reassure us that at the end of the day, there is a fact of the matter about right and wrong, and justice will prevail; (2) Correlatively, Deleuze's ontology forbids the absolute freedom of the subject. Constituted within a field of differential relations, a subject can never be an autonomous or purely rational agent who dispassionately chooses from among its various options. Freedom in contemporary ethics allows us to render judgments about how agents choose, and thus allows us to declare these choices as right or wrong, and their agents as good or evil. Moreover, without freedom, what possibility is there for action at all? Lacking freedom in the absolute sense, are we to resign ourselves to passive acceptance? In his chapter, Smith outlines a critique of transcendent values, centered precisely around their inhibitive nature: \"What an ethics of immanence will criticize, then, is anything that separates a mode of existence from its power of acting--and what separates us from our power of acting is, ultimately, the illusions of transcendence\"(125). The transcendencies of God, Self, and Moral Law prescribe ideals to which a world of becoming can never attain, thus casting a pallor of deficiency over all of life. Dictating to the body how it ought to be, but can never be, they serve a limiting and inhibitive role to desire. Explicating Nietzsche's theory of the drives, in parallel with Leibniz's discussion of freedom in The New Essays Concerning Human Understanding (odd bedfellows, at least on the surface), Smith points the way to a Deleuzian th","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126198423","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2011-11-01DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201171615
Kelly Oliver
Most philosophers discussing genetic engineering, including cloning, assume the "grown versus made" opposition. Therefore, their stance on the ethics of both revolves around whether they privilege one side of this binary over the other. Part and parcel of the "grown versus made" opposition is the liberal notion of freedom of choice also assumed in these discussions. Most philosophers engaged in debates over genetic engineering and cloning begin with some version of a liberal sovereign individual who has freedom of choice that must be protected, whether we are talking about the parents' freedom (or lack thereof) in considering genetic engineering and embryo selection, or the future persons' freedom (or lack thereof) resulting from such a process. The central question in these debates is whose freedom is most important and thus who gets to exercise their free choice, and why. Although they have different answers to this question--John Harris opts for protecting parents' rights to choose, Jurgen Habermas for protecting the rights of future persons, and some feminists for guaranteeing women's rights to reproductive choice, all of them assume a sovereign individual operating either within a social situation that also makes them interdependent, or on an abstract level preferred by some philosophers to avoid the mess of the real world in favor of moral purity. (1) In this essay, I consider what happens to debates over genetic enhancement when we "deconstruct" the opposition between "grown and made" and the notion of freedom of choice that comes with it. Along with the binary grown and made comes other such oppositions at the center of these debates: chance and choice, accident and deliberation, nature and culture. By deconstructing the oppositions between grown versus made (chance versus choice, or accident versus deliberate), and free versus determined, alternative routes through these bioethical thickets start to emerge. On both sides of debates over genetic engineering and cloning, we see that philosophers assume a sovereign liberal notion of the individual who is free to choose, who can make decisions, and control the future. For philosophers like John Harris this is a good thing while for Jurgen Habermas and others it is not. Habermas imagines that genetic enhancement would make us masters of our destiny in such a way as to undermine the contingencies that make us free. (2) Yet, for Habermas, it is the authorship of one's own life and the ownership of one's own body that results in human agency, an authorship and ownership already at odds with the contigency he privileges. If we refuse the sovereign author/owner as our starting point, then the contingency of life (and of morality) is not merely the result of an autonomous agent stuck in a contingent world. Rather, the subject itself cannot, contra Habermas, escape the Other and others to which and to whom it is beholden; its existence is a contingency all the way down to the kernel of its subjectiv
{"title":"Deconstructing “Grown versus Made”: A Derridean Perspective on Cloning","authors":"Kelly Oliver","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201171615","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201171615","url":null,"abstract":"Most philosophers discussing genetic engineering, including cloning, assume the \"grown versus made\" opposition. Therefore, their stance on the ethics of both revolves around whether they privilege one side of this binary over the other. Part and parcel of the \"grown versus made\" opposition is the liberal notion of freedom of choice also assumed in these discussions. Most philosophers engaged in debates over genetic engineering and cloning begin with some version of a liberal sovereign individual who has freedom of choice that must be protected, whether we are talking about the parents' freedom (or lack thereof) in considering genetic engineering and embryo selection, or the future persons' freedom (or lack thereof) resulting from such a process. The central question in these debates is whose freedom is most important and thus who gets to exercise their free choice, and why. Although they have different answers to this question--John Harris opts for protecting parents' rights to choose, Jurgen Habermas for protecting the rights of future