scholarly journals ‘Here be revisionary metaphysics!’ A critique of a concern about process philosophy

Dialogue ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Paul Giladi
Keyword(s):  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Process Philosophy ◽  
Logical Space ◽  
Key Features ◽  
Critical Social

ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that John Dupré and Daniel Nicholson's ‘process manifesto’ is ironically more sympathetic to descriptive metaphysics than to revisionary metaphysics. Focusing on their argument that any process philosophy automatically slides into Whiteheadian obscurantism if it does not just rest content with revealing the problematic features of ordinary language, I argue that their position occludes a logical space, one in which revisionary metaphysics is articulated without any Whiteheadian obscurantism and involves no dereliction of critical/revisionary orientation. I argue that key features of the respective critical social ontologies of Judith Butler and Talia Mae Bettcher occupy such a logical space.

Wittgenstein's Tractatus as Poetic Philosophy and Philosophical Poetics

Poetics Today ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 519-540
Author(s):  
Józef Bremer
Keyword(s):  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Gottlob Frege ◽  
Logical Space ◽  
The World ◽  
Philosophical Poetics

Abstract This article argues that it is helpful to discuss the logico-philosophical contents of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in terms that confront the poetic and literary qualities of its form and style. To begin with, it analyzes Wittgenstein's short remarks about expression as manifested in the “tone” of Georg Trakl's poetry and the “ineffability” of Ludwig Uhland's poem “Count Eberhard's Hawthorn.” Then it proceeds to consider his exchange of letters with Gottlob Frege about the form and style of the Tractatus. The final part of the article considers such Tractarian metaphors as “showing and saying,” “logical space,” “reflecting the world as in a mirror,” “ineffability,” and “climbing and throwing away a ladder.” The proposed examination concentrates mainly on the distinction—but also the connection—between what, through language as used in both philosophy and poetry, can be said and what can be shown, this being one of the central themes of the Tractatus itself. It is then claimed that the roots of Wittgenstein's later understanding of both “ordinary language” and the connection between philosophy, poetry, and the ethical form of one's life are already present in his first period of creativity.

Critical Social Thinking Training: A Framework for Design and Delivery

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda L. Thayer ◽  
Rebecca Grossman ◽  
Marissa L. Shuffler ◽  
Shawn Burke ◽  
Eduardo Salas
Keyword(s):  
Social Thinking ◽  
Critical Social

Identifying the best practices for critical social thinking and metacognitive thinking training

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth H. Lazzara ◽  
Marissa Shuffler ◽  
Michael Rosen ◽  
Luiz Xavier ◽  
Samuel Wooten ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Best Practices ◽  
Social Thinking ◽  
Critical Social

Riemann–Weyl in Deleuze's Bergsonism and the Constitution of the Contemporary Physico-Mathematical Space

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Calamari
Keyword(s):  
Field Theory ◽  
Gauge Field ◽  
Fibre Bundle ◽  
History Of Mathematics ◽  
Gauge Field Theory ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
Explicit Mention ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Features ◽  
Bernhard Riemann

In recent years, the ideas of the mathematician Bernhard Riemann (1826–66) have come to the fore as one of Deleuze's principal sources of inspiration in regard to his engagements with mathematics, and the history of mathematics. Nevertheless, some relevant aspects and implications of Deleuze's philosophical reception and appropriation of Riemann's thought remain unexplored. In the first part of the paper I will begin by reconsidering the first explicit mention of Riemann in Deleuze's work, namely, in the second chapter of Bergsonism (1966). In this context, as I intend to show first, Deleuze's synthesis of some key features of the Riemannian theory of multiplicities (manifolds) is entirely dependent, both textually and conceptually, on his reading of another prominent figure in the history of mathematics: Hermann Weyl (1885–1955). This aspect has been largely underestimated, if not entirely neglected. However, as I attempt to bring out in the second part of the paper, reframing the understanding of Deleuze's philosophical engagement with Riemann's mathematics through the Riemann–Weyl conjunction can allow us to disclose some unexplored aspects of Deleuze's further elaboration of his theory of multiplicities (rhizomatic multiplicities, smooth spaces) and profound confrontation with contemporary science (fibre bundle topology and gauge field theory). This finally permits delineation of a correlation between Deleuze's plane of immanence and the contemporary physico-mathematical space of fundamental interactions.

Katherine Mansfield and Translation

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Specific Interest ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Key Features ◽  
Critical Interest

Our understanding of Anglophone modernism has been transformed by recent critical interest in translation. The central place of translation in the circulation of aesthetic and political ideas in the early twentieth century has been underlined, for example, as well as translation’s place in the creative and poetic dynamics of key modernist texts. This volume of Katherine Mansfield Studies offers a timely assessment of Mansfield’s place in such exchanges. As a reviewer, she developed a specific interest in literatures in translation, as well as showing a keen awareness of the translator’s presence in the text. Throughout her life, Mansfield engaged with new literary texts through translation, either translating proficiently herself, or working alongside a co-translator to explore the semantic and stylistic challenges of partially known languages. The metaphorical resonances of translating, transition and marginality also remain key features of her writing throughout her life. Meanwhile, her enduring popularity abroad is ensured by translations of her works, all of which reveal sociological and even ideological agendas of their own, an inevitable reflection of individual translators’ readings of her works, and the literary traditions of the new country and language of reception. The contributions to this volume refine and extend our appreciation of her specifically trans-linguistic and trans-literary lives. They illuminate the specific and more general influences of translation on Mansfield’s evolving technique and, jointly, they reveal the importance of translation on her literary language, as well as for her own particular brand of modernism.

