Martial-arts practice is not quite anything else: it is like sport, but is not sport; it constantly refers to and as it were cohabits with violence, but is not violent; it is dance-like but not dance. It shares a common athleticism with sports and dance, yet stands apart from both, especially through its paradoxical commitment to the external value of being an instrument of violence. My discussion seeks to illuminate martial arts practice by systematic contrast to games of sport and (...) works of performance art, especially dance. (shrink)

Scholars have detected hostility to technology in Daoist thought. But is this a problem with any machine or only some applications of some machines by some people? I show that the problem is not with machines per se but with the people who introduce them, or more exactly with their knowledge. It is not knowledge as such that causes the disorder Laozi and Zhuangzi associate with machines; it is confused, disordered knowledge—superficial, inadequate, unsubtle, and artless. In other words the problem (...) is not with machines but with the ethics of engineering and the government of technology. The Daoist argument does not devalue machines or knowledge of them; instead, it sets a new goal, defining an alternative ideal—alternative to techniques held hostage to despotic ideas about efficiency and profit. (shrink)

Barry Allen defends a highly unorthodox and compact account of humans and their evolutionary adventure, which comprises inter alia epistemological, alethic, technological, and artistic aspects. His anthropocentric view distinguishes itself from traditional forms of realism and anti-realism by virtue of its dynamic and non-reductionist character. Allen adopts a certain perspective of techno-artistic and onto-epistemic construction, which we dub “panartifactualism,” claiming principally that nothing at all escapes the artifactualizing power of human beings. We maintain that, under closer scrutiny, various dimensions of (...) Allen’s account conflict and that his philosophical approach to “being” and “making” ultimately gives rise to a rather problematic ontological picture. Having pointed out its shortcomings and untenable results, we spell out the conceptual contours of a contemporary and far more attractive version of realism which suffers neither from the issues faced by views like panartifactualism nor from the obvious difficulties of noumenalist realism justifiably opposed by Allen. (shrink)

To explain Paulin J. Hountondji’s intellectual trajectory, I offer a critical account of his conception of the relationship between science and philosophy. Mapping the shift from his well-known critical writings on ethnophilosophy to his later work on scientific dependency is possible only if we recognize that Hountondji conceives of philosophy as essentially a theory of science (Wissenschaftslehre). Adequately characterizing Hountondji’s metaphilosophical orientation, however, requires greater specificity. The two most influential philosophers on Hountondji’s conception of the relationship between science and philosophy, (...) Edmund Husserl and Louis Althusser, would both have assented to the claim that philosophy is fundamentally a Wissenschaftslehre. However, they each adhered to different (and indeed contradictory) understandings of this claim. While Hountondji explicitly recognizes the dual influence of Husserl and Althusser on his conception of philosophy as a theory of science, he does not attempt to resolve the contradictions between Husserl’s understanding of the relationship between philosophy and science and Althusser’s conception of that relationship. By examining Hountondji’s relatively neglected later writings on scientific dependency, it becomes clear that his emphasis on the significance of the history and sociology of science points toward an Althusserian conception of philosophy qua theory of science rather than a Husserlian conception of what it is for philosophy to be a Wissenschaftslehre. (shrink)

What does it mean for philosophy to take seriously the chaos that haunts and threatens to undermine the fleetingly static formations that populate our epistemological landscapes? What does it mean to learn, think and know on a plane detached from transcendent truths, from recognition and representation, from the inverted image of falsity? We risk badly mangling our answers to these questions so long as we take for granted the orthodoxal image of thought and its conservative postulates. But critique is not (...) enough, we need reconception, creativity; we need thought. This paper locates in Deleuze's ‘Image of Thought’ precisely these resources in the form of a philosophy of learning, taking as its guiding light the claim that learning ought no longer to name a merely transitory movement between a lack of knowledge and its fulfilment in the apprehension of truth, but the domain from which the transcendental conditions of thought itself are to be drawn. (shrink)

This paper introduces Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage theory into the contemporary biological context. I begin by laying out at some length what I take to be the defining features of Deleuze and Guattari's theory of assemblage. I consider this to be a worthwhile endeavour in its own right, and so dedicate a large portion of this paper to producing a clear account of what it is that characterises an assemblage. Then I provide a reading of Deleuze and Guattari's critical conception (...) of the organism as a kind of assemblage typified by an especially restrictive, self-regulating form of functional integration. This restrictiveness comprises what I take to be the first pole of organic life. Then I reconsider Deleuze and Guattari's positive comments about ‘non-organic life’ in this context, as a feature internal to the organisation of organic life instead of something to be set against it. I theorise this mostly in terms of symbiosis. I take the significance of symbiosis, consisting in what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘shared deterritorialisation’, to comprise the second pole of organic life. I conclude the paper with a brief discussion of how Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage-based conception of organism might be thought to anticipate and accommodate some of the contemporary research on biological individuality. (shrink)

The linguistic turn is a central aspect of Richard Rorty’s philosophy, informing his early critiques of foundationalism in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and subsequent critiques of authoritarianism in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. It is argued that we should interpret the linguistic turn as a methodological suggestion for how philosophy can take a non-foundational perspective on normativity. It is then argued that although Rorty did not succeed in explicating normativity without foundations (or authority without authoritarianism), we should take seriously (...) the ambition motivating his project. But taking that ambition seriously may require reconsidering the linguistic turn. (shrink)