Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Philosopher And The Volcano, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Nietzsche's Zarathustra echoes Empedocles' as orator or speaker especially if reviewed in terms of Empedocles' esoteric Katharmoi or Purifications. This essay reads Zarathustra teaching of the eternal return of the same as the teaching of going to ground, that is: death and rebirth, arguing that death is present at the start and already at work in the section entitled The Adder's Bite. Indeed it is the explicit subtext of the overman.

Like Empedocles, Nietzsche's Zarathustra tells us that the human being is something that should be overcome. and thus it makes a difference that we hear Zarathustra proclaim this teaching …

Le Zarathoustra De Nietzsche Et Le Style Parodique. A Propos De L’Hyperanthropos De Lucien Et Du Surhomme De Nietzsche, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Abstract

Nietzsche’s Übermensch is derived from Lucian of Samosata’s term hyperanthropos. I argue that Zarathustra’s teaching of the overman acquires new resonances in the context of that terminological origination in Lucian’s Kataplous — literally: sailing into port — referring to the journey of the soul into the afterlife, as escorted by Hermes and ferried by Charon along with myriads of others facing the same fate. The Kataplous he tyrannos, a title usually rendered as the Downward Journey (or The Tyrant), is a Menippean satire telling the tale of the “overman” supposed superior to others of “lesser” station in …

Arthur Pap’S Functional Theory Of The A Priori, David J. Stump

Philosophy

Arthur Pap was not quite a Logical Empiricist. He wrote his dissertation in philosophy of science under Ernest Nagel, and he published a textbook in the philosophy of science at the end of his tragically short career, but most of his work would be classified as analytic philosophy. More important, he took some stands that went against Logical Empiricist orthodoxy and was a persistent if friendly critic of the movement. Pap diverged most strongly from Logical Empiricism in his theory of a “functional a priori” in which fundamental principles of science are hardened into definitions and act as criteria for …

Propaganda And The 21st Century Student, Miguel Martinez-Saenz , Provost, Academic Affairs, Tammy M. Proctor

Administrators/Executives/Staff Scholarship

This short piece provides a way of thinking about the Enlightenment’s legacy and the strength of modern propaganda in order to enable world history teachers to use these themes in their classes, both for teaching history and for helping students to reflect on their own lives. The authors provide background on the ideas of 1930s critical theorists and their impact on the interwar period, then suggest practical ways that world history instructors (in high schools and universities) can use these insights in developing lectures, lesson plans, and assignments for their classrooms.

"An Impoverishment Of Philosophy", Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Interview on philosophy journals and editing, academic publishing, digital content, the analytic continental divide in philosophy, its persistence along with the reasons for its denial, philosophy curricula.

All Play And No Work: An Ontology Of Jazz, Andrew Kania

Philosophy Faculty Research

If we consider different Western musical traditions, such as classical, rock, and jazz, we can find the same kinds of entities employed in all three traditions. For instance, there are recognizable, reinstantiable songs in all three traditions. There are also events we would happily call live performances of those songs, as well as recordings of them. Yet it is also true that these kinds of entities are treated differently in each of these traditions. For instance, those who produce and listen to rock recordings take, for the most part, a very different attitude toward what counts as acceptable use of …

Communication And The Pragmatic Condition, Gregory J. Shepherd

Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Papers

Presented March 9, 2011

The Birth Of Kd Lang’S Hallelujah Out Of The ‘Spirit Of Music’: Performing Desire And ‘Recording Consciousness’ On Facebook And Youtube, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

Art Of Life: Gauguin’S Language Of Color And Shape, Eva Maria Raepple

Philosophy Scholarship

Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth century philosopher (1844 -1900), whose works speak of his unyielding search for an art of life, warns of the serpent’s promise, a promise that according to Genesis 3 foreshadows tribulations. On the stage of life the promise to know, to know as a subject that actively grasps the world, is an alluring, call, one that permits free spirits to explore and design life as a work of art beyond the confines of the herd. A changing role of the knowing and imagining subject in the nineteenth century enticed philosophers and inspired artists, unleashing their creativeness to …

Higher Education And The Arts And Humanities In A Consumer Society, Eric Bain-Selbo

Philosophy & Religion Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Reconceiving Surrogacy: Toward A Reproductive Justice Account Of Indian Surrogacy, Alison Bailey

Faculty Publications - Philosophy

My project here is to argue for a reproductive justice approach to Indian surrogacy. I begin by crafting the best picture of Indian surrogacy available to me while marking some worries about the role of discursive colonialism and epistemic honesty in this project. Western feminists’ responses to contract pregnancy fall loosely into two moments: Post-Baby M approaches that raised questions about the morality of surrogacy and the new reproductive technologies, and more recent feminist ethnographic engagements that aim to capture how these practices are lived, embodied, and negotiated. Both approaches have shortcomings. Extending Western moral frameworks (e.g. liberal feminist approaches) …

Table Of Contents, Rory J. Conces

International Dialogue

No abstract provided.

