Cfp: "Adorno -- 40 Years On," Centre for Social and Political Thought, University of Sussex, August 6, 2009.

The Centre for Social and Political Thought (University of Sussex) is hosting a one-day conference on the 6th August 2009 to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the death of Theodor W. Adorno. Anyone interested in presenting at this event is invited to submit either a paper proposal or abstract (no more than 500 words) to adorno.spt@gmail.com no later than June 30, 2009. Please include with proposals/abstracts your full name, email address, institutional affiliation, and position within institution. We welcome papers on any issue directly related to (or influenced by) Adorno's work - areas of interest may include aesthetics, memory, technology, ethics, politics, ideology, literature, theory/praxis, fetishism, culture and critique, as well as Adorno's legacies, influence and contemporary relevance. Decisions regarding the final programme will be made shortly after the deadline.For any further information, please contact either Simon Mussell mailto:s.p.mussell@sussex.ac.uk? or Chris O'Kane co41@sussex.ac.uk. Visit the conference webpage here: http://adorno2009.blogspot.com/2009/03/call-for-papers-adorno-conference-6th.html. (From www.continental-philosophy.org.)

Mason, Kelby. Review of Robert C. Richardson's EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AS MALADAPTED PSYCHOLOGY. NDPR (June 2009).

Richardson, Robert C. Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. In recent years a range of philosophers have been making a similar charge against evolutionary psychology, that it's neither evolutionary nor psychology -- or, at least, that it isn't good evolutionary or psychological science. David Buller has most forcefully argued that evolutionary psychology is no good as psychology, and now Robert Richardson has provided the corresponding argument against its evolutionary bona fides (Buller 2005). Richardson's main contention is that once we hold evolutionary psychology to the same evidential standards applied elsewhere in evolutionary theory, we should reject its "pretensions" as "unconstrained speculation" (p38). On Richardson's account, doing evolutionary science is hard -- really hard -- and evolutionary psychology has simply failed to provide the kind of evidence that is required. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16331.

CFP: "Hamann and the Tradition," CUNY, Hunter College, March 20-21, 2009.

Update 2: Notes on the conference by Jonathan Gray are available here: http://jonathangray.org/2009/06/10/the-magus-in-new-york/. Update: The conference homepage, including the programme, is here: http://sapientia.hunter.cuny.edu/~german/Conf%20Home.html. Original Post (August 27, 2008): Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of scholarly interest in the work of Johann Georg Hamann, an interest which is spreading among scholars of world literature, European history, philosophy, theology, and religious studies. New translations of work by and about Hamann are appearing, as are a number of books and articles on Hamann’s aesthetics, theories of language and sexuality, and unique place in Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment thought. As such, the time has come to reexamine, in light of recent work, the legacy of Hamann’s writings, which have influenced such diverse thinkers as J. G. von Herder, F. H. Jacobi, J. W. von Goethe, G. W. F. Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, and Walter Benjamin, to name only an obvious few. We invite papers which investigate or problematize in new ways any underappreciated aspect of Hamann’s impact across the centuries, be it upon a thinker or work, a historical tradition, or even an entire branch of knowledge. Especially welcome are papers which promote dialogue among the diverse disciplines to which Hamann’s work speaks. All conference papers should be delivered in English. Please send a one-page abstract by October 1, 2008 to the conference organizer: Lisa Marie Anderson, Assistant Professor Department of German, Hunter College lisa.anderson@hunter.cuny.edu Keynote Speaker: Oswald Bayer, Systematic Theology, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen Author of Vernunft ist Sprache: Hamanns Metakritik Kants; Johann Georg Hamann: Der hellste Kopf seiner Zeit; Zeitgenosse im Widerspruch: Johann Georg Hamann als Radikaler Aufklärer Confirmed Speakers: John Betz, After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann Gwen Griffith-Dickson, Johann Georg Hamann’s Relational Metacriticism Kenneth Haynes, Hamann: Writings on Philosophy and Language Manfred Kuehn, Immanuel Kant: A Biography; Scottish Common Sense in Germany 1768-1800 Johannes von Lüpke, Director, Internationales Hamann-Kolloquium Katie Terezakis, The Immanent Word: The Turn to Language in German Philosophy 1759-1801

Pub: FICHTEANA 17 (2009).

