A central aspiration of the ‘Britishness’ agenda in UK politics is to promote community through the teaching of British values in schools. The agenda’s justification depends in part on the suppositions that harmony arising from agreement on certain values is a necessary condition of social health and that conflict arising from pluralism connotes a form of dysfunction in social life. These perceptions of harmony and conflict are traceable to the ancient Greeks. Plato used the device of the soul-city analogy to (...) provide a form of independent justification for his favoured model of community according to which harmony was essential. However, the soul-city analogy involves an intellectual sleight-of-hand. The idea that conflict connotes a defect in social life, which continues to haunt contemporary debates about community and values education, is the vestige of an ancient aristocratic ideology and we must learn to see it as such. There is no more reason to accept the Platonist portrayal of the place of conflict in social life than there is to accept a diametrically opposed Heraclitean account, which interprets harmony as the central threat to social flourishing. The implications of this ancient dispute for modern education are considerable: there is nothing natural or inevitable about the association of conflict with social dysfunction that partly supports the Britishness agenda; it is a political prejudice. Coming to see it as such will reveal new pathways to belonging and new ways of understanding the role of education in fostering the good society. (shrink)

Abstract: There is much that I admire in Richard Moran's account of how first-person authority may be consistent with self-knowledge as an achievement. In this paper, I examine his attempt to characterize the goal of psychoanalytic treatment, which is surely that the patient should go beyond the mere theoretical acceptance of the analyst's interpretation, and requires instead a more intimate, first-personal, awareness by the patient of their psychological condition.I object, however, that the way in which Moran distinguishes between the deliberative (...) and the theoretical attitudes is ultimately inconsistent with a satisfactory account of psychoanalytic practice; mainly because, despite Moran's claims to the contrary, such a distinction is still inspired by a Cartesian picture of the self. I argue that, in the light of his distinction, Moran may emphasize that an agent's psychological dispositions should be permeable to her decisions and projects, but is forced to reject the idea that permeability could go the other way too. I explore Bernard Williams' notion of acknowledgment and Simone Weil's distinction between two notions of necessity, in order to articulate a notion of receptive passivity which may help us to characterize this second direction of permeability. I finally outline why receptive passivity (and, thereby, the double direction of permeability) is crucial in order to identify the goal of psychoanalytic treatment and, derivatively, to understand how a certain kind of awareness may have a significant therapeutic effect. (shrink)

Vienna's Institute of Experimental Biology, better known as the Vivarium, helped pioneer the quantification of experimental biology from 1903 to 1938. Among its noteable scientists were the director Hans Przibram and his brother Karl , Paul Kammerer, Eugen Steinach, Paul Weiss, and Karl Frisch. The Vivarium's scientists sought to derive laws describing the development of the individual organism and its relationship to the environment. Unlike other contemporary proponents of biological laws, however, these researchers created an explicitly anti-deterministic science. By "laws" (...) they meant statistical regularities or "patterns." They interpreted their experimental results in ways that forged a "third way" between determinism and pure spontaneity, aiming to capture the complexity of the interaction between the organism and its environment. This common feature of their research was made possible by the availability at the Vivarium of the latest in climate-control technology and of methods borrowed from statistical physics. The deeper roots of this search for a "third way" lay, I suggest, in the shared educational, social, and aesthetic experiences of the laboratory's workers. (shrink)

