Pittsburgh Summer Symposium in Contemporary Philosophy

Duquesne University

Dept. of Philosophy

Pittsburgh, PA

Call for Applications

We are pleased to announce the 2014 Pittsburgh Summer Symposium in Contemporary Philosophy, held at Duquesne University. Details for the program are as follows:

Formalism and the Real: Ontology, Politics, and the Subject

August 4 – 8, 2014

(Optional Participants’ Conference, August 2-3)

“The real can only be inscribed on the basis of an impasse of formalization.”

— Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX

“We need a theory of the pass of the real, in the breach opened up by formalization. Here, the real is no longer only what can be lacking from its place, but what passes through by force.”

— Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject

Seminar Leaders:

Prof. Bruno Bosteels (Cornell University)

Prof. Tom Eyers (Duquesne University)

Prof. Paul Livingston (University of New Mexico)

Course Description:

Philosophy in the twenty-first century has seen an extensive reconsideration of formalistic methodologies and theoretical structures. This is heavily influenced by the formalism developed by a number of mid-twentieth century French thinkers who rejected humanist philosophies of experience or consciousness typified by dominant forms of existentialism and phenomenology. Insights derived from Marxism, Freudianism, and philosophy of science were argued to undermine central tenets of the latter, including the priority of description and the emphasis on first-person experiences. Rather, stress was placed on the priority of construction, an emphasis on the concept, and a rethinking of the nature of knowledge and the object of science.

The recent history of formalist approaches is framed in important ways by Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan. As is well known, Althusser rejected historicist and humanist readings of Marx in favor of a structuralist approach, which was amenable to the conception of science developed by thinkers like Jean Cavaillès, Gaston Bachelard, and Georges Canguilhem. Simultaneously, Lacan rejected ego-psychological readings of Freud, forming interpretive, theoretical, and clinical bases for psychoanalysis that drew on Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist linguistics and Claude Levi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology. This led him to a methodological formalism, particularly when addressing the Real and the psycho-dynamics in which it is involved. The presence of Althusser and Lacan at the École Normale Supériere during this time formed the intellectual milieu in which students such as Alain Badiou, Jacques-Alain Miller, Étienne Balibar, and Jacques Rancière would begin to develop their own thought. An important forum for this was the journal the Cahiers pour l’Analyse (1966-69). The current project to translate it into English has prompted a surge in research related to these themes. In the Cahiers, efforts were made to reconcile Marxist politics with a Lacanian account of the subject. Lacan’s notion of the Real was essential to this and, along with the other elements of his thought, came to be developed by Badiou to address political and ontological domains.

More recently, formalism in philosophy has expanded to address issues beyond these origins. For instance, formalistic reconstructions of Heideggerian and Husserlian thought have proved intensely productive and have problematized the opposition of philosophies of the concept to phenomenological philosophies. Moreover, recent efforts to address questions in aesthetics and politics with formal approaches has further expanded the boundaries of formalism’s theoretical scope. Paul Livingston’s book, The Politics of Logic: Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism, examines the landscape of political criticism and change given the results and paradoxes of 20th century projects of formalization in mathematics and logic. Following this, his current project focuses on Heidegger’s philosophy, and will reexamine our inherited notions of sense and truth. After writing a book on Lacan’s concept of the Real, Tom Eyers has analyzed the intellectual foundations of structuralism in 1930s and 1940s French epistemology and philosophy of science. He is presently writing a book entitled Speculative Formalism: The Poetics of Form in Literature, Science, and Philosophy which will bring that work to bear on poetics and literary theory. In addition to translating Badiou’s Theory of the Subject and Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, Bruno Bosteels has devoted numerous books to Badiou and issues in political thought. In his recent Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Psychoanalysis, and Religion in Times of Terror, Bosteels investigates ways art and literature provide insight into processes of subjectification at the core of Marxist and psychoanalytic concerns.