persons, and some feminists for guaranteeing women's rights to reproductive choice, all of them assume a sovereign individual operating either within a social situation that also makes them interdependent, or on an abstract level preferred by some philosophers to avoid the mess of the real world in favor of moral purity. (1) In this essay, I consider what happens to debates over genetic enhancement when we \"deconstruct\" the opposition between \"grown and made\" and the notion of freedom of choice that comes with it. Along with the binary grown and made comes other such oppositions at the center of these debates: chance and choice, accident and deliberation, nature and culture. By deconstructing the oppositions between grown versus made (chance versus choice, or accident versus deliberate), and free versus determined, alternative routes through these bioethical thickets start to emerge. On both sides of debates over genetic engineering and cloning, we see that philosophers assume a sovereign liberal notion of the individual who is free to choose, who can make decisions, and control the future. For philosophers like John Harris this is a good thing while for Jurgen Habermas and others it is not. Habermas imagines that genetic enhancement would make us masters of our destiny in such a way as to undermine the contingencies that make us free. (2) Yet, for Habermas, it is the authorship of one's own life and the ownership of one's own body that results in human agency, an authorship and ownership already at odds with the contigency he privileges. If we refuse the sovereign author/owner as our starting point, then the contingency of life (and of morality) is not merely the result of an autonomous agent stuck in a contingent world. Rather, the subject itself cannot, contra Habermas, escape the Other and others to which and to whom it is beholden; its existence is a contingency all the way down to the kernel of its subjectiv","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"64 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128062067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2011-11-01DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201171613
Sandor Goodhart
Emmanuel Levinas ... talks of the defenseless face of the other which shows itself to us in a way we can't avoid. When we recognize this face, it makes us a captive. This face is the face of the scapegoat, the victim, helpless and without possibility of escape. (1) Part One: Conflict Resolution, Girard, and Levinas One of the hot topics in conflict resolution studies over the past thirty years or so has been the introduction of the idea of reconciliation. (2) The idea behind it is that the resolution of conflict remains temporary as long as we focus exclusively upon the symptomatic issues at hand and that only if we step back and look more broadly at the people involved and the larger contexts in which they live and work can it be made permanent--and thus something like reconciliation becomes possible. In this expanding contextual understanding, the work of Rene Girard has assumed special importance. Why? Girard posits that all culture operates in effect as a management system for mimetic desire, a system sustained by what he calls the scapegoat mechanism, a system in which a victim arbitrarily chosen and sacrificially removed from the community in a veritable lynching is understood to be at the origin of all social distinction, founded as such distinction is upon the difference between the sacred and violence. The sacred and violence for Girard are one and the same. The sacred is violence effectively removed from the community, and violence is the sacred deviated from its segregated transcendent status and come down into the city to wreak havoc among its citizenry. If the system is effectively maintained, the originating violence is reenacted each year in the form of commemorative ritual, and the result is the regeneration of the sacred. If the system is not maintained, the result is violence, which is to say, difference gone wrong, distinction gone awry, asserted in the extreme in its inefficacy. Untouched by the outside world, archaic communities, as Girard tells the story, sustained their existence for thousands of years within this cycle of difference, difference gone wrong (or sacrificial crisis), paroxysmal exclusionary behavior (or surrogate victimage), and new differentiation (and commemorative reenactment). With the advent of the "modern" world some twenty five hundred years ago (and for whatever reason), these sacrificial systems were threatened and the ones that survived were the ones that effectively developed a means of living more or less without sacrificial victims in the traditional sense. It is not hard to imagine how or why conflict resolution theorists would be interested in these ideas and identify in this account of sacrificial violence and its mechanism a useful model. Here for example is how Roel Kaptein explains Girard: Our culture increasingly gives us the impression that we are atomized individuals, responsible for and to ourselves and free to do what we want. Inevitably in this situation, everybody and everything else
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Pub Date : 2011-11-01DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201171617
R. J. Young
