Foucault and Sellars are representatives of conflicting philosophical traditions: whereas Foucault famously insisted that “power is everywhere,” Sellars proposed the well-known scientia mensura dictum. The tension between the two perspectives seems to be so strong that each of them ends up reducing the other to an epiphenomenal illusion. In this article, I shall attempt to show that the works of Sellars and Foucault are not necessarily irreconcilable. The common ground for this dialogue is what I shall define as a historico-practical (...) conception of science. I will build this concept by tracing a connection between the Foucauldian notion of “conditions of possibility” of science and Sellars’s thesis about the “indispensability” of the manifest image. Finally, I will argue that this conception of science problematizes the clash between the scientific and manifest images of the world, paving the way for a different relationship between naturalism and critical theory. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print. Foucault and Sellars are representatives of conflicting philosophical traditions: whereas Foucault famously insisted that “power is everywhere,” Sellars proposed the well-known scientia mensura dictum. The tension between the two perspectives seems to be so strong that each of them ends up reducing the other to an epiphenomenal illusion. In this article, I shall attempt to show that the works of Sellars and Foucault are not necessarily irreconcilable. The common ground for this dialogue is (...) what I shall define as a historico-practical conception of science. I will build this concept by tracing a connection between the Foucauldian notion of “conditions of possibility” of science and Sellars’s thesis about the “indispensability” of the manifest image. Finally, I will argue that this conception of science problematizes the clash between the scientific and manifest images of the world, paving the way for a different relationship between naturalism and critical theory. (shrink)

Volume 51, Issue 9, August 2019, Page 886-894.

It is intended that a large Academy be erected, capable of containing nine thousand seven hundred forty and three persons, which, by modest computation, is reckoned to be pretty near the current nu...

Western Marxism, since its Western deviation and theoretical development in the 1920s, developed in diverse ways that has reflected the broader philosophical environment. First, a theory of conscio...

Editor's Comment: One of the functions of the journal is to develop an awareness of its own history. These papers are online-only papers that discuss the first ten years of the journal going back to 1969. Every so often the journal publishes synoptic articles that take a broad approach to the beginning of the Society and the journal to treat major themes and topics. As one can clearly see EPAT published many of the luminaries that helped to shape the discipline.

Editor's Comment: One of the functions of the journal is to develop an awareness of its own history. These papers are online-only papers that discuss the first ten years of the journal going back to 1969. Every so often the journal publishes synoptic articles that take a broad approach to the beginning of the Society and the journal to treat major themes and topics. As one can clearly see EPAT published many of the luminaries that helped to shape the discipline.

This paper analyses and examines Deleuze’s Foucault as a means of investigating intellectual resources for a new sociology – one that, in Foucault’s name, is neither foundationalist nor rep...

What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity i...

Against the tendency to regard Deleuze as a materialist and a naturalistic thinker, I argue that his core philosophical writings involve commitments that are incompatible with contemporary scientific naturalism. He defends different versions of a distinction between philosophy and natural science that is inconsistent with methodological naturalism and with the scientific image of the world as a single causally interconnected system. He defends the existence of a virtual realm of entities that is irreconcilable with ontological naturalism. The difficulty of reconciling (...) Deleuze’s philosophy with ontological naturalism is especially apparent in his recurrent conception of pure events that are irreducible to their incarnation in bodies and states of affairs. In the last section of this essay, I canvass some of the ways in which Deleuze’s thought might be reconciled with a more liberal, pluralist and ethical naturalism that he identified in an early essay on Lucretius. (shrink)

Deleuze reworks Marxist concepts in order to identify those that represent discontinuity and produce a theory of revolution. Marx is important because, along with Spinoza and Nietzsche, he is a part of a project to leave behind concepts such as transcendence and univocity which underlie the totalitarianism of traditional philosophy. Deleuze is looking for concepts that might form a different theory, within which the structures of production are not organised vertically by the domination of universal concepts, such as ‘being’ or (...) ‘essence’, but flow horizontally through a multiplicity of relations of conceptual singularity. The production of a different series of concepts is a strategic and tactical operation that, in confronting prior notions of transcendental philosophy, turns philosophy itself into a battlefield. Marx provides the general methodology for this tactical approach through two fundamental categories: production and conflict. Deleuze practises Marx's theoretical method and by using Marx's own central concepts challenges traditional Marxism, to arrive at a totally different and revolutionary philosophical structure based on concepts such as those of force, variation, difference, singularity, production and the war machine. (shrink)