This summer symposium will bring together interested graduate students, postdoctoral students, and junior faculty for a week of discussion, lecture, and close textual study. Together, we will pursue questions regarding formalism and its relation to the Real in contemporary ontology, politics, and theories of the subject and their consequences for understanding knowledge, history, state, language, art, and literature. Lacanian and Badiouian thought will form a key theoretical backdrop. Yet, we expect our studies will include work by a number of other figures, including Plato, Marx, Nietzsche, Frege, Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Lautman, Bachelard, Canguilhem, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida, Macherey, Miller, Butler, Jameson, Žižek, Hägglund, and Malabou.

All texts and discussion will be in English.

Application:

We invite current graduate students, postdoctoral students, and junior faculty in philosophy or related disciplines to submit an application composed of a C.V. and a short letter of intent (500 words maximum) to pghsummersymposium2014@gmail.com. The deadline for applications is Friday, April 25th, 2014. We expect to respond with notifications regarding acceptance to the symposium by Thursday, May 1st, 2014 to help facilitate summer plans. The seminar will be limited to 30-40 participants. For more information as it becomes available, we have created a website for the symposium: http://pghsummersymposium6.wix.com/pghsummersymp2014

Participants’ Conference (August 2-3):

In order to facilitate a further exchange of ideas and research, a participants’ conference will be held the weekend before the seminar begins. Applicants who receive notice of acceptance as participants will be asked – if interested – to submit an abstract of up to 500 words on any theme related to the topic of the seminar. The participants’ conference will take place on Saturday and Sunday, August 2-3, 2014.

Financial Information:

There will be a $200 registration fee for each participant of the seminar. This money will be used for event expenses like a conference dinner, celebration, daily coffee, etc. Please note that participants will be responsible for arranging their own housing as well as financing most of their own meals for the duration of the symposium. However, with respect to lodging, we expect a limited number of arrangements with graduate students will be available on a first come, first serve basis.

Organizers:

This Wednesday morning, Nov. 6, Sally Scholz, PhD, will lead a workshop on publishing in the humanities. Dr. Scholz is the editor of Hypatia, the world’s premiere journal for feminist philosophy. This event is a valuable opportunity to gain insight into the publishing process from the editor’s point of view, and will be of great benefit to scholars (both accomplished and aspiring) in a wide range of disciplines. It’s the second in a series of workshops being held this semester devoted to aspects of publishing. As with other events in this series, editors of other journals edited on campus will be on hand to offer insights and expertise. Here’s what the event’s organizers are saying about it:

Demystify the submission and review process! Ever wonder what happens to your paper once you have submitted it to a journal? Ever have questions you’d like to ask a journal but weren’t certain who to email? This brief workshop features insights from editors of humanities based journals. We’ll tell you all about the submission and review process, what to expect, when to prompt a journal, and even offer advice on how to maximize your chance of an acceptance. Wednesday, Nov. 6 at 8 a.m. in Hypatia Editorial Suite, near the Falvey West Stacks on the library’s first floor.

If you have questions, please contact: sally.scholz@villanova.edu

Falvey is pleased to announce that we now provide online access to 105 French humanities journals via the Cairn.info platform. This package includes journals in art, history, philosophy, literature, linguistics and the humanities generally, including benchmark titles like Actuel Marx, Philosophie, Cités, Clio, Les études philosophiques, Revue de philology, Revue de littérature compare, Le Français aujourd’hui, Critique, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Le Moyen Age and many others.

For each journal access runs from the most recent issue back through 2001. In many cases links are also provided to pre-2001 content hosted on other platforms.

The platform is exceptionally easy to use. It’s fully searchable and can be easily browsed by discipline. Articles can be read online or downloaded as (very crisp) PDF files. The platform also features useful tools like e-mail and RSS alerts, and the ability to export citations to EndNote, Refworks and Zotero. For the moment the interface is in French only, but English abstracts are provided for most recent articles, and English navigation is expected soon.

Nikolaus Fogle maintains the Philosophy blog and is the Philosophy, Theology and Humanities team coordinator. Nik can be reached by email or phone at 610-519-5182.