(Yubraj Aryal interviewed Robert Young on postcolonial studies. Mr. Aryal focused his questions on the issues of postcolonial agency, resistance and new models of political and cultural practices in postcolonial studies.) Y. A.: Since you are editing a leading journal, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, what "interventions" are you making in the postcolonial fields in terms of postcolonial agency, modes of resistance, and the emergence of new models of political and cultural practice of alternative communities? What forms of new knowledge have you been attempting to produce in the field since 1998? How can academic and non-academic experiences of alternative communities, like that of Nepali communities, for instance, be of interest to your journal? What has characterized the postcolonia in the past decade from the point of view of my first three questions? R.Y.: Because it is conditioned by history, the postcolonial is always in a situation of transformation. The political context is always changing, and the interventions that we make will always be shifting as a result from year to year. The global political scene has altered profoundly since the journal began in 1998, most notably of course 9/11 and its aftermath, but also in other arenas such as the high profile developments of indigenous struggles in Latin America, Australasia, South Asia and elsewhere. I don't think there is anything that we could call "postcolonial agency" as such: rather there are forms of agency which manifest themselves in specific situations, particularly those of resistance and, one might add, triumph. Agency itself is governed by the conditions of its production. So if we take the Arab Spring, for example, we can see that the agency there is at once individual and collective, and takes the form not only of protest but a general withdrawal of consent to power. Ultimately, in a revolutionary situation, this is the most formidable kind of agency, because it means that the revolution is coming from below, rather than from a vanguard elite (a situation which always poses trouble). With respect to new forms of knowledge, we have not ourselves been trying to produce them as such, though we do when we can, but rather to see the journal as a vehicle by which others can be enabled to produce and articulate new forms of knowledge, particularly those which go outside conventional academic protocols. We are particularly interested in knowledge that proceeds from everyday life, from people whose knowledge does not typically count as real or authorized knowledge, and from those who are struggling to articulate their own knowledges within frameworks that do not easily accommodate them. With respect to Nepali communities, we have been much less active than I should have liked, and this is of course related to the material which we receive and the contacts which we have. But we should have been more proactive in seeking out material from (rather than merely a
{"title":"Interventions: Postcolonial, Agency and Resistance","authors":"R. J. Young","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201171617","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201171617","url":null,"abstract":"(Yubraj Aryal interviewed Robert Young on postcolonial studies. Mr. Aryal focused his questions on the issues of postcolonial agency, resistance and new models of political and cultural practices in postcolonial studies.) Y. A.: Since you are editing a leading journal, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, what \"interventions\" are you making in the postcolonial fields in terms of postcolonial agency, modes of resistance, and the emergence of new models of political and cultural practice of alternative communities? What forms of new knowledge have you been attempting to produce in the field since 1998? How can academic and non-academic experiences of alternative communities, like that of Nepali communities, for instance, be of interest to your journal? What has characterized the postcolonia in the past decade from the point of view of my first three questions? R.Y.: Because it is conditioned by history, the postcolonial is always in a situation of transformation. The political context is always changing, and the interventions that we make will always be shifting as a result from year to year. The global political scene has altered profoundly since the journal began in 1998, most notably of course 9/11 and its aftermath, but also in other arenas such as the high profile developments of indigenous struggles in Latin America, Australasia, South Asia and elsewhere. I don't think there is anything that we could call \"postcolonial agency\" as such: rather there are forms of agency which manifest themselves in specific situations, particularly those of resistance and, one might add, triumph. Agency itself is governed by the conditions of its production. So if we take the Arab Spring, for example, we can see that the agency there is at once individual and collective, and takes the form not only of protest but a general withdrawal of consent to power. Ultimately, in a revolutionary situation, this is the most formidable kind of agency, because it means that the revolution is coming from below, rather than from a vanguard elite (a situation which always poses trouble). With respect to new forms of knowledge, we have not ourselves been trying to produce them as such, though we do when we can, but rather to see the journal as a vehicle by which others can be enabled to produce and articulate new forms of knowledge, particularly those which go outside conventional academic protocols. We are particularly interested in knowledge that proceeds from everyday life, from people whose knowledge does not typically count as real or authorized knowledge, and from those who are struggling to articulate their own knowledges within frameworks that do not easily accommodate them. With respect to Nepali communities, we have been much less active than I should have liked, and this is of course related to the material which we receive and the contacts which we have. But we should have been more proactive in seeking out material from (rather than merely a","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"68 6","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"113961570","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2011-11-01DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201161527
Satwik Dasgupta
