PREFACE The six themes chosen for study in the following text are themes deeply embedded within the respective structures of phenomenology and pragmatism,...

It is an irony perhaps worthy of John Ashbery that the critics who made his reputation as our premier contemporary poet have virtually ignored the innovations which in fact make his work distinctively of our time. The received terms show us how Ashbery revitalizes the old wisdom of Keats or the virile fantasies of Emersonian strength but they do so at the cost of almost everything about the work deeply responsive to irreducibly contemporary demands on the psyche. Such omissions not (...) only distance Ashbery from the urgencies of the present, they also make it far more difficult to appreciate just how the best contemporary art actually defines the challenges and possibilities created by that present. By banishing writers like Ashbery to literary tradition, we leave the domain of the postmodern to two dominant discourses. One is driven by post-structural theory’s idealization of the nomadic, the undecidable, and the profusion of simulacra. The other champions Marxist values which cast as the most significant contemporary art the rather slight oppositional devices of artists like Sherrie Levine, Hans Haacke, and Barbara Kruger. These critical idealizations then ignore what might be the central historical problem facing contemporary art. Can it continue to elaborate new dimensions of that late fifties postmodernism which set the values of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg against the increasingly formalist versions of modernism that then dominated the art world and the poetry workshops? Or does the age demand the emergence of a new sensibility, strands of which are being woven in post-structuralist mills? Charles Altieri is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Washington. Author of books on contemporary poetry and literary theory, he has just completed a book on abstraction in modern poetry and painting. This essay lays some groundwork for a book, Bourgeois Utopians, attempt to keep the arts central to our discussion of postmodernism. (shrink)

The chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) is today recognized as one of the most important twentieth-century thinkers about scientific knowledge and scientific community. Yet Polanyi's philosophy of science exhibits an unresolved tension between science as a traditional community and science as an intellectual marketplace. Binding together these different models was important for his overall intellectual and political project, which was a defense of bourgeois liberal order. His philosophy of science and his economic thought were mutually supporting elements within (...) this political project. Polanyi's intellectual corpus formed a contradictory unity, the tensions within which were manageable only under particular historical conditions. His attempt to hold together traditional authority and the free market fit with, and derived plausibility from, the social conditions under which his philosophical work came to maturity: Keynesian class compromise and surviving habits of social deference within postwar Britain. (shrink)

Andrea Mansker révise ici la célèbre analyse de Robert Nye : le duel – institution résolument masculine s’il en est – a été la représentation ultime de l’honneur masculin bourgeois. Cet honneur, foncièrement hétérosexuel, était, selon Nye, incarné (embodied) dans le bourgeois, déjà construit selon un modèle biomédical des sexes ; l’honneur féminin bourgeois, également embodied et foncièrement hétérosexuel en opposition à l’honneur masculin, s’est constitué par « la chasteté et le mariage légi...

I argue that race -- the European Spectre of the title -- has received insufficient attention within Marxist theory. Liberal and Marxist accounts of modernity differ on various points, but agree in characterizing modern society/capitalism as marked by the collapse of ancient and medieval status distinctions and the corresponding emergence of moral and juridical egalitarianism. But this basically Eurocentric narrative ignores the new system of ascriptive hierarchy established by European expansionism: white supremacy. Particularly in the United States, I suggest, race (...) has been the primary social division, in that racial identity has generally trumped other kinds of group identity. Ironically, then, the Marxist model works better for race than class, and if the concept of a bourgeois revolution is expanded to mean the overturning of ascriptive hierarchy of all kinds, it has yet to be fully carried out. (shrink)

Constitué d'analyses et de réflexions sur les méthodes pratiquées aujourd'hui dans l'écriture de l'histoire de la philosophie, cet ouvrage vise à rendre compte de la différence des pratiques existant selon les traditions et à interroger l'existence d'une démarche historique spécifique au domaine de la philosophie. L'enjeu fondamental est donc de savoir s'il existe une historiographie propre à la philosophie. Les interrogations portent en particulier sur les questions des critères d'exactitude, de vérification, de crédibilité qui permettraient de distinguer et de décider (...) entre les interprétations. Si le travail de l'interprétation est infini, toujours à refaire, reprendre et corriger, cela n'implique nullement l'abandon des exigences qui fondent la pertinence historique. Une introduction indispensable à toute pratique de l'histoire de la philosophie. L'ouvrage comporte notamment des textes de : P. Aubenque (Paris IV), J. Biard (Tours), B. Bourgeois (Paris I), C. Coutel (Artois), Th. De Koninck (Laval, Québec), D. Deleule (Paris X), D. Garber (Chicago), P. Magnard (Paris IV), J.-M. Narbonne (Laval, Québec), E. Nuzzo (Salerne), John Rogers (Keele), J. B. Schneewind (Johns-Hopkins, Baltimore), Tom Sorell (Essex), J.-L. Vieillard-Baron (Poitiers), Y. C. Zarka (CNRS, Paris), mais aussi de F. P. Adorno (Salerne, CNRS), P. Caye (CNRS), P. Destrée (CNRS, Belgique), T. Gontier (CNRS), J.-B. Gourinat (CNRS), E. Picavet (Paris I), I. Radrizzani (Munich), C. Viano (CNRS), A. Vasiliu (CNRS). (shrink)

« En vertu de quoi la catégorie de l’Utopique possède donc à côté de son sens habituel et justement dépréciatif, cet autre sens qui, loin d’être nécessairement abstrait et détourné du monde, est au contraire centralement préoccupé du monde : celui du dépassement de la marche naturelle des événements »« Il n’y a guère, même parmi les économistes bourgeois, un savant..

