“World without End”

In this article, I want to make the following points, none of which are totally new, but their constellation here is meant to be challenging. First, world is not a (Cartesian) thing but an event, the event of sense. This event is opening and meaning – verbal tense. God may be a philosophical name of this event. This is recognized by late-modern religious atheist thought. This thought differs from modern scientific rationalism in that the latter’s so-called areligious atheism is actually a hyperreligious theism. On the way, the alleged opposition between philosophy and theology, between thought and faith is seen to erode. The core matter of this philosophy of religion will be the absolute reference, the system of objectivity and the holiness of the name. All this because of a prefix a- that has its sense turned inside out by the death of God.

Of Sticks and Stones

In the seventeenth century, the words ‘essay’, ‘experience’, and ‘experiment’ could be synonymous. This chapter explores the relationship between these terms, taking Montaigne, Francis Bacon, and Robert Boyle as key examples. It argues that the essay, throughout its history, asserts the value of experience, rather than metaphysics or abstraction, as the ground of knowledge, and establishes in the seventeenth century a dynamic oscillation between bodily experience, its written transmission, and the experience of reading which is still legible in contemporary essay writing. The relationship between scientific experiment in Bacon and Boyle and the literary form of the essay also suggests that one of the major axes of opposition which defines the essay, in Theodor Adorno’s account—a resistance to scientific rationalism—emerges, paradoxically, from the early essay’s simultaneous concern with experience and experiment.

From the Mindfulness Revolution to the Mindfulness Wars

This chapter examines the ambivalent relationship between American Buddhist convert communities and the mindfulness movement, and tracks some of the major patterns around mindfulness that have emerged from within those communities. It argues that the mindfulness movement should be located in the lineage of scientific rationalism, one of the three main discourses of modern Buddhism, and is clearly traceable from U Ba Khin's modernist reframing of mindfulness as a nonsectarian practice to Kabat-Zinn's scientific universal iteration. Indeed, Buddhist scholars such as McMahan, Wilson, Sharf, and Braun are united in seeing secular mindfulness as an extension and expression of Buddhist modernism. Buddhist critiques of mindfulness, however, show considerable opposition to core modernist components: universalism, individualism, an emphasis on the experiential, and the scientific-rational lineage.

French grammars in England 1660‑1820

This paper presents an analysis of a corpus of grammars written for learning French in England from 1660 to 1820, a period sometimes referred to euphemistically as the “long century” which saw language teaching evolve in response to broader social and epistemological developments, namely the increased codification of vernacular grammar against a backdrop of scientific rationalism and, in England, the greater institutionalisation of school-based pedagogies. The aim of the analysis is twofold: firstly, to identify some key shifts in the formulation of content, specifically changes in overall structure and distribution of sections, including differences in grammatical nomenclature, and, secondly, to contextualise these developments by considering the changing role of the grammarian-teachers as demonstrated in the way they position themselves as authors to different publics.

Mindfulness in Western Contexts Perpetuates Oppressive Realities for Minority Cultures

This paper examines mindfulness-based practices in North American classrooms as culturally appropriated through the dominantly western modality of individualism and scientific-rationalism. Through investigating MindUP™ and other mindfulness teaching resources, I demonstrate the construed qualities of mindfulness practices in western contexts. I argue that mindfulness is molded to fit colonial ontologies of values and knowledge and perpetuates oppressive realities for minority cultures. I propose that mindfulness should be reoriented into its Buddhist contexts through required lessons and trainings in Buddhist cultures, ontologies, and knowledges, and creators and supporters of mindfulness-based educational programs should refer to the practices they are promoting as attention-focusing and stress-reduction strategies and not as misconstrued, individualistic qualities of mindfulness. This paper intends to extend awareness to the broader sociopolitical consequences of culturally appropriating mindfulness practices.

Sailing West: The Pacific Stories

This chapter examines how London’s Pacific stories are most frequently concerned with three interrelated subjects: an anthropologically-oriented interest in indigenous cultures and racial groups; an assessment of imperialism’s detrimental effects on native populations and its Western practitioners; and a search for wholeness and meaning through local mythologies, folklore, and religions—modes of inquiry London hoped might moderate the alienation wrought by the capitalistic marketplace and scientific rationalism. The discussion focuses on how, at times, London replicates the racist norms of the dominant culture, while in other instances he protests against them. “The House of Pride,” “The Heathen,” “Good-By, Jack,” “Koolau the Leper,” “Mauki,” “The Red One,” and “The Water Baby” are closely analysed.

Roots of the Organic Challenge

The introduction briefly surveys the developments that have taken place in the last 500 years relating to the growth of crown capitalism, monoculture, the rise of international trading regimes, the impact of industrial farming, and the scientific and romantic reaction that gave birth to organic farming. Organic farming merged romanticism, holism, ecology, science, and desiccation theory, and fitted within the larger environment movement that spanned from the nineteenth century to the present. It placed an emphasis on wholeness and change that inverted or rejected the main philosophical assumptions underlying scientific rationalism realism and re-introduced into mainstream European culture elements of immanence and mysticism.

For a Defense of Historical Knowledge

This chapter argues that historians must go beyond the premises of the paradigm of the Centaur and uphold the autonomy and prerogatives of historical knowledge with respect to the Enlightenment. It suggests that the correct question to ask a historian is not “What is the Enlightenment?” but rather “What was it?” and that we should ask what is it that we know about the Enlightenment's significance in the history of Europe during the Ancien Régime. On the other hand, the historian questioned should not think of the Enlightenment as a kind of philosophia perennis. The chapter also considers Ernst Cassirer's declaration of faith in Immanuel Kant and Isaac Newton's scientific rationalism and Michel Foucault's attempt to revive the paradigm of the Centaur as “historico-philosophical practice” in the wake of the great German historiography of the Aufklärung.