A common feature of much recent work done in a variety of disciplines is the foregrounding of embodiment. Thinking in terms of a situated body however, brings up a complex problem which has often been overlooked: the re-importation of a kind of metaphysics of the body or a covert idealism, which stubbornly persists in many such discussions. This is seen in treatments ofthe body as a mediation or as a site for inscription of socio-cultural codings. We will briefly show how even such an influential account ofritualization practices, that of Catherine Bell, shows traces of these problems. The corrective strategy to such conceptions is a properly situational ontology as suggested by Merleau-Ponty's later philosophy and Tim Ingolds critical work on environments.

There are those, even our enemies, we want to live; there are those, even our friends, we want to die. We imagine death may be the end of pain, but we may well will our pain. We honor those who die with dignity, but dignity is not something we ascribe to ourselves or can be our objective.

Following allusions that Melville scatters throughout "Bartleby the Scrivener," the article develops the writer's subtle criticism of Jonathan Edwards. The attorney's way of thinking is taken as an example of reasoning on the basis of "necessary" assumptions, which Melville finds in Edwards' "The Freedom of the Will." From the perspective of that philosophy, Barleby's existence appears inexplicable, or understandable only as a "loose existence," which, according to Edwards, would have to represent an error in the universe. By anayzing Edwards' (the attorney's) way of thinking, the author advances arguments concerning the identity of persons as well as the complex relationship the story constructs between certain types of activity and passivity.

Douglas Hoffstadter shows in his hybrid of fiction and mathematical introduction Godel, Escher, Bach—An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), how the paradoxes inherent in Godel's theorem (that "no fixed system, no matter how complicated, could represent the complexity of the whole numbers" (p. 19).), Escher's complex drawings and Bach's compositional techniques are isomorphic across disciplines. From Latin in venire, to come upon something, the word invention already suggests an element of accident: finding something that is already there. This paper shows how Hoffstadter's discussions and fictionalisations (via Lewis Carroll) of Bach's two-part and three-part inventions, illuminate complex yet simple processes in aesthetic work: coming upon, stumbling over, and ultimately writing stories out of ones ideas and imagination. Looking at the books fragmented patterns via Derrida's inventions of the 'other' (such as in his discussion of Leibniz and de Man) the paper argues that the relation between imagination and inventiveness in Hoffstadter is mediated by propositions on incompleteness and their paradoxical relation to 'whole' fragments.

Auster contributed an extract from Moon Palace to the collection "Edward Hopper and the American Imagination," and it is clear that Hopper's images of alienated individuals have had a profound resonance for him. This paper employs two main ideas to compare them. First, a pivotal moment in American literature: the hotel room drama watched by Coverdale in Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance. Secondly, Aby Warburg's concept of the "pathos formula" in art, which bypasses the problematic issue of influence, choosing instead to posit sets of inherited cultural memories. It therefore allows discussion of the re-emergence of Hawthorne's puritan tropes of paranoid specularity and transcendence in the work of Hopper and Auster.

This paper challenges the accepted interpretation of Oedipus Rex, which takes Oedipus' ignorance of the relevant facts to be an established matter. I argue that Oedipus epistemic state is ambiguous, and that this in turn generates a moral ambiguity with respect to his actions. Because ignorance serves as a moral excuse, my demonstration that Oedipus was not ignorant bears significantly on the moral meaning of the play. I next propose to anchor this ambiguity in the Freudian notion of the unconscious, by presenting an interpretation that treats Oedipus knowledge as unconscious. I discuss the moral status of an agent acting from unconscious knowledge andfind it to be genuinely indeterminate, thus supporting my claim that the play is epistemically and morally ambiguous.