In 1996, Gabriele Rippl wrote a seminal essay on the connection between Edgar Allan Poe and anthropology, formulating an unusual approach to Poe's fiction. Re-examining Poe's aesthetics, specifically through tales dealing with the body or the essential physicality of the characters, Rippl argues, would demonstrate that it is the readers who are indirectly the author of these tales. In other words, one can generate meaning from these texts provided one is able to discern Poe's vision as directed towards a reader-centric anthropology, whereby the author's aesthetics of terror are but a measure of his readers' responsiveness. As Rippl puts it, "[a] discussion of the anthropological impact of Poe's literary texts shows that his real interest is not so much in representing current conceptions of man, but rather the anthropology of the reader," and "it is not the examination of the body as such that interests Poe but the aesthetic effects to be achieved by this detailed presentation." (1) In addition, Rippl observes that just as Poe's protagonists become victims of their self-generated terrors, the readers are "victims" of Poe's aesthetics of the unity of effect, something that has been termed "aesthetics" of terror. Herbert Grabes points out that "[t]he growing interest in culture, or rather cultures, speaks for ... cultural anthropology," and "in this case, literature will be considered mainly as a cultural product providing evidence of the particular features of the culture within which it is produced." (2) What Grabes observes about "cultural anthropology" is traceable in Poe's fiction because it generally projects narrators into extreme conditions/states of being in the context of their immediate socio-cultural surroundings. Poe engaged in probing the essentials of mind-body dichotomy pointing to larger concerns affecting the human psyche. Whether satires, hoaxes, "arabesques," or "grotesques," Poe envisioned and revealed the minds of men possessing various degrees of sanity, intelligence, physical characteristics, and the like to highlight Man's existential crisis. As readers, we can understand and appreciate Poe's anthropocentrism by re-evaluating his fiction with respect to his essential ideas of the human being, both as a social animal and a cultural trope. Gabriele Rippl uses four tales from Poe's oeuvre--"Ligeia" (1838), "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1842), and "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845)--to demonstrate how Poe exploited his readers' anthropology to generate meaning and achieve his aesthetic of unity and terror. Graves' concept of the reader-centric anthropology is particularly suitable for Poe's fiction. "The anthropology of the reader" in Poe's fiction would mean that the readers' reactions and attitudes towards specific tropes of horror or cruelty are directly proportional to and built upon their inherent tolerance or repugnance towards such visions of atrocity. This concept is sim
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Pub Date : 2011-11-01DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201161526
Iswari P. Pandey
Introduction The study of woman in ancient literature is the study of men's views of women and cannot become anything else. --Phyllis Culham (1) Growing up in Nepal in the 70s, I witnessed my grandma worshipping Goddess Kali, a Hindu goddess of supreme power. A devotee of Kali, my grandma used to tell me stories about the many superhuman deeds attributed to the Goddess, one of which was to kill the demons and liberate the gods. Not only did I like the stories, I also identified the Goddess with my own grandmother because like the Goddess of the legends, she had also scored some extraordinary achievements by the standard of her times. She had taken my grandpa to court for his second marriage and extracted a fair share of property for her family. She had raised her only son alone in a much small property while her husband lived with his second wife in a relatively luxurious estate. Although unable to read or write, my grandma knew how to manage the household independently. If the Goddess was mother to the entire civilization, my grandma was the creator and protector of our family. But at about ten, my image of this Goddess came under what I then considered a mortal attack. I was attending a special nine-day, Goddess-worshipping, Fall ritual in which a pundit (literally) reciting and interpreting Devi Mahatmya (In Praise of Goddess) posited that the Goddess had emerged out of the combined energies of the three male gods: Brahma (the Creator), Bishnu (the Protector), and Mahadev (the Destroyer). To my young mind, it was hard to reconcile whether the Goddess was forged by the trinity of gods or she was a cosmic power operating independent of any other sources. According to the stories my grandmother told me, Kali was the cosmic power that started the motion of the wheel of universal time, as well as the primal impulse in the phenomenal existence and becoming. According to this tantric (ritualistic) version of the Goddess cult, while time (or kala, in Sanskrit) "devours" the worlds of all the three planes of Creation (the physical universe, the astral/ subtle universe, and the causal universe), at the end it is the Kali that "devours" even time (kala). Kali would, therefore, be the primordial cause of creation and destruction and in that could represent both consciousness and absolute existence. But according to this male pundit, the Goddess' existence was predicated on the will and energy of the male gods. Her role was tangential to the purpose set forth by these gods. I kept wondering which version was correct, and how one could reconcile the conflicting images of the same Goddess. To a young mind back then, it was more a problem of reconciliation than of representation. However, when I started pondering the silenced subjects in legends and other classical texts as a student of rhetoric, there was no such confusion. As I read about women in ancient rhetorical texts by men, for example, I knew these were the images of women at men's mercy, as Culham (
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Pub Date : 2011-04-04DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20116147
Martin Hägglund