« En vertu de quoi la catégorie de l’Utopique possède donc à côté de son sens habituel et justement dépréciatif, cet autre sens qui, loin d’être nécessairement abstrait et détourné du monde, est au contraire centralement préoccupé du monde : celui du dépassement de la marche naturelle des événements »« Il n’y a guère, même parmi les économistes bourgeois, un savant..

Vizcaíno examines Charles W. Mills's “early” (1984–1994) and “middle” (1994–1997) Marxist periods to contextualize his later “liberal turn.” Vizcaíno develops an interpretation of what it means to “occupy liberalism” for the purposes of a radical agenda, especially one that is expressed in terms of what Mills called “Black radical liberalism.” Mills's later liberal turn, when read in relation to his earlier work on Marxism, can be seen as an attempt to advance a revised theory of radical social transformation not (...) only for the twenty-first century but for the entire third millennium. Given liberalism's privileged position as a mainstream ideological norm in the modern world, Mills's intentions were to “occupy” liberalism as an exercise of ideologiekritik, where one exposes the limitations and contradictions of the theory from within, with the ultimate aim of overcoming it. In short, according to Vizcaíno, Mills's liberal turn is not so much an abandonment of his earlier radical aspirations as it is a new attempt to fulfill them. (shrink)

Contemporary theorization of the post-secular involves, and further invites, philosophical and historical reflection on the nature of the secular. Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, has warned against what he terms “subtraction stories” of the emergence of modern secularism, narratives built around simplistic images of the rejection of, and liberation from, a Christian age of faith; these polemical confections need to be replaced, he argues, by accounts that register the complex processes by which secularism emerged out of the Christian, (...) and how it bears the deep traces of that origin.1 Over seventy years before Taylor's injunction, Marcuse can be seen…. (shrink)

Taking its lead from analyses of gift exchange by Marcel Mauss and Marshall Sahlins as well as of contact by Charles Long and Jonathan Z Smith, this article elaborates a theory of the exchange, among dominant social subjects, of representations of their subjected proximate others in order to rectify the crisis precipitated by contact with otherness that threatens their claims to autonomy, authority, homogeneity, and universality. Specifically it situates the polemical exchange of representations of women among Friedrich Schlegel, G (...) W F Hegel, and Karl Gutzkow as exemplary German male bourgeois efforts to rectify the crises to subject formation generated, in part, by the emergence of gender-coded bifurcated bourgeois society and signaled by the Kantian and French Revolutions. The public dissemination of apotropaic representations screened the dependence upon proximate others by, and determined the positions among, exchange participants as well as maintained structures of domination. (shrink)

The framing question of Mills' important and thought-provoking paper is whether there is reason for political progressives and radicals to employ the notion of a social contract for either descriptive or normative purposes. In contrast to the common response that the social contract is a piece of "bourgeois mystification" he argues instead that a reformulated conception of the contract, one which he calls the.

This chapter addresses the passage from the State of Nature to the State of Society according to fictional stories published in the periodicals. The common thread to all the primary sources studied is that workers depict the pre-capitalist world as an idyllic state where men lived in perfect communion, where there is no private property or class differences. According to these narratives, the harmony of this fraternal community of brothers is destroyed by unknown monsters who came to kidnap the women (...) of the community. It argues that these narratives are presented as metaphors for the origin of capitalism inspired by the colonial experience. This chapter will conclude showing that Chilean workers understood communal property from a patriarchal perspective, in which women were conceived as communal goods from the outset. This implies that these traditional revolutionary narratives were not blind to sexual difference since they were based upon (1) a commodification of women (as communal property); (2) an interpretation of private property based upon an original expropriation of ‘communal women’; and (3) a depiction of the revolution as the ‘repossession’ of women by working-class men. These writings thus are not considered mere fictions, but as part of the political theory of the early Chilean working-class movement. In order to do this, these working-class writings are interpreted from Silvia Federici’s concept of primitive accumulation and contrasted to (1) Rousseau’s and Bakunin’s critique of Hobbes and Locke theories of the State of Nature; and (2) Charles Fourier’s utopia of the Community of Women and Marx’s critique of it. (shrink)

In 2005, Charles Mills published “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology” in Hypatia: a withering critique of much of contemporary political philosophy and ethics. For Mills such work in philosophy failed to attend to the realities of social life and politics, and in remaining silent on actual issues of domination and oppression served an ideological role in supporting the interests of white bourgeois men. Around the time that Charles Mills launched his broadside against ideal theory, trans theorists had been (...) fighting their own battle against the abstraction of theory from the realities of trans lives and oppression. Vivian Namaste (2000) and Jay Prosser (1998) argued that contemporary gender theory failed to justice to the actuality of trans life, retreating instead to understanding trans life through literary archetypes and idealized radical figures. In this chapter I’ll compare Mills’ critique of ideal theory with the transfeminist critique of 1990s gender theory, arguing that they share much in common. Centrally, both critiques share an underlying commitment to theory needing to be grounded in the actuality of oppression and power relations. This common thread, I suggest, must continue to guide transfeminist thought and action: contra Marquis Bey (2022) transfeminist thought and praxis must continue to be about trans lives, about the oppression of trans women, and about ways of actually achieving liberation from our current dire position. (shrink)

Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (born January 18, 1689; died February 10, 1755) was an outstanding thinker of the French Enlightenment in the first half of the eighteenth century, a sociologist and philosopher that laid the foundation for the theory of the bourgeois state and of the science of law. He was, with Voltaire and Rousseau, an intellectual pioneer of the French bourgeois revolution. This glorious name, Montesquieu, has to the ears of our people of (...) China both a familiar ring and a sense of intimacy. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 35, Issue 1, pp 35 - 60 The early-modern French translations of Erasmus’ Praise of Folly show an astonishing adaptability to its ever changing readerships. Much attention has been paid recently to the two sixteenth-century translations and their intended readers—royal and bourgeois respectively. The three French translations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are less known but all the more intriguing. In 1642 Folly addresses herself to the French pre-classicist readers, adepts of Richelieu’s new Académie Française—although (...) her translator, Hélie Poirier, was a Protestant refugee, recently settled in the Netherlands. In 1671 Folly seeks her readers in the Parisian salons, satirizing the same societal wrongs as her great contemporary Molière in Tartuffe and Les femmes savantes. The successful translation by Nicolas Gueudeville is also a chameleon: originally translated and printed in Leiden, the text gradually becomes more Parisian with each passing edition. Folly’s language is bowdlerized according to the principles of bienséance, and Vianen’s illustrations, based on Holbein, are discarded as rude and old-fashioned. In 1751 they are replaced by Charles Eisen’s elegant, long-limbed, periwigged figures, dressed to the latest fashion. Although she changes her name, her language, her appearance and attire, Folly remains much the same through the ages—everlasting and omnipresent, just as the vices she laughs at. (shrink)

Near the beginning of Charles Baudelaire’s Salon of 1846—one of the most brilliant and intellectually ambitious essays in art criticism ever written—the twenty-five-year-old author states that “the critic should arm himself from the start with a sure criterion, a criterion drawn from nature, and should then carry out his duty with a passion; for a critic does not cease to be a man, and passion draws similar temperaments together and exalts the reason to fresh heights.”1 It may be the (...) emphasis on passion, indeed on strong personal feeling of every kind, not only here but everywhere in the Salon, that has prevented commentators from taking wholly seriously the possibility that a single criterion is in fact at work throughout it. But what if that criterion operates in the realm of feeling, if it is itself a feeling or complex of feelings, and if, moreover, as Baudelaire as much as says, no conflict between the claims of reason and of passion exists within his conception of the critical enterprise? Not that scholars have failed to recognize either the brilliance or the ambitiousness of the Salon of 1846; on the contrary, it is widely regarded as the major extrapoetic text of Baudelaire’s early career and especially in recent years has received extensive commentary. But by and large, those who have written about it have focused primarily on topics, such as Baudelaire’s conception of nature, his vision of the creative process, and the relation of his ideas to those of other critics, that seem to me, if not quite pseudoproblems, at any rate concerns that lead us to ignore what the text may be saying about its own manner of proceeding.2 I acknowledge, too, that certain features of that manner—the mixture of irony and seriousness in the opening dedication to the bourgeois, the many abrupt fluctuations of tone in the body of the essay, the seeming breaks in the argument from section to section, the texture and movement of the prose—could hardly be less systematic in effect. And yet it would not be hard to show that the Salon as a whole is the product of a remarkable effort, not merely to ground the judgment of individual works of art in a single experiential principle but also to bind together a number of diverse concerns—pictorial, literary, political, philosophical—in an intellectually coherent structure every part of which is meant to be consonant with every other. No wonder the last sentence of the Salon apostrophizes Balzac: the sheer inclusiveness of Baudelaire’s undertaking recalls nothing so much as the scope of the Comédie humaine. 1. Charles Baudelaire, Salon of 1846, Art in Paris 1845-1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne , pp. 101-2. All further references to the Salon of 1846 will be included parenthetically in the text . I have also consulted the recent edition, Baudelaire: “Salon de 1846,” ed. David Kelley , which includes a useful introduction and bibliography.2. See, for example, Margaret Gilman, Baudelaire, the Critic , pp. 12-53 and 77-111; F. W. Leakey, “Les Esthétiques de Baudelaire: Le ‘Système’ des annés 1844-1847,” Revue des sciences humaines, n.s., fasc. 127 : 481-96, and Baudelaire and Nature , pp. 73-88; and Kelley, “Deux Aspects du Salon de 1846 de Baudelaire : La Dédicace aux bourgeois et la couleur,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 5 : 331-46, and introduction to Baudelaire: “Salon de 1846,” pp. 1-114. Michael Fried, professor of humanities and the history of art and director of the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Morris Louis and Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. He is currently at work on a book on Gustave Courbet. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry, “The Structure of Beholding in Courbet’s Burial at Ornans,” appeared in the June 1983 issue. (shrink)

