Philosophy Commons^™

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 …

Playing Politics With Bioethics: Now That's Repugnant, Yvette E. Pearson

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In a recent Washington Post editorial, Leon Kass claimed that neither he nor the President's Council on Bioethics (PCB) is "playing politics with science." At this point, it is clear that nobody really buys this claim. Nonetheless, even if they are not playing politics with science, someone certainly is playing politics with bioethics, which is just as unacceptable, if not worse.

On Agamben's The Open, Matthew Wolf-Meyer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

With no mention of his prior work on the issues of sovereignty or the production of humanity, Agamben makes a foray into complicating such matters by examining the theorization of the animal and its relation to the human in the work of Kojève (and Hegel) and Heidegger; what Agamben attempts to do is to collapse the figures of the animal and man (and, despite the sexist overtones of man, I'll abide by his usage) into one another, implying that the state of animality is a performative, just as humanity is, and that there is strength to be drawn …

Review Of La Philosophie Désormais, By Jean Pierre Faye, Hervé Regnauld

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

From Butler To Buffy: Notes Towards A Strategy For Identity Analysis In Contemporary Television Narrative, Rob Cover

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Given the increasing significance of questions of identity, subjectivity and selfhood in contemporary postmodern western cultures, it is important to begin acknowledging how these questions are reflected in contemporary media and television and to develop new strategies by which to analyse television characters in terms of identity and subjectivity. The scope for analysing television series' characterizations through recent postmodern and poststructuralist theories of non-essentialist, non-foundationalist subject/identity performativity has not yet been considerably explored. It is my contention here, however, that such a method both reflects the representation of self and identity transformation in new television series as well …

The Status Of Ethics In Technology Education, Philip A. Reed, Susan Presley, Angela Hughes, Diane Irwin Stephens, Roger B. Hill (Ed.)

STEMPS Faculty Publications

Ethics is not a new concept within technology education. The inclusion of ethics evolved naturally from the progression of technological activity in the latter part of the twentieth century. During this shift to a postindustrial society, people started to look at technology from a more humanistic view than they previously had. To keep pace with these changes, a "new ethic" was suggested to help advance technological literacy by highlighting the relationship between humans, the environment, and technology (DeVore, 1980, 1991).

How far have we come? This chapter reviews the current state of ethics within technology education. In the first two …

Endless Enlightenment: Eye-Operated Technology And The Political Economy Of Vision, Michael Gardiner

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Despite a residual popular temptation to see the posts of cultural analysis as signs of temporal closure, the logic of global visual media is strengthening, not weakening, metaphors of visibility which remain intact from the Enlightenment. Here I describe a stand-off between post-Enlightenment critiques (as in some sectors of Cultural Studies) and a narrow power base which is defined by producing light and managing the very conditions of visibility. For the world's most powerful state, still strongly bound to its original Enlightenment foundations, intervention into other states' sovereignty is increasingly justified by evidence from spy planes (rather than …

Review Of Kann Gestern Besser Werden?, By Joern Ruesen, Rares Piloiu

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

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.

Review Of Pure Immanence, Essays On A Life, By Gilles Deleuze, Ellen E. Berry

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Dread, Route And Time: An Autobiographical Walking Of Everything Else, Phil Smith

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

This response to Reconstruction's Summer 2002 edition, Volume 2, Number 3, autobiogeography: considering space and identity, particularly to the papers of Matthew Wolf-Meyer and Davin Heckman, Subhash Jaireth, Deirdre Heddon and Sally Munt, is an attempt to establish provisionally whether a discourse that sets critical theory, autobiographical practice and a poetics of space in performative motion orbiting each other can add anything to the critical discussion of autobiogeography. Part of my motivation is an antipathy toward criticism that can be applied to everything but itself. Given that hybridity will be an important part of a critical discourse about …

Review Of Crepuscular Dawn, By Paul Virilio, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Rogerian Rhetoric As Negotiation: Does Its Dependence On Game Theory Pose Ethical Problems?, Stacy Fussell Thorne

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In the war game Diplomacy, players win by gaining control of Europe. In order to win, however, players must successfully negotiate with other players, make alliances with them, and sometimes gain the support of their ally's military resources, their armies or fleets. In the rules of the game, Diplomacy is described as

a game of negotiations, alliances, promises kept, and promises broken. In order to survive, a player needs help from others. In order to win the game, a player must eventually stand alone. Knowing whom to trust, when to trust them, what to promise, and when …

Hegel, Nietzsche, And The Postmodern Teleological Impasse, Michael P. Tarpey

Institute for the Humanities Theses

Our postmodern intellectual climate is characterized by two apparently contradictory impulses. One seeks to undermine, unmask, and deflate the pretenses of philosophy as traditionally conceived. The result is a focus on difference, surfaces, and fragmentation. The competing impulse seeks to reconcile, integrate, and synthesize. The result is a holistic focus on deeper similarities behind surface differences. I argue that these competing impulses can be traced back to Hegel and Nietzsche. Thus, an understanding of the relationship between these two thinkers can illuminate our current postmodern condition. I argue that Nietzsche and Hegel are remarkably similar in their approach to many …

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 …

The Cyborgian Self: Toward A Critical Social Theory Of Cyberspace, Michael Ian Borer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Contemporary social theory currently remains at a virtual standstill, quivering over the decision to radically leave the past behind or to continue within the historical narrative of the Enlightenment. Postmodern social theorists, advocating the position that we have, in fact, entered a new historical epoch, pose serious challenges to our perception of modernity and cultural identity. As an influential strategy that has infiltrated both the humanities and the social sciences for more than thirty years, postmodernism can no longer be dismissed as merely a fad or trend. In a world where the use of complex, and often mobile, …

Supposing A Space: The Detecting Subject In Paul Auster’S City Of Glass, Richard Swope

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

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.