Corporate governance is a theme that is important to Business Ethicists for various reasons. It relates to how and for whose benefit corporations are governed, to how important corporate decisions are taken, and to how organizational cultures are “managed.” In this article, it will be argued that in each of these respects, corporate governance relies on particular identity constructs that need to be questioned. In fact, it will be argued that the way in which corporate governance initiatives address the various (...) crises of capitalism, allows us to gloss over some crucial ontological questions that could precipitate a more rigorous questioning of capitalist practices. The article will plot the limitations of the kind of thinking that we encounter within the corporate governance realm, and expose its problematic assumptions by exploring a selection of Deleuzoguattarian concepts. It will be argued that the challenges facing corporate governance relate to the relationship between identity crises and crises of control. We will argue that a better understanding of the nature of capitalism could open new avenues for ethical questioning of contemporary corporate practices, and put the various “crises” that capitalism faces in a new perspective. (shrink)

The notion of “responsibility” can be understood in a number of different ways, namely as being accountable for one’s actions, as a personal trait, or as a task or duty that results from one’s role. In this article we will challenge the assumptions that underpin each of these employments of the word “responsibility” and seek to redefine the concept as such. The main thrust of the argument is that we need to critically interrogate the idea of “identity” and deliberate decision-making (...) that inform the use of all three of these notions of “responsibility”. By drawing on selected concepts emanating from the oeuvre of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, our understanding of agency moves away from “identity” towards “multiplicity”. In fact, it will be argued that our sense of “agency” is a side-product of our own desiring-production as it operates in and through our interactions with other human beings and organizational structures. The article therefore contends that “responsible management” requires ongoing re-articulations of moral responsiveness. (shrink)

The problem I raise here is not what ought to succeed mankind in the sequence of species (- the human being is an end -): but what type of human being one ought to breed, ought to will, as more valuable, more worthy of life, more certain of the future. (Friedrich Nietzsche1) The question which leads us beyond the grave of our own generation is not 'how will human beings feel in the future', but 'how will they be' ... We (...) do not want to train up feelings of well-being in people, but those characteristics we think constitute the greatness and nobility of our human nature. (Max Weber2). (shrink)

Hardt and Negri's Empire pronounces the end of socialist/communist history based upon class and colonial struggles. The only dialectic of history is in the capacity of American capitalism for self-transformation and universalization. Empire presents a revisionary narrative of American republicanism, New Deal and post-war hegemony that has evolved into the current new world order. In this project, the struggle for social justice has shifted from national to international institutions of humanitarian justice and security sanctioned by US military and commercial power. (...) Yet Empire delivers its own post-communist manifesto, arguing that information capitalism cannot dominate the general intellect of its symbolic labour force. The latter must be understood in terms of Spinoza's concept of the constitutional capacity of the multitude for exercising its collective freedom, becoming-communist. Empire concedes the privatization of the industrial commons and ignores the repressive and violent interventions of old-order US imperialism. (shrink)

Hardt and Negri's Empire pronounces the end of socialist/communist history based upon class and colonial struggles. The only dialectic of history is in the capacity of American capitalism for self-transformation and universalization. Empire presents a revisionary narrative of American republicanism, New Deal and post-war hegemony that has evolved into the current new world order. In this project, the struggle for social justice has shifted from national to international institutions of humanitarian justice and security sanctioned by US military and commercial power. (...) Yet Empire delivers its own post-communist manifesto, arguing that information capitalism cannot dominate the general intellect (Marx, Grundrisse) of its symbolic labour force. The latter must be understood in terms of Spinoza's concept of the constitutional capacity of the multitude for exercising its collective freedom, becoming-communist. Empire concedes the privatization of the industrial commons (loss of welfare state functions) and ignores the repressive and violent interventions of old-order US imperialism. (shrink)

