Philosophy Commons^™

Masochism: A Queer Subjectivity?, Amber Musser

Publications and Research

Judith Butler's Gender Trouble elaborates what may be called a queer subjectivity. Characterized by non-essential, performative identity, her theory has been criticized because, according to its critics, it does not give the subject political agency. Liberal theorists, such as Seyla Benhabib, have been particularly concerned with the political effects of this form of subjectivity on already marginalized social groups while other theorists, such as Susan Stryker and Ed Cohen, have articulated concern that the theory does not sufficiently account for embodiment, affect, and identity. This essay brings Deleuze's theory of masochism in dialogue with Butler's theories of subjectivity in an …

Portals To Knowledge: Confluence And Conflict Between Enlightenment And Postmodern Currencies, Benjamin G. Lanier-Nabors

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

In order to provide any viable critique of twenty-first-century discourses -- whether signified by late capitalism, epistemological hegemony, cultural domination, or globalization (the catch-word for all of these) -- one must not employ an ahistorical or static lens; alternatively, one must dredge up and analyze the sediments that underlie current discourses, and many of these sediments are found in the eighteenth century. More specifically, by reading the thoughts of such writers as Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift, one is forced to read the links and antipathies between the discursive economies of epistemology -- philosophical, scientific, and economic -- …

From Guts To God: Credulity, Postmodernism, And Contemporary Physics, Michael Hardin

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

In an attempt to remove one of the major misunderstandings made by individuals in the humanities about contemporary physics, the issue of incredulity, this essay examines Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge against contemporary and twentieth-century theories and discoveries in physics. One of the best arguments against incredulity is the frequent use of god as metaphor within physics. In Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, two physicists, argue that the use of metaphor is one of the characteristics of postmodern science; this essay concludes with a discussion of those elements …

A Privatization Of Politics: Anthony Elliot's Concepts Of The Self (2001), Paula Murphy

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

It would be difficult to find a more appropriate image of selfhood in the modern world than that found in Ezra Pound's poem In a Station of the Metro. It is a selfhood which is at once unique and conglomerative, fleetingly visible then tantalizingly out of focus. It is this slippery, indefinable entity that is the subject of Anthony Elliot's book. The title bears witness to the enormous breadth of its subject matter: Concepts of the Self is an attempt to engage with the various contemporary theoretical frameworks through which selfhood is explicated. Elliot's approach is admirably inter-disciplinary, …

To See More Clearly And Broadly: Science And The Postmodern Sentiment, C. Jason Smith, Robert Froemke

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

What we call postmodernism, whether we refer to the sciences or the humanities, is a certain preoccupation with the role of the human observer in the composition and perception -- perhaps even construction -- of reality. The postmodern condition, so to speak, is the moment in history when the hard sciences and the sciences of man seem to be suffering from the same anxieties about the relevance of the self-reflexive interaction between the observer and the subject to the fabric of existence and the web of knowledge. In simplest terms, we would define the postmodern question as this: …

Of Parts And Wholes: Self-Similarity And Synecdoche In Science, Culture And Literature, Dirk Vanderbeke

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

The discussion here centers on how self-similarity, or parts resembling a whole, has been a recurring aspect in the most diverse fields of human thinking from antiquity to the present. Primary examples are drawn from physics, biology, cybernetics, alchemy, philosophy, myth and, of course, language and literature. The author argues that self-similar patterns are one of the persistent ways in which the human mind structures its experience and knowledge of the world, and then examines some of the questions that arise when an almost ubiquitous concept, structure or linguistic and literary phenomenon resurfaces in a new guise in …

The Latecoming Of The Posthuman, Or, Why 'We' Do The Apocalypse Differently, 'Now', Ivan Callus, Stefan Herbrechter

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

The paper takes its cue from a brief but pointed passage in Specters of Marx, in which Jacques Derrida describes as latecomers those who discuss the apocalypse in a manner that disregards previous discussions of the theme within philosophy and theory. Especially concerned with tracing Derrida's wariness of the beguilements of narratives of the end, Callus and Herbrecther analyze the implications of that wariness for any study of the vexed relation between the apocalyptic and the posthuman, doing so on the basis of reference to a number of the relevant essays by Derrida, but in particular to …

Toward A Posthuman Ethics, Dongshin Yi

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editor's Introduction]

Setting a posthuman ethics as a goal toward which the collaboration of posthumanism and ethics must move, Yi in his essay, Toward a Posthuman Ethics, points out that the collaboration is detained because current debates on the cyborg harbor on the question of representations and consider how political, social and cultural problems of the human are reconfigured, and possibly resolved, by the cyborg. Thus, the debates are bound to be retrospective in approach and circular in direction, as they fail to recognize new possibilities that the cyborg may present. Arguing that the failure indicates the cyborg is being …

