Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry最新文献

{"title":"Emily Dickinson: What Is Called Thinking at the Edge of Chaos?","authors":"D. Thomières","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20158202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20158202","url":null,"abstract":"Reading Emily Dickinson has always been something of a (hopefully exciting) challenge. We all know of plenty of interpretive traditions have been brought to bear on her poetry. The question one is tempted to ask; which one will yield the best results, that is which is the most illuminating, the one that will account for the highest number of elements from this or that text, and that consequently possesses the most far-reaching implications? We've all come across, to limit the list to one example, Christian readings of her poems. It hard not to ask oneself where God is; in the obsessions of the critic, in the text, or in what is known of the mind in 1862 of the former Mount Holyoke student who refused to stand up during assembly? Are we honestly allowed to say that she finally discovered that our human certainties are to be found at a transcendental level? In this essay, I'd like to address another tradition; the venerable English empiricist approach. My starting point is that it seems that, very often, Emily Dickinson looked upon her poems as as many problems. A problem is a question. It does not refer to something you know, but to something you do not know, and that possibly you may never know. In many instances, what she wrote on these odd pieces of paper had to do with issues that are too big for one to understand; life, death, trauma, and more generally things that are beyond what our culture enables us to perceive. Dickinson obviously wrote about objects and about the world. In so doing, she kept trying to define what her self was, or more precisely what passes for self or personal identity. What she found was that these notions were empty notions. What did then she discover at the edge of chaos? Is there something to discover? Dickinson always alternates between experience and experiment. For her, writing generally proceeds from an experience that remains unnamed. What matters is not the experience itself, that is to say something that violently affected her body or her mind, or probably both. It would seem that she received a sort of wound, or shock, or that she suffered a loss, which resulted in a trauma. That is all readers will know and all there is to know. Then comes the experiment. She experiments with words, as a wound has no meaning in itself. Each poem is a construction. It is an adventure that maybe will help her discover the meaning of her traumatic experience. Experience and experiment as a matter of fact share the same etymology. Both words refer to a trial, and Dickinson was certainly aware of the fact that they usually possess two complementary meanings. Experience especially concerns something violent that happens to you. (The word \"peril\" interestingly shares the same Latin origin ex-periri with experience/experiment as it derives from a Greek term meaning \"passing through.\") The words also signify trying to achieve a goal. In her most compelling poems, Emily Dickinson tries. Partly because there are very few detailed inte","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115144216","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}

{"title":"Toward an Ethics of Speculative Design","authors":"L. Banu","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20158205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20158205","url":null,"abstract":"In Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, And Social Dreaming, designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby reassure us that, \"the purpose of speculation is to unsettle the present rather than predict the future.\" (1) Their work and the work of other speculative designers drive design beyond the user and problem solving orientation of commercial design practices. They challenge us to attend to the agency of material, to the process of making, to the demand of things on us, and most importantly to design as a critical practice of questioning ourselves through our things. Extending Dunne and Raby's call to projection into alternate possibilities, I argue that speculative design is a material practice of ethical creative coexistence as distinct from standardized, industrial design solutions. Simply put, speculative design makes us think beyond ourselves and fosters the ethical comportment of recognized non-identity resistant to instrumentalization. My argument stems from the 21st century need to confront wasteful and thoughtless overconsumption and related social, political and environmental abuses fueled by a need to control and master, natural and artificial goods, as well as socio-economic identity. In particular, design in the 20th century that aimed to standardize production, to universalize market appeal, to emphasize uniformity, to focus on human comfort and to market products as singular, isolated machines of modernity is no longer sustainable. Countering the modern impulse to dominate the world of natural resources, technological advancements and synthetic materials speculative practices utilize an object oriented perspective of coexistence and ask how can we design beyond our own needs? The conceptual path of my argument relies on the speculative philosophical approaches of Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter and her attention to the agency of things, Timothy Morton's Realist Magic and his celebration of object opacity, and Ian Bogost's Alien Phenomenology