Notions of complexity, non-linear dynamics and self-organization in the natural sciences seem to resonate with certain literary and social scientific traditions of thinking about cosmopolitan life in a sense that may be more than merely metaphorical. Just as science speaks of forms and patterns which come into being spontaneously, unpredictably and `from below', so too is there a resurgent interest in a `baroque' vision of modernity which foregrounds chance encounters and `underworld' associations. The parallels are still stronger if we take (...) a consider the life-world of embodied cosmopolitans as including not only other human beings and human artifacts, but also the many non-human life-forms that make themselves at home in our built environments, in our networks, and inside our own bodies. Contra theorists of risk society, fusion of complexity theory with cosmopolitan aesthetics raises the possibility of conceiving of runaway biological and technological events as both creative and destructive. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The paper discusses a possible political theological interpretation of arguments developed in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. What emerges is that Musil pose a fundamental challenge to the possibility of any real analogy between God and the political sovereign, as suggested by Carl Schmitt. At stake is Austria as a yet-to-be-born modern sovereign. However, the novel shows why attempts to conceive it in an image of God all fail. After surveying four such attempts, the main focus will be (...) the discussion of Anselm of Canterbury’s existential argument in this secular context. At Diotima’s inspiration it is General von Bordwehr, a largely neglected figure, who makes the most serious attempt to argue for the political sovereign as the greatest conceivable thing. The argument is that greatness entails containing every idea and its opposite, and this yields the concept of order. But order means the frozen end of everything. Hence, instead of a living God, we end up with a political sovereign marked by death. (shrink)

To the realists.—You sober people who feel well armed against passion and fantasies and would like to turn your emptiness into a matter of pride and ornament: you call yourselves realists and hint that the world really is the way it appears to you. As if reality stood unveiled before you only, and you yourselves were perhaps the best part of it … But in your unveiled state are not even you still very passionate and dark creatures compared to fish, (...) and still far too similar to an artist in love? And what is ‘reality’ for an artist in love? You are still burdened with those estimates of things that have their origin in the passions and loves of former centuries. Your sobriety still contains a secret and inextinguishable drunkenness. Your love of ‘reality’, for example-—oh, that is a primeval ‘love’ … Subtract the phantasm and every human contribution from it, my sober friends! If you can! If you can forget your descent, your past, your training—all of your humanity and animality. (F. Nietzsche,The Gay Science, Book Two, extract from Section 57). (shrink)

Reading is not a peripheral philosophical pastime; it constitutes most of what we do when we do philosophy. And the experience of reading philosophy is much more than just a series of interpretative acts: the philosopher-reader is subject to, among other things, sensations, passions, emendations, and transformations. In this essay, I argue that a full account of philosophical reading should outline some of the sociological structures that determine how different communities of philosophers construct such experiences, as well as describe in (...) detail the ways in which philosophers encounter truths while reading. It should, that is, describe ways in which philosophy acts upon readers and the various effects that result. (shrink)

If technology is the single most important factor in explaining the organization of modern societies, it is likewise the key to understanding the modern personality. The technological personality is the psychological counterpart to the technological society.Technology indirectly destroys the basis of a common morality and so leaves human relationships vague, insincere, and potentially dangerous. The technological personality possesses a façade of extroverted cheerfulness to conceal and compensate for an inner core of loneliness and fear of others. At the same time (...) the technological personality allows one to internalize technological stimuli, thus creating a shield against certain kinds of stress, it reinforces and deepens loneliness. (shrink)

The modern university has become a subsystem within the technological system. As such, the university has lost its autonomy. Every aspect of the university— administration, pedagogy, research—has become specialized and technical. Success, power, and efficiency are its only values. An alternative to the modern university is briefly explored.

My considerations are organised into four sections. The first section provides a survey of some significant developments that determine contemporary philosophical discussion on the subject of ‘time’. In the second section, I show how the question of time and the issue of media are linked with one another in the views of two influential contemporary philosophers: Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty. Finally, in the third section, the temporal implications of cultural practices which are developing in the new medium of the (...) Internet are analysed and, in the fourth section, related to the central theses of Derrida and Rorty. (shrink)

In some sections of On Certainty, Wittgenstein uses the term “persuasion,” pitting it, on the one hand, against “giving reasons”, and comparing it, on the other, to conversion, while, finally, defining it as “giving someone one's own picture of the world.” In this essay, I analyse these sections, in an effort to fit them into the broader context of On Certainty, and to clarify the meaning and the limits of the comparison between persuasion and conversion. My aim is to show (...) that persuasion as Wittgenstein understands it here is quite similar to what we could call “re-education.”. (shrink)