‘Freedom – The Beginning and End of All Philosophy’
A Symposium on the Philosophy of FWJ Schelling

Co-organized by the Department of Philosophy at Temple University
and the International Center for Philosophy at Bonn University

October 4-5, 2013
Temple University
Philadelphia, PA

Speakers:
Jennifer Dobe (Grinnell College, USA)
Michael Forster (University of Bonn, Germany)
Markus Gabriel (University of Bonn, Germany)
Marcela Garcia (Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, Mexico)
Sebastian Gardner (University College London, UK)
Yitzhak Melamed (Johns Hopkins, USA)
Dalia Nassar (Villanova University, Philadelphia, USA; University of Sidney, Sidney Australia)
Lara Ostaric (Temple University, USA)
Richard Velkley (Tulane University, USA)
Eric Watkins (University of California, San Diego, USA)
Jason Wirth (Seattle University, USA)
The sponsors for this event include: The Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium, The University of Bonn International Center for Philosophy, the Department of Philosophy at Temple University, the Office of International Affairs at Temple University, and the Center for the Humanities at Temple (CHAT)-Temple University.

For more information: http://schelling2013.weebly.com/index.html

Contacts:
Dr. Lara Ostaric: lostaric@temple.edu
Dr. Owen Ware: owenjware@temple.edu

A few more of the latest:

A Companion to Meister Eckhart
edited by Jeremiah M. Hackett (Brill)

From the publisher: This book meets an obvious need in English language studies on Meister Eckhart. It is the first handbook on Eckhart for graduate and undergraduate students. It is divided into three parts. Part one deals with the life, works, career, and trial; Greek, Jewish, and Arabic philosophical sources, and some central philosophical ideas. Part two examines Eckhart as a Latin exegete, vernacular preacher, Eckhart’s understanding of God, Eckhart as a reader of Maimonides and in relation to women’s spirituality. Part three deals with the reception of Eckhart and his works from the fourteenth century to the twenty-first century. It covers fourteenth-century German readers of Eckhart, the fifteenth-century reader Nicholas of Cusa, the sixteenth-seventeenth-century reader Valentine Weigel, the reception of Eckhart in German idealism and romanticism and Eckhart and philosophy in the twentieth century. There is an epilogue on mysticism and philosophy in Eckhart and an appendix on Dominican education in the Middle Ages. Contributors include Walter Senner OP, Allesandra Beccarisi, Dagmar Gottschall, Loris Sturlese, Tamar Tsopurashvili, Jennifer Hart Weed, Jeremiah Hackett, Udo Kern, Alessandro Palazzo, Eliza Rubino, Donald F. Duclow, Bruce Millem, Markus Enders, Yossef Schwartz, Lydia Wegener, Jack C. Marler, Nadia Bray, Elizabeth Brient, Fiorella Rettucci, Andrew Weeks, Cyril O’Regan, Dermot Moran, Karl Albert and Paul Dietrich.

Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World
by Claude Lévi-Strauss, translated by Jane Marie Todd (Harvard University Press)

From the publisher: Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World is the first English translation of a series of lectures Claude Lévi-Strauss delivered in Tokyo in 1986. Written with an eye toward the future as his own distinguished career was drawing to a close, this volume presents a synthesis of the author’s major ideas about structural anthropology, a field he helped establish. Critiquing insights of his earlier writings on the relationship between race, history, and civilization, Lévi-Strauss revisits the social issues that never ceased to fascinate him. He begins with the observation that the cultural supremacy enjoyed by the West for over two centuries is at an end. Global wars and genocides in the twentieth century have fatally undermined Western faith in humanity’s improvement through scientific progress. Anthropology, however, can be the vehicle of a new “democratic humanism,” broadening traditional frameworks that have restricted cross-cultural understandings of the human condition, and providing a basis for inquiries into what other civilizations, such as those of Asia, can teach. Surveying a world on the brink of the twenty-first century, Lévi-Strauss assesses some of the dilemmas of cultural and moral relativism a globalized society faces—ethical dimensions of economic inequality, the rise of different forms of religious fundamentalism, the promise and peril of genetic and reproductive engineering. A laboratory of thought opening onto the future, Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World is an important addition to the canon of one of the twentieth-century’s most influential theorists.

