This paper discusses the history of the confusion and controversies over whether the definition of consequence presented in the 11-page 1936 Tarski consequence-definition paper is based on a monistic fixed-universe framework?like Begriffsschrift and Principia Mathematica. Monistic fixed-universe frameworks, common in pre-WWII logic, keep the range of the individual variables fixed as the class of all individuals. The contrary alternative is that the definition is predicated on a pluralistic multiple-universe framework?like the 1931 Gödel incompleteness paper. A pluralistic multiple-universe framework recognizes multiple (...) universes of discourse serving as different ranges of the individual variables in different interpretations?as in post-WWII model theory. In the early 1960s, many logicians?mistakenly, as we show?held the ?contrary alternative? that Tarski 1936 had already adopted a Gödel-type, pluralistic, multiple-universe framework. We explain that Tarski had not yet shifted out of the monistic, Frege?Russell, fixed-universe paradigm. We further argue that between his Principia-influenced pre-WWII Warsaw period and his model-theoretic post-WWII Berkeley period, Tarski's philosophy underwent many other radical changes. (shrink)

Language and Ontology: Linguistic Relativism (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) vs. Universal Grammar Universal Ontology vs. Ontological Relativity Semiotics and Ontology: The Rediscovery of John Poinsot (John of St. Thomas) Annotated Bibliography of John Deely. First part: 1965-1998 Annotated Bibliography of John Deely. Second part: 1999-2010..

In the late seventies of the 20th century, Jacob Taubes, a philosopher of religion and a scholar in Jewish thought, visited Carl Schmitt in his home. Schmitt was a scholar in constitutional and international law who joined the Hitler regime in 1933. Both were fascinated by the apocalyptic tradition, albeit it in opposite ways. They had a conversation about the apostle Paul, especially about his ‘Letter to the Romans’. Their discussion focused on the passage in which Paul speaks of the (...) Jews as 'enemies of God'. Against the background of history’s violent anti-Semitism, this exceptional conversation deconstructs Paul’s texts, traditionally conceived as constitutive of orthodox Christianity, and opens them up for a more subversive, heterodox reading. By Taubes, Paul is portrayed as an heretic Jew who joined the ‘Jesus movement’. He remained loyal to his tradition, while at the same time searching for new forms of spiritual community, avoiding direct political actions, as well as Gnostic interiorization, and establishing a new Law. (shrink)

In Art and intention Paisley Livingston develops a broad and balanced perspective on perennial disputes between intentionalists and anti-intentionalists in philosophical aesthetics and critical theory. He surveys and assesses a wide range of rival assumptions about the nature of intentions and the status of intentionalist psychology. With detailed reference to examples from diverse media, art forms, and traditions, he demonstrates that insights into the multiple functions of intentions have important implications for our understanding of artistic creation and authorship, the ontology (...) of art, conceptions of texts, works, and versions, basic issues pertaining to the nature of fiction and fictional truth, and the theory of art interpretation and appreciation. Livingston argues that neither the inspirationist nor rationalistic conceptions can capture the blending of deliberate and intentional, spontaneous and unintentional processes in the creation of art. Texts, works, and artistic structures and performances cannot be adequately individuated in the absence of a recognition of the relevant makers4intentions. The distinction between complete and incomplete works receives an action-theoretic analysis that makes possible an elucidation of several different senses of "fragment" in critical discourse. Livingston develops an account of authorship, contending that the recognition of intentions is in fact crucial to our understanding of diverse forms of collective art-making. An artist's short-term intentions and long-term plans and policies interact in complex ways in the emergence of an artistic oeuvre, and our uptake of such attitudes makes an important difference to our appreciation of the relations between items belonging to a single life-work. The intentionalism Livingston advocates is, however, a partial one, and accommodates a number of important anti-intentionalist contentions. Intentions are fallible, and works of art, like other artefacts, can be put to a bewildering diversity of uses. Yet some important aspects of art's meaning and value are linked to the artist's aims and activities. (shrink)

Joseph Margolis argues that philosophy must acknowledge its radical informality. I provide a brief account of what Margolis means by informality and its consequences for the practice of a pragmatist philosophy. I discuss his criticism of Robert Brandom's analytic pragmatism on the grounds that it overemphasizes the potential gains of a formal approach. I highlight two concerns with Margolis’ insistence on informality recommending a reduced emphasis on the consequences of informality for the pragmatist philosopher.