This article reviews and brings together two literatures: classical political economists’ views on the skilling or deskilling nature of technological change in England, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when they wrote, are compared with the empirical evidence about the skill effects of technological change that emerges from studies of economic historians. In both literatures, we look at both the skill impacts of technological change and at the “inducement mechanisms” that are envisaged for the introduction of new technologies. Adam Smith (...) and Karl Marx both regarded the deskilling of the labour force as the predominant form of biased technical change, but other authors such as Charles Babbage also took account of capital-skill complementarities and skill-enhancing effects of technological change. For Smith, the deskilling bias was an unintended by-product of the increasing division of labour, which in his view “naturally” led to ever more simplification of workers’ tasks. As opposed to Smith, Marx considered unskilled-biased technical change as a bourgeois weapon in the class struggle for impairing the workers’ bargaining position. Studies of economic historians lend support to Marx’s hypothesis about the inducement mechanisms for the introduction of unskilled-biased innovations, but have produced no clear-cut empirical evidence for a deskilling tendency of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century technological change as a whole. Industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rather led to labour polarization, by simultaneously deskilling a large part of the workforce and raising the demand for some high-skilled workers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 30.2 (2006) 410-423 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Reading Our Way To Democracy? Literature and Public EthicsSimon Stow The College of William and Mary"I believe," wrote Franz Kafka, "that we should only read those books that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it?" 1 Almost all of us who read (...) books for a living and/or pleasure have undoubtedly experienced that most delightfully troubling of phenomena: a novel that forces us to think differently about the world and the way that we live. In recent years, literature's capacity to generate in its readers "a rigorous scrutiny of everything they believe in and live by" 2 —what Stanley Fish calls its "dialectical" potential—has drawn the attention of a number of liberal-democratic theorists, most notably Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty. By "liberal-democratic" is meant here, of course, that system of government with popular rule, regular elections, a commitment to individual rights and the rule of law; one that draws on a tradition of political thought that includes the work of John Locke, John Stuart Mill and John Rawls. Although their exact formulations of the claim differ in important ways, Nussbaum and Rorty are united in the belief that reading can enhance the practice of liberal-democracy by expanding the moral imaginations of a citizenry. Such an expansion will, they believe, promote the values of tolerance, respect for other viewpoints, and a recognition of the contingency of one's own perspective, in short, the values of civil society. Whilst there is undoubtedly something intuitively appealing about their claim, there is much that is philosophically and politically problematic about their respective formulations of it. Both seem to rest for example upon an implausible theory of the impact of literature upon its readers, and an illiberal tendency to treat reader-citizens as means and not as ends. Attempting to capture what is of value [End Page 410] whilst jettisoning what is problematic, I will briefly set out their claims; identify the difficulties within them; and offer an account of how their project might be operationalized in a way that is both more philosophically plausible and more politically consistent with liberalism. My aim will not be to offer another detailed account of the connection between literature and democracy—not least because I believe that the current accounts are overly deterministic—but rather to suggest some ways in which we might nevertheless build upon the current work to capture the potential benefits of reading for liberal-democratic societies.Although Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty hold quite different views about the proper role of literature in philosophy—Nussbaum believes that literature is merely a valuable addition to philosophical Reason traditionally conceived, whereas for the postfoundational Rorty, the literariness goes all the way down—both suggest that reading will promote two values that they regard as essential to liberal-democratic practice. Following Rorty we might label these values contingency and solidarity. 3 Contingency arises from the recognition that even one's most deeply held beliefs are always only a perspective. It is connected to civility in that it serves, Nussbaum and Rorty believe, to undermine the vehemence of individual claims. Although this claim about the partiality of individual perspectives sounds dangerously postmodern for thinker such as Nussbaum—Rorty, who calls his political philosophy "postmodernist bourgeois liberalism," 4 has no such qualms—there are limits to this insight in her thought. Nussbaum is simply concerned to show that an excessive and over-confident reliance on philosophical Reason is likely to generate an incomplete understanding of a given situation. For this reason, she suggests, "storytelling and literary imagining are not opposed to... but can provide essential ingredients in a rational argument." 5 She argues, for example, that Hard Times by Charles Dickens will alert its readers—in particular "the person brought up solely on economic texts" who "has not been encouraged to think of workers (or indeed anybody else) as fully human... (shrink)