Notes From The Editor, Rory J. Conces

International Dialogue

Notes from International Dialogue's Editor-in-Chief, Rory J. Conces

The Morality Of Humanitarian Interventions, Per Bauhn

International Dialogue

In this paper I develop an argument to the effect that humanitarian moral interventions, far from being inconsistent with the normative framework of just war, fit in very well with the justifying conditions of this framework. The argument develops by considering three objections against humanitarian military interventions, emanating from just war criteria. The criteria in question are just authority, just cause, and non-combatant immunity. It will be argued that while just authority logically depends on just cause and has no independent argumentative force of its own, the criterion of just cause should be understood to include a defence of human …

Russia On The Edge - Edith Clowes, Thoams Ambrosio

International Dialogue

Edith Clowes’ Russia on the Edge is an engaging and accessible examination of three central questions of post-Soviet Russia: What is Russia? Who are the Russians? Where is Russia? The last question might be odd, given that the physical borders of the Russian Federation are not in doubt, since they are the same as those of the Russian republic borders from the Soviet period. However, when it comes to the creation of a post-Soviet Russian identity, the physical borders are secondary to how they are imagined. As stated in the preface: if Soviet identity was defined largely in terms of …

Security And Environmental Change - Simon Dalby, Len Broberg

International Dialogue

In Security and Environmental Change, Simon Dalby seeks to reframe national security in terms of environmental change and its threats to human safety and prosperity. Dalby promises a multifaceted examination of the issue, making clear that environmental change encompasses more than climate change but includes all human modifications of the planet: deforestation, water diversion and species extinction to name a few. In addition, the book seeks to deconstruct and rebuild the notion of security, moving out of classically framed Cold War national security focused on nation states toward a more human centered security. This effort succeeds and, in the process, …

Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, And The Politics Of Dwelling - David J. Gauthier, Joseph Bien

International Dialogue

Books on Heidegger and books on Levinas are plentiful in English, French and German. Books dealing with a comparison of both authors, especially in terms of the politics of dwelling, are not at all common and certainly should demand our attention. This work appears to be a reworked version of a dissertation with all the standard problems that go with such an undertaking. That said, this is a useful introduction to the question of dwelling in the writings of two extremely important philosophers.

Darker Than Blue: On The Moral Economies Of Black Atlantic Culture - Paul Gilroy, Shiera S. El-Malik

International Dialogue

In this work, Paul Gilroy charges academics including scholars of the African and Black Diaspora with inadequately addressing ethical questions of racial hierarchy. He posits that academics apply a uniquely American framework of racial hierarchy to their analyses of places other than the U.S. The result, according to Gilroy, is that American conceptions of blackness (and whiteness) then substitute for social structures regardless of people’s lived experiences. Further, this globalised spectacle of blackness operates in the service of the U.S. imperial war machine. Gilroy argues that the current moment of geo-political restructuring offers opportunities for rethinking the connection between racial …

After Evil: A Politics Of Human Rights - Robert Meister, Debra L. Delaet

International Dialogue

In After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights, Robert Meister puts forth an original, subtle, and provocative critique of mainstream human rights discourse in contemporary global politics. He describes this discourse, which he capitalizes as Human Rights Discourse throughout the text, as “… a new discourse of global power that claims to supersede the cruelties perpetrated by both revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries during the previous two centuries” (3). Meister argues that this discourse creates a false temporal divide between historical periods of “evil” in which gross violations of human rights are committed and post-conflict periods of justice during which parties are …

Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization - Jeffrey S. Juris, Jackie Smith

International Dialogue

Networking Futures represents an important contribution to research on transnational organizing, social networks, and on the effects of technology on social relations. Juris, an anthropologist, draws from several years of field research that is part of his multi-sited, global ethnographic study. His experiences in the field lead him to offer, in addition to insightful analyses of contemporary organization and activism, important insights into the practice of social research in a networked, global age.

Latin American Politics And Development, 7th Ed. - Howard J. Wiarda And Harvey F. Kline (Eds.), Paul C. Sondrol

International Dialogue

The scholarly literature on the government and politics of Latin America continues to flourish, offering interesting research questions and cross-national comparisons touching on a variety of themes that continue trends from the past. Howard J. Wiarda and Harvey Kline’s (eds) Latin American Politics and Development is the most recent edition of the popular text on the government and politics in Latin America, revised and updated on recent developments since 2000. Leading specialists on the region provide an overview of Latin American development, policy processes, and key actors (the military, the Catholic Church, the landed oligarchy, bureaucracies, political parties and elections, …

First As Tragedy, Then As Farce - Slavoj Žižek, Edward Sandowski

International Dialogue

Slavoj Žižek is a prolific, original, and formidable philosopher. His publishing habits are so productive that any discussion of a particular book is bound to be only a very partial consideration of his work and views as a whole. This applies to the present discussion of First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. The title, of course, is taken from Marx. One relevant classical passage is from the Eighteenth Brumaire: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” …

Why So Stuck?, Margaret Urban Walker

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

In a 1998 book, the psychologist Virginia Valian asked the question of her title, Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women (Valian 1998). This question has become perennial specifically within the profession of philosophy, where the advancement, or just the representation, of women seems a bit worse than slow. While the past decades have seen advances in our numbers within professional philosophy, in recent years we seem to be stuck.