Occasional Newsletter of the North American Fichte Society. Access the issue here: http://home.earthlink.net/~cubowman/fichte/f17.html.

Hindley, Meredith. "The Voracious Pen of Thomas Carlyle." HUMANITIES (March/April 2009).

When Thomas Carlyle sat down in 1834 to write The French Revolution: A History, he wanted to do more than chronicle the mere procession of events. He wanted readers to smell the fear in the streets during the Terror, to taste the decadence of the Bourbon monarchy, to observe the sartorial cavalcade when the Estates-General meets for the first time since 1614, to picture blood spilling from guillotines. To accomplish his task he marshaled the same tools used by novelists—shifting point of view, imagery, and telling details—and borrowed tone and grandeur from Homer, Virgil, and Milton. What sprang forth from Carlyle’s pen was not a dry account of the French Revolution, but a book brimming with passion and philosophy, one that offered a new style of storytelling that influenced a generation of Victorian writers. That Carlyle would produce such a fervent account is somewhat surprising given his dour upbringing. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2009-03/Historian.html.

Stern, Sol. "Pedagogy of the Oppressor." CITY JOURNAL 19.2 (2009).

Like the more famous Teach for America, the New York Teaching Fellows program provides an alternate route to state certification for about 1,700 new teachers annually. When I met with a group of the fellows taking a required class at a school of education last summer, we began by discussing education reform, but the conversation soon took a turn, with many recounting one horror story after another from their rocky first year: chaotic classrooms, indifferent administrators, veteran teachers who rarely offered a helping hand. You might expect the required readings for these struggling rookies to contain good practical tips on classroom management, say, or sensible advice on teaching reading to disadvantaged students. Instead, the one book that the fellows had to read in full was Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. For anyone familiar with American schools of education, the choice wasn’t surprising. Since the publication of the English edition in 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has achieved near-iconic status in America’s teacher-training programs. In 2003, David Steiner and Susan Rozen published a study examining the curricula of 16 schools of education—14 of them among the top-ranked institutions in the country, according to U.S. News and World Report—and found that Pedagogy of the Oppressed was one of the most frequently assigned texts in their philosophy of education courses. These course assignments are undoubtedly part of the reason that, according to the publisher, almost 1 million copies have sold, a remarkable number for a book in the education field. The odd thing is that Freire’s magnum opus isn’t, in the end, about education—certainly not the education of children. Pedagogy of the Oppressed mentions none of the issues that troubled education reformers throughout the twentieth century: testing, standards, curriculum, the role of parents, how to organize schools, what subjects should be taught in various grades, how best to train teachers, the most effective way of teaching disadvantaged students. This ed-school bestseller is, instead, a utopian political tract calling for the overthrow of capitalist hegemony and the creation of classless societies. Teachers who adopt its pernicious ideas risk harming their students—and ironically, their most disadvantaged students will suffer the most. . . . Read the rest here: http://city-journal.org/2009/19_2_freirian-pedagogy.html.

Rogers, Pat. "Cheerfulness Breaks In." NEW CRITERION (June 2009).