This article outlines Foucault’s conception of critique in relation to his writings on Kant. In that Kant saw Enlightenment as a process of release from the status of immaturity in that we accept someone else’s authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for, it is claimed in this article that Foucault’s notion of critique reveals his own conception of maturity. Whereas Kant sees maturity as the rule of self by self through reason, Foucault sees (...) it as an attitude towards ourselves and the present through an historical analysis of the limits, and the possibility of transgression, of going beyond. Critique is thus a permanent interrogation of the limits, an escape from normalization, and a facing-up to the challenges of self-creation while seeking to effect changes in social structures on specific regional issues of concern. The article concludes by suggesting that the problem of historical and epistemological relativism, which a conception of total critique gives rise to, may not be as insurmountable as some critics of Foucault have claimed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence has confounded generations of thinkers. This article enters the fray by treating recurrence as an invitation to develop a radically new approach to metaphysics itself. I develop the argument by analyzing the place of recurrence in the work of Heidegger and Deleuze. By framing recurrence as an illustration of Nietzsche's core metaphysical commitment, Heidegger provides the crucial point of entry for this argument. However, while Heidegger regards that return to metaphysics as a weakness, (...) the Deleuzean reading makes clear that it should instead be seen as the final creative possibility. The element of recurrence that makes it the ‘highest formula of affirmation’ is its metaphysics, understood now to be a metaphysics of difference. This reading is essential if we hope to respond to the nihilism of modernity without descending into chaotic despair or defaulting to redemptive violence. (shrink)

It is well-known that Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari) are critical of the notion of ideology. However, it is not very clear why they seem to be so dismissive of it. In what follows, I will begin my discussion by showing what Deleuze means by ideology and reconstructing why Deleuze thinks that ideology is a misused concept and that the misuse of the concept warrants its dismissal. In Anti-Oedipus, the insufficiency or inadequacy of the concept of ideology can be understood (...) in light of the opposition between production and representation. Next, I will show that—in A Thousand Plateaus—this very opposition between production and representation is relaxed in favor of the notion of assemblage. By looking at Althusser’s theory of ideology, I will argue that ideology is not merely a cognitive representation in the sense that it can be considered as having its own material existence. If so, the concept of ideology does not have to be too narrowly conceived. Rather, I propose that Deleuze and Guattari offer a different kind of ideology critique through noology and the critical analysis of microfascism. Finally, I will conclude by arguing that Deleuze is still enacting a novel form of ideology critique despite his dismissal of the very terminology. (shrink)

In this paper I track the deployment of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment by three major thinkers in postcolonial theory, namely Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and Achille Mbembe. My argument is that while postcolonial theory has used ressentiment in a captivating way, which may have the potential for accounting for how contemporary moral culture conditions racism, nativism and xenophobia, the deployment remains incoherent. The postcolonial deployment of ressentiment begins with an incoherent reading of Nietzsche by Fanon, a mistake which is (...) creatively appropriated by Said and Mbembe. As ressentiment travels into the postcolony Nietzsche’s insights are discarded and the term is transformed through Hegelian and psychoanalytic schematics that take morality to be a universal and prescriptive code, the very problem that Nietzsche was attempting to overcome. For Fanon, ressentiment explains how colonial projection or the racial gaze is internalized by the colonized subject to produce a relation... (shrink)

Axiomatic and problematic approaches to ontology are discussed, at first in relation to the work of Badiou and Deleuze in mathematics. This discussion is then broadened focussing on problematics in Deleuze and Guattari’s critiques of capitalism and psychoanalysis which results in an analysis of the implications of this discussion for education. From this, education as being already there, which is an assumption in some strands of philosophy of education, following Deleuze’s critique of axiomatic presentations of ontological identities, is described as (...) a repressive, stabilizing operation, which produces objectives which are characterized as peculiar things. By contrast, those aspects of practice, knowledge, behaviours and populations which cannot be accommodated and resolved by axiomatic formulae and fall from axiomatic systems are characterized as queer things that constitute counter cultures. (shrink)