Review Of Reading Karl Marx, By Rainer Ganahl, Matthew Wolf-Meyer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Framing Intelligibility, Identity And Selfhood: A Reconsideration Of Spatio-Temporal Models, Sally Munt

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The relationship between intelligibility and identity over the past thirty years has largely been approached through the linguistic construct of the subject. Proposing that our subjectivities be theoretically comprehended (made intelligible) as discursive effects is now common sense. Poststructuralism, following particularly Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, has ensured that the subject is a cardinal category of contemporary thought; in any number of disciplines, it is one of the first concepts we teach to our undergraduates. But are we best served by continuing to insist on the intellectual primacy of the subject, formulated as it has been …

Breaking The Mimetic Contract: Notes On Ideology, Intersubjectivity, And Film Theory, Giorgio Bertellini, C. Paul Sellors

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In this essay we would like to sketch out a few notes outlining historical and theoretical trajectories of the confusing, and often confused, relationships between ideology, history and subjectivity in Marx, Marxism and post-Marxism. Marx and Engels' approach to ideology in The German Ideology (1845-46), spawned and influenced a variety of interpretations and philosophical positions from not only the numerous schools of Marxism proper, but also structuralism, semiotics and psychoanalysis up to the very raison d'être of discourse theory and new historicism. This reaching influence occurs only at the cost of contradiction, however, between Marxist factions -- disagreements …

To Blend In The Place You're In, But With A Mind To Do Something: The Practice Of Merging In James Dickey's To The White Sea, Casey Clabough

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In a final sortie the day before the great fire-bombing raid on Tokyo in the last months of World War II, Muldrow (his first name is purposefully never given), an American tail gunner, parachutes from his burning B-29 into the city. Protected at first by the smoke-blackened anarchy on the ground, he journeys north, away from the chaos and ruin of Tokyo, instinctively drawn toward Japan's sparsely-populated northern island of Hokkaido, a frozen, desolate sanctuary he is certain will assure his survival. With little more than a knife and a small map of Japan he makes his way …

Writing Identity Into Space: The Relationship Between Ethnography, Autobiography, And Space In Bronislaw Malinowski's A Diary In The Strict Sense Of The Term And Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, Lawrence Phillips

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

From a number of disciplinary perspectives autobiography has always presented a challenge to more or less discrete modes of reading and evaluating the text. To read autobiography as a literary text is to suppress its close relationship to the writer, however fictionalised and evasive the writing subject might be about a textual identity so closely related to his or her public persona. On the other hand, to read it as history or a documentary presentation of a life is to fail to acknowledge the heavy use of literary techniques and imbedded subjectivity that makes autobiography what it is. …

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

Navigating The Starless Night: Strategies For Understanding Autobiogeography, Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Ancient mapmakers relied upon the presence of celestial bodies for their conceptualization of the world, for their external knowledge-making tools, as if a far-off body could help to make sense of our terrestrial life/as if it couldn't. Cosmology, as a practice, relied on the construction of an external body of knowledge that the local meaning-maker could situate him- or herself into, and more broadly, their entire society and culture -- the interior is determined by its relationship to the exterior (or the exteriorized). For the ancient Greeks then, the font of Western culture, this cosmology works at once …

The Observing Body: Quantum Mechanics, The Anthropic Principles, And Panopticism, C. Jason Smith

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

When philosopher of history and science Michel Serres wrote of that rare and narrow passage between the human sciences and the exact sciences [1], he intended to suggest not only the infrequency and difficulty of such contact, but also the unwillingness on either side to engage in what could be a dangerous, low-profit venture. It seems a long haul back to our common origins in philosophia, and typically, efforts to regain common ground between the disciplines have approached the problem as a one-sided move from the exact sciences to the study of the humanities. Notable exceptions such …

A Phenomenological Inquiry Into The Nature Of The Sacred, Ana Maria Janssen

Institute for the Humanities Theses

There is good reason to believe that sacred experience is available to all humans. Yet the question of the sacred is frequently reduced to a debate between believers of various religions. As the focus of contention narrows, the ubiquity of sacred experience is neglected. Keeping this in mind, this analysis of the sacred confines itself strictly to the phenomenon of the sacred as a human experience, without confirming or denying the existence of a god or the veracity of any system of belief. Heidegger's Phenomenology is a useful model for such an analysis precisely because it lays aside conjecture about …

An Empirical Investigation Into Significant Factors Of Moral Reasoning And Their Influences On Ethical Judgment And Intentions, Janet K. Mullen Marta

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

This dissertation is a partial test of the Hunt-Vitell (1986, 1993) general theory of marketing ethics, which, along with previous tests of the model and other empirical and theoretical work, serves as the basis for this research. The dissertation model is the most comprehensive test of Hunt-Vitell to date, in the sense that it tests variables at almost every stage of the ethical decision making process described in the Hunt-Vitell theory.

The sample was obtained through a mail survey of American Marketing Association (AMA) practitioner members. Empirical testing was carried out through correlation and regression analysis. Of the seventeen hypotheses, …

John Skorupski, Ed., "The Cambridge Companion To Mill.", Dale E. Miller

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.