Martin, Peter. Samuel Johnson: a Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009. Meyers, Jeffrey. Samuel Johnson: the Struggle. New York: Basic, 2009. As time goes by, it generally softens asperities in the character of men and women from the past. We have quite a cuddly image of Ben Franklin, but to those who met him he could seem truculent and abrasive. Something rather different has happened in the case of Samuel Johnson. He used to be presented as a formidable figure—an overbearing literary potentate, if not a clubroom bore whose table you would avoid in the dining room. People thought him domineering and arrogant, qualities reflected in his nickname “the Great Cham.” Oldstyle British actors gave him a plummy upper-class bark, even though the evidence showed that he spoke with a strong Midlands accent, not too far from the nasal intonation you can hear on the streets of Birmingham today. It has all changed dramatically in the last half-century. In fact, the shift has its roots even further back, in an essay by an outstanding scholar from Berkeley, first published in 1944. Bertrand Bronson’s study “Johnson Agonistes” set the agenda for much of what has come out in recent decades, together with work by other writers emphasizing the “perilous balance” that Samuel maintained in his psychic health. It is not surprising, then, that a sense of internal conflict pervades these new versions of Johnson’s life—the first two, but not the last, of a crop of biographies marking the tercentenary of his birth in this year. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Cheerfulness-breaks-in-4098.

Scruton, Roger. "Farewell to Judgment." AMERICAN SPECTATOR (June 2009).

The sciences aim to explain the world: they build theories that are tested through experiment, and which describe the workings of nature and the deep connections between cause and effect. Nothing like that is true of the humanities. The works of Shakespeare contain important knowledge. But it is not scientific knowledge, nor could it ever be built into a theory. It is knowledge of the human heart. Shakespeare doesn’t teach us what to believe: he shows us how to feel—case by case, person by person, mood by mood. As universities expanded, the humanities began to displace the sciences from the curriculum. Students wished to use their time at university to cultivate their leisure interests and to improve their souls, rather than to learn hard facts and complex theories. And there arose a serious question as to why universities were devoting their resources to subjects that made so little discernible difference to the wider world. What good do the humanities do, and why should students take three or four years out of their lives in order to read books which—if they were interested—they would read in any case, and which—if they were not interested—would never do them the least bit of good? In the days when the humanities involved knowledge of classical languages and an acquaintance with German scholarship, there was no doubt that they required real mental discipline, even if their point could reasonably be doubted. But once subjects like English were admitted to a central place in the curriculum, the question of their validity became urgent. And then, in the wake of English came the pseudo-humanities—women’s studies, gay studies and the like—which were based on the assumption that, if English is a discipline, so too are they. And since there is no cogent justification for women’s studies that does not dwell upon the subject’s ideological purpose, the entire curriculum in the humanities began to be seen in ideological terms. The inevitable result was the delegitimizing of English. Unlike women’s studies, which has impeccable feminist credentials (why else was it invented?), English focuses on the works of dead white European males whose values would be found offensive by young people today. So maybe such a subject should not be studied, or studied only as a lesson in social pathology. . . . Read the rest here: http://spectator.org/archives/2009/06/05/farewell-to-judgment.

Shaw, Joshua. Review of Desmond Manderson, ed. ESSAYS ON LEVINAS AND LAW. NDPR (June 2009).

Manderson, Desmond, ed. Essays on Lévinas and Law: a Mosaic. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Essays on Lévinas and Law: a Mosaic is a helpful new collection of essays that apply Emmanuel Lévinas' ideas about ethics to law. The overall quality of the essays contained in this collection is quite good. The book's editor, Desmond Manderson, warns readers in his introduction that the essays are "not intended as an introduction to Lévinas." (5) However, I found this volume to be more accessible than many publications on Lévinas. This accessibility may be due to the fact that several essays apply his writings to concrete cases and problems in law, with the effect that they highlight his philosophy's practical significance. Indeed, Essays on Lévinas and Law is a welcome addition to what seems to be a growing trend in Lévinas scholarship to chart out the practical relevance of his work for political philosophy, normative ethics, and, with this collection, law. The editor, Desmond Manderson, contributes an introduction and also one of the thirteen essays. The essays are organized into five sections, each titled after one of the five Mosaic books. This organization is slightly misleading, however, since it suggests that the collection is more unified than it actually is. The essays were commissioned for a conference held at McGill University in 2006, the "Centennial Conference on Lévinas and Law," which brought together over 100 scholars to explore the significance of Lévinas' philosophy for law. Like other conference-based collections, Essays on Lévinas and Law contains essays on a broad range of topics. Given this breadth, it would be difficult to review each contribution. Let me focus, therefore, on offering a sketch of each section and on elaborating some of the strengths of the collection as a whole. Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16327.