This article begins with the question, is mind prefigured in life? Andreas Webber and Francisco Varela argue that the autopoietic model in combination with Jonas's theory of metabolism provide a more robust model than Kant's account of natural teleology in the third critique, and thus it is able to make a claim to, at least, a pre-figuration of human freedom. I argue that Freud's illustration of the death drive via the analogy of the cell in Beyond the Pleasure Principle provides (...) a valuable counter-example to Jonas's conception of metabolism and exposes the type of metaphysical assumptions that the Kantian project was so averse to. My intention here is not to reify either Jonas or Freud's claims on the determinative nature of natural causation; rather it is to argue that each exists as valuable heuristic tools. Any causal determinative judgment on the nature of natural teleology must be exercised with nothing less than a Kantian level of caution as the implication of placing the value of the coherence of our conceptual structures over the actual mechanical processes of the natural world confronts us with the direct risk of misrecognition on a massive scale. (shrink)

Philosophers of music, like Charles Swann in Proust’s novel (Proust 1913/1992, p. 360), have traditionally found it difficult to utter the word ‘profound’ unironically. But this changed with Peter Kivy’s 1990 paper ‘The profundity of music’ The problem Kivy draws our attention to is this: we do call some musical works profound. However, Kivy argues, given that a work is profound only if it is about something profound and given that music (or ‘music alone’) is not about anything, this leads (...) to something of a paradox: how can music be profound if it is not about something profound. My aim in this paper is to argue that what makes a work profound is not that it is about something profound, but that it actively challenges any straightforward interpretative activity (while at the same time nudges you to keep on trying to interpret it). I argue that this line of argument is very much in tune with Kivy’s general theoretical commitment that “music alone isn’t about anything” (Kivy 1990, p. 245). (shrink)

This article introduces the work of philosopher-novelist Walker Percy to the Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science readership. After some biographical and contextual preliminaries, I suggest that the conceptual collecting feature to Percy's work is his critique of abstractionism manifest in a tripartite congruence of Cartesianism, derivatively misapplied science, and social atomism.

In this “Response to Critics,” Cathleen Kaveny continues the conversation in the JRE symposium centered on her recent book, Prophecy without Contempt: Religious Discourse in the Public Square. The book's central argument is that adequate discussion of contention in the contemporary public square requires attending to matters of rhetoric, particularly the rhetoric of prophetic indictment. Kaveny engages the comments of four interlocutors: Alda Balthrop-Lewis, James Childress, William Hart, and Martin Kavka. The first section, “Overarching Goals,” summarizes the objectives of the (...) book. The second section, “Methodology,” engages critics regarding methodological issues, highlighting Kaveny's commitment to a version of MacIntyre's tradition theory and her indebtedness to her legal training. The third section, “Structure,” responds to particular questions her interlocutors raise about the four parts of the book. The fourth section, “Larger Questions,” ponders the next stages of the academic and political discussion about contention in the public square. (shrink)

In "Democracy and Tradition," Jeffrey Stout contends that American constitutional democracy constitutes a well-functioning moral and political tradition that is not hostile to religion, although it does not depend on any specifically religious claims. I argue that Stout's contention is supported by a consideration of the great common law subject of contracts, as taught to first-year law students across the United States. First, I demonstrate how contract law can fruitfully be understood as a Maclntyrean tradition. Second, I illustrate the moral (...) richness of this tradition, and the mutually interpreting nature of rules and facts, by close attention to one particularly colorful case, Syester v. Banta. I conclude by suggesting that both religious and secular ethicists might find common law cases in general and contract law cases in particular to be a source of moral reflection that is substantively rich without being religiously divisive. (shrink)