In this essay I focus on the idea of the univocity of being, championed by Duns Scotus and given prominence more recently by Deleuze. Although I am interested in how this idea can be established, my primary concern is with something more basic: how the idea can even be properly thought. In the course of exploring this issue, which I do partly by borrowing some ideas about logical syntax from Wittgenstein's Tractatus, I try to show how there can be dialogue (...) between analytic philosophers and those of other traditions. (shrink)

Several scholars align Nietzsche’s philosophy with Stoicism because of their naturalist approaches to ethics and doctrines of eternal re- currence. Yet this alignment is difficult to reconcile with Nietzsche’s criticisms of Stoicism’s ethical ideal of living according to nature by dispassionately accepting fate—so much so that some conclude that Nietzsche’s rebuke of Stoicism undermines his own philosophical project. I argue that affinities between Nietzsche and Stoicism belie deeper disagreement about teleology, which, in turn, yields different understandings of nature and human (...) flourishing, so that Nietzsche’s objections to Stoicism support his commitments to ethical naturalism and to affirming life’s eternal recurrence. (shrink)

This article examines Nietzsche’s enduring influence on Deleuze by showing how the interpretation advanced in Nietzsche and Philosophy informs Deleuze’s later work with Guattari. I analyse Deleuze’s reading of the will to power as a typology of forces and his interpretation of the Overman as a pinnacle of creative activity with an eye towards demonstrating that these are not merely Deleuzian creations but are also defensible interpretations of Nietzsche; and I suggest how these portions of Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche influence (...) his concepts of desiring-production and nomadism, respectively. By analysing Deleuze’s relation to Nietzsche as a longue durée, we can better appreciate how Deleuze’s early reading of Nietzsche is carried forward in his later work. (shrink)

In his dialogues with Claire Parnet, Deleuze asserts that: ‘Whether we are individuals or groups, we are made of lines’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2007: 124). In A Thousand Plateaus (with Guattari), Deleuze calls these kinds of ‘lifelines’ or ‘lines of flesh’: break line (or segmental line, or molar line), crack line (or molecular line) and rupture line (also called line of flight) (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 22). We will explain the difference between these three lines and how they are related (...) to the ‘soul’. We will also explain how a singular individual or group can arise from the play of the lines. Eventually, we will introduce the concept of ‘Creal’ to develop the Deleuzian figure of the ‘Anomal’, the so(u)rcerer. (shrink)

The article reviews Suzi Adams’s book on Cornelius Castoriadis, Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation, by debating the options and possible deficits in Castoriadis’s notion of creativity. While Adams criticizes Castoriadis for neglecting the overarching – and horizontal – worldliness that must ultimately condition creativity in various instances of interpretation, in the most expanded sense as a cosmology, the review ponders an alternative approach which focus on Castoriadis’s creativity seen as a notion of a lateral and emergent positing of the novel, (...) ‘creations ex nihilo – but not in nihilo or cum nihilo’, with the statement in one of the last exposures of his thought. (shrink)

This paper draws upon Deleuze and Guattari's ideas to suggest a different kind of reading of a narrative of a mother of a child with severe disability, and thus a different kind of ethical response to them. This reading gives readers the possibility of opening up experiences of parents and children with disability, rather than compartmentalising such stories. The reader becomes, is transformed, through reading these narratives and through engaging with the intensities which are recognised in the text, asking the (...) question ‘Does it work for me?’ This is what Gilles Deleuze calls ‘reading with love’. (shrink)

