thehumanities.com

From David Brooks at The New York Times…

Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Most people think it is a gift from God, who revealed His laws and elevates us with His love. A smaller number think that we figure the rules out for ourselves, using our capacity to reason and choosing a philosophical system to live by.

Moral naturalists, on the other hand, believe that we have moral sentiments that have emerged from a long history of relationships. To learn about morality, you don’t rely upon revelation or metaphysics; you observe people as they live.

This week a group of moral naturalists gathered in Connecticut at a conference organized by the Edge Foundation. One of the participants, Marc Hauser of Harvard, began his career studying primates, and for moral naturalists the story of our morality begins back in the evolutionary past. It begins with the way insects, rats and monkeys learned to cooperate. More…

From Alan Kirby at The Times Higher Education…

Postmodernism is dead. Wail and rend your clothes. Postmodernism is dead. The tyrant is vanquished!

Can the rumours be true? Can postmodernism, the darling of the humanities for a quarter of a century, really have departed this world?

Who says postmodernism is dead? Jean-Michel Rabaté, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania, for one. For him, the term is “now almost completely discarded”.

Scholars who a generation or so ago built their careers on explaining the meaning of postmodernism now tell us the game is over. Linda Hutcheon, the Canadian literary critic, whose 1988 book A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction became a standard text, now calls it “a twentieth-century phenomenon, that is, a thing of the past … Let’s just say: it’s over.” The Egyptian-born critic Ihab Hassan, who pioneered the study of postmodern culture in the 1970s, explored similar territory in a recent paper, “Beyond postmodernism: toward an aesthetic of trust”. And the American architectural theorist Charles Jencks, whose 1977 book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture helped popularise the term, now believes that postmodernism came to an end around the turn of the millennium. In fact, as the American literary critic Andrew Hoberek says, “declarations of postmodernism’s demise have become a critical commonplace”. They are everywhere … but are they true? More…

From Jeremy Adler at The Sunday Times…

Few writers did more to propagate the idea of a singular genius than the young Goethe, yet few can have done more than he to cultivate their relationships to others. As the studies by Rüdiger Safranski and Gustav Seibt remind us, Goethe’s interest in other people often entailed a highly conscious, indeed sometimes stylized, pose that helped him both to place himself in the world and to perfect his art. Whether dealing with writers, scholars, scientists or men of affairs, Goethe knew how to achieve the maximum mutual benefit. That he was so often able to form a productive rapport with the leading figures of his day, notably with Schiller, his only competitor as a writer, and even with the Emperor Napoleon, says much about Goethe’s culture – a self-culture or Bildung which he promulgated in his writing. Intriguingly, both Schiller and Napoleon sought Goethe out, flattered him, and won him over by literary-critical discourse. Anyone who today doubts the value of criticism could do worse than examine these instances. Goethe himself did much to foreground them. He consolidated the public image of the friendship with Schiller by publishing the Goethe–Schiller correspondence, and recorded the meeting with Napoleon in a brief sketch, as in some suggestive references to the man he liked to call “my emperor”. More…

From Eurozine…

Analytic philosophy has a complex history of more than one hundred years and this movement is so variegated that it can hardly be characterized by a single feature. Most of those who have tried to do so either were not aware of its diversity or considered only some part of its history. For example, it is sometimes believed that analytic philosophy is committed to a thoroughly anti-metaphysical stance. Such a belief may be rooted in some of the famous pronouncements of the logical empiricists, in the philosophical method put forward by Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, or in the fact that some of the works of early analytic philosophy due to Russell and Moore – two of the founding fathers of the movement – have usually been interpreted as reactions against Bradley’s metaphysics and other versions of the British idealism of the time. Other facts, however, which support a completely different view, should not be overlooked. For one thing, Russell’s theory of the proposition and his logical atomism, as well as his philosophy of logic, clearly had metaphysical implications. For another, the logical empiricists’ anti-metaphysical crusade, which had been forceful in the twenties and the thirties, began to run out of steam in the sixties. At that time, other prominent figures of analytic philosophy were much less prone to reject any form of metaphysics as fundamentally unclear or unscientific: Quine’s famous criterion of ontological commitment had already been formulated in a paper which appeared in the Review of Metaphysics, Strawson had published his Individuals. An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, and Kripke’s semantics for modal logic would soon arouse a wave of metaphysical thinking about the existence of possible worlds. Today, metaphysics is a well established and respected important part of analytic philosophy – indeed, one of its main divisions – although the style of the authors who take part in it is, to be sure, not really akin to the one Hegel or Bergson used in their writings. More…