Interference phenomena are a well-known and crucial feature of quantum mechanics, the two-slit experiment providing a standard example. There are situations, however, in which interference effects are (artificially or spontaneously) suppressed. We shall need to make precise what this means, but the theory of decoherence is the study of (spontaneous) interactions between a system and its environment that lead to such suppression of interference. This study includes detailed modelling of system-environment interactions, derivation of equations (‘master equations’) for the (reduced) state (...) of the system, discussion of time-scales etc. A discussion of the concept of suppression of interference and a simplified survey of the theory is given in Section 2, emphasising features that will be relevant to the following discussion (and restricted to standard non-relativistic particle quantum mechanics.[1] A partially overlapping field is that of decoherent histories, which proceeds from an abstract definition of loss of interference, but which we shall not be considering in any detail. (shrink)

In the past twenty years, issues about the relationship between perception and thought have largely been framed in terms of the question of whether the contents of perception are nonconceptual. I argue that this debate has rested on an ambiguity in `nonconceptual content' and some false presuppositions about what is required for concept possession. Once these are cleared away, I argue that none of the arguments which have been advanced about nonconceptual content do much to threaten the natural view that (...) perception and thought are relations to the same kind of content. (shrink)

ExcerptI. The Action of the Play: The Playacting Character of Human Life Antonio, the “Merchant of Venice,” in speaking to his friend Gratiano at the beginning of the play, says: “I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano: / A stage where every man must play a part, / And mine a sad one” (1.1.77–79).1 The Merchant of Venice, which is a play, is (as Shakespeare announces at the outset) about the inescapability and insurmountability of playacting as the substance (...) of human reality. Life, as it were, is lived at one remove from itself—where our assumption…. (shrink)

ExcerptCarl Schmitt's Hamlet or Hecuba (1956) is a peculiar text. For one, it stands out as the only detailed interpretation of a literary work that Schmitt ever produced. This is not to deny Schmitt's overall erudition and familiarity with Western literature nor his particular interest in the intricate relationship between aesthetics and politics, all of which can be traced throughout his writings from the 1910s to the 1950s. But the fact remains that apart from Hamlet or Hecuba, Schmitt did not (...) employ close readings of literary texts as a means to elaborate on his politico-philosophical ideas. Hamlet or Hecuba is…. (shrink)

De moderne filosofie lijdt aan muziekvergetelheid. Opvallend is echter dat filosofen, wanneer ze toch aandacht schenken aan muziek, hun aandacht bij voorkeur op één bepaald genre richten, namelijk de opera. Filosofen zoals Søren Kierkegaard en Friedrich Nietzsche lieten hun gedachten over Don Giovanni, Parsifal en Carmen gaan, terwijl omgekeerd de filosofie van Arthur Schopenhauer de opera heeft beïnvloed via Wagner. Diens werk lijkt zich op het snijpunt van het grensverkeer tussen moderne filosofie en moderne muziek te bevinden. Het was zijn (...) ambitie de menselijke existentie en de menselijke geschiedenis in één panoramisch oeuvre te vatten, vanaf het primordiale begin tot en met de dramatische finale die ophanden leek: een catastrofale apotheose die een geheel nieuwe toekomst mogelijk zou maken. Dat is althans de verhaallijn van zijn meesterwerk Der Ring des Nibelungen. Aan het slot van Götterdämmerung lijkt zich een algehele verwoesting te hebben voltrokken: ‘Everything is destroyed and there is an enigmatic kind of hovering over the scene of destruction’ (Badiou 2010, p. 106), een ambivalente stemming van hoop en destructie zette Wagner op muziek. Voor Wagner is dan ook een hoofdrol in deze studie weggelegd: voor zijn muziektheoretische geschriften (waarin hij over een ‘muziek van de toekomst’ filosofeerde), maar meer nog voor de muzikale totaalkunstwerken die hij daadwerkelijk componeerde. (shrink)

In an earlier publication, titled, “What Happens in Philosophical Texts,”1 I present what I refer to as Matthew Lipman’s model theory of the philosophical text. I argue there that the distinctive form of Lipman’s own philosophical novels—the curricular flagship of the Philosophy for Children program—lies in how they perform a modeling function, in the sense of being both a model of and a model for philosophical thinking. In addition, I attempt to locate through this theoretical rendering the place that Lipman’s (...) novels occupy in the history of written philosophical discourse, and argue that the novels are simultaneously retrospective and futuristic: harkening back to a time when philosophical texts served as a technology with which we form our philosophical thinking, rather than as an exposition to which, as readers, we are merely exposed; and, at the same time, I suggest that Lipman’s novels point toward a hoped-for future in which narrative discourse might once again establish a position of priority over exposition in the development of philosophical curriculum. (shrink)