Carl Cohen’S ‘Kind’ Arguments For Animal Rights And Against Human Rights, Nathan Nobis

Animal Welfare Collection

Carl Cohen’s arguments against animal rights are shown to be unsound. His strategy entails that animals have rights, that humans do not, the negations of those conclusions, and other false and inconsistent implications. His main premise seems to imply that one can fail all tests and assignments in a class and yet easily pass if one’s peers are passing and that one can become a convicted criminal merely by setting foot in a prison. However, since his moral principles imply that nearly all exploitive uses of animals are wrong anyway, foes of animal rights are advised to seek philosophical consolations …

The Abnā Al-Dawla: The Definition And Legitimation Of Identity In Response To The Fourth Fitna, John P. Turner

Faculty Articles

Reopens the question about the identity and provenance of the abã al-dawla of the Abbasid dynasty. Period when these individuals formed an identity; Previous definitions of abã al-dawla; Reason why they formed a collective.

Review Of Time For Revolution, By Antonio Negri, John Conley

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Review Of Subject, Society, Culture, By Roy Boyne, Michael Ian Borer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

From Fleck’S Denkstil To Kuhn’S Paradigm: Conceptual Schemes And Incommensurability, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

This article argues that the limited influence of Ludwik Fleck’s ideas on philosophy of science is due not only to their indirect dissemination by way of Thomas Kuhn, but also to an incommensurability between the standard conceptual framework of history and philosophy of science and Fleck’s own more integratedly historico-social and praxis-oriented approach to understanding the evolution of scientific discovery. What Kuhn named “paradigm” offers a periphrastic rendering or oblique translation of Fleck’s Denkstil/Denkkollektiv, a derivation that may also account for the lability of the term “paradigm”. This was due not to Kuhn’s unwillingness to credit Fleck but rather to …

Kuhn's Paradigm As A Parable For The Cold War: Incommensurability And Its Discontents From Fuller's Tale Of Harvard To Fleck's Unsung Lvov, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

In a journal issue dedicated to a discussion of Steve Fuller's Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times, I argue that Kuhn’s limited acknowledgment of Fleck’s influence on his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was due to a foundational incommensurability between the standard conceptual framework for philosophical studies of science and Fleck’s historico-social and praxis-oriented approach to scientific progress. The incommensurability in question constituted an insurmountable tension between the kind of language and thinking manifest in Fleck’s study and the conceptual language evident in Kuhn and characteristic of one might still call the received view’ in philosophy of science. …

Hegemony: Methods And Hypotheses, Rares Piloiu

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Recent political thought from the left has re-awoken the interest in Gramscian theory. Even if, pace Louis Althusser or, in America, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci's syntax of ideology as an integral form of relation between individual and society has been quite popular in cultural studies, the notion of hegemony has not enjoyed the same repute. It is therefore Ernesto Laclau's merit to have reintroduced the term in contemporary debates concerning problems of political power, authority, cultural policy and ideology. Hailing from a reinvented Marxist perspective (one that had to account, among others, for the failures of actual existing …

Violence, Mourning, Politics, Judith Butler

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

I’d like to speak to you this evening on the matter of politics and, specifically, how the struggles of gender and sexual minorities might offer a perspective on current issues that are before us, questions of mourning and violence, which we have to deal with as part of an international community. I'd like to start, and to end, with the question of the human, of who counts as the human, and the related question of whose lives count as lives, and with a question that has preoccupied many of us for years: what makes for a grievable life. I believe …

Rorty's Complicit American Neo-Pragmatism, Haidar Eid

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Despite the obvious French origin of poststructuralism, its paradigmatic resonance can be found in the American philosophical scene, an essential part of which is Richard Rorty's neo-pragmatism -- the theoretical basis of American (post)modernism. However, different from poststructuralism's apparent antagonism to the authoritarian establishments, Rorty adopts the Derridean poststructuralist motifs of the decentering of the subject, and the disappearance of meaning and truth in order to defend the establishment -- or rather, the status quo.