This paper offers both a phenomenologically psychological and a phenomenologically transcendental account of the constitution of the unconscious. Its phenomenologically psychological portion was published in the previous volume of this journal as Part I, while its phenomenologically transcendental portion is published here as Part II. Part I first clarified the issues involved in Husserl's differentiation of the respective contents and methodologies of psychological and transcendental phenomenology. On the basis of this clarification it showed that, in marked contrast to the prevailing (...) approach to the unconscious in the phenomenological literature, an approach that focuses on the emotive and aesthetic factors (rooted in Freud's theory of repression) in the descriptive account of the constitution of an unconscious, there are cognitive factors (rooted in Jung's theory of apperception) that have yet to be descriptively accounted for by phenomenological psychology. Part I concluded with a phenomenologically psychological account of the role these cognitive factors play in the constitution of an unconscious. Part II shows how Jung's claims regarding a dimension of unconscious contents that lacks genealogical links to consciousness proper, i. e., the so-called "collective unconscious," can be phenomenologically accounted for if: (1) Jung's methodological differentiation of empirical and interpretative (hermeneutically phenomenological) approaches to the unconscious is attended to and; (2) such attention is guided by the phenomenologically transcendental critique of the emotive and aesthetic limitations of both the Freudian and heretofore Husserlian accounts of the descriptive genesis of something like an unconscious. (shrink)

Folly is an under-explored vice, despite its common occurrence and close relationship to core aspects of practical rationality and the good life. This paper develops an account of folly as a subspecies of imprudence and distinctive source of wrongdoing, with a special focus on its relational, social or inter-personal aspect. Drawing on Rotenstreich’s historically-based account, folly is defined as a form of practical irrationality resulting from closedness to the world. I expand Rotenstreich’s view and depart from him on two key (...) points. First, I argue that folly should be cleanly differentiated from stupidity. Second, I show that the wrong in folly—i.e. the harms it involves intrinsically, as opposed to as a matter of causal consequence—is partly obscured by Rotenstreich’s exclusive focus on the fool as an isolated individual agent. When, instead, we consider folly as a pathology of interpersonal relations, it reveals itself to be a vice which infects and undermines human relationships of love and care, and thus to be a serious threat to living well or human flourishing in almost all of their forms. (shrink)

The following discussion considers three aspects of the Sciences-versus-Humanities divide: the historical evolution of disciplines in the modern period through the beginning of the twenty-first century; the epistemology of the sciences versus that of the Humanities as defined and practiced in that same period; and the ways in which the two cultures interact with each other and with religion and faith today. It finds that while it may feel ancient and natural, the historical divide between what are called the Humanities (...) and the Sciences is really quite new and contingent; that no single “scientific” epistemology exists but rather many “epistemic virtues” replace each other over time, often overlapping between the Sciences and Humanities, and that, finally, as the Humanities/sciences divide increasingly weakens or becomes complicated, as is happening today, knowledge and faith are juxtaposed to a greater degree. (shrink)

This paper develops a way of understanding G. E. M. Anscombe's essay “The First Person” at the heart of which are the following two ideas: first, that the point of her essay is to show that it is not possible for anyone to understand what they express with “I” as an Art des Gegebenseins—a way of thinking of an object that constitutes identifying knowledge of which object is being thought of; and second, that the argument through which her essay seeks (...) to show this is itself first personal in character. Understanding Anscombe's essay in this light has the merit of showing much of what it says to be correct. But it sets us the task of saying what it is that we understand ourselves to express with “I” if not an Art des Gegebenseins, and in particular what it is that we understand ourselves to express with sentences with “I” as subject that might seem to express identity judgments, such as “I am NN”, and “I am this body”. (shrink)

How do Dutch people let each other know that they disagree? What do they say when they want to resolve their difference of opinion by way of an argumentative discussion? In what way do they convey that they are convinced by each other’s argumentation? How do they criticize each other’s argumentative moves? Which words and expressions do they use in these endeavors? By answering these questions this short essay provides a brief inventory of the language of argumentation in Dutch.