By the end of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s an estimated 22,438 people were unaccounted for. Their whereabouts were unknown or their remains were missing. The clarification of the fate of the missing is a fundamental component of transitional justice processes. Taking as its focus two photographic projects—one with forensic identification purposes and the other with a memorialisation focus—this article explores the juridical and memorialisation contexts in which these photographs circulate, asking how photographs might be, on (...) the one hand, practical tools for the identification of remains, but also, at the same time, act as visual vehicles for raising awareness and action around the broader justice questions concerning the clarification of the fate of the missing. (shrink)

The idea of finding Foucault first looks at the many influences on Foucault, including his Nietzschean acclamations. It examines Foucault’s critical history of thought, his work on the orders of discourse with his emphasis on being a pluralist: the problem he says that he has set himself is that of the individualization of discourses. Finally, it addresses his work on the culture of the self which became a philosophical and historical question for Foucault later in his life as he investigated (...) the historical form of relations between subjectivity and truth in Western philosophy since Antiquity and how philosophy as an activity taught about the care of the self. The conclusion suggests some ways that students might approach his work as they proceed in finding Foucault and their own selves. (shrink)

Over the last decades, many scholars, feminist and others, have argued that critique must be reframed in different and more ‘productive’ ways because its ‘conventional’ formulation and practice have outlived its usefulness as a conceptual tool. Instead, they have called for affirmation or affirmative critique and a more generative mode of critical engagement in the search for new imaginaries, transformative potentialities and other futures. New feminist materialist thought’s emergence is, we argue, symptomatic of this contemporary intellectual landscape that claims to (...) move beyond critique. While sympathetic with the desire to rethink a form of critique that speaks to the (urgent) politics of the present and the remaking of political imaginaries, we argue that the theoretical gesture to move beyond critique may offer a potentially troubling remapping organised around certain kinds of repression (of the undetermined and ambivalent work of critique) and amnesia (of feminist genealogies and over different feminist projects’ conceptualisation of matter) that yield a politics without politics. (shrink)

Why has the Islamic economy, as a model of socioeconomic development, gained traction as a viable option? The existing literature suggests that the Islamic economy has been popularized by a combination of factors, including anticolonial movements, a global renewal of religiosity, and the activities of new social strata who merge piety with capitalist orientations. These approaches, however, tend to homogenize social actors, subsuming them under the overarching label of Islamism. In contrast, this article employs the lens of “intra-hegemonic struggles” to (...) identify three competing orientations of Islamism and their manifestation in the economy. Drawing on eighteen months of fieldwork in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, it argues that this contestation motivates diverse segments of the society to create and engage in the Islamic economy, rather than any single state-driven or identity-based movement. The article synthesizes three otherwise isolated bodies of work: the political sociology of articulation, new theories of Islamism, and the concept of imaginaries from economic sociology. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to defend, contra Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini (F&PP), that the theory of natural selection (NS) is a perfectly bona fide empirical unified explanatory theory. F&PP claim there is nothing non-truistic, counterfactual-supporting, of an “adaptive” character and common to different explanations of trait evolution. In his debate with Fodor, and in other works, Sober defends NS but claims that, compared with classical mechanics (CM) and other standard theories, NS is peculiar in that its explanatory models are (...) a priori (a trait shared with few other theories). We argue that NS provides perfectly bona fide adaptive explanations of phenotype evolution, unified by a common natural-selection guiding principle. First, we introduce the debate and reply to F&PP’s main argument against NS. Then, by reviewing different examples and analyzing Fisher’s model in detail, we show that NS explanations of phenotypic evolution share a General Natural Selection Principle. Third, by elaborating an analogy with CM, we argue against F&PP’s claim that such a principle would be a mere truism and thus explanatorily useless, and against Sober’s thesis that NS models/explanations have a priori components that are not present in CM and other common empirical theories. Irrespective of differences in other respects, the NS guiding principle has the same epistemic status as other guiding principles in other highly unified theories such as CM. We argue that only by pointing to the guiding principle-driven nature that it shares with CM and other highly unified theories, something no-one has done yet in this debate, one can definitively show that NS is not defective in F&PP’s sense: in the respects relevant to the debate, Natural Selection is as defective and as epistemically peculiar as Classical Mechanics and other never questioned theories. (shrink)

