Philosophical naturalism is ambiguous between conjoining philosophy with science or with nature understood scientifically. Reconciliation of this ambiguity is necessary but rarely attempted. Feminist science studies often endorse the former naturalism but criticize the second. Karen Barad's agential realism, however, constructively reconciles both senses. Barad then challenges traditional metaphysical naturalisms as not adequately accountable to science. She also contributes distinctively to feminist reinterpretations of objectivity as agential responsibility, and of agency as embodied, worldly, and intra-active.

Within art therapy discourses there is a dearth of scholarly literature related to the dilemmas of voicing lesbianism and picturing lesbians. This is the result of sustained discrimination and censorship worldwide. In order to address this issue, a research study was designed to investigate this topic and its relationship to informing art therapy. There were two research methods and two research processes used in the project. Autobiography and art based research were the methods, and intertextuality and reflexivity were the research (...) processes. The methodology that underpinned the project was postmodern-feminism. Autobiographical material created through an art-based research method was reflexively viewed. The newly created visual texts stimulated intertextual links to past visual and written texts. These texts were used to map and track deeply held assumptions found embedded in essentialist, dualistic and modernist paradigms. By the use of postmodernfeminism deconstruction and reconstruction the investigation exposed and interrogated paradigm shifts resulting in subsequent personal transformations. The study revealed how past personal experiences of homophobia, lesbian invisibility and mental health treatment were deeply embedded in gender/sexuality norms, visual art discourse and social stigmatisation. These experiences impacted significantly on the ability to verbally and visually reveal both lesbian and lesbianism, and as such impacted on perceptual shaping of multiple selves within self. The study further demonstrated how the postmodern-feminist investigation destabilised dominant paradigms and subverted their location in “truth”, allowing for reconstruction of selves to be explicitly pictured. The significance of the findings for art therapy is three fold. Firstly, by offering a postmodern-feminist perspective through a lesbian lens, embedded modernist paradigms central to art therapy discourse are challenged. Secondly, the creative process of image making, within a postmodern-feminist frame is showcased. Within such a process change can be mobilised and self perceptions can be transformed. Thirdly, the study has advanced art therapy towards a more contemporary and critically informed discipline, one that can reflect on possible dilemmas encountered by lesbian clientele when verbally or visually self representing. The implications of the study have several intersections for the broader arts and health care sectors. (shrink)

This paper critically engages with Simon Glendinning’s The Idea of Continental Philosophy. Glendinning purports to show that there can be no coherent philosophical understanding of continental philosophy as comprising any sort of distinct or unified tradition. In this paper, however, I raise some questions about the largely unilateral direction in which his account of the motives for the divide is pursued: analytic philosophy is envisaged as pathologically projecting the internal and unavoidable threat of philosophical failure upon an external ‘continental’ other. (...) I also contend that Glendinning’s claims regarding the lack of thematic and methodological continuity at work in continental philosophy are overstated. Without denying that there is less of a normative consensus undergirding this polyvocal tradition than is evinced in the analytic tradition, in the second half of the paper I will argue for a ‘quasi-unity’ that revolves around the co-imbrication of methodological considerations and what I characterise as continental philosophy’s ‘temporal turn’. (shrink)

The terms deconstruction and différence are central to both Jacques Derrida's work and to poststructuralism generally. These terms attempt to provide an alternative to metaphysical construals of linguistic meaning. I compare Derrida's discussion of linguistic meaning and reference with the contemporary pragmatist, Robert Brandom, arguing that Brandom has important similarities to Derrida. However, whereas Derrida remains committed to metaphysics even as he tries to contest it, Brandom, to his credit, more thoroughly rejects metaphysics.

The Social Theory of Practices effectively criticized conceptions of social practices as rule-governed or regularity-exhibiting performances. Turner’s criticisms nevertheless overlook an alternative, "normative" conception of practices as constituted by the mutual accountability of their performances. Such a conception of practices also allows a more adequate understanding of normativity in terms of accountability to what is at issue and at stake in a practice. We can thereby understand linguistic practice and normative authority without having to posit stable meanings, rules, norms, or (...) presuppositions underlying the manifest diversity of social life. Key Words: normativity • practices • rules • language. (shrink)

The author argues that Thomas Hobbes anticipates a set of questions about meaning and semantic order that come to fuller expression in the 20th century, in the writings of W.V.O. Quine, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Donald Davidson, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty. Despite their different points of departure, these 20th-century writers pose a number of profound questions about the conditions for the stability of meaning, and about the conditions that govern the use of the term “language” itself. Though the more recent debate (...) benefits from a set of philosophical tools unavailable in the seventeenth century, the author further argues that Hobbes performs a number of maneuvers in his texts from which his 20th-century successors would profit. (shrink)

In this essay I argue for a constructivist account of the entities composing the object languages of Davidsonian truth theories and a quotational account of the reference from metalinguistic expressions to interpreted utterances. I claim that ‘radical quotation’ requires an ontology of repeatable events with strong similarities to Derrida's account of iterable events. In part one I summarise Davidson's account of interpretation and Olav Gjelsivk's arguments to the effect that the syntactic individuation of linguistic objects is only workable if interpreters (...) make richer assumptions about semantic properties than Davidson can tolerate. In part two I show that the objectivist account of syntactic objects which Gjelsivk's arguments presuppose is incompatible with one corollary of Davidsonian semantic indeterminacy: namely, the relativity of language to interpretative scheme. In place of this an account of radical interpretation is presented in which a quotational theory of metalinguistic reference furnishes the requisite relativity. In part three I argue that this account requires that particular utterance events must be repeatable to be radically quotable and give reasons why particularity and repeatability are not incompatible. (shrink)

This paper seeks to apply some of the tools of analytic philosophy to a text written by a 'continental' philosopher, in order to evaluate the quality of its arguments. In 'On Forgiveness', Jacques Derrida seems to be making two different claims about forgiveness. First, he claims that an act of forgiveness is only truly meaningful as forgiveness when one is forgiving the unforgivable. Second, he is also recommending that we change our understanding of the concept of forgiveness for ethical reasons. (...) I examine three lines of argument used in the essay to support the first claim. I find each of these lines of argument problematic. Since these arguments are unconvincing, I argue that this leaves only the second claim for Derrida to defend. (shrink)

Davidson’s 1974 argument denying the possibility of incommensurable conceptual schemes is widely interpreted as entailing a denial of metaphysical pluralism. Speakers may group objects differently or have different beliefs about the world, but there is just one world. I argue there is tension arising from three aspects of Davidson’s philosophy: the 1974 argument against conceptual schemes; Davidson’s more recent emphasis on primitive triangulation as a necessary condition for thought and language; and Davidson’s semantic approach to metaphysics, what he calls ‘the (...) method of truth in metaphysics’. After elucidating the tension, I argue the tension can be resolved while preserving at least two major tenets of Davidson’s philosophy: conceptual schemes do not carve an uninterpreted reality into different worlds and truth is objective and non-epistemic. I argue Davidson is implicitly committed to a plurality of worlds. (shrink)

. Books Received. Inquiry: Vol. 43, No. 4, pp. 493-494.

As a genus of philosophy, comparative philosophy serves various important purposes. It helps people understand various philosophies and it helps philosophers develop new ideas and solve problems. In this essay, I first clarify the meaning of “comparative philosophy” and its main purposes, arguing that an important purpose of comparative philosophy is to help us understand cultural patterns. This function makes comparative philosophy even more significant in today’s globalized world.