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"Foul Death, Bitter Death": On Ivan Illich's Amicus Mortis, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

Pseudo-Science And ‘Fake’ News ‘Inventing’ Epidemics And The Police State, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

A Living City: Food Accessibility And Urban Growth In New York City, Kat Coleman

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper examines the way in which food equity and localization initiatives, specifically in New York City, are a vital response to urban growth and sustainable food demand. Improvements to the current food system in the form of changing the way food is produced, procured, stored, transported, and distributed improves nutrition and contributes to urban sustainability. Chapter 1 provides data on urban environmental justice issues related to food equity, drawing on research from the United Nations and food justice organizations in New York City. Chapter 2 explores the ethical issues surrounding food access and food justice in an increasingly urban …

Toward A Feminist Ethics Of Nonviolence [Toc], Timothy J. Huzar, Clare Woodford

Philosophy & Theory

Edited collection of original essays debating Adriana Cavarero’s feminist ethics of nonviolence. Including an original essay by Adriana Cavarero and responses from Judith Butler, Bonnie Honig, Olivia Guaraldo, Simona Forti, Christine Battersby, Lorenzo Bernini, Mark Devenney, Tim Huzar and Clare Woodford. Although inspired by Cavarero’s recent work on an ethical maternal posture of inclination the responses situate Cavarero’s argument in her wider corpus of nonviolence and uniqueness, that critiques and offers an alternative to the masculine symbolic of philosophy. This introduction endeavours to not only introduce Cavarero’s work, but to chart the journey of an increasingly productive dialogue between Cavarero …

Günther Anders’S Epitaph For Aikichi Kuboyama, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Günther Anders’s poem Du kleiner Fischerman is read here as a text contribution to the irruption that is violence and its enduring (omnipresent) aftermath. The essay includes a discussion of transmedial expression, including dramatization, or television and social media, text and subtext, as well as the inspiration of Anders’s poem as a work of art continuing in our times: the ongoing exclusion(s) of certain names and certain thinkers as of certain musical modes, including electronic musical works, as of voices and of collective memory, or oblivion. Reading Raymond Williams along with Anders and Adorno on television updated in today’s era …

Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, And The Post-Sovereign State [Toc], Gareth Williams

Literature

This book proposes to clear a way through some of the dominant political determinations and violent symptoms of contemporary globalization. It does this in in order to make a case for “infrapolitics” as an enactment of intellectual responsibility in the face of a tumultuous world of war and of technological value extraction on a planetary scale. In Infrapolitical Passages the politics of contemporary global capital is a race to the bottom of reason itself, extended in the wake of the subordination of all forms of living to the economized relation between means and ends. It is this relation which, thanks …

Ethical Implications Of Population Growth And Reduction, Tiana Sepahpour

Student Theses 2015-Present

No abstract provided.

Talking Weather From Ge-Rede To Ge-Stell, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Talking about the weather was until recently a clicM expression for time wasting, idle chatter, what Heidegger calls Gerede. Today's talk of global warming seems altogether different. Yet Heidegger's analysis of Ge-Stell also permits a complex reading of the mobilization of popular opinion, totalized as he knew this to have been in his own political era. Here it is useful to take up the question of its current totalization along with a reflection on today's "climatic regimes," as Bruno Latour has recently spoken of these. For his part, Peter Sloterdijk uses the language of atmoterrorism, and although his analysis draws …

Solicitude: Towards A Heideggerian Care Ethics-Of-Assistance, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

Radical Social Ecology As Deep Pragmatism: A Call To The Abolition Of Systemic Dissonance And The Minimization Of Entropic Chaos, Arielle Brender

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper aims to shed light on the dissonance caused by the superimposition of Dominant Human Systems on Natural Systems. I highlight the synthetic nature of Dominant Human Systems as egoic and linguistic phenomenon manufactured by a mere portion of the human population, which renders them inherently oppressive unto peoples and landscapes whose wisdom were barred from the design process. In pursuing a radical pragmatic approach to mending the simultaneous oppression and destruction of the human being and the earth, I highlight the necessity of minimizing entropic chaos caused by excess energy expenditure, an essential feature of systems that aim …

On Guenther Anders, Political Media Theory, And Nuclear Violence, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

• Guenther Anders was a philosopher concerned with the political and social implications of power, both as expressed in the media and its tendency to elide the citizenry and thus the very possibility of democracy and the political implications of our participation in our own subjugation in the image of modern social media beginning with radio and television. Anders was particularly concerned with two bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II, and he was just as concerned with the so-called ‘peaceful’ uses of nuclear power, i.e., what he named our apocalypse-blindness and the urgency of violence. To …