You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics
by Peter Sloterdijk (Polity Press)

From the publisher: In his major investigation into the nature of humans, Peter Sloterdijk presents a critique of myth – the myth of the return of religion. For it is not religion that is returning; rather, there is something else quite profound that is taking on increasing significance in the present: the human as a practising, training being, one that creates itself through exercises and thereby transcends itself. Rainer Maria Rilke formulated the drive towards such self-training in the early twentieth century in the imperative ‘You must change your life’. In making his case for the expansion of the practice zone for individuals and for society as a whole, Sloterdijk develops a fundamental and fundamentally new anthropology. The core of his science of the human being is an insight into the self-formation of all things human. The activity of both individuals and collectives constantly comes back to affect them: work affects the worker, communication the communicator, feelings the feeler. It is those humans who engage expressly in practice that embody this mode of existence most clearly: farmers, workers, warriors, writers, yogis, rhetoricians, musicians or models. By examining their training plans and peak performances, this book offers a panorama of exercises that are necessary to be, and remain, a human being.

Philosophos: Plato’s Missing Dialogue
by Mary Louise Gill (Oxford University Press)

From the publisher: Plato famously promised to complement the Sophist and the Statesman with another work on a third sort of expert, the philosopher–but we do not have this final dialogue. Mary Louise Gill argues that Plato promised the Philosopher, but did not write it, in order to stimulate his audience and encourage his readers to work out, for themselves, the portrait it would have contained. The Sophist and Statesman are themselves members of a larger series starting with the Theaetetus, Plato’s investigation of knowledge, and the whole series relies on the Parmenides, the second part of which presents a philosophical exercise, introduced as the first step in a larger philosophical program. Gill contends that the dialogues leading up to the missing Philosopher, though they reach some substantive conclusions, are philosophical exercises of various sorts designed to train students in dialectic, the philosopher’s method; and that a second version of the Parmenides exercise, closely patterned on it, spans parts of the Theaetetus and Sophist and brings the philosopher into view. This is the exercise about being, the subject-matter studied by Plato’s philosopher. Plato hides the pieces of the puzzle and its solution in plain sight, forcing his students (and modern readers) to dig out the pieces and reconstruct the project. Gill reveals how, in finding the philosopher through the exercise, the student becomes a philosopher by mastering his methods. She shows that the target of Plato’s exercise is internally related to its pedagogical purpose.

Saul Kripke : Puzzles and Mysteries
by John Burgess (Polity Press)

From the publisher: Saul Kripke has been a major influence on analytic philosophy and allied fields for a half-century and more. His early masterpiece, Naming and Necessity, reversed the pattern of two centuries of philosophizing about the necessary and the contingent. Although much of his work remains unpublished, several major essays have now appeared in print, most recently in his long-awaited collection Philosophical Troubles. In this book Kripke’s long-time colleague, the logician and philosopher John P. Burgess, offers a thorough and self-contained guide to all of Kripke’s published books and his most important philosophical papers, old and new. It also provides an authoritative but non-technical account of Kripke’s influential contributions to the study of modal logic and logical paradoxes. Although Kripke has been anything but a system-builder, Burgess expertly uncovers the connections between different parts of his oeuvre. Kripke is shown grappling, often in opposition to existing traditions, with mysteries surrounding the nature of necessity, rule-following, and the conscious mind, as well as with intricate and intriguing puzzles about identity, belief and self-reference. Clearly contextualizing the full range of Kripke’s work, Burgess outlines, summarizes and surveys the issues raised by each of the philosopher’s major publications. Kripke will be essential reading for anyone interested in the work of one of analytic philosophy’s greatest living thinkers.