From Montclair State University…

Artists and those who love the arts have tried to gain more meaning and insight by taking a critical look at what they have viewed or heard. Oftentimes, we challenge how we are affected emotionally and psychologically through the performances or artwork we experienced, seeking to process any messages that playwrights, visual artists, musicians or choreographers may be sending.

In the world of theatre, dramaturgy can be described as the art of dramatic composition and the representation of the main elements of drama on stage. Applied in a sociological perspective, the idea of dramaturgy (coined in modern times by Erving Goffman in homage to G.E. Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy of 1767) contends that human actions are dependent upon time, place, and audience. As Shakespeare put it so eloquently, the world is indeed a stage.

In theatre, dramaturgy is a significant component in the construction and deconstruction of dramatic work while taking a critical look at how everything fits together. There has been no formal equivalent in the world of dance, however — until now. More…

(Image: Lois Greenfield)

From Ahmad Saidullah at 3quarksdaily…

Sylvia Beach was an independent bookseller, a publisher, a literary agent and promoter. Noel Riley Fitch dubbed her “the midwife of literary modernism.” She opened Shakespeare and Company, “a little American bookshop on the Left Bank,” in a disused laundry on rue Dupuytren in 1919 on her third trip to Paris. Drawn by the cheap franc like other expats at the end of World War I, she chose the City of Lights over New York and London.

She was also drawn to Adrienne Monnier, owner of a literary bookstore La Maison des Amis des Livres in the Odéon quarter. In 1921, she moved Shakespeare and Company to 12 rue de l’Odéon, a few doors down from Adrienne’s shop. They would share their personal and professional lives until Adrienne’s death from an overdose of sleeping pills in 1955. More…

From Christina Masters at Eurozine…

Increasing military interest in the body cancels the transgressive potential of the cyborg. Where humans become the weakest link in contemporary warfare, the cyborg represents a desire for total masculinist control and domination. Machines, not human bodies, are now the subjects of the text.

Feminisms, technology and the military

In “Fact and Fantasy: The Body of Desire in the Age of Posthumanism”, Renée C. Hoogland (2002: 214) argues that “in the increasingly technologized age of posthumanism, bodily matters are, quite simply, too substantial to be left to the ‘empirically’ inclined minds of natural scientists”, and therefore calls on cultural theorists to take up the weighty issue of bodily matters. Recent developments indicate, however, that bodily matters are more and more coming under the ambit of the “strategic” and “security” inclined minds populating military institutions and government administrative offices, in ways perhaps far more troubling and disturbing in all of its potential and real implications. In the post-9/11 context of the war on/of terror, one can scarcely overemphasize the dangerous possibilities signalled in this shift. Dangerous, in that bodily matters are being taken up by institutions primarily concerned with the defence and security of the nation-state in an increasingly biopolitical architecture of power. More…

Image: Flickr/Daquella manera

From sightandsign.com…

The secret transcripts of Heidegger’s notorious seminar “On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History and the State” have been published for the first time. By Albert Kissler

The bitter word stands in the room. It casts huge shadows over his work. Was Martin Heidegger a “Nazi philosopher”? Did Heidegger, as his student the philosopher Ernesto Grassi emphasised in 1988, derive “justification from his theoretical principles for an anti-Semitic and National Socialist position”? The case against the dark thinker is made with recourse to passages from his “Being and Time” as well as an assortment of statements, letters and reports and, above all, the Freiburg rectoral address and a seminar from the winter semester of 1933/34.