This essay considers how various European novels written and published around the turn of the millennium may be grouped together as an historically and geographically contingent literary genre, while also reflecting on the implications of this. In doing so, this essay coins the term ‘melancholy cosmopolitanism’ to best describe this genre of literary works. Ultimately, this genre suggests, first of all, that the sense of melancholy obsolescence articulated by European writers at this time is not confined to discrete national literary (...) contexts. Moreover, this essay argues, it implies a form of solidarity among these writers and their works, such that they encapsulate the possibility of working through the melancholy of history precisely through the aesthetic similarities among their literary explorations of it. Contemporaneous melancholy works of European literature are understood here as ‘cosmopolitan’ in a hermeneutic sense: their aesthetics resonate with each other beyond discrete national literary contexts, while also exemplifying individually assumed poses of melancholy amid a broader collective. In construing European melancholy aesthetics as a form of cosmopolitanism, then, the literary genre proposed by this essay suggests that mutual articulations of melancholy in various European novels collectively embody a potential for the melancholy of history to be overcome. (shrink)

There is nowadays consensus in the community of didactics of science regarding the need to include the philosophy of science in didactical research, science teacher education, curriculum design, and the practice of science education in all educational levels. Some authors have identified an ever-increasing use of the concept of ‘theoretical model’, stemming from the so-called semantic view of scientific theories. However, it can be recognised that, in didactics of science, there are over-simplified transpositions of the idea of model. In this (...) sense, contemporary philosophy of science is often blurred or distorted in the science education literature. In this paper, we address the discussion around some meta-theoretical concepts that are introduced into didactics of science due to their perceived educational value. We argue for the existence of a ‘semantic family’, and we characterise four different versions of semantic views existing within the family. In particular, we seek to contribute to establishing a model-based didactics of science mainly supported in this semantic family. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 46, Issue 3, pp 337 - 348 Gadamer is prominent on the list of counter-enlightenment philosophers of the20th century. He is on this list for good reasons, reasons that I will briefly explore here. Gadamer borrows much from Heidegger’s critique of modernity and he adds to it. As we all know, Gadamer’s critique of the Enlightenment and modernity serves as an opening for a reappropriation of the Greeks, especially Plato and Aristotle. Gadamer is often taken, again with (...) good reason, to be one of the leading voices revivifying the battle of ancients and moderns and urging, at least in some regards, the superiority of the ancients. Kant is without question the leading figure of the Enlightenment—at least within the German tradition, if not for the European Enlightenment in general. As such we should expect Gadamer to be strongly critical of Kant. And yet we find Gadamer’s relation to Kant displaying a deep ambivalence. It is this ambivalence that this paper examines. (shrink)

The most successful historical arguments are expressed in a voice unmistakeably the author’s own, yet this numbers among the most difficult skills to accomplish. In this article, I discuss a series of seminars which I ran in University College London’s History Department in order to help undergraduate historians develop their authorial voice. Some of these seminars were held under the aegis of University College London’s Writing and Learning Mentor Programme; others were held as a series of classes taken by all (...) first-year undergraduate historians. The aim was to encourage students to think carefully about how historical research can be articulated, and about the links between different types of history and different types of argument. In order to define historical argument, we studied the characteristics of several different but very established historians, and used this as a springboard to focus on the authorial voices of the students themselves. (shrink)

For a long time before the ‘climategate’ emails scandal of late 2009 which cast doubt on the propriety of science underpinning the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), attention to climate change science and policy has focused solely upon the truth or falsity of the proposition that human behaviour is responsible for serious global risks from anthropogenic climate change. This article places such propositional concerns in the perspective of a different understanding of the relationships between scientific knowledge and public policy (...) issues from the conventional ‘translation’ model, in which prior scientific research and understanding is communicated and translated into corresponding policies — or not, if it remains disputed and overly uncertain. Explaining some of the key contingencies and bases for uncertainty in IPCC climate projections and human influences, I show how social and technical analysis of climate science is not about denial of the scientific propositional claims at issue, but about understanding the conditional and essentially ambiguous epistemic character of any such knowledge, however technically sophisticated and robust it may be. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is entirely plausible that existing scientific representations of climate change and its human causes may understate the risks induced by prevailing social-economic processes rather than exaggerate them. As the article shows, the public meanings given to climate science, and to ‘the climate problem’, and thus also the public culture which that knowledge is supposed to inform, are themselves already in key respects presumed and (attemptedly) imposed by the science and its framing. This gives rise to perverse effects on public readiness to take informed democratic responsibility for ‘the global climate problem’, and associated cross-cutting issues which existing scientific framings of public policy erase from view. (shrink)