Pittsburgh Summer Symposium in Contemporary Philosophy

Duquesne University

Dept. of Philosophy

Pittsburgh, PA

Call for Applications

We are pleased to announce the Pittsburgh Summer Symposium in Contemporary Philosophy, held at Duquesne University.  Details for the program are as follows:

Schelling and Naturphilosophie

August 5 – 9, 2013

(Optional Participants’ Conference, August 3-4)

“What then is that secret bond which couples our mind to Nature, or that hidden organ through which Nature speaks to our mind or our mind to Nature?” (Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature)

“The concept of nature does not entail that there should also be an intelligence that is aware of it. Nature, it seems, would exist, even if there were nothing that was aware of it. Hence the problem can also be formulated thus: how does intelligence come to be added to nature, or how does nature come to be presented?” (System of Transcendental Idealism)

Seminar Leaders:

Prof. Iain Hamilton Grant (University of the West of England, Bristol)

Prof. Jason Wirth (Seattle University)

Course Description:

In recent years there has been a surge of research on the work of the German philosopher F.W.J. Schelling, aided in the English-speaking world by a number of recent translations. This movement has included reexaminations of Schelling as a figure in the history of philosophy, as a source of influence on a number of twentieth century thinkers, and as a rich resource for addressing contemporary philosophical debates.

Schelling’s distinctive influence in the history of philosophy has been, in part, a product of his objective approach to transcendental idealism. In opposition to Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, which argued that the subject must be the fundamental ground for transcendental idealism, Schelling argued that an objective approach, taking the form of Naturphilosophie, is equally necessary for explaining the subject-object form of knowledge. Additionally, in his later works, Schelling’s concepts of freedom, existence, and the non-ground, would give some of the earliest critiques of Hegel’s absolute idealism, and would later influence thinkers like Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche. In the twentieth century, the impact of his work would continue. His Freiheitsschrift, for instance, forms an important part of the conceptual context within which Martin Heidegger developed his notions of event, ground, and the plight of the human being, operative in the 1930s and early 40s. Likewise, Schelling’s influence profoundly marked Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology of the flesh, his understanding of art, the unconscious, and the provocative task of doing a “psychoanalysis of Nature.”

More recently, Iain Hamilton Grant has mobilized Schellingian Naturphilosophie as a basis for recasting epistemological and metaphysical or ontological issues regarding the relation of physics and metaphysics, the nature of time, the nature of ground, and more broadly calling for a radical reevaluation of the post-Kantian philosophical framework dominant over much of the last two centuries. This project has established one of the major arms of the recent movement to rethink the realist/anti-realist debate. Likewise, Jason Wirth has revitalized Schellingian accounts of the Good, intellectual intuition, aesthetics, nature, and life in contemporary debates. He has also worked to put Schelling into conversation with a number of other recent thinkers, both Western and, notably, of the Japanese Kyoto School.

Other contemporary philosophers have also taken up Schelling in related manners. Markus Gabriel, for instance, has integrated Schelling’s notion of non-ground into his “domain ontology” and its treatment of the nature of the world (or more properly the non-existence of the world), mythology, evil, contingency, and necessity. Further, in the Lacanian meta-psychology of Slavoj Žižek and Adrian Johnston, Schelling’s philosophy has been used to give an account for the genesis of the transcendental subject out of natural and material substance conceived with reference to Trieb, or drive.

This summer symposium will bring together interested graduate students, postdoctoral students, and junior faculty  for a week of discussion, lecture, and close textual study concerning this important philosopher. The topic for the seminar is Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. We will examine questions about nature, objectivity, matter, life, knowledge, and whether or not transcendental philosophy can be reconciled with the findings of the empirical sciences. All texts and discussion will be in English.

Application:

We invite current graduate students, postdoctoral students, and junior faculty in philosophy or related disciplines to submit an application composed of a C.V. and a short letter of intent (500 words maximum) to pghsummersymposium2013@gmail.com. The deadline for applications is April 5, 2013. The seminar will be limited to 20-30 participants. For more information as it becomes available, we have created a website for the symposium:

http://pghsummersymposium.wix.com/pghsummersymp2013

Participants’ Conference (August 3-4):

In order to facilitate a further exchange of ideas and research, a participants’ conference will be held the weekend before the seminar begins. Applicants who receive notice of acceptance as participants will be asked – if interested – to submit an abstract of up to 500 words on any theme related to the topic of the seminar. The participants’ conference will take place on Saturday and Sunday, August 3-4, 2013.

Financial Information:

There will be a $125 registration fee for each participant of the seminar. This money will be used for a conference dinner, celebration, and daily expenses such as coffee, etc. Please note that participants will be responsible for arranging their own housing as well as financing most of their own meals for the duration of the symposium. However, with respect to lodging, we expect a number of arrangements with graduate students will be available on a first come, first serve basis.