and his strategies to enact an object orientation. (2) These philosophers offer alternatives to user-centric instrumental thinking in service of efficiency and commercial dominance by fundamentally challenging our relationship with things in the world. Their perspectives utilize speculation as a way to attend to the opacity, the complexity and the specificity of things able to chart a claim of object agency and in turn human responsibility. Together these efforts release us from the dominance of categorical and instrumental thinking, making and using. Correspondingly, the concrete path of my argument relies on two design two examples that represent a range of design between universal ambition and local amplification: the globally branded Starbucks coffee cup, a standardized design object speculatively received and Marti Guixe's, The Solar Kitchen Restaurant for La pin Kulta (2011) a design project that reimagines the restaurant by structurally incorporating features of practical speculation. The p","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130342006","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}

{"title":"The Reproduction of Subjectivity and the Turnover-time of Ideology: Speculating with German Idealism, Marx, and Adorno","authors":"J. Weiss","doi":"10.5840/jphilnepal20158206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/jphilnepal20158206","url":null,"abstract":"In the wake of Michel Foucault's now-famous critique of the repressive role of the state apparatus (dispositif), (1) a central tenet of social theory, namely ideology critique, lost considerable support among scholars and activists. A constant refrain, heard from all quarters, consisted of the need to finally leave behind a model of subjection based on a \"sovereign,\" top-down conception of power, and instead employ a method that gleans the horizontal dispersions or discursive metamorphoses that are more primary in the positive constitution of subjectivity. (2) And yet, in the face of the last fifteen to twenty years, it has grown increasingly difficult to deny the persistent role of the Leviathan in contemporary life. If the explosion in the U.S. prison population were not enough, basic knowledge of the function of the surveillance state likely causes one to begin to question the ease with which approaches like that of Louis Althusser's were discarded in favor of Foucault's approach. (3) Indeed, especially after the recent bailout of international capital by the U.S. Empire, i,e., the international lender of last resort, the question of how contemporary subjectivity is formed in relation to a state apparatus that-despite the element of truth in the \"relative autonomy\" or non-economistic thesis-is indissolubly linked to the reproduction of capital, weighs down on any theorist who would try to give an adequate account of the present balance of social and political forces. Have we not, along these lines, lost something essential in wholly departing from Althusser's approach? Have we not, that is to say, missed the chance to enrich this mode of inquiry by putting it in tension with the present state of affairs? Surely, given the present constellation, we can now see that the complete dismissal of ideology critique in favor of an analysis of the transformations in discourse is itself part of a power dynamic that thwarts the possibility of grasping just how much repression, i.e., the hail of the State, the threat of external punishment, or, in short, the unparalleled power with which capital, through its various (economic, political, legal, and military) channels, demands the passive adaptation of its subjects. Surely such a position against ideology critique is also part of the mechanism that generates an incapacity to understand how the reproduction of capital simultaneously instigates positive and negative effects on the subject, affirmative and prohibitive games of power that are essential to the formation of contemporary subjectivity?* * 4 And surely, in the midst of economic disparity that has reached Gilded Age levels, it is high time that we return to a consideration of the links between the flows of capital and the manner in which its subject is schematized in and through a relationship to the socially necessary maintenance of class domination. With this background in view, there are two aspects of Althusser's ideology critique that I would li","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125605653","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}

{"title":"The Question of Alterity and the Problem of Encounters, Communication, and Dialogue","authors":"C. E. Mejame","doi":"10.5840/jphilnepal20158204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/jphilnepal20158204","url":null,"abstract":"\"L'anaiyse de la perception d'autrui rencontre la difficulte de Principe que souleve le monde culture!, puisqu'elle doit resoudre !e paradoxe q'une conscience vue par !e dehors, d'une pensee qui reside dans!' exterieur, et qui donc au regard de !a mienne, est deja sans sujet et anonyme\" --Merleau-Ponty \"Nous naissonsgrace a autrui, nous vivons avec autrui, nous devrns mourir un jour avec ou sans autrui.Comment concevoir I'existence humain et meme I'humanite de I'homme sans !a relation a autrui sans qu'elle soit assume?