Seeking a Mnemonic Turn: Interior Reflections in Gadamer's Post-Platonic Thought This paper reflects on trajectories and pathways for philosophical hermeneutics, now, after the death of its founder, Hans-Georg Gadamer in 2002. More specifically, it challenges the notion that Gadamer's thought is simply tied to the linguistic turn of the 20th century. Instead, it considers the possibility that Gadamer's thinking makes for an implicit declaration of its own kind, calling for a mnemonic turn in modern philosophy and present day hermeneutics. Some (...) reference will be made to both rationalist and empiricist models of inquiry insofar as Gadamer attempts to take philosophy beyond, for example, the Ur-grammar of Chomsky's linguistic theories, and into a world of post-Platonic memory. (shrink)

This article surveys the exponential increase in Rand references in scholarly and popular sources to illustrate her cultural ascendancy as an iconic figure. Special attention is paid to Rand's impact on popular literature, television, cartoons, and illustrated media, including comics. Rand's own involvement in illustrated presentations of her ideas is explored, as is her influence on such comic artists as Steve Ditko, Frank Miller, and others. Nathaniel Branden's insights on the role of comics in projecting heroic values are also addressed.

One of the claims sometimes advanced in favour of anti-doping is that allowing doping would lead to a uniform increase in performance in comparison to no doping. The idea is that if all athletes wo...

ABSTRACTIn this article I examine Axel Honneth’s positive theory of recognition. While commentators agree that Honneth’s theory qualifies as a positive theory of recognition, I believe that the deeper reason for why this is an apt characterisation is not yet fully understood. I argue that, instead of considering only what it is to recognise another person and what it means for a person to be recognised, we need to focus our attention on how Honneth pictures the practice of recognition as (...) a whole, which according to him works to make societies into places of greater freedom. This conception of recognition as a freedom-enhancing practice is supposed to provide a solution to a key problem of Frankfurt School critical theory, namely of how to determine the emancipatory practice in which critical theory is rooted, which becomes apparent as soon as one turns to the context in which Honneth originally develops his theory of recognition. At the end of the article, I offer a few reasons for doubting the overly positive picture of the practice of recognition that Honneth provides us with. (shrink)

The article reconstructs the most important issues on the map of Polish lager prose, those that are ignored, inconvenient for readers or authors, and sometimes for both. The author of the essay also presents the zones of silence that resulted not from the threat of violation of social taboos and political prohibitions, but from the negligence of researchers. They characterize the most important tasks faced by scholars of Polish lager prose.

Derrida’s philosophy is usually known as a form of critique of metaphysics. This article, however, argues that Derrida’s deconstructions do not only dismantle metaphysics from within, but also remain in themselves thoroughly, and problematically, metaphysical. Its goal is to determine exactly where the metaphysical features of Derrida’s work can be found. The article starts with an analysis of Derrida’s understanding of metaphysics, as well as its deconstruction, by explaining the working of différance, mainly focusing on its temporality. Further, it will (...) demonstrate how in the temporization or deferral of différance a metaphysical desire for purity remains effective. In readings of several texts, the mutual interdependence of metaphysics and deconstruction will be sketched. Then the ethical side of deconstruction will be highlighted, both in Derrida’s early work as well as in the slightly different elaboration of différance in the later ethical notions like justice, the gift and the messianic. This results in a distinction of three versions of différance. Finally, a critical discussion of the metaphysical side of deconstruction will be followed by a comparison of different readings of deconstruction and différance. (shrink)

Some philosophers need no introduction. Julius Kovesi is a philosopher who, regrettably, does need introducing. Kovesi’s career was as a moral philosopher and intellectual historian. This book is intended to reintroduce him, more than twenty years after his death and more than forty years after the publication of his only book, Moral Notions. This Introduction will sketch some of the key features of his life and philosophical thought.