Organizers:

Past Masters is an abundantly useful online collection of primary source texts, mainly in philosophy, which has proven to be highly popular among those who have discovered it.

It consists of scholarly editions of great writers and thinkers, usually the complete or collected works in the original language or in English translation. At present, our Past Masters holdings include the works of Anselm, Aquinas, Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Dewey, Feuerbach, Fichte, Foucault, Hegel, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, Leibniz, Locke, Marx and Engels, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Pascal, Peirce, Plato, Santayana, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, Wittgenstein, and Wollstonecraft.

We also have several period collections that contain many further important works: The Latin Background: 1100-1550, The Continental Rationalists, British Philosophy: 1600-1900, The Romantic Age, and Political Philosophy: Machiavelli to Mill.

Apart from the convenience of being able to read these works online, on a mobile device, or select sections to print, it’s also very handy to be able to search the full text. You can do this not only for individual works, but for whole collections as well. For example, if you know that Merleau-Ponty discusses marxisme in parts of his corpus, but you don’t know exactly where, Past Masters will create a neatly formatted list of the places in each work where the term occurs.

We are continuing to expand our access to Past Masters collections, so look out for new works to be added in the future.

Great heaps of new philosophy books have been arriving at Falvey lately. Here’s a sampling:

Leviathan (3 vols.)
by Thomas Hobbes, edited by Noel Malcolm (Oxford University Press)

From the publisher: Hobbes’s Leviathan is one of the most important philosophical texts in the English language, and one of the most influential works of political philosophy ever written. This is the first critical edition based on a full study of the manuscript and printing history. It is also the first edition to place the English text side by side with Hobbes’s later Latin version of it, complete with a set of notes in which the many passages that differ in the Latin are translated into English. So, for the first time, readers of Leviathan will be able to see every stage of the development of the text at a single glance. Both texts are fully annotated with explanatory notes. The editor’s Introduction, which takes up the whole of the first volume, gives a path-breaking account of the work’s context, sources, and textual history. This definitive edition will set the study of Hobbes’s masterwork on a new basis.

Schizoanalytic Cartographies
by Felix Guattari (Bloomsbury Academic)

From the publisher: Schizoanalytic Cartographies represents Félix Guattari’s most important later work and the most systematic and detailed account of his theoretical position and his therapeutic ideas. Guattari sets out to provide a complete account of the conditions of ‘enunciation’ – autonomous speech and self-expression – for subjects in the contemporary world. Over the course of eight closely argued chapters, he presents a breathtakingly new reformulation of the structures of individual and collective subjectivity. Based on research into information theory and new technologies, Guattari articulates a vision of a humanity finally reconciled with its relationship to machines. Schizoanalytic Cartographies is a visionary yet highly concrete work, providing a powerful vantage point on the upheavals of our present epoch, powerfully imagining a future ‘post-media’ era of technological development. This long overdue translation of this substantial work offers English-speaking readers the opportunity finally to fully assess Guattari’s contribution to European thought.

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science
edited by Eric Margolis, Richard Samuels and Stephen P. Stich (Oxford University Press)

From the publisher: Recent research across the disciplines of cognitive science has exerted a profound influence on how many philosophers approach problems about the nature of mind. These philosophers, while attentive to traditional philosophical concerns, are increasingly drawing both theory and evidence from empirical disciplines — both the framing of the questions and how to resolve them. However, this familiarity with the results of cognitive science has led to the raising of an entirely new set of questions about the mind and how we study it, questions which not so long ago philosophers did not even pose, let alone address. This book offers an overview of this burgeoning field that balances breadth and depth, with articles covering every aspect of the psychology and cognitive anthropology. Each article provides a critical and balanced discussion of a core topic while also conveying distinctive viewpoints and arguments. Several of the articles are co-authored collaborations between philosophers and scientists.