Cfp: IGEL 2010, International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media, Utrecht University, July 7-11, 2010.

Debate about the relevance of both the Social Sciences and the Humanities is getting more pragmatic and businesslike. The Dutch Government, for instance, stresses that these Faculties should focus on making their research more useful and work on making research findings available to society (AWT, 2007). In the United Kingdom we hear similar voices calling for valorization. In its response, the British Academy has warned against evaluating Humanities and the Social Sciences purely on the basis of direct and economic profit. But there is much deliberation about how to define the desired (direct or indirect) impact of alpha and gamma research. A number of scholars reflect on what the social purposes of university research and training should be; some wonder what kind of edification the Humanities provide, and speculate on what graduates of for instance literature might contribute to society (e.g., Nussbaum 1997, Paulson 2001). However, few of the claims are supported by empirical research. IGEL’s unique combination of members from the Humanities (e.g., literary studies, media studies) and the Social Sciences (e.g., sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists) makes it an excellent forum for exchange and cooperation to make our research socially useful. Some use it to work together on testing hypotheses formulated by literary theorists. Others explore the relevance of laboratory studies for complex stimuli like movies and literary texts. Still others study behavior within social institutes in order to inform other disciplines like literary history. Most of these studies have a valorization potential, some more implicit than others. During the 2004 IGEL conference in Edmonton, Sybil Moser made this issue focal point of a discussion in a session about the relevance of empirical research of literature and media to society at large. The 2010 conference follows up on that discussion, inviting keynote speakers and other participants to reflect on the practical implications of their findings, the potential of IGEL research in terms of what it could mean to people working in education, government, and NGO’s. Many of the conference contributions will pertain to studies that are socially relevant. Speakers will reflect on how to make results usable for organizations and individuals outside academia. The sessions and symposia will contribute to a better understanding of the potential functions of literature and media in society, what it means to the lives of individuals, how our research could help to enhance literacy and literary participation, how it might contribute to the conservation of cultural heritage, the accessibility and distribution of ideas, what our research could mean to literary education or to the understanding of learning and persuasion processes. IGEL invites you to send in suggestions for conference papers, symposia, and posters on the following topics and related fields: Literary reading processes (emotion, cognition, personality, etc.); The social role of literature and related media (e.g. film, theatre, Internet, multimedia, virtual reality); Literature and media from an evolutionary perspective; Early literary / media socialization; Pedagogical and educational aspect of literature and the media; The processes of literary/media production, distribution and reception; The role of literary and other cultural institutions: past, present and future; The empirical study of historical reception and historical readers; Historical reception studies; Digital methods of research on literature and the media (corpus studies, hypertext models, etc.). Visit the conference homepage here: http://www2.hum.uu.nl/congres/igel/papers.html.

Reagan, Charles. Review of Paul Ricoeur's LIVING UP TO DEATH. NDPR (June 2009).

Ricoeur, Paul. Living up to Death. Trans. David Pellauer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. This is a strange book requiring a strange review. It is the publication of some of Paul Ricoeur's previously unpublished writing, which he himself did not intend to publish. The first part of the book comes from notes he made in 1995-96 on the topic of death. After they were written, they were left in a folder and he never returned to them again. In the second part of the book are some of the "fragments" he wrote during his last days, mostly brief reflections on topics which preoccupied him such as life and death, Christianity, his faith and his philosophy, the Bible, his friend Jacques Derrida and resurrection. There is a Preface by Olivier Abel, a long-time friend of Ricoeur's and a Postface by Catherine Goldenstein, also a very close friend for his last ten years. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16308.

Pub: PARRHESIA 6 (2009).

