William Thomas Beckford’s Vathek chronicles the eponymous Caliph’s struggle and ultimate fall into hell as a divine punishment for his unre­strained desire for knowledge. Around the time Beckford wrote Vathek, Immanuel Kant released the Critique of Pure Reason, whose central implication is that human knowledge is restricted to appearances. Drawing on textual evidence from Vathek’s first three editions and from Kant’s Critique, I explore ways in which knowledge is negotiated and mediated by the limits of human intellect and sensory perception as they intersect with the protean boundary between reality and appearance, and suggest that Beckford’s Vathek may be viewed as a literary instantiation of Kant’s transcendental idealism, as they both - albeit in different ways - impose severe limits on man’s epistemic ability.

Contemporary democratic theory, in its focus on the distinction between a private and a public sphere, tends to exclude emotions from political life. Arendt, Habermas, and Angus present critical theories of politi­cal action and deliberation that demand that emotions be left behind in favour of a narrower rationality. On the basis of a first step toward incorporating emotions into political life as accomplished by Martha Nussbaum – despite its limitations – and of a second step taken by Sara Ahmed, an outline of a theory of emotions becomes possible, and brings into question the distinction between private and public life. Emotions act as motivations that accompany every instance of participation or for non-participation, be it because of apathy or of disengagement.

This essay argues that the critically neglected work of the American mid-twentieth-century writer Jane Bowles is a rare attempt at realism in modern fiction that takes as its metaphysical premise the reality referred to in Spinoza’s pronouncement, “By reality and perfection I understand the same.” Bowles’ innately allegorical fiction is an effort to reveal the perfect reality of the world by prophetically creating the future rather than mimetically preserving the present and recovering the past, expressing a world that is existentially founded rather than representationally endured. The realism of perfection her prophetic creations strive to apprehend serves as a necessary reproof of the all too actual world reflected in merely mimetic fiction.

In Reasons and Persons (1984), the greatest contribution to utilitarian philosophy since Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics (1874), Derek Parfit supports his Reductionist contention “that personal identity is not what matters” by turning to the neurosurgical findings of Roger Wolcott Sperry. Parfit’s scientifically informed argument has important implications for W. E. B. Du Bois’s contentious hypothesis of African-American “double-consciousness,” which he initially advanced in “Strivings of the Negro People” (1897), before amending for inclusion in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). An analysis of “Of the Coming of John,” chapter 13 in The Souls of Black Folk, helps to trace these ramifications, resituating Du Bois’s notion from the pragmatist to the utilitarian tradition, and revealing how his concept effectively prefigured Parfit’s scientifically informed Reductionism.

For the most part, interpreters of Martin Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” have neglected his appropriation of C. F. Meyer’s “The Roman Fountain,” yet the poem deserves attention because its final description of water as it “streams and rests” provides a motif which Heidegger uses to work out his understanding of the relationship between “world” and “earth.” Richard Wilbur uses similar language to make a similar point in his own poem about Roman fountains, “A Baroque Wall- Fountain at the Villa Sciarra.” Juxtaposing Wilbur’s depictions of moving and resting water with Heidegger’s brings out a latent implication in Heidegger’s use of the imagery, the possibility that the moving and resting interplay will result in enhanced understanding.

The academic world, at least in the West, has traditionally always been suspicious when it comes to introducing in its quest for knowledge notions of materiality, touch, texture, or “haptics” – in other words what is generally associated with sensory-experience. In the human sciences and the artistic fields the practice of research has always privileged “textual reason” over “sensory texture,” the textual over the textural. Only in the recent past have so-called postmodern theories of all kinds attempted to overcome the hierarchical dichotomy between discursive reason and embodied thought. Unfortunately, this has very often created an unprecedented ragbag of epistemological confusions and identity crises. This essay shall attempt to explain and clarify the epistemological nature of materiality, touch, texture, or “haptics,” and the role it can play in academic research in the artistic fields with particular reference to ideas developed by French philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas.

In this article, I begin with Kant’s notion of a “categorical imperative” as a framework from which to discuss the ontology of Franz Kafka’s writing. Since Kant’s moral law is a device for reflecting on our responses to challenging circumstances rather than one that tells us what we should always do in every situation, I draw inferences concerning Kafka’s own descriptions of his sense of being a writer in opposing phenomenal and spiritual worlds. Since Kafka cannot be understood exclusively from a Kantian perspective of autonomous will, I discuss Kafka’s experiencing in terms of the reciprocal interplay of being and non-being, and his awareness of finitude and the possibility of transcendence. I argue for a humanistic-existential vision of the reading of a literary text as an encounter that responds to the alterity of the Other and which, consistent with Kafka’s oeuvre, privileges being faithful to one’s own experiencing.