This seminar was declared to contain decisive evidence for “the total identification of Heidegger’s teachings with the principles of Hitlerism”. This was how Emmanuel Faye expressed it in his book “Heidegger. The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy”, which was published last year in English and German translations. Faye was building on the 1987 book “Heidegger and Nazism” by the Chilean historian Victor Farias, who turned 70 last week. More…

Michael Dummett’s The Nature of Philosophy…

1: Philosophy as an Academic Subject

Practically every university throughout the world deems it as essential to have a philosophy department as to have a history department or a chemistry department. This is certainly a very lucky thing for philosophers. Historians can teach in schools and advise on television programs and films; the minority gifted with the ability to write popular books can subsist on their incomes as authors. Chemists can work for industry; if they are lucky, they may even be paid by their companies to do research. By contrast, only in a few countries is philosophy taught as a subject in the schools; philosophy books will never become best-sellers; no commercial enterprise will pay for original work in this field. Until recently, professional philosophers would have been unemployable had it not been for the universities. Some who specialize in ethics have obtained positions advising on bioethics, that is, on moral problems arising out of or within the practice of medicine; but of course this is an application of only one specialized branch of the subject. In the modern world, scarcely anyone can live without being employed or profitably self-employed. Philosophers not engaged in applied ethics must count themselves extremely fortunate that the state, which funds many of the universities, is willing to pay that they may devote themselves to the pursuit of their subject. More…

From the Ibishblog…

Paul Berman’s important and frequently brilliant, but also seriously flawed, new book “The Flight of the Intellectuals” (Melville House, 2010) is an old-fashioned polemic that takes aim at two main targets. Berman’s main subject, judging from the title and certainly the conclusion of the book, are his fellow liberal intellectuals Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, who he accuses of a witches’ brew of offenses involving white liberal guilt and displaced racism, abandoning Enlightenment values and craven cowardice in the face of Islamist bullying, and who he sees as emblematic of a widespread rot in the Western liberal intelligentsia. But to get to them, he has to go through Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss Muslim academic and activist who also happens to be the grandson of the founder of the original Muslim Brotherhood party in Egypt, Hassan al-Banna, and the son of his second in command, Said Ramadan. So actually, the bulk of the book dwells on not only Ramadan but also al-Banna and, in great detail, his ally Amin al-Husseini, the one-time “grand mufti” of Jerusalem. More…

Colin Marshall talks to David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

From 3quarksdaily.com…

David Shields is a professor of English at the University of Washington and author of fiction, nonfiction and various hybrids thereof about sports, autobiography, celebrity and death. His new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, uses collage writing to challenge preconceived ideas about form and genre in art, especially as they pertain to literature. Shields advocates disregarding these hardened constraints, a move which will allow art to use more of and become more like life itself. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation  on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas.

For the interview…

From Sam Harris at The Huffington Post…

Over the past couple of months, I seem to have conducted a public experiment in the manufacture of philosophical and scientific ideas. In February, I spoke at the 2010 TED conference, where I briefly argued that morality should be considered an undeveloped branch of science. Normally, when one speaks at a conference the resulting feedback amounts to a few conversations in the lobby during a coffee break. I had these conversations at TED, of course, and they were useful. As luck would have it, however, my talk was broadcast on the internet just as I was finishing a book on the relationship between science and human values, and this produced a blizzard of criticism at a moment when criticism could actually do me some good. I made a few efforts to direct and focus this feedback, and the result has been that for the last few weeks I have had literally thousands of people commenting upon my work, more or less in real time. I can’t say that the experience has been entirely pleasant, but there is no question that it has been useful. More…

By Patricia Cohen at The New York Times…

To illustrate what a growing number of literary scholars consider the most exciting area of new research, Lisa Zunshine, a professor of English at the University of Kentucky, refers to an episode from the TV series “Friends.”