This article proposes a reading of the lives of teachers through a Deleuzian-Guattarian materialistic approach. By asking the question ‘what kind of life do teachers live?’ this article reminds us that teachers sometimes welcome the imposed policies, procedures and programmes, the consequences of which remove them from students. This desire is compared to another desire—the desire for children. Teachers are seen as machines rather than singular organisms, so that what helps a teacher in her becoming are her connections to students. (...) Activities are seen in terms of intensities and flows, rather than as actions which crystallise such flows. Roald Dahl's story of Matilda is used as a fictional example of the above. (shrink)

This essay explores aesthetics, affect, and educational politics through the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière. It contextualizes and contrasts the theoretical valences of their ethical and democratic projects through their shared critique of Kant. It then puts Rancière's notion of dissensus to work by exploring it in relation to a social movement and hunger strike organized for educational justice in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood. This serves as a context for understanding how educational provisions are linked to the aesthetic (...) distribution of perception within the neoliberal city. It also serves as a powerful example of how these orders of perception are resisted and subverted at the local level by aesthetic and affective means. Through the Little Village hunger strike the essay argues that while Rancière allows us to recognize the aesthetic dimensions of the political, he falls short in addressing tactical and/or affective considerations. The essay concludes by seeking to extend the critical efficacy of Rancière's dissensus through a rendering of tactical affect within Deleuzian metaphysics. (shrink)

Although it is not clear that Deleuze and Guattari were simply and unambiguously Jungians, they extensively engaged with Jung’s depth psychology in both affirmative and critical ways. It is striking that Deleuze expresses a strong affinity between his work and that of Jung in several texts; Jung’s influence on Deleuze has not tended to be emphasised by scholars, though there is a rapidly growing ‘Jungian turn’ in Deleuze and Guattari studies. This article briefly extracts the influence of Jung on Deleuze (...) and Guattari and, more extensively, explores profound resonances between Deleuze's Difference and Repetition and James Hillman's Re-Visioning Psychology. (shrink)

Efforts to embed anti-heterosexist curriculum at the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) can become confused and contradictory because of the persistent subjection of the student to the curriculum, and by maintaining sex as a subject of danger and prohibition. Examples from the new TDSB anti-discrimination curriculum resource that were perceived as politically controversial in 2011 are briefly assessed with the popular queer(ed) theories of Foucault (1978/1990), Butler (1990; 1993), and Rubin (1984/1993). Deleuze's (1988) interpretation of Spinoza’s work is also plumbed (...) to explain the consequences of heterosexist discourse in schools. The Deleuzian-Spinozan example of the caricatures of the “moralist trinity” shows that heterosexist discourses promote the production of “sad passions” throughout social relationships by creating “sad” characters within each individual. Finally, anti-heterosexist action in schools is described as modelling consent in curriculum and exposing relationships of subjection. (shrink)

The image of thought that Rembrandt proposes with his Philosopher in Meditation still wears the mask of the old philosophical pedagogy based on ascent and the heights, but it ushers in new percepts and affects corresponding to the philosopher's concept, fold, that Leibniz elevates to the status of the principle of Baroque variation. The fold unleashes a power that carries forms and statements over a variety of disjunctive statements.

The French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, is emerging as one of the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th century, having published widely on philosophy, literature, language, psychoanalysis, art, politics, and cinema. However, because of the ‘experimental’ nature of certain works, combined with the manner in which he draws upon a variety of sources from various disciplines, his work can seem difficult, obscure, and even ‘willfully obstructive’. In an attempt to resist such impressions, this paper will seek to provide an (...) accessible introduction to Deleuze's work, and to begin to discuss how it can be employed to provide a significant critique and reconceptualization of the theoretical foundations and therapeutic practices of psychiatry, psychotherapy, and mental health nursing. In order to do this, the paper will focus upon Deleuze's masterwork, and the cornerstone to his philosophy as a whole, Difference and Repetition; in particular, it will discuss how his innovative and challenging account of time can be employed to provide a conception of human life as a ‘continuity’, rather than as a series of distinct ‘moments’ or ‘events’. As well as discussing the manner in which his work can provide us with an understanding of how life is different and significant for each human being, this paper will also highlight the potential importance of Deleuze's work for logotherapy, for the recent ‘turn’ to ‘narrative’ as a psychotherapeutic approach and for contemporary mental health care's growing interest in ‘social constructionism’. As such, this paper also seeks to stimulate further discussion and research into the importance and the relevance of Deleuze's work for the theory and practice of psychiatry, psychotherapy, and mental health nursing. (shrink)