This article provides a Lacanian reading of one of the short stories of Zhang Ailing, a Chinese writer. It is intended to explore the possibility of employing Lacan’s theory of the symbolic order to the interpretation of a Chinese text, as well as to broaden our understanding of Zhang’s work and to unlock the potential of the applicability of Lacan’s ideas. The final part of the article will draw on Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan to illustrate how Zhang, unlike most of her contemporaries, is exempted from the obsession with China and how this obsession can lead us to the conclusion that whatever we chase obsessively in life is nothing but nothingness.

Biological, social, and technical causes of the splendor and decline of classical music are examined and found insufficient. Evidence shows that music involves unconscious motivation. The classical summit predominantly included part of the German Awakening, showing that this motivation was, at least in part, collective. The German Awakening was a phase of the Western turn from religion to a world view centered on conscious human experience and power. The decline of classical music parallels developments in literature, science, and history as this world view approaches a stage of exhaustion.

This paper proposes that the Gilgamesh epic is constructed as an encoded expression of the wish of the people where it arose to have a more responsible king. The decoding builds to a deeply encoded structure, emerging as a precursor from which all other encodings are derived. Enkidu, Utnapishtim, and the episode of a spiny bush in the Great Deep decode as three assaults on the king’s grandiose self-seeking, a character trait that supports his abuse and tyranny over Uruk’s people. Shamhat, the priestess of Ishtar, decodes as the king’s instrument with which to bring Enkidu under his own influence and to thwart Anu’s reason for creating him—to balance the king. Ishtar decodes as one who creates indebtedness from the king to her in order to later express how the king defaults on his responsibilities. The subtlety of the encoding structure reflects the depth of anxiety in the people of the epic’s time about their king sensing their anger, as well as the length of time over which the epic was elaborated.

The interface between literature and medicine has long been an area of interest for researchers. It is difficult to conceptualize any singular methodological approach for such an interdisciplinary field. However, the theoretical developments in Bioethics are promising. Besides, literary texts representing medical themes and characters have created a cultural discourse of Bioethical problems in the modern world. Borrowing its title from Shaw’s famous medical satire, The Doctor’s Dilemma, the present paper aims at exploring how far a bioethical approach—with special reference to the doctor-figures represented in some twentieth century literary works—can be helpful in delineating the complexities involved in issues like the doctor-patient relationship, medical ethics and the rapidly growing technological orientations in the modern world.

In the latter period of his work, Samuel Beckett began to devote much of his writing to exploring the nature of the voice and the gaze. Even those works that directly concerned silence and blindness implicitly thematized the voice and the gaze by embodying their absence. With later works, Beckett began to call into question the way in which these phenomena contributed to the constitution of subjects, modes of self-identification, and their relation to chosen objects of desire. In the 1950s and 1960s, Beckett produced dozens of short pieces of prose and theatrical works that wholly dispensed with traditional plot and character in favor of a series of experimental reductions, for example, to breath and light (Breath), to a disembodied voice (Company, Eh Joe, That Time, Cascando), or to a mouth illuminated by a point of light (Not I). Jacque Lacan, who would come to secure the place of the voice and the gaze in the philosophical canon, wrote and lectured on these concepts at the same time. If brought into dialogue, the work of each thinker—each highly nuanced and complex in its own right—can serve as a hermeneutic tool for better elucidating the function of the voice and the gaze and the role that they play in the formation of subjects. A great deal of critics have erroneously overlooked Lacan’s insistence that when he invokes these concepts he is not speaking about the phenomenal voice or the gaze of perception as such; similarly, Beckett’s work, though it directly thematizes their phenomenal aspects, treats these concepts in a thoroughly Lacanian manner.

While certain levels of fear and anxiety seem quite appropriate to the experience of birth, it is detrimental if they become overwhelming. This article strives to understand birth-related affects more thoroughly by asking which affects are commonly involved, and how they come about. Martin Heidegger provides the most developed phenomenology of affects available to us. A phenomenological perspective proves useful because its close description allows categorising affects into mundane ones like fears—evoked by specific entities and circumstances—and existential ones like anxiety. Anxiety concerns our existence in its entirety and brings us face to face with the fact that we are finite beings in a groundless existence. Giving birth means needing to negotiate existential affects in a mundane situation. The birthgiving woman is dependent on others to take her seriously in her experience of affective turmoil in which anxiety and wonder, fears and anticipatory anxiousness come together.

Madness has long been an object of fascination in the Western cultural, literary, medical, and philosophical consciousness, and rightfully so; the human mind is the incredibly powerful, profoundly dynamic lens through which we inevitably perceive reality, and when that lens is corrupted by a defect of health or experience, the results are astounding. Illnesses such as schizophrenia continue to confound scientists to this day, whereas the cause-and-effect designs of other disorders such as PTSD are easily understood.