\" --Dominique Janicaud Alterity was the essential discovery of great voyages undertaken in 15th and 16th centuries. The exploration of new continents confronted Europeans with people different from them, whom they did not even imagine their existence. Before these \"savages\", these\" primitive\" people who seemed to live near nature, Europeans adopted diverse perspectives. For some respect, curiosity, interest; for others assimilation and predation. Europe, from 16th century to 19th century, whether in the American, African, or Asian continent, intended to subject the Other, to exploit, to convert it to a culture, to European civilization, the conveyor of progress. For the Other is difference, and difference is dreadful, appalling, also, it must be driven underground. Faced with these encounters, what has been the attitude of writers, philosophers, etc., across the centuries? Some denounced injustices, seeing themselves as defenders of the oppressed and awakeners of consciences. Others, on the contrary, where the mouth pieces of the dominant discourse, the apostles of the colonial order, considering that civilization and progress justify all the violence done against people considered as inferior. In the 21st century the problem of alterity yet exists and it still goes unanswered. Also, in the United States it is a constant subject of debate in philosophy, especially in continental philosophy. Philosophy, specifically Western philosophy, has a horror of the notion of the other; it prefers Being that has no alterity. Philosophy as such is essentially structured around Being, immanence, and autonomy. The primary behavior of the world at large, is positioning. Further to me, is the unknown; the inaccessible, and practically everyone. Then there is an approach which can be one of resentment, reciprocity without recognition, contract (which implies exchange, competition, and defiance) and the gift. Into the bargain, the fundamental problem in contemporary philosophy, especially contemporary continental philosophy, is the importance it accords to relation, which is primarily difference, the difference between A and B. These two people can hardly understand themselves inasmuch as they are different, therefore, they are doomed to mutual misunderstanding thanks to their differences. By laying too much emphasis on difference, there is a tendency to show the abyss that separates people. Now, all communication supposes something that is common. If","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"73 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133972878","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}

{"title":"Late Pound: The Case of Canto CVII","authors":"P. Nicholls","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20158201","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20158201","url":null,"abstract":"With Canto CVII we approach the end of Pound's epic journey. In the Thrones sequence alone we have already travelled far, the poet conducting us from the eighth-century history of the Lombards in Italy, through Byzantium and China, and on finally to three Cantos (CVII-CIX) quarried from the Institutes of the great English jurist, Edward Coke. Few readers have warmed to the unrelenting opacity of these last three Cantos, however, and committed apologists aside, few have felt ready to adopt the prone position Pound's didacticism here seems to expect. As a result, little has been written about these Cantos that is not primarily exegetical. (1) The present essay attempts, then, a close reading of Canto CVII, not principally to provide explication but rather to scrutinise the modalities of Pound's thinking at this late point in his long poem. In Thrones, Coke is a pivotal figure who stands at the interface between feudal and commercial periods, and who represents a moment in which, as Steve Shepherd, Coke's latest editor, explains, \"kings sought ever more control over the affairs of state and of individuals but in which individuals had both new ideas about their own opportunities and new money with which to pursue them.\" (2) Coke is an obvious hero for Pound since he seems to share with the author of The Cantos a deep attachment to tradition and precedent while at the same time promoting a conception of law that was \"in every sense revolutionary,\" striking a \"new balance between monarch and subject.\" (3) Shepherd also sees him as responsible for notions of a legally limited monarch and of common subjects who held rights, which were, thanks to Coke, now deemed to have existed since Magna Carta, and the idea of a legal machinery independent of all but the authority of the nation's legislature are nearly inextricable from the other causes of the English Civil War, of the American Revolution, and of the American Civil War. (4) Coke, then, is hardly an eccentric point of reference for Pound in these last Cantos where questions of justice and representation are of primary importance--questions that had recently had a particular urgency for Pound himself with his extradition from Italy to the United States. Indeed, he would later preface his collection of essays called Impact with \"Of Misprision of Treason,\" a passage culled from the third volume of Coke's Institutes. (5) This level of personal involvement with his new legal materials may explain some of the obliquity of these Cantos where syntactical connectedness is often drastically reduced in order to hint at other forms of connection which may not be expressed directly. We may find a first taste of this in the opening lines of Canto CVII: The azalea is grown while we sleep In Selinunt', In Akragas Coke. Inst. 2.. to all cathedral churches to be read 4 times in the yeare 20.H. 3 that is certainty mother and nurse of repose he that holdeth by castle-guard pays no scutage (Pound, Cantos, 77) Selinunt' is f","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121454839","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}