This article considers, from a feminist perspective, the introduction of the European Equal Treatment Amendment Directive (E.T.A.D.) and its impact on the law of sexual harassment in the United Kingdom. Since feminists identified sexual harassment as a problem for women in the 1970s, feminist legal scholars have focused their attention on the law as a means of redressing it. Bringing claims in the U.K. has been difficult because of the absence of a definition of sexual harassment and reliance in the (...) Sex Discrimination Act 1975 on a comparator approach. These problems are illustrated by the recent House of Lords decision in Pearce v. Governing Body of Mayfield Secondary School(2003). The failure of the House of Lords in Pearce to understand sexual harassment as an issue of substantive equality for women makes the introduction of the European law all the more the pressing. The author discusses the implications of the changes embodied in the E.T.A.D. in the light of feminist theory. She argues that the changes envisaged constitute welcome developments which will make it easier to remedy workplace sexual harassment. However, it is also likely that problems will remain for women in establishing sexual harassment claims, particularly if concepts of reasonableness and unwelcome behaviour continue to form part of the legal definition. (shrink)

This article examines lessons which can still be learned from Professor Lauri Honko’s research and writings, particularly for those working at the interstices of folklore and religious studies who appreciate the mutually enriching relationship between the two fields which has been the hallmark of modern Finnish and Nordic scholarship. Three broad areas are considered here by way of illustration: the importance of studying belief and the continuing utility of genre as a tool of research; the use of folklore and material (...) culture in the formation of cultural and spiritual identities in the contemporary milieu; and tradition ecology in relation to Celtic spirituality. (shrink)

From Herder to Benedict Anderson, language and nation have been at the centre of ideas about community. This hypothesis, however, poses a problem for analysing ideas about Europe. How can we understand “Europe” as a concept or form of identity when language and nationality are considered the foundation of imagined communities and loyalties? This article addresses this difficulty. It uses J. G. A. Pocock’s definition of “sub-languages” to suggest that one can investigate the rhetorical strategies, images and vocabularies with which (...) texts articulate ideas about Europe. These sub-languages evoke imagined communities, most obviously when texts name and identify particular groups of people as “Europeans.” But by using images and rhetorics about Europe, these texts also appeal to a readership that comprehends—even if it does not fully accept—certain assumptions about the continent. In this way, texts evoke an imagined community of readers who purportedly share a similar way of understanding Europe, or who can perhaps be persuaded to think about it in similar terms. These processes are historically particular, and so the article concludes with concrete examples. It focuses on how early-nineteenth-century philhellenes evoked a European imagined community to solicit support for the Greek Revolution. (shrink)

This paper offers a comparative analysis of the uses and formulations of speech-act theory in Derrida's and Deleuze/guattari's work. It begins by juxtaposing Derrida's concept/nonconcept of ‘iterability’ to Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the ‘order-word’ and then examines these theories of the speech act in terms of their implications and consequences for a politics of resistance. Whereas Deleuze and Guattari generate a detailed material stratum — an order-word plateau — for exploring the performative in socio-political contexts, Derrida attends to the (...) singular, wholly unique acts that occur when a repeatable formula such as a political declaration is uttered or otherwise takes place. The paper then concludes by drawing a tentative link between iterability and Deleuze and Guattari's notion of ‘deterritorialisation’ via the order-word plateau. (shrink)

Murray Edelman's work raised significant theoretical and methodological questions regarding the symbolic nature of politics, and specifically the role played by non‐rational beliefs (those that lack real‐world grounding) in the shaping of political preferences. According to Edelman, beneath an apparently functional and accountable democratic state lies a symbolic system that renders an ignorant public quiescent. The state, the media, civil society, interpersonal relations, even popular art are part of a mass spectacle kept afloat by empty symbolic beliefs. However suggestive it (...) is, the weaknesses of Edelman's theoretical and methodological approach, and the relative strengths of more recent research on the politics of cultural symbols, render Edelman's work unable to serve as either model or springboard for the contemporary study of political symbols. (shrink)

Edited by J. Anthony Blair and Ralph H. Johnson King’s College London, UK: College Publications, 2011. Pp. vii, 1-299. Softcover. ISBN: 978-1-84890-030-1. US$ ~20.

Standard, or ordinary, modern philosophy, with its inadequately examined assumption of what amounts to a Cartesian-inspired epistemological stance accompanied today with materialist reductionist patterns of seeing and thinking, presents significant obstacles to recognizing the cognitive force of the diverse experiences that arise within and are made possible by our need and interest-based practices whose roots lie in our bio-social nature.1 This denial of epistemic value to experience has negative consequences in general but particularly for understanding the ethical dimension of our (...) lives, not the least being learning what is required to foster our ethical maturation in a pluralistic world. (shrink)