(Follow closely now; this is about the science of English.) Phoebe and Rachel plot to play a joke on Monica and Chandler after they learn the two are secretly dating. The couple discover the prank and try to turn the tables, but Phoebe realizes this turnabout and once again tries to outwit them.

As Phoebe tells Rachel, “They don’t know that we know they know we know.”

This layered process of figuring out what someone else is thinking — of mind reading — is both a common literary device and an essential survival skill. More…

From n+1 magazine…

Walter Benjamin, or rather, the now-beloved figura of Benjamin—shuffling, myopic, mustachioed, fat, unhealthy, small round glasses glinting like flashlights—was largely unattractive in his own lifetime. Introducing Benjamin, a precis of his life and work in comic-book form, spends an inordinate amount of time demonstrating that Benjamin had no positive libido—and that, in fact, women just could not under any circumstances find him attractive. How strange is it now, then, to read in the Guardian that “as a teenager,” the novelist Nicole Krauss “had a crush on the German philosopher.” How odd to reflect upon the growth and consolidation of a veritable Benjamin industry in the sixty-five years since his death, an industry that extends well beyond the academy, to art-pop songs like Laurie Anderson’s “The Dream Before (For Walter Benjamin),” and Jay Parini’s embarrassingly unreadable “novel of ideas” Benjamin’s Crossing. A movie must surely be on the way: can I start by suggesting Tim Robbins as Benjamin? More…

From Marco Roth at n+1 magazine…

Jacques Derrida died last weekend. Polite French journalese will refer to “sa disparition,” his disappearance. Now, if I were a “deconstructionist,” this would be the moment to reflect on the words disappearance and appearance. We only say someone has disappeared, we do not speak of his life as an appearance, but yet this is what is implied by someone’s disappearance. He was, at one point, present, here, appearing, now he has disappeared. But everyday French language only has the negative without the positive. There is not first, in the order of things, something called appearance and then something called disappearance which happens later. There is always the trace of disappearance inside of every appearance, absence within presence. More…

Op-Ed by Alain Badiou at Infinite Thought….

For almost thirty years, the present, in our country, has been a disoriented time. I mean a time that does not offer its youth, especially the youth of the popular classes, any principle to orient existence. What is the precise character of this disorientation? One of its foremost operations consists in always making illegible the previous sequence, that sequence which was well and truly oriented. This operation is characteristic of all reactive, counter-revolutionary periods, like the one we’ve been living through ever since the end of the seventies. We can for example note that the key feature of the Thermidorean reaction, after the plot of 9 Thermidor and the execution without trial of the Jacobin leaders, was to make illegible the previous Robespierrean sequence: its reduction to the pathology of some blood-thirsty criminals impeded any political understanding. This view of things lasted for decades, and it aimed lastingly to disorient the people, which was considered to be, as it always is, potentially revolutionary.

To make a period illegible is much more than to simply condemn it. One of the effects of illegibility is to make it impossible to find in the period in question the very principles capable of remedying its impasses. If the period is declared to be pathological, nothing can be extracted from it for the sake of orientation, and the conclusion, whose pernicious effects confront us every day, is that one must resign oneself to disorientation as a lesser evil. Let us therefore pose, with regard to a previous and visibly closed sequence of the politics of emancipation, that it must remain legible for us, independently of the final judgment about it.

In the debate concerning the rationality of the French Revolution during the Third Republic, Clemenceau produced a famous formula: ‘The French Revolution forms a bloc’. This formula is noteworthy because it declares the integral legibility of the process, whatever the tragic vicissitudes of its unfolding may have been. Today, it is clear that it is with reference to communism that the ambient discourse transforms the previous sequence into an opaque pathology. I take it upon myself therefore to say that the communist sequence, including all of its nuances, in power as well as in opposition, which lay claim to the same idea, also forms a bloc. More…