Features:

• Cinema as a Democratic Emblem by Alain Badiou, translated by Alex Ling and Aurélien Mondon
• The Desert Island and the Missing People by Vanessa Brito, translated by Justin Clemens
• Althusser and the Concept of the Spontaneous Philosophy of Scientists by Pierre Macherey, translated by Robin Mackay
• 68 + 1: Lacan's année érotique by Jean-Michel Rabaté

Essays:

• The Nihilistic Affirmation of Life: Biopower and Biopolitics in The Will to Knowledge by Keith Crome
• In the Middle by Sean Gaston

Reviews:

• Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life by Danielle Sands
• 'Without wanting to push the analysis further ...': Jean-Michel Rabaté and the Materialities of Theory by Pieter Vermeulen

Visit the journal homepage here: http://parrhesiajournal.org/.

Pub: HISTORY AND THEORY 48.2 (2009).

Original Articles:

• PP. 1-4 "TRUTH AND AUTHENTICITY IN CONTEMPORARY HISTORICAL CULTURE: AN INTRODUCTION TO HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION AND HISTORICAL TRUTH" by CHRISTOPH CLASSEN, WULF KANSTEINER DOI 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2009.00495.x
• PP. 5-24 "ALL THIS HAPPENED, MORE OR LESS: WHAT A NOVELIST MADE OF THE BOMBING OF DRESDEN" by ANN RIGNEY DOI 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2009.00496.x
• PP. 25-53 "SUCCESS, TRUTH, AND MODERNISM IN HOLOCAUST HISTORIOGRAPHY: READING SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF METAHISTORY" by WULF KANSTEINER DOI 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2009.00497.x
• PP. 54-76 "PHOTOGRAPHS, SYMBOLIC IMAGES, AND THE HOLOCAUST: ON THE (IM)POSSIBILITY OF DEPICTING HISTORICAL TRUTH" by JUDITH KEILBACH DOI 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2009.00498.x
• PP. 77-102 "BALANCED TRUTH: STEVEN SPIELBERG'S SCHINDLER'S LIST AMONG HISTORY, MEMORY, AND POPULAR CULTURE" by CHRISTOPH CLASSEN DOI 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2009.00499.x
• PP. 103-121 "DIGITALIZING HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS" by CLAUDIO FOGU DOI 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2009.00500.x
• PP. 122-137 "THE SYNTAX OF OBJECTS AND THE REPRESENTATION OF HISTORY: SPEAKING OF SLAVERY IN NEW YORK" by BETTINA M. CARBONELL DOI 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2009.00501.x

Subscribers may download the current issue here: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118501930/home.

Petrucciani, Stefano. "Rethinking Critical Theory." KRITIKOS 6 (2009).

The philosophical reflections developed by the first and the second generation of the Frankfurt School (through the work of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and Habermas) constitute, in my opinion, a contribution of vital importance to the construction of a critical theory capable of responding to the current challenges of society and politics. However, in order to reconstruct a critical theory for the present times, it is necessary to start from the problems that the Frankfurt tradition left open. With regard to this, my thesis is that the evolution from the first to the second generation of the Frankfurt School, in particular from Adorno to Habermas, can be framed as a passage from a social theory of domination to a normative theory of democracy. I am convinced that, if isolated from each other, both perspectives are insufficient. In my view, Habermas was right in underlining the normative deficit of the critical theory of the first generation, but his normative theory of democracy – developed in Between Facts and Norms and in the following books – lacks a conceptualization of the reality of power as social domination. Despite his awareness of the problem, Habermas failed to embed it into an adequate theoretical framework. Apparently Habermas has also abandoned the attempt, developed in Theory of Communicative Action, of conceptualizing the pathologies of modernity in terms of a “colonization of the life-world.” This account was meant to be a viable alternative to Adorno’s totalizing account of domination, but it seems that Habermas took no interest in developing it further. In my view the separation between a theory of domination and a normative theory of democracy reveals a theoretical problem. Hence, a reconstructed critical theory should aim at the reconciliation of these two dimensions (theory of power and theory of democracy), both fundamental for a critical understanding of the present. However, a concrete development of this theoretical proposal requires broader conceptual tools than those of the critical theory of the Frankfurt school. As far as the theory of power is concerned, it is necessary to undertake a critical confrontation not only with the Marxist tradition, in particular with some neo-Marxist approaches, like the one proposed in recent years by the French scholar Jacques Bidet, but also with other aspects of the contemporary research on power. As far as the normative perspective is concerned, it is important to critically consider the revitalization of normative political theory put forward by John Rawls and by many other scholars. . . . Read the rest here: http://intertheory.org/petrucciani.htm.