There is much that I admire in Richard Moran's account of how first‐person authority may be consistent with self‐knowledge as an achievement. In this paper, I examine his attempt to characterize the goal of psychoanalytic treatment, which is surely that the patient should go beyond the mere theoretical acceptance of the analyst's interpretation, and requires instead a more intimate, first‐personal, awareness by the patient of their psychological condition.I object, however, that the way in which Moran distinguishes between the deliberative and (...) the theoretical attitudes is ultimately inconsistent with a satisfactory account of psychoanalytic practice; mainly because, despite Moran's claims to the contrary, such a distinction is still inspired by a Cartesian picture of the self. I argue that, in the light of his distinction, Moran may emphasize that an agent's psychological dispositions should be permeable to her decisions and projects, but is forced to reject the idea that permeability could go the other way too. I explore Bernard Williams' notion of acknowledgment and Simone Weil's distinction between two notions of necessity, in order to articulate a notion of receptive passivity which may help us to characterize this second direction of permeability. I finally outline why receptive passivity (and, thereby, the double direction of permeability) is crucial in order to identify the goal of psychoanalytic treatment and, derivatively, to understand how a certain kind of awareness may have a significant therapeutic effect. (shrink)

Friendship, as a unique form of social relationship, establishes a particular union among individual human beings which allows them to overcome diverse boundaries between individual subjects. Age, gender or cultural differences do not necessarily constitute an obstacle for establishing friendship and as a social phenomenon, it might even include the potential to exist independently of space and time. This analysis in the interface of social science and phenomenology focuses on the principles of construction and constitution of this specific form of (...) human encounter. In a “parallel action,” the perspective of social science focuses on concrete socio-historical constructions of friendship in different time periods. These findings are confronted with the description of principles of the subjective constitution of the phenomenon of “friendship” from a phenomenological perspective. The point of reference for the study is the real type of the symbolically established and excessively idealized form of friendship intended for eternity which was especially popular in eighteenth century Germany. Analogous to the method of phenomenological reduction, three different levels of protosociological reduction are developed for the exploration of the unique social phenomenon of friendship. (shrink)

In this thesis I offer an interpretation of Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism. I argue against interpreting Schopenhauer’s pessimism as if it were merely a matter of temperament, and I resist the urge to find a single standard argument for pessimism in Schopenhauer’s work. Instead, I treat Schopenhauer’s pessimism as inherently variegated, composed of several distinct but interrelated pessimistic positions, each of which is supported by its own argument. I begin by examining Schopenhauer’s famous argument that willing necessitates suffering, which I defend (...) against the misrepresentative interpretation advocated by Ivan Soll. I also offer a metaphysical reading of Schopenhauer’s claim that no amount happiness can compensate for the mere fact of suffering, based upon his negative conception of happiness. I proceed by analysing Schopenhauer’s criticisms of two prominent optimists, Leibniz and Rousseau. I attempt to salvage something of Schopenhauer’s counterargument against Leibniz that this is the worse of all possible worlds, and I also examine Schopenhauer’s claim that the optimistic metaphysics of a priori rationalistic philosophy cannot cope with the evidence of meaningless suffering. In the case of Rousseau, I interpret Schopenhauer’s brief objection to Rousseau’s assumption of original goodness, by means of an examination of Schopenhauer’s conception of the contrary doctrine, original sin. Next I consider the metaphysics of Schopenhauer’s account of eternal justice. After defending it against a number of objections, I argue that the nature of his version of eternal justice, which he admits constitutes a justification for suffering, does not conflict with the fact that he so strongly condemns Leibniz’s and Rousseau’s optimistic justifications for suffering. Finally I assess whether and to what extent Schopenhauer’s ethics of salvation are either pessimistic or optimistic. I conclude that the mere fact that salvation is possible is not necessarily a cause for optimism, but that Schopenhauer’s doctrine of salvation is made partly optimistic by the higher form of cognition that he describes as part of it. I also argue that Schopenhauer’s views on the essentially mystical nature of the state of salvation ultimately commit him to being neither positively optimistic nor positively pessimistic about salvation. I conclude overall with some brief remarks about the meaning of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, and how in spite of its diverse nature, it is able to lay down a singular challenge to all future philosophers concerned with the question of suffering. (shrink)