La Violenza Della Violenza, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

ünther Anders, al pari di Hannah Arendt, fu un teorico del potere che sviluppò un’esplicita riflessione filosofica sulla violenza. Tuttavia, anche gli esperti delle sue opere trovano solitamente che le riflessioni di Anders sul potere (in tedesco Macht) implichino una certa difficoltà interpretativa, specialmente perché la sua scrittura è stilisticamente impegnativa, ma anche perché, in modo più decisivo, Anders scrisse sulla natura della tecnica, argomento inusuale per la maggior parte dei teorici della politica e dei filosofi. Questo interesse può essere riscontrato a cominciare dalle primissime riflessioni del filosofo tedesco sulla musica, e in tutti i suoi studi sull’essere …

Philosophy Bakes No Bread, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Philosophy Bakes No Bread

Far from baking bread, far from practical applicability, philosophy traditionally sought to explain the world, ideally so. Thus, when Marx argued that it was high time philosophy “change the world,” his was a revolutionary challenge. Today, philosophy is an analytic affair and analytic philosophers seek less to explain the world than to squirrel out arguments or, more descriptively, to resolve the minutiae of this or that name problem. Faced with diminishing student demand, analytic philosophers have taken to urging that everyone from primary school students to scientists be required to study (analytic) philosophy. Just so, applied …

Tools For Subversion: Illich And Žižek On Changing The World, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Reviewing the work of Ivan Illich, Robert Kurz and Stanley Aronowitz together with Slavoj Žižek, this essay includes a discussion of Heidegger’s technically economic articulation of standing reserve correspondent to challenging forth (the world, ourselves, animals, plants, whatever), this essay takes up “the thought of the weak in search of alternatives” as Vattimo and Zabala argue for the possibility of interpretive transformation. In addition to Slavoj Žižek’s analysis of the resistance to revolution that functions as corollary to the existential stress of the dislocated mind, this reflection includes a discussion of media and illusion via Adorno.

Nietzsche’S Posthuman Imperative: On The Human, All Too Human Dream Of Transhumanism, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

Ivan Illich’S Medical Nemesis And The ‘Age Of The Show’: On The Expropriation Of Death, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

What Ivan Illich regarded in his Medical Nemesis as the ‘expropriation of health’ is exacerbated by the screens all around us, including our phones but also the patient monitors and increasingly the iPads that intervene between nurse and patient. To explore what Illich called the ‘age of the show’, this essay uses film examples, like Creed and the controversial documentary Vaxxed, and the television series Nurse Jackie. Rocky’s cancer in his last film (and his option to submit to chemo to ‘fight’ cancer) highlights what Illich along with Petr Skrabanek called the ‘expropriation of death’. In contrast to what Illich …

La Violenza Della Violenza, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Günther Anders, al pari di Hannah Arendt, fu un teorico del potere che sviluppò un’esplicita riflessione filosofica sulla violenza. Tuttavia, anche gli esperti delle sue opere trovano solitamente che le riflessioni di Anders sul potere (in tedesco Macht) implichino una certa difficoltà interpretativa, specialmente perché la sua scrittura è stilisticamente impegnativa, ma anche perché, in modo più decisivo, Anders scrisse sulla natura della tecnica, argomento inusuale per la maggior parte dei teorici della politica e dei filosofi. Questo interesse può essere riscontrato a cominciare dalle primissime riflessioni del filosofo tedesco sulla musica, e in tutti i suoi studi sull’essere umano …

The ‘New’ Heidegger, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

If discussion of “new” approaches to Martin Heidegger contradicts Heidegger’s own indictment of the passion for “novelty” in philosophy, today’s Black Notebooks scandal reminds us of the ontic problem of new news. Indeed the backwards working evidence of the notebooks kept before, during, and after WWII both vindicates and problematizes his notion of temporality temporalizing from the future -- lapsing into the past -- setting up what is now regarded as patent in the present. Simultaneously, we see that if heretofore many philosophers of technology sought to dismiss engagement with Heidegger’s critique of technology, these critical contributions turn out to …

Angels, The Space Of Time, And Apocalyptic Blindness: On Günther Anders’ Endzeit — Endtime, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Anders was a preeminent critic of technology and critic of the atomic bomb as he saw this hermeneutico-phenomenologically in the visceral sense of being and time: the sheer that of its having been used (where the Nietzschean dialectic of the ‘having been’ reflects the essence of modern technology) as well as the bland politics of nuclear proliferation functions as programmatic aggression advanced in the name of defense and deterrence. The tactic of sheerly technological, automatic, mechanical, aggression is carried out in good conscience. The preemptive strike is, as Baudrillard observed, the opponent’s fault: such are the wages of evil. Violence …

Requiem, Babette Babich

Working Papers

No abstract provided.