The present article focuses on American and European personalism during the early part of the twentieth century. The immediate predecessor of the personalist movement as such was the philosopher Rudolf Hermann Lotze who inspired two of his students, Methodist Borden Parker Bowne and Rudolf Eucken. In France, in the meantime, Charles Renouvier published his Le personnalisme in 1903, while Emmanuel Mounier later presented personalism as a new political philosophy under the influence Alexandre Marc’s comments on Nicolai Hartmann’s Ethik. Mounier’s (...) Manifeste au service du personnalisme develops a dialectical critique on both liberal bourgeois individualism and all forms of collectivism, all, in his opinion, ‘inverted theocracies’ with shared dehumanizing tendencies. As alternative, it was necessary for personalism to become the leading spiritual and philosophical guide in order to Refaire la Renaissance. As a matter of fact, Jacques Maritain’s Humanisme intégral might justly be considered a first attempt to describe the nature of a new civilization in any detail. Maritain is more explicit on the Christian face of this new humanism, while refuting any kind of mancentred humanism. Mounier’s and Maritain’s personalist ideas together with Max Scheler’s non-formal ethics of value and his Aktlehre had a considerable influence on Louis Janssens. In Personne et société he not only criticizes several contemporary European ideologies in line with Mounier, but he also accepts that persons can only be really known by co-operation, in line with Scheler’s idea of inter-subjectivity and Aquinas’ idea of the social nature of the human being. Following Maritain, Janssens distinguishes between the human being as individual and the human person. Individuality contains a material component, characterized by its concrete position in space and time, while the person and his/her spiritual component facilitate a movement away from the self towards others in freedom and love. The person is not only understood as the highest value, he/she is able to control the hierarchy of values by his/her ordo amoris, a flexible undertaking influenced by the love of others in which love opens each person for growth towards higher values. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.4 (2002) 345-367 [Access article in PDF] Imagining in the Public Sphere Robert Asen Contemporary public sphere scholarship has been motivated significantly by a concern to overcome historical and conceptual exclusions in public spheres. Recent theory and criticism has investigated direct and indirect exclusions. Direct exclusions expressly prevent the participation of particular individuals and groups in public discussions and debates. Prohibitions against women speaking in public, (...) for example, have served historically to inhibit women's participation in various forums (see, e.g., Landes 1998). Indirect exclusions function tacitly through discursive norms and practices that prescribe particular ways of interacting in public forums. Indirect exclusions compel participants to conform to established modes of discourse that effectively negate the perspectives and contributions of previously directly excluded individuals and groups. Calls for "objective" and "dispassionate" debate, for instance, sometimes have restricted public agendas by portraying culturally specific forms of address as universally practiced (see, e.g., Warner 1993). Indirect exclusions may regulate discourse in various forums even when direct exclusions have been counteracted. Scholarship seeking to overcome these exclusions has proceeded on two levels. On one level, scholars have recounted the efforts of excluded persons to participate in public life despite restrictions by developing alternative modes of publicity (see, e.g., Ryan 1990; Zaeske 2002). On a second level, theorists have proposed more inclusive conceptual models of the public sphere that may overcome historical exclusions of the bourgeois public sphere while retaining a commitment to critical publicity (see, e.g., Asen 1999; Benhabib 1996; Hauser 1999; Mouffe 2000).Practicing democratic discourse fairly and justly depends indispensably on enabling inclusion. Proponents of deliberative democracy argue that political legitimacy arises from processes of inclusive public debate. Seyla Benhabib asserts that "legitimacy in complex societies must be [End Page 345] thought to result from the free and unconstrained public deliberation of all about matters of common concern" (1996, 68). Others regard inclusive public discourse as crucial for the formation of affirmative individual and collective identities. Craig Calhoun faults bourgeois notions of publicity for treating "identity formation as essentially private and prior to participation in the idealized public sphere of rational-critical discourse" (1993, 274). Identity formation entails mutual recognition among members of diverse cultures, yet theorists have observed that truncated discursive processes may inhibit mutual recognition. Charles Taylor writes that practicing a politics of recognition requires an openness toward other cultures—a presumption of value tested through sustained engagement so that "what we have formerly taken for granted as the background to valuation can be situated as one possibility alongside the background of the formerly unfamiliar culture" (1994, 67). Inclusiveness is also important for individuals and groups seeking to advance self-fashioned interpretations of their interests and needs against interpretations imposed by others. Nancy Fraser explains that self-fashioning is necessary because in public debates and controversies "who gets to establish authoritative thick definitions of people's needs is itself a political stake" (1989, 164).Although inclusion is indispensable, exclusion is never total. Sometimes, people force their way into public forums and agendas. For example, participation by activists in discussions of AIDS research and treatment often has been limited by researchers' assertions of expert privilege in investigating scientific matters. Valeria Fabj and Matthew J. Sobnosky (1995) detail how AIDS activists have responded by engaging in discursive acts of redefinition and translation to gain entry into previously circumscribed forums. At other times, people surreptitiously access public arenas. Prison writing is one way that those officially banished from public view nevertheless continue to participate in oppositional discourses and movements. Gerard A. Hauser (2001) considers how dissident Adam Michnik remained a vibrant voice in Polish civil society through his writings even after his imprisonment in the 1980s by an authoritarian regime. At still other times, typically excluded people may be invited to participate in public discussions. Members of the AIDS activist group ACT UP occasionally have testified in the traditional setting of the congressional committee hearing as invited witnesses. Daniel C. Brouwer (2001) maintains that politically sympathetic committee chairs facilitated ACT UP's "official" appearances before members of Congress. Whether invited or... (shrink)

In this chapter Campbell considers the possibility – popular with historians – that an aristocratic ethic was more conducive to modern consumerism than a bourgeois one. He starts by outlining the ‘cavalier ethic’ typical of the supporters of Charles I, noting that it was a mannered ethic centred on the value of honour, before moving on to consider the importance of neo-stoicism in Eighteenth-century thought, as expressed for example by Dr. Johnson. Crucially, neither of these traditions of thought (...) supplied the unqualified support for emotional expression, together with the pursuit of imaginatively-mediated pleasure, necessary for modern consumerism. Nor, perhaps more surprisingly, did the subsequent ‘dandy ethic’. For although dandies took pride in their appearance and were fiercely competitive, theirs was also a mannered ethic that placed a premium on control of all impulses and emotions. (shrink)

“Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” juxtaposes elliptical descriptions that reveal the interiorization of commodities in the economy of high capitalism. “Allegory in the nineteenth century vacated the outer world, to colonize the inner world.”32 Each of the exposé’s six sections consists of two parts: “Fourier, or the Arcades,” “Daguerre, or the Panoramas,” “Grandville, or the World Exhibitions,” “Louis-Philippe, or the Interior,” “Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris,” “Haussmann, or the Baricades.”33The commercial arcade and not the factory is the logical (...) starting point for Benjamin. Paris, like London, the other capital of nineteenth-century capitalism, is an administrative and financial but not an industrial center. Paris is the locus classicus of bourgeois culture, which finds its most conspicuous expression in the arcade. The arcade cuts through and commercializes the residential block. It harnesses the technology of cast-iron “Pompeian” pillars, to offer in its enticing bay windows the latest, most sophisticated form of bourgeois merchandising. Fourier houses his “land of Cockaigne” in a “reactionary modification” of the arcade.34Parallel to the technical innovation of the arcades is that of the lifelike painted panoramas, which serve Jacques-Louis David’s pupils when they “draw from nature.” Politically superior, the city still dreams of the country. “The panoramas, which declare a revolution in the relation of art to technology, are at the same time an expression of a new feeling about life.”35 They drive a wedge between “plastic foreground” and “informational base.” The worker in the literary panorama is “a trimming for an idyll.” Technical innovations in photography reduce the representational significance of painting. Now photography “is given the task of making discoveries”: it explores the sewers and catacombs. It markets events. With impressionism and cubism, painting in turn transcends bourgeois conceptions of realism. 32. “Die Allegorie hat im neunzehnten Jahrhundert die Umwelt geräumt, um sich in der Innenwelt anzusiedeln” .33. Adorno objects to the use of people’s names in these titles and suggests that objects like dust or plush would bemore illuminating. Benjamin retains the names to evoke bourgeois interiorization. Louis-Philippe, however, is anomalous, since he is emblem rather than allegorist; the true allegorist of the “Louis-Philippe, or the Interior” section is the collector. Otherwise, the organization is strictly symmetrical: Benjamin discusses Charles Fourier, Louis Daguerre, and Grandville at the end of the sections in which they appear, the others at the beginning.34. Trans. Jephcott, p. 148. “Das Schlaraffenland,” “ihre reaktionäre Umbildung” . Anne Higonnet, formerly a student at the Ecole du Louvre, is a graduate student of art history at Yale University. Margaret Higonnet, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Connecticut, has written on Romantic and modern literary theory. Patrice Higonnet is Goelet Professor of French History at Harvard University. He has written on the French Revolution and, with Margaret Higonnet, is coauthor of a forthcoming book on suicide in eighteenth-century France. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviews 105 NEW RUSSIAN WORK ON RUSSELL IRVING H. ANELLIS Modern Logic Publishing I Box 1036, Welch Ave. Station Ames, JA 5°010-1036, USA A. S. Kolesnikov. cI»HJIOCOcPHJl BepTPaHa PacceJIa [Filosofija Bertrana Rassela]. Leningrad: Izdatel'srvo Leningradskogo Universiteta, 1991. Pp. 232. 3 rub. 30 kop.. Anatolii Sergeevich Kolesnikov is a relatively new name in Russell studies,.r1.a1though his book shows a deep knowledge of the material available on Russell in Russian and (...) a wide acquaintance with Russell's publications in English and in Russian translation.1 In this work, which translates as The Philosophy ofBertrand Russel~ Kolesnikov traces the evolution of Russell's "world-view", while presenting a traditional Soviet interpretation of Russell's place in "bourgeois" philosophy. This monograph presents for the first time in Russian a thorough analysis of the evolution of Russell's philosophy as the outstanding representation of contemporary bourgeois philosophy, and is the first major study on Russell's philosophy in Russian since the appearance in'1962 ofSoviet philosopher 1. S. Narskii's The Philosophy ofBertrand Russell2 Russell himself is viewed by Kolesnikov as the best representative of the bourgeois humanist, philosopher, and mathematician. The author seeks a critical understanding of the historical and philosophical sources of Russell's ideas and conceptions and of the influence which these exercised and continue to exercise on contemporary Western philosophy and science. The author's aim is to "uncover" the neo-realist empiricist direction of Russell's philosophy as it manifested itself as a condition of his scientific and epistemological thinking. As had been usual for Soviet studies of Western "bourgeois" philosophers and their philosophies, Lenin and his empiriocriticism serves as a foil for the elucidation of Russell's thought and its development. Probably the most famous example of the dialectical attack on anaI Kolesnikov is also the author of The Freethought ofBertrand Russell [Svobodomyslie Bertrana Rassela] (Moscow: Mysl', 1978). 2 The Philosophy ofBertrand Russell: Lectures for Students in the University Philosophy Faculty [Filosofija Bertrana Rassela: lekcija dlja studentovfilosofikih fakul'tov universitetov] (Moscow: 1962). In the first footnote (on p. 60) to his translation of the article on "Bertrand Russell in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia: Translation from Russian", Russel~ nos. 23-4 (1976): 60-2, Charles Haynes wrote that "Narskiy... appears to be a leading Soviet writet on Russell's philosophy." In fact Narskii wrote extensively on philosophy of logic, for which work he is bcst known. 106 Reviews lytic philosophy revolved around the rather rough treatment accorded to A. J. Ayer when he lectured at Moscow State University in 1962. This methodology for criticizing "bourgeois idealism" has declined in recent years as a consequence of perestroika; from as early as 1987 Soviet philosophers have managed to refrain from employing this tactic in their writings (as one may readily see, e.g., from Zinaida Sokuler's recent paper on "Wirrgenstein on the Contradictions in Logic and in the Foundations of Mathematics"3). Kolesnikov's discussion of political-ideological, social and moral issues is limited to the Preface, which also presents a brief sketch of Russell's life, especially his education and the earliest of the philosophical influences at Cambridge, of course Russell's visit in 1920 to Soviet Russia and the writings that derived from that trip, especially his book The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, and of his travels in China. Here Kolesnikov notes Russell's ties to the Fabian socialists and names in particular the Webbs, H. G. Wells and "other members representative of the bourgeois intelligentsia" (p. 5). Mention is also made here of his activism for nuclear disarmament and against the American war in Indochina, and of the essay "Why I Am Not a Christian". We are told at the very outset (p. 3) that "the name of this philosopher is widely known in our country." The remainder of the book is concerned with Russell's technical philosophy, i.e. with his work in philosophy of mathematics, logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics and epistemology. Kolesnikov divides Russell's philosophical evolution into three stages (p. 22). The "early" period (1894-1910) is the developmental stage, characterized by the influence ofneo-Hegelianism and neo-Kantianism and by the development of the conception of... (shrink)