Vallier, Robert. Review of Brett Buchanan's ONTO-ETHOLOGIES. NDPR (June 2009).

Buchanan, Brett. Onto-Ethologies: the Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze. Albany: SUNY Press, 2008. In the last few years Continental philosophy, in various guises, has rediscovered life. Phenomenologists direct their attention to the lifeworld, and to the phenomena of life and living beings. Some poststructuralists "deconstruct" the difference between organic and inorganic, while others concern themselves with germinal and viroid life and propose various biophilosophies, and still others talk about life as that to which 'biopower' is directed. And most evidently, if we take recent book catalogues as an index, there is a great deal of interest in animality (here I don't refer to animal rights or ethics, which have also given rise to much reflection and debate, but rather the question of animal being) to think about the animal in itself, and about the original difference between animal and human being, thus in some way clarifying the special status of the latter which many, since Aristotle, have determined to be both rational and political. What so much -- it would be unfair to say all -- of this resuscitated interest has in common is a striking disregard for the sciences of life, all too easily dismissing them as predicated on an unreflected and non-philosophical concept of life, which, the standard narrative goes, is inevitably reduced to some form of (neo-)vitalism, (neo-)mechanism, or (neo-)finalism. That may or may not be true as a criticism of the life-sciences, but it certainly should not constitute an excuse to avoid a careful reading of and thoughtful engagement with their theoretical research and experimental findings, which seems so often to be symptomatic of this return to life. It is precisely in this regard that Brett Buchanan's Onto-Ethologies marks a difference. As suggested by the subtitle ("The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze"), Buchanan endeavors to show how the theoretical findings of the properly experimental work of one particular scientist -- the important Swiss biologist, Jakob von Uexküll, sometimes called "the father of ethology" -- made their way into and helped to shape the itineraries of three major Continental philosophers. This alone makes it a valuable contribution to the growing body of literature on life-philosophy generally, and animality in particular. Given that it is written with a great deal of clarity and attention to detail, the book will certainly repay careful study. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16305.

Cfp: Readings of Difficult Freedom, North American Levinas Society and Société Internationale de Recherches Emmanuel Levinas, Toulouse, July 5-9, 2010

First published in 1963, with a second edition in 1976, Difficile Liberté, Essais sur le judaïsme is considered Levinas' most accessible book and an excellent introduction to his work. This collection of essays, which appeared in a variety of journals (L'arche, Information juive, L'esprit, Evidences, etc.) reflects the society, culture and philosophy of France from the 1950s to the 1970s. While closely linked to this era (end of World War II, the discovery of the horror of the concentration camps, Stalinism, the founding of the State of Israel) Difficile Liberté is by no means a collection of circumstantial writings. In Difficile Liberté Levinas defines post-Holocaust Judaism, and sets out the requirements and need for Jewish thought and education in an authentic but critical dialogue with modern society. These considerations are frequently interspersed with references to writers and thinkers who influenced Levinas such as Claudel, Heidegger, Hegel, Spinoza, S. Weil, Gordin and Rosenzweig, but more often to sacred texts, the Bible and the words of the Sages of Israel which Levinas continually emphasized the need to study. Does Levinas' modernity paradoxically lie in his appeal to Jews to return to these old "worm-eaten tractates" ("the Jew of the Talmud should take precedence over the Jew of the Psalms")? These articles are still innovative, sharp, concise and overarching; the style is sometimes lyrical – Levinas rarely wrote in such a strident, argumentative way, blending conviction and stupefaction. The key to what unites Levinas' work – the link between his philosophical writings and his specifically Jewish dimension – may just be found in Difficile Liberté. Beyond the obligatory analysis of the title (taken from the last few words of the article "Education and Prayer") this conference aims not only to place the essays in Difficult Freedom in their historical context and within the trajectory of Levinas' thought, but more importantly to examine them afresh – with the wonderment and questions they still elicit today. Diachronic and synchronic analyses of the articles in Difficle Liberté will help situate them with respect to Levinas' other works. Issues such as the following could be explored: Phenomenology, Ethics, the Holocaust, Israel, the Talmudic Readings, Levinas' views of science and technology, Levinas' relationship to Heidegger, Rozensweig, Bergson, French philosophers and writers, Levinas' relationship to Christianity, Levinas the educator, etc. Further information may be found here: http://www.sirel-levinas.org/.