Ideology And Public Sphere: A Preliminary Bibliography, Giorgio Bertellini, C. Paul Sellors

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Bibliography accompanies Bertellini & Sellors article Breaking the Mimetic Contract: Notes on Ideology, Intersubjectivity, and Film Theory

Pengaruh Falsafah Pascamoden Dalam Pemikiran Barat, Nafisiah Abdul Rahman

Student Works (2000-2009)

Postmodermisme is one of the idea which first discussed since the First World War. The prime development of the idea is obviously seen since the last three decades until now, especially in the aspects of epistemology, art, music and architecture. The development of the idea has urged the writer to study the pattern of this idea specially on how it adopts/spreads into the western thought. To complete this writing, the writer took nearly six months just to study on all relevant references of available resources before the writing began. All the references were borrowed from the main library of University …

Ethical Values Of Islam And Confucianism : A Comparative Study, Omar Min Ke Qin

Student Works (2000-2009)

Islam and Confucianism are two great traditions of mainly Asian people. which have encountered in China since very beginning of Islam's advent to this world, and are in direct confrontation to one another especially in the South East Asian and Pacific Region in the modern time. With the rapid development of the region in all aspects of sciences particularly economic enhancement, works in making the two traditions understand each other increasingly appear important and inevitable. Major common senses between Islam and Confucianism lie mainly in ethics, in which a considerable amount of values are almost having the 􀀝e implications, and …

Neutrosophy, A New Branch Of Philosophy, Florentin Smarandache

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

In this paper is presented a new branch of philosophy, called neutrosphy, which studies the origin, nature, and scope of neutralities, as well as their interactions with different ideational spectra. The Fundamental Thesis: Any idea is T% true, I% indeterminate, and F% false, - where T, I, F are standard or non-standard subsets included in ]0-, 1+[. The Fundamental Theory: Every idea tends to be neutralized, diminished, balanced by ideas (not only , as Hegel asserted) - as a state of equilibrium. Neutrosophy is the base of neutrosophic logic, a multiple value logic that generalizes the fuzzy logic, of neutrosophic …

The Truth Claims Of Online Higher Education A Social Constructionist Analysis, Thomas Wells Brignall Iii

Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Is Science Ever Science? The Politics Of Child Care, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article explores the political behavior of psychologists in the carrying out of scientific tasks.

Living Legitimacy: A New Approach To Good Government In Africa, Ajume H. Wingo

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article argues for the reorientation of African governments from a model that privileges the central or garrison states to one rooted in the living experiences of citizens, such as their economic conditions, fellowship associations, local governments, and community self-reliance. It begins by describing and analyzing in depth an example of a set of moral, political, and social institutions that still work well to make collective decisions that the members of the community consider legitimate and follow without coercion. It demonstrates that a legitimate government is not and should not be a matter of instituting finished, polished, or ready-made solutions …

Trends. Psychological Pathways To Suicidal Terrorism, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article discusses psychological pathways to suicidal terrorism. This discussion includes aspects of both social cognition and social learning, as well as philosophical psychology.

Woman As Contender For The United States Presidency: A Look At The Movie, "The Contender", Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article explores whether the movie, "The Contender," supports the viability of a woman for the presidency of the United States.

The Professional Academic And Hubris: The Case Of Yongyi Song, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article describes a reification of academic activities in a world where there may be many kings. This reification is often employed as a vehicle to support human and civil rights initiatives. Unfortunately, this vehicle may mitigate against such rights.

6. Geraldo (Novel), Ann Margaret Sharp

Later Elementary School Curriculum

Migrating to a new country brings about enormous changes in Geraldo's life. Not only is there a new language to learn, but Geraldo must make new friends and adjust to significant cultural differences.

7. Discovering Our Voice: A Manual To Accompany 'Geraldo', Ann Margaret Sharp, Laurance J. Splitter

Later Elementary School Curriculum

Geraldo is a story about what an immigrant undergoes when he leaves one culture and tries to 'join' another culture. An immigrant suffers a triple disruption: he loses his sense of place, he enters into an alien language, and he finds himself surrounded by beings whose social behavior, norms and traditions are very unlike, and sometimes even offensive to his own. The explanation of the leading ideas in this manual help students and teachers explore the philosophical themes in Geraldo. The discussion plans, exercises, and activities are designed to foster and cultivate the process of philosophical dialogue in the classroom.

Confucianist's Perception Of Woman : Its Influence On Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior : Memoirs Of A Girlhood Among Ghosts And Amy Tan's The Joyluck Club, Yoke Lin Yap

Student Works (2000-2009)

This thesis proposes to examine critically how the fundamental ideals contained within the philosophy of Confucius have evolved into social rites and rituals contained within the Five Classics and Four Classics for women. This is important for it is the social conventions that form the essential patriarchal structure in addition to the moral as well as behavioral norms of Chinese society. The study and analysis of Confucius' principal doctrines will help us understand the roles and responsibilities held by Chinese women within the structural hierarchy of Chinese family and society in general. The above will provide for a unique comparison …