Adorno On Science And Nihilism, Animals, And Jews, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No less than Heidegger or Nietzsche, Adorno had his own critical notions of truth/untruth. But Adorno’s readers are unsettled by the barest hint of anything that might be taken to be anti-science. Thus it is argued that Adorno opposes not science but scientism. But, and here not unlike Arendt, Adorno argued that so-called “scientistic” tendencies are the very conditions of society and of scientific thought.” I ask how we are to read Adorno by exploring his thought on animals and nihilism.

The Ister: Between The Documentary And Heidegger’S Lecture Course Politics, Geographies, And Rivers, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

The Ister, the 2004 documentary by the Australian scholars and videographers, David Barison, a political theorist, and Daniel Ross, a philosopher, appeals to Martin Heidegger’s 1942 lecture course, Hölderlins Hymne «Der Ister»and the video takes us «backward» as the river flows: beginning from the Danube’s delta where it ends in the sea and «journeying» with it to its source in the Alps.

the value of the Barison/Ross documentary for both political theory and philosophy is its illustration of the technological incursions or assaults on the river itself, that is to say: its representation of the ‘uses’ and hence …

Great Men, Little Black Dresses, & The Virtues Of Keeping One’S Feet On The Ground, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

One can use phenomenology, along with the usual tools of scholarship and analysis, to make the point that the promises of the 1960’s and 1970’s especially those of the women’s movement, have yet to bear significant fruit in the academy. Hence, for everybody’s non-thingly phenomenology of non-practice, a handy-dandy wiki-check on the net yields the claim that “U.S. Department of Education reports indicate that philosophy is one of the least proportionate, and possibly the least proportionate, fields in the humanities with respect to gender,” with a rather dismal addendum reporting that in “2004, the percentage of Ph.D.s in philosophy going …

Ex Aliquo Nihil: Nietzsche On Science And Modern Nihilism. Acpq, 84-2 (Spring 2010): 231-256., Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

This essay explores the nihilistic coincidence of the ascetic ideal and Nietzsche’s localization of science in the conceptual world of anarchic socialism as Nietzsche indicts the uncritical convictions of modern science by way of a critique of the causa sui, questioning both religion and the enlightenment as well as both free and unfree will and condemning the “poor philology” enshrined in the language of the “laws” of nature. Reviewing the history of philosophical nihilism in the context of Nietzsche’s “tragic knowledge” along with political readings of nihilism, willing nothing rather than not willing at all, today’s this-worldly and very planetary …

'Wars The Like Of Which One Has Never Seen', Tracy B. Strong

Research Resources

'WARS THE LIKE OF WHICH ONE HAS NEVER SEEN': READING NIETZSCHE AND POLITICS

Tracy B. Strong

Will As Commitment And Resolve: An Existential Account Of Creativity, Love, Virtue, And Happiness, John Davenport

Philosophy & Theory

In contemporary philosophy, the will is often regarded as a sheer philosophical fiction. In Will as Commitment and Resolve, Davenport argues not only that the will is the central power of human agency that makes decisions and forms intentions but also that it includes the capacity to generate new motivation different in structure from prepurposive desires.

The concept of "projective motivation" is the central innovation in Davenport's existential account of the everyday notion of striving will. Beginning with the contrast between "eastern" and "western" attitudes toward assertive willing, Davenport traces the lineage of the idea of projective motivation from …

Heideggers "Beiträge Zur Philosophie" Als Ethik. Phronesis Und Die Frage Nach Der Technik Im Naturwissenschaftlichen Zeitalter., Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

Continental Philosophy In Britain And America, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Continental, or as it is sometimes called, contemporary European philosophy represents a range of approaches to academic philosophy distinguished from the analytic modality dominating professional or institutional philosophy in the United Kingdom and in the United States, as in Australia, Canada, and Ireland. Where the analytic tradition itself may be said to trace its own roots to Europe, e.g., positivism may be traced to France and its originator August Comte, and logical empiricism to Germany and to Austria and the writings of Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein and the members of the Vienna Circle, continental philosophy expresses an ideological tradition …

The Origin Of Living Things, By Julius Seiler, Translated By Gerard Farley, Gerard Farley

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Rendt's Radical Good And The Banality Of Evil: Echoes Of Scholem And Jaspers In Margarethe Von Trotta's Hannah Arendt, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Margarethe von Trotta's 2012 film Hannah Arendt suggests that for Arendt the signal problem with Adolf Eichmann had to do with a lack of thinking (the same problem Martin Heidegger diagnoses repeatedly in his book What is Called Thinking). For Heidegger, we are "still" not thinking. For Arendt, what is characteristic of Eichmann is that he does not think, meaning that he does not think as Aristotle defines thinking, namely as characteristic of the human qua human, here conceiving thinking as an inherently philosophical project that is more than practical but always contemplative (i.e., thinking about thinking). Is Eichmann …