"One of the major works in the development of contemporary criticism and philosophy." -- J. Hillis Miller, Yale University Jacques Derrida's revolutionary theories about deconstruction, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, first voiced in the 1960s, forever changed the face of European and American criticism. The ideas in De la grammatologie sparked lively debates in intellectual circles that included students of literature, philosophy, and the humanities, inspiring these students to ask questions of their disciplines that had previously been considered improper. Thirty years (...) later, the immense influence of Derrida's work is still igniting controversy, thanks in part to Gayatri Spivak's translation, which captures the richness and complexity of the original. This corrected edition adds a new index of the critics and philosophers cited in the text and makes one of contemporary criticism's most indispensable works even more accessible and usable. (shrink)

In this book, I make use of an idea from economics to suggest how noble human tendencies might not only have survived the ruthless pressures of the material world, but actually have been nurtured by them.

In his historical perspective on the changes in scientific thought over the last 100 years, Carl N. Degler explores the study of social evolution and the ongoing search for human nature. In Search of Human Nature provides a detailed perspective on the reasons behind the shifting emphasis in social thought from biology, to culture, and again to biology. Degler examines why these changes took place, the evidence and people fostering these changes and why students of human nature decided to accept (...) this momentous change in thought. He suggests varying ideologies as the underlying force behind this shift in the study of social science. From Darwin's theory that human social behaviour has drastically evolved from animals, to the belief that human experience serves as the basic differentiating factor in humans, Degler provides a thorough and captivating examination of the roots of human behaviour. (shrink)

Second, this collection of cognitive programs evolved in the Pleistocene to solve the adaptive problems regularly faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors-...

The Lucid Veil is conceived as a sequel to The Mirror and the Lamp by M.H. Abrams. It gives a comprehensive account of the philosophic background of Victorian poetics. It is the first study to attempt to relate the theory and practice of poetry in the Victorian period to changing axioms of knowledge and perception. it will become a major work of reference and a new point of departure in the study of Victorian thought, philosophy, language and poetry. The author (...) is Professor of English at Victoria College, University of Toronto. (shrink)

Three eminent scientists analyze the scientific, social, and political roots of biological determinism.

Presupposing that all knowledge is the study of a unitary order of nature, the author maintains that the study of literature should be included within the larger field of evolutionary theory. He outlines four elementary concepts in evolutionary theory, and he argues that these concepts should regulate our understanding of literature. On the basis of these concepts, he repudiates the antirealist and irrationalist views that, under the aegis of “poststructuralism,” have dominated academic literary studies for the past two decades. He (...) examines the linkage between poststructuralism and standard social science, and he speculates about the ideological and disciplinary motives that have hitherto impeded evolutionary study in both the social sciences and the humanities. Finally, he distinguishes literature from science and argues that literary criticism integrates elements of both. (shrink)

Despite wide acceptance that the attributes of living creatures have appeared through a cumulative evolutionary process guided chiefly by natural selection, many human activities have seemed analytically inaccessible through such an approach. Prominent evolutionary biologists, for example, have described morality as contrary to the direction of biological evolution, and moral philosophers rarely regard evolution as relevant to their discussions. -/- The Biology of Moral Systems adopts the position that moral questions arise out of conflicts of interest, and that moral systems (...) are ways of using confluences of interest at lower levels of social organiation to deal with conflicts of interest at higher levels. Moral systems are described as systems of indirect reciprocity: humans gain and lose socially and reproductively not only by direct transactions, but also by the reputations they gain from the everyday flow of social interactions. -/- The author develops a general theory of human interests, using senescence and effort theory from biology, to help analye the patterning of human lifetimes. He argues that the ultimate interests of humans are reproductive, and that the concept of morality has arisen within groups because of its contribution to unity in the context, ultimately, of success in intergroup competition. He contends that morality is not easily relatable to universals, and he carries this argument into a discussion of what he calls the greatest of all moral problems, the nuclear arms race. (shrink)

Theorizing about the place of human culture in cosmic evolution.

We may begin to grasp the importance of exploring the relations between literary studies and the sciences by reflecting on some of the implications of a recent scholarly publication in literary theory. The example that I have in mind is an article by Ruth Salvaggio, entitled "Shakespeare in the Wilderness; or Deconstruction ithe Classroom," which was included in an anthology called Demarcating the Disciplines. In her article Salvaggio reproduces and comments on a paper written by Andrew Scott Jennings, a second-year (...) student in an American university who was enrolled in her survey course on British literature. The paper, she convincingly argues, ably embodies five major features of deconstructive criticism. Although she admits to having taught deconstruction ithe course, she claims that she did not encourage the members of the class to write deconstructive papers, and thus was quite surprised when she received a student essay that boldly reduced Shakespeare's sonnet 104 to the formula: "i + i + i = + 0," concluding that interpreting the poem is a "silly game." Salvaggio comments: "Iwasn't quite prepared. But I am now moving toward acceptance, maybe even welcome. And I am changing many of my assumptions". In his introduction to the volume, Samuel Weber would seem to approve of Salvaggio's willingness to let the sophomore's essay demolish her previous assumptions about the goals and meaning of literary criticism. According to Weber, his volume "assembles protocols of an alteration at work in what is perhaps the beginning of an institution turning itself inside out". It would seem that Salvaggio's account of what Weber refers to as "the confrontationf a college teacher of literature with a strange and remarkable undergraduate paper" deserves to be printed along with one of Derrida's readings of Hegel because both texts contribute to the deconstructive enterprise by exploring the relations between the reading and writing of texts and the operations of the institution. (shrink)