This essay replies to critics of my earlier piece in Historical Materialism which looked at the origins of the American Civil War. The essay re-emphasises the importance of the shift to wage labour in the North, it re-asserts the need to incorporate slave resistance as a key factor in any causal account of the sectional conflict, and it argues that the ultimate northern victory in that conflict should be seen as constituting a ‘bourgeois revolution’. It engages specifically with the (...) criticisms and some of the alternative interpretations offered by Charles Post, Eric Foner and Neil Davidson. (shrink)

Discussions of the object as a key to understanding central aspects of modern and contemporary art. Artists increasingly refer to "post-object-based" work while theorists engage with material artifacts in culture. A focus on "object-based" learning treats objects as vectors for dialogue across disciplines. Virtual imaging enables the object to be abstracted or circumvented, while immaterial forms of labor challenge materialist theories. This anthology surveys such reappraisals of what constitutes the "objectness" of production, with art as its focus. Among the topics (...) it examines are the relation of the object to subjectivity; distinctions between objects and things; the significance of the object's transition from inert mass to tool or artifact; and the meanings of the everyday in the found object, repetition in the replicated or multiple object, loss in the absent object, and abjection in the formless or degraded object. It also explores artistic positions that are anti-object; theories of the experimental, liminal or mental object; and the role of objects in performance. The object becomes a prism through which to reread contemporary art and better understand its recent past. Artists surveyed include Georges Adéagbo, Art in Ruins, Iain Baxter, Louise Bourgeois, Pavel Büchler, Lygia Clark, Claude Closky, Brian Collier, Jimmie Durham, Fischli & Weiss, Luca Frei, Meschac Gaba, Isa Genzken, Gruppe Geflecht, Eva Hesse, Mike Kelley, John Latham, Antje Majewski, Gustav Metzger, Cady Noland, Gabriel Orozco, Adrian Piper, Falke Pisano, Eva Rothschild, Aura Satz, Kenneth Snelson, Hito Steyerl, Josef Strau, Alina Szapocznikow, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Erwin Wurm Writers include Homi K. Bhabha, Jack Burnham, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Lynne Cooke, Gillo Dorfles, Jean Fisher, Ferreira Gullar, Charles Harrison, Paulo Herkenhoff, Julia Kristeva, Bruno Latour, Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger, Jean-François Lyotard, Lev Manovich, Ursula Meyer, Bruno Munari, Georges Perec, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Dieter Roelstraete, Howard Singerman, Nancy Spector, Marcus Steinweg, Anne Wagner, Gérard Wajcman, Slavoj Zizek. (shrink)

The spirit of computer dating, lacking only the technology, was one of a number of schemes by which Charles Fourier wanted to radically transform human sexual relations. Early 19th century socialist thought, socialist movements and experiments were concerned with the entire catalog of miseries afflicting humankind. Monogamy and all its woes figured far more prominently than surplus value, which (according to pharmacists' records) was rarely the cause of suicidal depression. The Marxist tradition, while paying lip service to the “utopian” (...) critique of bourgeois society, repressed most of the “cultural” concerns of early socialism. The Utopians did not ignore or accept capitalism; it was a major evil, but not necessarily the source of all the other evils. (shrink)

Cette édition numérique a été réalisée à partir d'un support physique, parfois ancien, conservé au sein du dépôt légal de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, conformément à la loi n° 2012-287 du 1er mars 2012 relative à l'exploitation des Livres indisponibles du XXe siècle. Pages de début Avant-propos I - Philosophie des droits de l'homme 2 - Kant et les droits de l'homme 3 - Fichte et les droits de l'homme 4 - Hegel et les droits de l'homme 5 - (...) Marx et les droits de l'homme Postface Références Pagesde fin. (shrink)

La philosophie hégélienne culmine avec l'analyse du rapport entre le moment infini, absolu, divin, et le moment fini, objectif, humain, de l'esprit. Le premier donne son sens - religieux et philosophique - au second qui, en retour, le fait exister - politiquement. Chacun d'eux joue ainsi un rôle spécifique au sein de leur unité cependant fondamentalement divine. A l'encontre de toutes les interprétations anthropologiques du hégélianisme, le texte de Hegel vérifie l'actualisation d'une telle relation dialectique, mais hiérarchisée, entre l'humanité et (...) la divinité de l'esprit, au sein de l'histoire politique comme au sein de l'histoire de la religion et de la philosophie, et, plus généralement, dans le rapport même de celles-ci. La présente étude propose donc une thèse sur l'articulation hégélienne de la politique, de la religion et de la philosophie dans le développement de l'esprit. (shrink)