Utopias from ancient times to the present have come and gone. They remain as a part of literary, philosophical and historical texts and communal practices. Yet this subject has never ceased to inspire contemporary minds as well. My aim in this paper is to consider the communities known as favelas that have formed on the edges of the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro as a contemporary form of utopian community. The paper begins with a brief analysis of the concept (...) of utopia. Then follows a discussion of the Favela as an urban utopia as seen from the perspective of Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel’s philosophy of liberation as represented in his book, The Philosophy of Liberation. The remainder of the paper will consider in what sense the Favela settlements can be understood as a form of utopia. Among additional sources for this paper, I will refer to the research on the favelas by such scholars as Janice Perlman and Catalytic Communities. Other sources will include art projects in the favelas, the novel and film City of God made on site, and photographs of Miguel Rio Branco taken in the Favelas. All of these artists’ representations reflectactual experiences of life in the Favelas. An underlying question throughout will be the role that art might play in understanding utopias. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the importance of treating mental experience on its own terms. In defense of “experiential realism” I offer a critique of modern psychology’s all-too-frequent attempts to effect an objectification and quantification of personal subjectivity. The question is “What can we learn about experiential reality from indices that, in the service of scientific objectification, transform the qualitative properties of experience into quantitative indices?” I conclude that such treatment is neither necessary for realizing, nor sufficient for capturing, (...) subjectively given states (such as perception, pain, imagery, fear, thought, memory) – that is, for understanding many of the principle objects of psychological inquiry. A “science of mind” that approaches its subject matter from a third-person perspective should, I contend, be treated with a healthy amount of informed skepticism. (shrink)

Many of us have experienced a peculiar feeling of freedom, of the world being open before us. This is the feeling that is captured by phrases like “the freedom of the open road” and “free spirits,” and, to quote Phillip Larkin, “free bloody birds” going “down the long slide / To happiness, endlessly.” This feeling is associated with the ideas that my life could go in many different directions and that there is a vast range of things that I could (...) become. It arises in concert with a wide range of human experiences, including experiences of artistic creation, play, fun, and resistance to authority. This freedom of openness and spontaneity, which I call spontaneous freedom, is central to our ordinary talk about freedom. Yet it is a phenomenon largely ignored in discussions of freedom in contemporary moral philosophy. This is because moral philosophers are primarily concerned to identify the sort of freedom that is a prerequisite for moral responsibility, and so focus on deliberate, voluntary action rooted in rational choice. When moral philosophers do discuss spontaneous freedom, it is often to disparage it as, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, the freedom of “the wanton” whose liberty is merely that of “anarchic impulsive behavior.” My dissertation develops a theory of spontaneous freedom and of the role it does and should play in our lives, including our moral and political lives. I argue that, to do full justice to the human aspiration for freedom, moral and political theory must recognize the value of spontaneity. Through a study of characters from stories and films by Virginia Woolf, Saki, Akira Kurosawa, and Aman Sethi, I develop a phenomenological account of the nature of spontaneous freedom. I argue that we experience spontaneous freedom when we experience our actions as arising out of ourselves but not fixed in advance either by the decisions of other agents or by our own preexisting commitments or plans. I further argue that spontaneous freedom is valuable because it allows for the distinctive pleasure of feeling that one’s life is unforetold and that one is among the sources of novelty in the world, a feeling that is central to artistic creativity. It also affords solace from the anxiety associated with the inevitability of death. As with many experiences, like falling in love or seeing an alpine lake, experiences of spontaneous freedom are most valuable when they are veridical. But even the subjective experience of spontaneous freedom, I suggest, activates our awareness of and openness to possibility. Achieving this awareness, at least on occasion, is valuable because it provides us with a sense of our own psychological potential and sharpens a skill that contributes to practical deliberation. My claim that spontaneous freedom is valuable conflicts with a popular account of the self. According to that account—endorsed by a number of moral philosophers but most famously associated with Christine Korsgaard—the ideal self is one that is well-ordered, actively constituted through rational deliberation. Such integrity theories of the self are attractive because they provide an account of agency according to which ideal moral agents invariably endorse their own actions and beliefs. Integrity theories view freedom as involving rational, deliberative control of one’s actions. But I argue that integrity theories forbid well-constituted moral agents to seek out experiences of spontaneous freedom: such agents must act in a manner that they antecedently and reflectively endorse, while spontaneous freedom requires acting in a manner not antecedently fixed by one’s own decisions. Insofar as spontaneous freedom is a kind of freedom that we do and should value, my account exerts pressure on this standard view of agency and the self. My account of spontaneous freedom also has important political implications. One version of liberal theory holds that the only sort of political freedom worth having is the freedom of each individual to effectively exercise choice compatibly with every other individual doing likewise. On this picture, I have all of the freedom that I could want if I am able to choose autonomously and act in accordance with my choices. But I argue that a community that secures this liberal variety of freedom does not yet provide its members with all the freedom for which people rightly yearn. When public and private institutions arrange our circumstances in ways that make the courses of our lives predictable, our own choices about how to act may be largely settled by the plans and decisions of other agents. This in turn makes it difficult for us to regard our futures as open in the way that is characteristic of experiences of spontaneous freedom. States should promote spontaneous freedom by providing the material and social preconditions for us to feel that our lives could head in radically different and unanticipated directions. (shrink)

