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

{"title":"Leibniz and Newton on Space, Time and the Trinity","authors":"P. Redding","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201171614","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201171614","url":null,"abstract":"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 ","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"22 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":"122961375","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":"Stephane Mallarme's Un Coup De Des and the Poem And/as Book as Diagram","authors":"J. Drucker","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201171612","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201171612","url":null,"abstract":"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","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"143 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":"115811131","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 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}

{"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}

{"title":"“The Self and Other People: Reading Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation with René Girard and Emmanuel Levinas”","authors":"Sandor Goodhart","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201171613","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201171613","url":null,"abstract":"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 ","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"13 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":"126746279","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":"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}

{"title":"The Anthropocentric Vision: Aesthetics of Effect and Terror in Poe’s “Hop-Frog”","authors":"Satwik Dasgupta","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201161527","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201161527","url":null,"abstract":"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","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"1 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":"133387246","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":"Kali, Clodia, and the Problem of Representation","authors":"Iswari P. Pandey","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201161526","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201161526","url":null,"abstract":"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 (","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"56 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":"123333176","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":"Radical Atheism and “The Arche-Materiality of Time”","authors":"Martin Hägglund","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20116147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20116147","url":null,"abstract":"(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","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125625843","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":"Mother and Son: The Dynamics of Hamlet’s Cartesian Madness","authors":"John DeCarlo","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20116146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20116146","url":null,"abstract":"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","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125742197","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}