Retrieving Aristotle in an Age of Crisis
by David Roochnik (SUNY Press)

From the publisher: In 1935 Edmund Husserl delivered his now famous lecture “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity,” in which he argued that the “misguided rationalism” of modern Western science, dominated by the model of mathematical physics, can tell us nothing about the “meaning” of our lives. Today Husserl’s conviction that the West faces a crisis is no longer an abstraction. With the ever-present threat of nuclear explosion, the degradation of the oceans, and the possibility that climate change will wreak havoc on civilization itself, people from all walks of life are wondering what has gone so terribly wrong and what remedies might be available. In Retrieving Aristotle in an Age of Crisis, David Roochnik makes a lucid and powerful case that Aristotle offers a philosophical resource that even today can be of significant therapeutic value. Unlike the scientific revolutionaries of the seventeenth century, he insisted that both ordinary language and sense-perception play essential roles in the acquisition of knowledge. Centuries before Husserl, Aristotle was a phenomenologist who demanded that a successful theory remain faithful to human experience. His philosophy can thus provide precisely what modern European rationalism now so painfully lacks: an understanding and appreciation of the world in which human beings actually make their homes.

Textes dispersés I : esthétique et théorie de l’art / Miscellaneous Texts I: Aesthetics and Theory of Art 
by Jean-Francois Lyotard, edited by Herman Parret (Leuven University Press)

From the publisher: This fourth volume in the series devoted to Jean-François Lyotard’s writings on contemporary art and artists presents nine essays on general aesthetics and the theory of art. They are published in the original French along with English translations on facing pages. Most of these texts, preserved in the Lyotard archives of the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris, are published here for the first time. They do not reveal ‘another Lyotard’ than the one whom we know through his major writings. Nevertheless, they cover the whole period of his production, from 1969 to 1997; and they make the development of his philosophy of art explicit. After the ‘libidinal’ conception of art in his early writings, the ‘Kantian twist’ of around 1980 places his view on art under the aegis of the sublime. These essays specify what, for Jean-François Lyotard, the hand of the painter means, as well as the gaze of the viewer, enamoured with resonant colours.

As Catholic social thought finds its way onto syllabi across the curriculum, you may be wondering what the best starting points are for research in this field. Over on Falvey’s Library News blog, theology and religious studies librarian Darren Poley written a terrific post to get us oriented.

Despite their popularity, the Cambridge Companions are not the only user-friendly scholarly compendia to the different areas of philosophy. In addition to the Cambridge series, the library provides access to several other series of guides, notably the Continuum Companions, Blackwell Guides, and Oxford Handbooks. These typically follow the model set by the Cambridge Companions: each volume presents specially-commissioned articles that orient the reader in a given topic, while in most cases also setting out the author’s own position as a point of entry to the wider debate. These series also draw authors who are experts on their topics, so the quality is consistently high. In fact, it’s not uncommon to see the same authors cropping up repeatedly across several series.

And as with the Cambridge Companions, these series are good for providing a foundation in a topic, and pointing out avenues for further investigation. Titles invariably contain representative bibliographies, and the essays themselves provide context for other important authors and their contributions. The Continuum Companions do a particularly nice job of supplying extras. The Continuum Companion to Pragmatism, for example, includes a list of important journals and professional organizations, and directs readers to the Pragmatism Cybrary, an internet hub for pragmatism scholarship. Similarly, The Continuum Companion to Continental Philosophy comes with a glossary, a contextual timeline, and a list of research resources.

The main drawback to these other series is that, unlike the Cambridge Companions, they are not generally available online. There are times when this is less than ideal. The Oxford Handbooks in particular tend to be large, bulky things that are difficult to read comfortably. But that shouldn’t dissuade you from using them, since they often contain valuable content not available elsewhere. For instance, an entire third of The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy—seven essays—is devoted to “problems of method,” an important topic to which the rival Continuum volume gives only a single essay. (At the moment there is no general Cambridge volume for continental philosophy). Oxford is also the first to deliver a volume (coming soon to Falvey) focused on philosophy and neuroscience, an area that is attracting great attention at present.

A list of our holdings for each of these series can be obtained by doing a title search in the catalog for “Continuum Companion,” “Blackwell Guide,” or “Oxford Handbook.”