This article addresses a fundamental philosophical problem in environmental governance: Can non-conscious artificial intelligence systems provide legitimate representation for non-conscious ecological systems within democratic frameworks? I argue that the epistemic asymmetry between human cognition and ecosystem functioning creates what I term "double non-conscious representation"—AI systems representing ecological entities that, like the AI systems themselves, lack consciousness in traditional senses. This arrangement requires reconceptualizing both representation theory and democratic legitimacy beyond anthropocentric assumptions. Through analysis of ecological commons governance as a paradigmatic (...) case, I develop a framework of "technological constitutionalism" that identifies conditions under which AI guardianship can enhance rather than undermine democratic environmental governance. The core philosophical contribution lies in demonstrating how epistemic privilege regarding ecological systems can ground bounded autonomous authority for AI representatives despite the absence of conscious agency in both representative and represented, provided appropriate institutional constraints preserve democratic accountability while enabling genuine ecological decision-making. (shrink)

Oddities about the common usage of the phrase sustainable development can be explored with a view to finding a family of clear meanings for this widely used phrase. The most popular definition, authored by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), is really a framework for definitions that vary with context. In spite of its vagueness, this WCED definition gives rise to a definitional schema that can be used to clarify and categorize many of the definitions currently in use. (...) Because the WCED family of concepts can be applied in practical ethics, it is not necessary to throw up our hands and dismiss sustainable development as chimerical in spite of the plethora of definitions one may find in current use. (shrink)

«Color siderum ». Η χρύσωσις των ελληνικών πήλινων ειδωλίων κατά την ελληνιστική και ρωμαϊκή εποχή. Η έρευνα που διεξάγεται εδώ και δεκαπέντε χρόνια στο Μουσείο του Λούβρου σχετικά με την πολυχρωμία των ελληνικών πήλινων ειδωλίων επικεντρώθηκε στη μελέτη της τεχνικής της χρύσωσης. Το άρθρο πραγματεύεται ένα σύνολο είκοσι ειδωλίων, που χρονολογούνται από τον 4ο αι. π. Χ. έως το 2ο αι. μ. Χ. και προέρχονται κυρίως από την ηπειρωτική Ελλάδα (Αττική, Βοιωτία) και τη Μικρά Ασία. Γίνεται προσπάθεια, μέσω της εξέτασης (...) των επιφανειακών υπολειμμάτων μετάλλου, να αναγνωριστεί το μέρος της δουλειάς που αναλογεί στο ζωγράφο και/ ή στον επιχρυσωτή. Η ξέταση με βιντεομικροσκόπιο και η μη καταστροφική σωματιδιακή και δομική ανάλυση του φύλλου χρυσού, των στρωμάτων της βάσης και της προετοιμασίας οδηγούν στην αποκατάσταση των βημάτων της διαδικασίας της χρύσωσης και στην αναγνώριση της υψηλής εξειδίκευσης των εργατών. Η μελέτη αυτή επιτρέπει την επανεξέταση της σημασίας των έργων. (shrink)

We discuss two interpretations of two-dimensional semantics (2DMS) due to D. Chalmers and R. Stalnaker. The main problem with both interpretations of the formal framework is the relinquishng of rigidity for terms. They are in a sense unfaithful to an agent's beliefs. We present alternative principles to capture what we take to be agents's beliefs, namely: the principles of hyper-rigidity and backward reference to actuality. We propose then to go back to a one-dimensional semantics which affords a satisfactory model of (...) beliefs reports. Our proposal, like 2DMS, addresses typical problems of representation for beliefs and epistemological difficulties related to modal knowledge. (shrink)

Traditional ethics training for scientists and engineers stresses the basic ethical obligations of conducting research with honesty and integrity. But as the products of science and engineering research impact society in increasingly profound ways, major ethical issues closely connected to science and technology research are not captured, or even approached, by such training. As the powers conferred on us by science and technology research grow, and their impacts on society become increasingly conspicuous, it is past time that ethics training for (...) scientists and engineers evolve to embrace the social responsibilities related to research. Following on experiences developing and deploying an advanced social-responsibilities-of-research program for doctoral STEM students at the University of Notre Dame, this chapter argues that the virtue ethics tradition provides essential conceptual resources both to frame and then to provide training in the social responsibilities of research. (shrink)

Il s’agit de montrer que Gorgias avait conçu une opposition structurelle entre une persuasion bonne et une persuasion mauvaise et trompeuse. Il a souvent paru difficile de concilier sa prétention à dire la vérité au sujet d’Hélène et sa description, au sein du même texte, du discours comme indissociable d’une persuasion explicitement dite trompeuse. L’ Éloge d’Hélène serait-il lui-même trompeur, sa vérité ne serait-elle en réalité qu’une δόξα parmi d’autres, puisque le discours faillirait à dire ce qui est? Au contraire, (...) Gorgias évoque « quelque mauvaise persuasion », suggérant que la persuasion, ambivalente, peut aussi être bonne ou neutre : il parlerait principalement d’une persuasion mauvaise associée à la tromperie pour démontrer l’innocence d’Hélène qui l’a subie. Cette persuasion trompeuse fonctionnerait parce que ses victimes méconnaîtraient les faits passés, présents et futurs. Toutefois, le texte suggère que certains individus puissent les connaître. Gorgias en ferait partie : il se présente en opposition avec les poètes, qui estiment détenir leur savoir des Muses mais diffusent des discours mensongers, et, loin de transmettre comme eux un discours acquis d’avance, il a recours au raisonnement, λογισμός, seul moyen d’accéder à une connaissance des événements. Il reste cependant comme les poètes tributaire de la tradition. (shrink)