Published in 1972, Anti‐Oedipus was the first of a number of collaborative works between the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, and the French psychoanalyst and political activist, Felix Guattari. As the first of a two‐volume body of work that bears the subtitle, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti‐Oedipus is, to say the least, an unconventional work that should be understood, in part, as a product of its time – created as it was among the political and revolutionary fervour engendered by the events of (...) ‘May 1968’. However, this paper will suggest that Anti‐Oedipus – as a critique of psychoanalysis and the Oedipus complex, as well as being a study of the relationship between capitalism and schizophrenia – should also be understood in a less ‘time‐bound’ fashion. In particular, the paper will examine Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of a concept of ‘desire’ and its employment in relation to subjectivity, time, capitalism, representation, and the radical ‘therapeutic’ practice that they refer to as ‘schizoanalysis’. Moreover, nearly 40 years after the events of May 1968 and against possible doubts concerning the contemporary relevance of psychoanalysis, it will be suggested that psychoanalysis and the Oedipus complex are to be understood as symptomatic of a wider ‘malaise’ that can be discerned within psychiatry, psychotherapy, and contemporary capitalist society itself, and that it is this that forms the broader target of the book’s critique. Accordingly, by providing an accessible and critical introduction to Anti‐Oedipus, the paper also hopes to stimulate further discussion and research regarding both the critique and the contribution that the work can make to contemporary psychiatry, psychotherapy, and mental health nursing generally. (shrink)

This article responds to Johan Dahlbeck’s ‘Towards a pure ontology: Children’s bodies and morality’, 2014, pp. 8–23). His arguments from Nietzsche and Spinoza do not carry the weight he supposes, and the conclusions he draws from them about pedagogy would be ill-advised in practice.

The aim of this article is to give an account of a methodological link between drama and political theory. This account is drawn primarily from the early philosophical work of Deleuze. Following Deleuze, we will refer to it as ‘the method of dramatization’. We will argue that dramatization is a method aimed at determining the quality of political concepts by ‘bringing them to life’, in the way that dramatic performances bring to life the characters and themes of a play-script. We (...) demonstrate that this can be specified in relation to the development of this method in Deleuze's early philosophical work as a practical, critical and artistic method and, in relation to the ontological assumptions he articulated and defended in Difference and Repetition, as a process of intensification of the Idea of the political. By way of example, we discuss how the dramatization of the concept of ideology functions in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. We conclude with some lines of inquiry that could be pursued by political theorists looking to investigate further the dramatic nature of method in political theory. (shrink)

This essay investigates thought as an event of “multiplicity.” French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou pose this as a concept of change (political and otherwise). Both philosophers propose that multiplicity means thinking happens as an event by engaging a theoretical impasse, or “un-thought.” Un-thought opens up and changes ideas into complex varieties or multiplicities. This dynamic is examined through the example of May ‘68, an actual event that gives context to how multiplicity expresses “radical change.” The aim of this (...) article is to see how both thinkers’ theories overlap. For Badiou, multiplicities are “truths” that happen whilst making a decision, engaging a notion of “point.” For Deleuze, multiplicities are concepts that happen materially in life as metaphysical forces, or “lines.” Multiplicity is critically approached as a complex variety of ideas that change in the forms of art, politics, and science. (shrink)

In contrast to rigid conceptions of nonhuman animals, several philosophers have put forth ideas that suggest a more flexible and extended vision of other animals. In articulating the condition of humans in the world, philosophers have referenced ideas that necessarily bring other beings in common with humanity. Significantly, conceptions of movement and biological transformation have played a central role in these ruminations, thereby suggesting the importance of geographical variables in human/nonhuman relations. By drawing out the connections between these perspectives, this (...) paper outlines an ethics of extension. (shrink)