Monti, Martino Rossi, et al. Review of OBJECTIVITY by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. IRIS 1 (April 2009): 277-288.

Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone, 2008. “These were little plates of ice, very flat, very polished, very transparent, about the thickness of a sheet of rather thick paper [...] but so perfectly formed in hexagons, and of which the six sides were so straight, and the six angles so equal, that it is impossible for men to make anything so exact.” With these words René Descartes describes, in his treatise Les Météores (1635), some snowflakes observed with the naked eye. Not long before, Johann Kepler had celebrated the beauty and perfect symmetry of snowflakes in a short treatise entitled Strena Seu de Nive Sexangula (1611 – A New Year’s Gift of Hexagonal Snow). Since then, those who have described and drawn snowflakes, from Robert Hooke to the nineteenth-century English meteorologist James Glaisher, have seen them as absolutely perfect forms, marvelous expressions of invariable mathematical relations. Everything that appeared asymmetrical or irregular, whenever noted, was labeled as an “exception” or declared inessential. There was a sort of blindness or annoyance towards the irregularities of nature. The human eye, as St. Augustine had remarked, is “irritated” by asymmetry (De vera religione, XXX, 54). Around Christmas 1892, in Berlin, the photomicrographer Richard Neuhauss, under the direction of the meteorologist Gustav Hellmann, took a series of photographs of snow crystals. Accustomed to the “absolute regularity” and “perfect symmetry” of the snowflakes drawn by earlier scientists, Hellmann and Neuhauss were met with a disappointing sight: the crystals appeared irregular, imperfect. Only the cold and ruthless precision of the photographic camera had been able to give them a faithful image of how nature really was. As Hellmann wrote: “despite the icy hardening of the surroundings, these are natural pictures, warm with life” (151 – my italics). The snowflakes reproduced by Hellmann and Neuhauss were not ideal forms or “types,” produced by abstracting from all the particularities and imperfections of single flakes observed in nature. They were not the ideal snowflake, but this or that snowflake. This is just one example – enriched by a few details – of the history of the birth of what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison call “scientific objectivity” or “mechanical objectivity.” In Objectivity the authors provide us with many others, no less interesting and stimulating, always anchored to the world of scientific images (the scientific atlases published from the eighteenth century to the present time). The idea of scientific objectivity – this is the main thing this book shows – has a history. But there is more: the book also shows that science has not always been defined in terms of objectivity. In fact, for Daston and Galison, only around the mid-nineteenth century – with positivism the rage – did the idea begin to emerge that in order to represent a scientific object faithfully one had to eliminate all subjective interferences: “to be objective is to aspire to knowledge that bears no trace of the knower – knowledge unmarked by prejudice or skill, fantasy or judgment, wishing or striving. Objectivity is blind sight, seeing without inference, interpretation, or intelligence” (17 – my italics). Up to that moment, quite another kind of “epistemic virtue” had prevailed: that which, let us say, an eighteenth-century botanic atlas sought to represent was not an array of specimens – unique in their singularity – but, on the contrary, the ideal form, the type of each species. In order to grasp such a primary form, the naturalist had to perform a sort of platonic purification: through tenacious and tireless observation, he had to discard everything he judged inessential and accidental, in order to extract the universal from the particular. Far from being passive, the naturalist had to exercise his intelligence actively in order to abstract the perfect form from the chaos of multiplicity. Daston and Galison call this epistemic virtue “truth-to-nature.” According to the authors, both these virtues – truth-to-nature and objectivity – were strongly connected to the philosophies and theories of knowledge of their time. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hsdept/bios/docs/objectivity_iris_09.pdf.