at seek to identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for a work to count as fiction. She argues that this goal cannot really be achieved; instead, she appeals to the notion of genre to distinguish between fiction and nonfiction. This notion is significantly more flex- ible, since it invites us to identify standard—but not necessary—and counter-standard features of works of fiction in light of our classificatory practices. More specifically, Friend argues that the genre of fiction has the genre of nonfiction—and (...) only that genre—as its con- trast class. I will refer to the particular way in which Friend elaborates this claim as the contrast view. I have, nevertheless, the impression that this view unnecessarily narrows down the array of perspectives and attitudes from which we can approach works of fiction. I will thus develop a line of reasoning to the effect that the contrast view should rather be construed as picking out a particular way of relating to works of fiction that lies at the end of a continuum defined by different degrees of reflectivity and estrangement. This implies that the contrast view is false as a general claim about how we experience works of fiction, even though this view may appropriately de- pict a specific way of approaching such works. (shrink)

The question of how literature can evoke emotions is a familiar one, as is the idea that a good work of literature arouses the right emotion in the right place through our capacity for sympathy. However, there is no consensus on how this works, partly because there is no agreement on the nature of emotions. One figure that contributes to both of these topics is Robert Musil. As a thinker and as a novelist, he had both a theory of emotions (...) and a novelistic treatment of them. His novels are notable, however, for the way in which they do not appeal to the reader’s capacity for sympathy, owing partly to the formlessness of his characters. Yet it is precisely the gap he creates between fiction and emotional reality that allows for a richer investigation of the relationship between emotions and literature. (shrink)

All narrative is a function of architecture, and architecture is always a reflection of its time, especially the architecture of information. The humanist novel, with its concern for individual autonomy, authenticity, and mimetic representation through visual detail, is often designed to depict the world at the human scale: the scale of the every-day world where Newtonian physics work, as well as natural language, and common metaphor. It is the human scale of face-to-face interaction. But at a time when people increasingly (...) understand the world at larger scales, a time when even the concept of the human is being eclipsed by a posthuman awareness, the optical metaphor of the human scale may be less relevant to an architecture of the novel than one that relies upon a larger scale: an architecture which privileges emergence over cause and effect, or pattern over individual viewpoint. By seeing emergence as an organizing principle in the architecture of novels, a mode of narration opens up in both their creation and criticism that complements the contemporary, posthuman ground of being as well as the architecture of the humanist novel once fit the humanist conception of “mankind” and became the “natural” way to write. An earlier version of this essay was delivered as a keynote address to the Centre de Recherches en Littératue Américaine, Universite Paris Sorbonne. (shrink)

