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Displaying: 1-16 of 16 documents


1. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 20
Peter Nicholls Late Pound: The Case of Canto CVII
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Pound’s Thrones de los Cantares, the last full sequence of The Cantos has always been the least popular part of the long poem. Ronald Bush speaks for many when he concludes that its “substance is so abbreviated as to be unreadable” and that “the truncated and gnomic style of Thrones is inappropriate to the point of absurdity.”This essay seeks to analyze in detail one Canto from the sequence–Canto CVII–so as to define more closely the particular problems, formal and conceptual, that it presents to the reader. The essay offers a reading of the Canto and of Thrones that detects a profound tension in Pound’s writing between reference and allusion.
2. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 20
Daniel Thomières Emily Dickinson: What Is Called Thinking at the Edge of Chaos?
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The article is concerned with the problem of tradition. In what tradition should we place ourselves in order to understand Emily Dickinson a little better? For a number of reasons, empiricism is suggested and redefined, as there are at least two conceptions available (Locke's and Hume's). It is argued that this approach helps us account for the way Dickinson uses language in order to go as far as words will let her go. Can empiricism and Emily Dickinson enable us to see what the self, or identity–for want of better words–are? The poem "It was not Death, for I stood up" is studied in detail.
3. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 20
Hoyt Edge, Margaret A. McLaren Relational Selves: Gender and Cultural Differences in Moral Reasoning
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Our paper examines the impact of the intersection of cultural and gender identity on moral reasoning. We argue that concepts of self and approaches to moral reasoning are connected, concepts of self differ by gender and culture, moral reasoning differs by gender and culture. We propose that moral philosophy strives to be as inclusive as possible by including the full range of human diversity and experience. This would mean embracing—indeed, starting from—a multicultural, feminist approach to moral theories and questions; this approach would not only be sensitive to gender and cultural bias, but also offer an alternative model to the paradigmatic rational, autonomous, independent agent of traditional moral theory. This has implications for other areas of philosophy as well, such as recent work in philosophy of mind on the idea of extended cognition.
4. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 20
Charley Ejede Mejame The Question of Alterity and the Problem of Encounters, Communication, and Dialogue
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Contemporary philosophers, humanists, and social scientists have been wrestling with the difficulties mankind has in living together, with the problem of alterity, the problem of the other, the conundrum of the damnation of hell (as Jean-Paul Sartre terms it), its torture or agony and sufferings in the modern world. It is mentioned that we are nothing without others, that we are strongly interdependent, and that it is beyond the bounds of possibility avoiding their presence, which is basic to what we are. Yet living together with them is complex and difficult. Sundry problems, torments are, as it were, caused by their behaviors and judgments. We are sent negative images as well as deterministic plans to wrestle with. For Jean-Paul Sartre our relation with others is per se conflictual. The problem of alterity has all along presented serious problems to philosophers and humanists; they have not only found themselves powerless in the face of these manifestations but even seems foster them. This article identifies and examines the function and the devastating repercussions of this conflict, the representation, which we every one of us can have of himself in terms of identity in contemporary society. The paper also establishes significant points of convergence and contrast between contemporary Western thinkers (Levinas, Derrida etc.) and the healing wisdom of Africa implicit in its yet to be explored linguistic and literary corpus in addressing contemporary problems in humans living together, the problematic of an ethical life. According to Edgar Morin, we are in the prehistory of the human mind, meaning that the human mental capacities are yet to be explored, especially at the level of our relations with others.
5. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 20
Lisa S. Banu Toward an Ethics of Speculative Design
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This essay attempts to come to a philosophical understanding of the ethical provocation of speculation as evident in design. I argue that speculative design is a material practice of ethical creative coexistence and present three features of speculative philosophy that manifest in the design and use of two design examples: the Starbuck’s coffee cup and Marti Guixe’s design project, Solar Kitchen Restaurant in La Pin Kulta (2011). The philosophical interpretation relies on object-oriented works of Ian Bogost, Timothy Morton and Jane Bennett and their shared insistence on recognized non-identity.
6. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 20
Joseph Weiss The Reproduction of Subjectivity and the Turnover-time of Ideology: Speculating with German Idealism, Marx, and Adorno
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This essay aims to lay the grounds for further exploration into how Louis Althusser’s conception of ideological interpellation might relate to the contemporary stage of neo-liberal capitalism. While bearing in mind Althusser’s framework, I mainly focus on how both Marx’s conception of the turnover-time (Umschlagszeit) of circulation and T.W. Adorno’s conception of the war-torn process of negative dialectics bring to the fore the moment when the unity of subjectivity ruptures. Through an examination of the process of reproduction, we not only observe how much German Idealism’s appeal to the unity of apperception was already structured by the logic of the commodity-form, we also witness how modern subjection has always been caught up in a speculative fetishism that disavows the negativity of experience, prioritizes time over space, and remains in thrall to the ever-accelerating speed of the totality. This indicates that the historical transformations in the temporal and spatial organization of subjectivity may, on the one hand, strengthen subjectivity by upsetting the capacity or desire to answer the so-called “hail” of the State, but may also, on the other hand, increase its malleability to domination.
7. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 19
Contributors
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8. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 19
Charles Ross Murrin, Lewis, Greenblatt, and the Aristotelian Self-Swerve
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Michael Murrin’s work on allegory provides an instructive contrast to Stephen Greenblatt’s Aristotelian conception of art as representation. This essay argues that Christian Platonism created the allegorical mode in which Spenser wrote, allowing a different perspective of the self than the one Greenblatt describes in Renaissance Self-Fashioning. The essay then suggests that those Christian thinkers (cited by Greenblatt in The Swerve) who rejected Lucretius and Epicureanism did so for philosophical reasons deeply grounded in Plato’s thought–reasons that in the twentieth century found a home in the work of C. S. Lewis.
9. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 19
Mamikon Asatryan The Key to the Economic and Socio-political Fallacies of Marxism
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The defeat of the USSR and of the world system of socialism, which was of a world-wide significance, raised a key question of its underlying causes. As an answer to that question, it is shown that the defeat was by no way accidental as it was brought forth not only because of mistakes in the application of Marxism but also of significant economic and socio-political fallacies. The key is in the fallacies, which are hidden deeply inside the methodology of Marxism and which therefore went unnoticed by anyone, i.e. in the violation in Marx’s Das Kapital of the requirements of a number of scientific methods that he used. Marx violated the requirements of the main method used in Das Kapital, viz. the method of ascension from the abstract to the concrete (he attributed the function of forecasting the future to that method, even though the method does not have it) as well as the methods of forecast, systems approach and hypothesis. Those methodological fallacies and distortions and their epistemological consequences provide evidence that Marxism is a result of seriously flawed beliefs and it could not avoid failure. Exposure of the above-mentioned fallacies and distortions will help broad masses of people to shed communist illusions and to avoid new social and political upheavals.
10. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 19
John F. DeCarlo Introduction: Busting the Hermeneutical Ghosts in the Hamlet Machine
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Busting the Hermenuetical Ghosts: Steering clear of pre-modern, Romantic, Freudian, and post-modern readings, DeCarlo asserts how Shakespeare's Hamlet text foreshadows the modern philosophical thought of Descartes, Kant, and Heidegger, particularly in regard to the intellectual issues of thought and doubt, time and action, and being and death.
11. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 19
Heidi L. Pennington “But why must readers be made to feel. . . .”: Repulsing Readerly Sympathy for Ethical Ends in the Victorian Realist Novel
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In this article, I investigate the ethical potential of Victorian literature that markedly discourages readerly sympathy with the protagonists. Generating sympathy for fictional characters was, and often still is, considered to be the primary way in which the novel promotes ethical thoughts, feelings, and behavior in readers. For this reason, the ethical prospects of novels that fail or refuse to make their main characters appealing and instead inspire aversion in readers have received very little critical attention. Taking an unpopular novel by Anthony Trollope as my primary example, I analyze how the formal narrative strategy of “disnarration” (theorized by Gerald Prince) creates profound dislike for the book’s protagonists. Further, I propose that these same passages of disnarration, by emphasizing the text’s fictionality, can encourage readers to seek the sympathetic fulfillment that the text refuses them by engaging with the real world. In this way, I argue, even Victorian realist novels that defy the conventions of sympathy might still share an investment in realizing the ethical potential of fiction.
12. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 19
Charles Altiei Aesthetics of Affects: What Can Affect Tell Us about Literature?
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book reviews
13. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 19
Arjun Poudel European Avant-garde Studies and the Future of Europe
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14. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 19
Rockwell F. Clancy Complicating the Dualisms: History versus Becoming
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15. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 19
J. Chris Westgate Philosophical Tensions in Modern Dramatic Literature
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16. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 19
Notice to Contribution
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