Fodor, Jerry. "Where is my Mind?" LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS February 12, 2009.

Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford: OUP, 2008. If there’s anything we philosophers really hate it’s an untenable dualism. Exposing untenable dualisms is a lot of what we do for a living. It’s no small job, I assure you. They (the dualisms, not the philosophers) are insidious, and they are ubiquitous; perpetual vigilance is required. I mention only a few of the dualisms whose tenability we have, at one time or other, felt called on to question: mind v. body; fact v. value; knowledge v. true belief; induction v. deduction; sensing v. perceiving; thinking v. behaving; denotation v. connotation; thought v. action; appearance v. reality . . . I could go on. It is, moreover, a mark of an untenable dualism that a philosopher who is in the grip of one is sure to think that he isn’t. In such a case, therapy can require millennia of exquisitely subtle dialectics. No wonder philosophers are paid so well. So, for example, you might have thought that the distinction between, on the one hand, a creature’s mind and, on the other, the ‘external’ world that the creature lives in is sufficiently robust to be getting on with; and that commerce between the two, both in perception and in action, is typically ‘indirect’, where that means something like ‘mediated by thought’. But plausible as that may seem, the thesis of Andy Clark’s new book, Supersizing the Mind, is that the mind v. world dualism is untenable. The best way through Clark’s book is to start by reading the foreword by David Chalmers and the paper by Clark and Chalmers that is reprinted as an appendix. These are short, informal presentations of the so-called ‘Extended Mind Thesis’ (EMT), of which the rest of the book is an elaboration and discussion. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n03/fodo01_.html.

Noe, Alva. "You are not Your Brain: Interview with Gordy Slack." SALON.COM March 25, 2009.

Noë, Alva. Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang / Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009. For a decade or so, brain studies have seemed on the brink of answering questions about the nature of consciousness, the self, thought and experience. But they never do, argues University of California at Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë, because these things are not found solely in the brain itself. In his new book, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness," Noë attacks the brave new world of neuroscience and its claims that brain mechanics can explain consciousness. Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Francis Crick wrote, "You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." While Noë credits Crick for drawing popular and scientific attention to the question of consciousness, he thinks Crick's conclusions are dead wrong and dangerous. Noe's conversational style is gentle, attentive and easygoing. But, in true philosopher fashion, he also picks his words deliberately, as if stepping off the path of right thinking would result in some tragic plummet into the abyss of illogic. . . . Read the whole interview here: http://www.salon.com/env/atoms_eden/2009/03/25/alva_noe/.

Strawson, Galen. "Up and Coming." TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT May 28, 2009.

Analytic philosophers of mind are heavily into the body. They’re forever in flight from something they call "Cartesianism". There's a pouring forth of books and papers explaining that the mind or self is essentially embodied, essentially environmentally embedded, "ecological", "enactive", elementally earthy, endogenously "extended" beyond the bounds of the skull and even the body. Much of this is good and sensible; for an overview see for example Shaun Gallagher’s How the Body Shapes the Mind (reviewed in the TLS, January 27, 2006), or Evan Thompson's Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind (to be reviewed in a future issue of the TLS). Philosophy, though, tends to careen from one extreme to another, and many think that the "extended mind" hypothesis, according to which your diary and mobile phone are quite literally part of your mind, goes too far. . . . Read the rest here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6377644.ece.