How do people behave in interpersonal interactions? And why do they behave the way they do? In this thesis, I present a novel social-cognitive account of role-taking explaining how fixed positions affect our emotions, thoughts, and behavior in interactions. The basic notion of Role-Taking Theory is that actors represent roles in form of mental schemata, and that role-taking activates the role-specific mental schema. In its application, Role-Taking Theory was used to explain third-party reactions to conflicts. As a result, this thesis (...) entails three manuscripts currently under review for publications: one theoretical, and two empirical. In the theoretical article, we explain the core premises of RTT, discuss RTT’s contributions over and above existing theory, apply RTT to interpersonal conflicts, and outline future directions. In the two empirical articles, we report first empirical tests of hypotheses deriving from RTT’s assumptions. In sum, the manuscripts provide answers to how the number of constituting roles can be identified in any interpersonal interaction, how features of identified roles can be derived, how features of roles affect actors due to role-taking, why some actors take over certain roles in conflicts more frequently than others, why some actors benefit from taking over certain roles in conflicts more than others, why actors sometimes stick to roles even when this comes with costs, and – ultimately – how all these mechanisms tied to role-taking explain when and why interactions stabilize or destabilize. In a final chapter at the end of this thesis, the incremental contributions of these manuscripts over and above existing literature are discussed both in its novel theoretical rationale as well as in empirical insights. In sum, I argue that RTT’s universality and precision are apt for sustained empirical and theoretical work in the future. However, RTT is still in an early developmental stage, and thus, I prepare the next steps by analyzing the present state, outlining the most critical challenges in theory development, and identify the most promising directions for future research. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to develop and illustrate an approach for making the commonplace visible in a natural, as opposed to manipulated, social setting. The key research task was to find a way of capturing the ongoing production or enactment of the self that provides some insight into the way in which it is produced in a routine, matter of fact way. The article takes a number of steps to develop a research approach to the task. First, gender-identity (...) was selected as a more specific aspect of self-production. Second, the concept of "flashpoints" was used to refer to a particular moment in the routine which achieves some significance or salience as a result of the participants seizing upon some otherwise unremarkable action or statement and twisting it to their purpose. In this study, the purpose was gender-identity creation. Primary school children in the classroom and their teachers were the participants of the study. Through the use of flashpoints, the article demonstrates how gender-identity production of these children can be caught in flight. The article concludes that this approach can be added to the researcher's toolkit. (shrink)

This article brings forth a new perspective concerning the relation between stupidity and thinking by proposing to conceptualise the state of non-thinking in two different ways, situated at the opposite ends of the spectrum of thinking. Two conceptualisations of stupidity are discussed, one critical which follows a French line of continental thinkers, and the other one which will be called educational or ascetic, following the work of Agamben. The critical approach is conceptualised in terms of seriality of thinking, or thinking (...) captured by an apparatus, whereas the ascetic-educational approach is discussed by tracing the links between studying and stupidity. Both accounts assume that stupidity as non-thinking is a condition for thinking, either placed before thinking emerges or as an after-thought. However, the political implications concerning the role of philosophy in the public realm are divergent: for the critical approach, the task of the philosopher is to criticise the world, whereas for the ascetic approach, the task is to work on one’s own self and hope that the world will be changed through thinking. The wider aim of this article is to contribute to the debate concerning the public role of the intellectual starting from the assumption that there is a duty to think publicly and then clarifying what this duty entails in relation to the self and the others. (shrink)