(Robert King interviewed Martin Hagglund. Dr. King focused his questions on the impact of Radical Atheism and the "arche-materiality" of time). R.K.: Did the reception of Radical Atheism push your research in any surprising directions? M.H.: The most surprising thing, at least for me, is first of all how much response the book has generated. The reception of Radical Atheism has gone far beyond anything I expected and I am deeply grateful for the ways in which it has challenged me to refine my thinking and develop my arguments. Thanks to careful and demanding respondents, I have not only been given the chance to press home the stakes of my intervention; I have also been pushed to pursue issues that were either underdeveloped or inadequately addressed in my previous work. Beginning with The Challenge of Radical Atheism conference at Cornell and continuing with the colloquium on Ethics, Hospitality and Radical Atheism at Oxford as well as the Derrida and Religion conference at Harvard, I have had the good fortune to engage in direct debate with central interlocutors of the book. These debates have in turn informed the written exchanges about the book, which continue to inspire my current work. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Leaving aside the specific polemics about Derrida scholarship, I would emphasize two strands of questioning that have been both the most difficult and the most productive to address. The first strand concerns the status of the structure of the trace in my argument, while the second concerns the conception of desire that informs what I call radical atheism. R.K.: Could you say more about these two strands of questioning? And how do you see them intersecting with other developments in Continental Philosophy? M.H.: The first strand of questioning can be situated in relation to a trend that is increasingly visible in Continental Philosophy, namely, a turn away from the focus on questions of language and discourse in favor of a renewed interest in questions of the real, the material, and the biological. If Saussure and linguistics once were an obligatory reference point, Darwin and evolutionary theory have increasingly come to occupy a similar position. In the wake of this development, Derrida's work is largely seen as mired in the linguistic turn or as mortgaged to an ethical and religious piety that leaves it without resources to engage the sciences and the question of material being. As I argue in Radical Atheism, however, such an assessment of deconstruction is deeply misleading. Already in Of Grammatology Derrida articulates his key notion of "the trace" in terms of not only linguistics and phenomenology but also natural science. My crucial point here is that Derrida defines the trace in terms of a general co-implication of time and space: it designates the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space, which Derrida abbreviates as spacing (espacement). Spacing is according to Derrida the condition for both the animate and the in
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Pub Date : 2011-04-04DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20116146
John DeCarlo
Introduction In his Hamlet essay: "Hamlet and His Problems," T.S. Eliot conceived Hamlet as an artistic failure, pointing at the inexplicable manner in which Hamlet is obsessed with his mother's behavior; and how in terms of an objective correlative, Gertrude is not only an inadequate object for the emotions generated in the play, but also unable to support them. In other words, the problem of the play lies not in the character of Hamlet, but in the author's treatment of "the effect of a mother's guilt upon her son." (1) But might there be an image that distills Hamlet's emotional connection to his mother? Picture Hamlet standing in the graveyard contemplating the universal and fleeting nature of life, while also holding the skull of Yorick, the symbol of all that is wild, silly and ridiculous. Might such a juxtaposition of consciousness correspond to the conceptual form of Descartes' Cogito, whereby a determined reason and a determined madness stand both together, and yet separate? By the same token, while Elliot's superego considered Shakespeare, the artist, incapable of controlling his disordered subjectivity and to transform it to the literary tradition that preceded him or surrounded him, might the philosophical form of the Cogito, which Shakespeare implicitly pre-figures in the play, be the form which helps to understand Hamlet's intense feelings towards his mother's sexual behavior? (2) In keeping with the assertion that the play as a whole is problematic, Eliot also suggests that Stoll is correct in steering away from a psychological reading of the leading character, in terms of staying "nearer in spirit to Shakespeare's art." (3) In this respect, it seems that Eliot is correct in asserting that some other factor must be responsible for Hamlet's emotions. However, in asserting that the dominating emotion is "inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear" (4) seems to be misleading in terms of Eliot's underestimation of the play's philosophical dimensions, and the degree that Hamlet's psychological response to his philosophical concerns spills over to his perception and judgment of his mother's behavior. In contrast, it will be developed how Hamlet's judgment of his mother's sexual behavior and her shameless attitude toward it, is intensified by his own restless sense of shame related to his unguarded philosophical doubts. A) Hamlet's Pre-Cartesian Doubt In keeping with Eliot's assertion that "there was an older play by Thomas Kyd," (5) most critics agree that Kyd probably wrote the UR-Hamlet, performed during the late 1580's and early 1590's. Considering that Kyd's version already contained the elements of the Ghost, the play within the play, etc, as well as the conditions of the Elizabethan stage and conventions of the revenge tragedy, it would give great insight into Shakespeare's innovations and underlying intentions. Since the primary source has been irrevocably lost, Shakespeare's intentions are not clear and rem
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