{"title":"Relational Selves: Gender and Cultural Differences in Moral Reasoning","authors":"H. Edge, M. Mclaren","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20158203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20158203","url":null,"abstract":"The analysis of moral reasoning requires an interdisciplinary approach. Because it is central to moral theory and ethics, it is a basic concern of philosophers; but because it deals with cognition, reasoning, and moral development (and thus, more generally, human development), it is also an important area in psychology. Our paper addresses both of these disciplines as well as the intersection of gender and culture by exploring the ways that empirical research can help to illuminate philosophical issues about moral reasoning and its relationship to conceptions of self. In a recent lead article for Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan argued that most research in psychology has been carried out on WEIRD subjects; Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic. (1) They assert that enough data exists to call into question generalizing those findings to the status of universal psychological knowledge. Saying that Americans are \"the most individualistic people in the world,\" they point out that Western cultures differ in cognition from non-Western ones. (2) Westerners prefer analytic thought while non-Westerners prefer holistic reasoning, and these differences give rise to different cognitive strategies employed in moral reasoning. In particular, Richard Nisbett also argues for this distinction, bringing empirical evidence to show that the two cultures have different approaches to reasoning, and these match their independent and interdependent views of themselves. (3) In addition to these cultural studies, much research has been carried out on gender differences in moral reasoning, and increasingly research has also examined cultural differences specifically in moral thinking. In this paper we explore both the parallels and the intersections between gender and cultural differences in moral thinking. We bring together work from philosophy, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and women's and gender studies to analyze our recent empirical data that demonstrate both gender and cultural differences in moral reasoning, as well as their intersection. We support the following claims about culture, moral reasoning, and concepts of self: 1) Concepts of self are tied to approaches to moral reasoning. 2) Concepts of self differ by gender and culture. 3) Moral reasoning differs by gender and culture. 4) Gender and culture intersect in the formation of self-identity. We demonstrate the above four points both through our empirical research and a discussion of the growing body of literature in support of these claims in the aforementioned disciplines. Furthermore, we believe that theoretical claims ought to be informed, at least in part, by empirical data when the claims relate to aspects of human development, such as moral reasoning. Both theory and empirical research lends support to the view that Western males are unique in their moral reasoning, overemphasizing independence and isolation over interdependence and connectedness. We fi","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"243 ","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120881854","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}

{"title":"“But why must readers be made to feel. . . .”: Repulsing Readerly Sympathy for Ethical Ends in the Victorian Realist Novel","authors":"Heidi L. Pennington","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20138195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20138195","url":null,"abstract":"Scholars have paid substantial attention to questions of readerly sympathy with and compassion for fictional characters in conversations about affect in the Victorian novel. Both Victorian and contemporary critics of the novel have proposed that this type of identification with fiction is in itself a mode of ethical engagement with the real world, even if the precise dynamics of this relation remain unclear. Rachel Ablow's comments reflect that, although there is a widely held belief that fiction can have a potent effect in the extratextual world, the connection between world and text remains a rather tenuous one: \"[t]he exact means by which novels were thought to instruct or influence readers varied widely. But the novel's ability to encourage sympathy was consistently identified as central to its effectiveness.\" (1) Mary-Catherine Harrison, attempting to clarify this relationship, traces a causal trajectory between novel-reading and ethical behavior in the real world this way: \"readers engage in a metaphorical, or what we might call synechdocal, interpretation of character: taking the part (individual) to refer to the whole (group). In this way, readers' emotional responses to fictional individuals can be parlayed into an emotional and ethical response towards groups of people whom they represent.\" (2) Writing primarily on Charles Dickens, Harrison points out that \"his vivid portraits of fictional suffering were coupled with epistemological claims of their accurate and faithful relationship to modern society\"; in this way, Harrison suggests, Dickens' work moves to resolve the \"non-interventionism inherent to the paradox of fiction: readers might not be able to intervene in characters' lives, but they can intervene on behalf of someone 'like' them.