This paper explores how affirming events rather than substances, and difference rather than identities, might affect how one responds to life's exigencies, in particular the act of choosing when to end the life of a dog that was a beloved companion. The paper addresses the concepts of the event and the time of Aion as they are presented in The Logic of Sense, and examines the resonances these concepts have with a notion of learning presented in Difference and Repetition and (...) a notion of essence presented in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. The argument is made that Deleuze presents us with a notion of death that is a part of the creative unfolding of life, and that affirming events rather than substances and difference rather than identities can give us insight into practical questions about how to live one's life. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to conceptualize and evaluate the transhumanist movement by applying a Nietzschean critique to its techno-progressive agenda of human enhancement. The investigation itself is divided into three distinctive, yet methodologically intertwined steps: first, I will present an exegetical approach by circumscribing the discussion concerning the alleged similarities and disparities between the transhumanist notion of transforming the human into a posthuman being and Nietzsche’s concept of education, understood as self-overcoming; secondly, in a more practical and future-oriented (...) manner, I will consider some of the major aporias for conceptualizing a ‘Nietzschean transhumanism’ by confronting the techno-progressive idea of morphological freedom with Nietzsche’s critical approach to the commerce- and consumer-oriented mentality of the non-creative modern individual; finally, I will employ Nietzsche’s complex treatment of nihilism in order to formulate a critical evaluation of transhumanism’s cultural implications. My fundamental conclusion will be that the techno-progressive agenda does not strive to overcome human limitations by coping with the tragic nature of life in a Nietzschean sense, but merely promotes the nihilistic dream of Zarathustra’s ‘last human’ to establish a common happiness by eradicating the Dionysian reality of all existence. (shrink)

Animating Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological idea of the body as a pre-reflective organizing principle in perception, consciousness and language has become a productive and popular endeavor within philosophy of mind during the last two decades. In this context Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of an embodied mind has played a central role in the attempts to naturalize phenomenological insights in relation to cognitive science and neuropsychological research. In this dialogue the central role of art and aesthetics in phenomenology has been neglected or at best (...) treated as a peripheral phenomenon. In this article I argue that the failure to place art and aesthetics at the center of thought within phenomenology leads to a neglect of the expressive primacy of the body in movement. In the current naturalization of phenomenology the questions related to expressive movement are often consigned to the notions of motor intentionality or gesture. However, in his book How the Body Shapes the Mind the philosopher Shaun Gallagher interestingly concludes, based on experimental results, that bodily movements of gesture cannot be accounted for by the phenomenologically adapted notions of ‘body image’ and ‘body schema’. Symptomatically, Gallagher ends his chapter on bodily gesture with a section title asking the relevant question that remains unanswered within a phenomenology of mind: Expressive movement from the beginning? The search for an answer to this question points, in my view, to the possibility of a more radical understanding of the embodied mind based on the primacy of expressive experimentation rather than representational experience, which makes the question of art and aesthetics a core issue. Following the image of thought in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze I argue that art, as the production of sensation through experimentation, presents us with a mode of thinking that accounts for expressive bodily movement as a constitutive force in subjective thought and experience. (shrink)

This article uses the post-modern Nietzsche affirmation as a criterion for an analysis of the philosophical concept of the Constitution for the Earth (Šmajs, 2015) and other texts by Josef Šmajs, the principal author of the theory of evolutionary ontology. The author draws the attention of the group of authors of the Constitution for the Earth to the risk of the modernist and nihilist application of evolutionary ontology and proposes that the theory be extended to include new criteria and methods (...) to enable it to be applied in a more acceptable manner. The author places efforts aimed at the biophilic transformation of culture into the value-based and ethical framework of moderate anthropocentrism instead of the ecocentric approach preferred by the creators of evolutionary ontology. The author also underlines the risk of the application of an ecocentric approach through the application of recent analysis of media presentations of those who support and deny climate change in the work entitled Environmental Ethics and Behavioural Change (Franks, Hanscomb & Johnston, 2018). (shrink)