Preservation, Passivity, And Pessimism, Sheila Lintott

Faculty Journal Articles

Many committed and passionate environmental thinkers currently champion restoration as an appropriate and positive model for human-nature interaction and interdependence. Recent philosophical defenses of restoration sidestep the issues that have been raised about the possibility of restoring degraded nature to a state that is identical, ontologically or evaluatively, to some pre-degraded state. Informed by feminist theory, I expose and explore some problematic assumptions and associations found in common defenses of restoration and defend the thesis that preservation is the more promising avenue to character remediation and the forging of a harmonious human-nature culture. I allow that many restoration projects will …

Witness And Testimonies: A Diachronic Perspective On The History Of The Bosnian Muslims, Rusmir Mahmutćehajić

International Dialogue

In his essay, “Witness and Testimonies: A Diachronic Perspective on the History of the Bosnian Muslims,” Rusmir Mahmutćehajić explores and deconstructs ideological abuses of some of the most important terms in the Muslim intellectual tradition. The terms ‘witness’ and ‘witnessing’, ‘opener’ and ‘opening’ are of key significance for understanding and reasoning for Muslim sacred tradition. Distorted, narrowed and reductive forms of these terms have been taken by antimuslim ideologists as material within their own constructions. In deconstructing the ideological abuse of these terms, Mahmutćehajić applies new knowledge from his experience in Scriptural Reasoning. Terms from the cultural history of Bosnia …

The Recurring Great Lakes Crisis: Identity, Violence And Power - Jean-Pierre Chretién And Richard Banégas (Eds), Catherine Bolten

International Dialogue

The Recurring Great Lakes Crisis is an edited volume comprising individual case studies that examine aspects of historical and on-going violence in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, and Congo-Kinshasa. The purpose of the volume is to “lead to a better understanding of the changes in the perceptions of violence which constitute one of the most serious obstacles to lasting peace” (1). The case studies encompass a diverse array of aspects of each of the conflicts, from the role of the Catholic Church in Rwanda since 1957, to the political and social problems created by the label “disaster victims” in Burundi after the …

The Unfinished Global Revolution: The Pursuit Of A New International Politics - Mark Malloch-Brown, Robert Weiner

International Dialogue

Several themes run throughout this book, in which Mark Malloch-Brown melds his personal experience as a British civil servant with his career as an international civil servant, working at various times at the World Bank, as the head of the United Nations Development Program, and UN Secretary-General’s Kofi Annan’s assistant. The central theme of the book revolves around the need for an effective system of global governance to cope with the major challenges which the international community faces in the age of globalization in the 21st century. Some of the problems involve the darker side of globalization, such as terrorism …

Determinants Of Democratization: Explaining Regime Change In The World, 1972-2006 - Jan Teorell, Joseph Derdzinski

International Dialogue

Just as the Color Revolutions of the last decade did, the Arab Spring once again brings the concept of democratization to the forefront of public discourse. They remind us yet once again how few countries have made at least the initial transition from authoritarianism, and how many more there are to democratize. Yet, having said this, the pool of countries that have liberalized politically and socially has grown tremendously in the past 40 years, yielding a fertile universe of cases for study and analysis. Jan Teorell at Sweden’s Lund University, in his compact but rich Determinants of Democratization: Explaining Regime …

Archaeologists As Activists - M. Jay Stottman, Curtis Hutt

International Dialogue

Archaeologists as Activists: Can Archaeologists Change the World? is comprised of papers edited by M. Jay Stottman—many of which were initially prepared for a session at the 2004 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology in St. Louis. The focus of this volume is “activist archaeology” as theorized and performed by archaeologists working in the last few decades in the United States. While the specific topics addressed are quite local, the questions raised and practices deployed are highly significant for archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians engaged in international settings. First, I must make a few disclaimers. This reviewer is neither …

Interpretation's Contrapuntal Pathways: Addams And The Averbuch Affair, Marilyn Fischer

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In March 1908 the Chicago Police Chief shot Lazarus Averbuch, a young, Russian Jewish immigrant, claiming self-defense against an anarchist plot. Jane Addams refused to join the public's outcry of support for their chief, declaring that she had the obligation to interpret rather than denounce the incident. Her analysis of Averbuch's killing, given in her essay, ““The Chicago Settlements and Social Unrest,”” provides a focal point for seeing how interpretation functions as a unifying theoretical category for Addams, bringing together her activism, her style of writing, and her philosophy of social change. Addams's conception of interpretation is multi-faceted and dynamic; …