\" (3) Harrison's equation of feeling with action (4) implicitly relies not just on the idea that fictional characters are \"like\" or similar to real people in the world, but also on the notion that readers must like--that is, feel positively about--those fictional characters in order for them to desire to \"intervene on behalf of their counterparts in the reader's own reference world. I find Harrison's arguments about realism's ethical aspirations and methodologies convincing. However, some key questions remain: just because readers could act in their own world based on feelings of sympathy for a fiction, does it necessarily follow that they do or did act upon those feelings? Is direct real-world action the only measure of ethical efficacy in fiction? And, most pertinently to the present analysis, what happens when readers do not like or identify with a work's fictional protagonists--do these feelings of aversion foreclose the possibility of positive ethical outcomes beyond the text? The first two questions have already informed the work of many critics, most notably Suzanne Keen's 2007 monograph Empathy and the Novel, and they will guide the present essay as context for my argument. However, whether fic","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129172773","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}

{"title":"The Key to the Economic and Socio-Political Fallacies of Marxism","authors":"M. Asatryan","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20138193","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20138193","url":null,"abstract":"After the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and a radical return to capitalism (which was unprecedented for the human history), and wild capitalism at that, the global social and political sciences found themselves in the position of French historians of the Restoration epoch who sought to identify the true causes of the Great French Revolution and of subsequent events. Since the struggle for communism for the world over was launched under the banner of Marxism, the defeat of the global system of socialism on the global scale posed the following cardinal question for social and political scientists: if Marx's doctrine is true, why was the end of the global socialism so inglorious? If, however, the doctrine was not true, why wasn't it refuted so fundamentally as to rule out any objections on the part of Marxist-Leninists? Twenty two years have passed after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the global system of socialism and the end of the Cold War, feelings have calmed down and it seems like it is high time to tackle this question in a calm and impartial fashion without unnecessary emotions. Generally speaking, failure of any scientific or scholarly theory can be an outcome of two main causes, viz. of the theory itself or of its practical application being fallacious or of the combination of both. That mistakes, including serious ones, were made in the process of application of Marxism is not denied even by present-day Communists. Suffice it to say that communist rulers were not, in fact, communists in terms of their cast of mind and of way of life. Marxism for them was a cash cow, which was supposed to provide them with power and the life of privilege, including magnificent apartments and summer houses, luxury cars, special supply centers, etc. Now new communists, the likes of Zyuganov, Ampilov, Chavez, etc. promise to correct mistakes of the past and again urge people to launch struggle this time for genuine Socialism and Communism. Thus, the ground is being forged for revanche, and first gains are present already. Venezuela embarked recently on the communist road, followed by Nepal. A communist was elected as a President of Cyprus. China's might is rapidly growing. China has become the second largest economy of the world and has been pursuing NEP (New Economic Policy) in Lenin's style--in earnest and for a long period of time. It is expected that the NEP will pave the way to mighty socialist China. The global community, and first of all the US, already perceive the growing global threat posed by China as it will result in unpredictable shift in the balance of power in the world. The threat of Marxist socialist ideas becomes even more serious with the growth of anti-capitalist sentiment in the West following the recent financial crisis that triggered a significant increase in unemployment and the protest movement \"Occupy Wall Street.\" Western media report that Marx's Das Kapital enjoys considerable popularity as its sales have tripled. It f","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132673028","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}

{"title":"Aesthetics of Affects: What Can Affect Tell Us about Literature?","authors":"Charles Altiei","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20138196","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20138196","url":null,"abstract":"(Yubraj Aryal interviewed Charles Altieri on Aesthetics of Affects. Mr Aryal is focusing on what can affect tell us about expression of value, judgment, subjectivity and aesthetic experience itself in literature.) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Y. A.: You wrote on your homepage \"I also recently wrote a book on the affects and that shapes my thinking on most topics. But I am in transition. I have been teaching Shakespeare and Hegel and will teach the epic because I want a grand stage on which to figure out what I can say about affect in literature.