Shakespearean Melancholy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. F. Bernard
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
The Core ◽  
Robert Burton

What’s so funny about melancholy? Iconic as Hamlet is, Shakespearean comedy showcases an extraordinary reliance on melancholy that ultimately reminds us of the porous demarcation between laughter and sorrow. This richly contextualized study of Shakespeare’s comic engagement with sadness contends that the playwright rethinks melancholy through comic theatre and, conversely, re-theorizes comedy through melancholy. In fashioning his own comic interpretation of the humour, Shakespeare distils an impressive array of philosophical discourses on the matter, from Aristotle to Robert Burton, and as a result, transforms the theoretical afterlife of both notions. The book suggests that the deceptively potent sorrow at the core of plays such as The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, or The Winter’s Tale influences modern accounts of melancholia elaborated by Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, and others. What’s so funny about melancholy in Shakespearean comedy? It might just be its reminder that, behind roaring laughter, one inevitably finds the subtle pangs of melancholy.

Process Philosophy and Political Liberalism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel A. Dombrowski
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Liberalism ◽  
Reflective Equilibrium ◽  
Process Philosophy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Static View ◽  
Process Oriented ◽  
The Right ◽  
Political Right

In this work two key theses are defended: political liberalism is a processual (rather than a static) view and process thinkers should be political liberals. Three major figures are considered (Rawls, Whitehead, Hartshorne) in the effort to show the superiority of political liberalism to its illiberal alternatives on the political right and left. Further, a politically liberal stance regarding nonhuman animals and the environment is articulated. It is typical for debates in political philosophy to be adrift regarding the concept of method, but from start to finish this book relies on the processual method of reflective equilibrium or dialectic at its best. This is the first extended effort to argue for both political liberalism as a process-oriented view and process philosophy/theology as a politically liberal view. It is also a timely defense of political liberalism against illiberal tendencies on both the right and the left.

Maclaurin on Occasionalism: A Reply to Ablondi

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-135
Author(s):  
Patrick J. Connolly
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Recent Article ◽  
Gravitational Attraction ◽  
Matter Theory ◽  
Key Features ◽  
Short Essay ◽  
The Way

In a recent article Fred Ablondi compares the different approaches to occasionalism put forward by two eighteenth-century Newtonians, Colin Maclaurin and Andrew Baxter. The goal of this short essay is to respond to Ablondi by clarifying some key features of Maclaurin's views on occasionalism and the cause of gravitational attraction. In particular, I explore Maclaurin's matter theory, his views on the explanatory limits of mechanism, and his appeals to the authority of Newton. This leads to a clearer picture of the way in which Maclaurin understood gravitational attraction and the workings of nature.

Bad Dreams and Secret Artists: Translating Freud into Literature

2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Careful Attention ◽  
Popular Approach ◽  
English Reader ◽  
Creative Writer ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Way

This article addresses the increasingly popular approach to Freud and his work which sees him primarily as a literary writer rather than a psychologist, and takes this as the context for an examination of Joyce Crick's recent translation of The Interpretation of Dreams. It claims that translation lies at the heart of psychoanalysis, and that the many interlocking and overlapping implications of the word need to be granted a greater degree of complexity. Those who argue that Freud is really a creative writer are themselves doing a work of translation, and one which fails to pay sufficiently careful attention to the role of translation in writing itself (including the notion of repression itself as a failure to translate). Lesley Chamberlain's The Secret Artist: A Close Reading of Sigmund Freud is taken as an example of the way Freud gets translated into a novelist or an artist, and her claims for his ‘bizarre poems' are criticized. The rest of the article looks closely at Crick's new translation and its claim to be restoring Freud the stylist, an ordinary language Freud, to the English reader. The experience of reading Crick's translation is compared with that of reading Strachey's, rather to the latter's advantage.

Refusal to Mourn

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Runions
Keyword(s):  
American Politics ◽  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
American People ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
The Public ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
The Us ◽  
Robert Bellah

In her recent book Precarious Life, Judith Butler points out that not more than ten days after 9/11, on 20 September 2001, George W. Bush urged the American people to put aside their grief; she suggests that such a refusal to mourn leads to a kind of national melancholia. Using psychoanalytic theory on melancholia, this article diagnoses causes and effects of such national melancholia. Further, it considers how a refusal to mourn in prophetic and apocalyptic texts and their interpretations operates within mainstream US American politics like the encrypted loss of the melancholic, thus creating the narcissism, guilt, and aggression that sustain the pervasive disavowal of loss in the contemporary moment. This article explore the ways in which the texts of Ezekiel, Micah, Revelation, and their interpreters exhibit the guilt and aggression of melancholia, in describing Israel as an unfaithful and wicked woman whose pain should not be mourned. These melancholic patterns are inherited by both by contemporary apocalyptic discourses and by the discourse of what Robert Bellah calls ‘American civil religion’, in which the US is the new Christian Israel; thus they help to position the public to accept and perpetuate the violence of war, and not to mourn it.

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