\" What kind of transition are you talking about? Does this transition signal the change in your position of theory of meaning in interpretation of literature? What is that \"grand stage,\" which allows you to say something in literature, which was not possible before? C. A.: I felt I was in transition in many respects. I had written all I had to say about feeling and about mood. I did not feel I had anything original to say about other affective states. And I was dismayed that the position setting emotion against subjectivity seemed to dominate literary theory while philosophers did not even mention my book in their bibliographies. I also knew that what I was writing on Wallace Stevens was probably pretty good, but after that I thought I would have nothing new to say about Modernism and Modernist writers. This is the negative side. Positively I wanted to teach Shakespeare and the epic because any literary theory seems to me to have to fully appreciate the many aspects of such work. And it, along with my continuing fascination with Wittgenstein, has considerably transformed my thinking. The most important change is that I want to talk about values and valuing rather than affect per se. Much of affect theory can be focused on how we make valuations, since value seems to me to depend on feeling plus a reflection that wants the feeling to continue or appreciates where it is leading. My dream is to reconsider formalist claims as in fact claims about invitations to perform acts of valuing. Then formalism is not an instrument for securing autonomy but rather an education in distinctive possibilities for aligning our senses of value with what occurs as we read. And the patterns in our valuings tend to produce an actual orientation toward what we take as significant values worth fighting for and adapting in general contexts. Also reading those texts makes me think about how almost all literary theory seeks ways of talking about the worldliness of the text. We argue really only about to what degree this worldliness can or should be based distinctively on modes of reading and engaging the work that we can teach as literary and so shared by texts from different historical epochs. For me this worldliness is captured best by theories of expression, that is theories trying to explain how self-consciousness can take overt responsibility for what had been inchoate senses of who one is that become articulate in the process of writi","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125602463","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}

{"title":"Complicating the Dualisms: History versus Becoming","authors":"R. Clancy","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20138198","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20138198","url":null,"abstract":"Complicating the Dualisms: History versus Becoming Craig Lundy, History and Becoming: Deleuze's Philosophy of Creativity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), Pages 218. Craig Lundy's History and Becoming: Deleuze's Philosophy of Creativity is an ambitious work that engages the question of history in Deleuze's thought, attempting to demonstrate \"the vital importance of Deleuze's philosophy of history to his wider creative agenda\" (1). Lundy claims secondary works to date have largely misconceived the relation of history to Deleuze's thought. He criticizes Jay Lampert's problematic distinction between a \"good\" and a \"bad\" history in Deleuze--Lampert associates the former with \"nomadic\" history based on \"pure becoming\" and the latter with \"historicism\" (103)--as well as Manuel Delanda's distinction between ideal, top-down histories and material, bottom-up histories (8). Lundy claims \"Deleuze's hostility towards history is highly superficial\" (37). Critical remarks Deleuze makes concerning history bear on a specific account of history, an understanding of history as \"historicism.\" Hence, Lundy's primary aim is to show that \"history need not be condemned to historicism\" (157), and that conceptual resources exist in Deleuze's work to formulate an account of history in terms other than historicism, what Lundy describes as an understanding of history as a process of creation (38). Lundy links this account to figures discussed by Deleuze throughout his work, \"Peguy, Nietzsche and Foucault, who all promoted an alternative kind of history\" (181). Lundy includes Braudel in this list as well (180). Central to an understanding of history in these terms is Deleuze's notion of becoming. The relation between history and becoming in Deleuze's thought should not be understood in either/or terms--where Deleuze rejects history in favor of becoming. Rather, one can take up and explore Deleuze's conception of becoming, explaining how this notion lies at the heart of a Deleuzian account of history. Towards this end, Lundy focuses on complicating--or \"complexifying\"--a number of dualisms in terms of which Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari are commonly explained (66). The oppositions Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari establish between--for example--depth and height, and the nomad and the state, consist in \"extractions or abstraction of de jure purities from de facto mixtures\" (102). Deleuze's characterization of \"a monism that in fact equals pluralism,\" says Lundy, can be understood in these terms (89), as well as the emphasis Deleuze places on \"the diagonal\" in his reading of Foucault (90-91). Lundy justifies this approach with reference to Deleuze's \"distaste\" for extremes (63), the fact that Deleuze gives priority to the \"between\" (56) or \"middle realm\" (97). Building on this claim, Lundy says Deleuze's thought should not be understood in terms of \"revolutionary becoming\" alone, but is characterized by precaution and prudence (98). Similarly, one cannot overly ","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131530028","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}