Worlds apart: Marx, Marcuse and creative engagement

Marx’s early account of socialism as the simultaneous liberation of mankind and nature holds creativity to be mankind’s defining and trans-historical characteristic and the locus of human freedom. Yet, as I argue, Marx’s creativity is predicated upon subject-object relations of domination that engender a pathological relationship between humans and nature, thereby militating against true freedom. This paper will explore Marcuse’s attempt to rehabilitate Marx’s account and will find that Marcuse fails to resolve the crucial tension between subject and object, while his model of freedom contains the possibility for an escalation in the very violations of nature that his account seeks to overcome. Finally, I argue that creative processes and creative engagement suggest a way to resolve the tension in Marx’s account of human nature, while offering us a vantage point from which to critique and subvert the brutality of our own historical moment.

Worlds apart: Marx, Marcuse and creative engagement

Marx’s early account of socialism as the simultaneous liberation of mankind and nature holds creativity to be mankind’s defining and trans-historical characteristic and the locus of human freedom. Yet, as I argue, Marx’s creativity is predicated upon subject-object relations of domination that engender a pathological relationship between humans and nature, thereby militating against true freedom. This paper will explore Marcuse’s attempt to rehabilitate Marx’s account and will find that Marcuse fails to resolve the crucial tension between subject and object, while his model of freedom contains the possibility for an escalation in the very violations of nature that his account seeks to overcome. Finally, I argue that creative processes and creative engagement suggest a way to resolve the tension in Marx’s account of human nature, while offering us a vantage point from which to critique and subvert the brutality of our own historical moment.

Terror in utopia: Crisis (mis-) management during the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden

This article provides an early account to document Swedens strategy to the COVID-19 pandemic and critically examines the countrys crisis response during the first six months of 2020. Sweden stood out internationally with a hands-off approach that gained much attention. Schools remained open, no lock-downs were underaken, no face masks reccommended, even in care homes, and testing-tracing-isolation was very limited. Although Swedens death rate per million was among the seven highest in the world during the period, there was no change in strategy. The article employs concepts to analyse and understand this peculiar approach and the secutity culture and political culture underpinning it. It uncovers deeper systemic defects and a breakdown in the state functions accompanyied by secrecy and cover-ups, as well as a totalitarian element in the political culture.

Intentionality and the Intentional Object in the Early Husserl

This chapter challenges the widely held view that Husserl’s early account of intentionality was a simple and direct development of Brentano’s theory. Husserl’s theory developed as a response to the account of intentionality in Twardowski’s On the Content and Object of Presentations. The chapter argues that Twardowski thought Brentano’s theory inadequate to address Bolzano’s problem of objectless presentations and that Husserl’s account, which differs from both Brentano’s and Twardowski’s, satisfactorily addressed this problem. Later developments in Husserl’s theory, he concludes, were the result of attempting to address problems other than the Bolzano problem.

Religion, Art, and the Emergence of Absolute Spirit in the Phenomenology

More than a decade and a half before he began to deliver separate series of lectures on aesthetics and religion in Berlin, Hegel offered an early account of art in the context of the “Religion” chapter of Phenomenology of Spirit. This chapter examines the importance of Hegel’s emerging perspective on art as offering a key to three main claims that remain crucial for his mature system: the development of a notion of pre-classical “natural religion,” the interpretation of ancient Greek religion as a “religion of art,” and the fundamentally altered stance that Hegel comes to take toward Christianity in a new account of the relation between religion and philosophy.

Skating before Figures

Today, skating on artificial ice in indoor rinks is a year-round recreational activity enjoyed by people of all ages and abilities as well as a sport both amateur and professional that enjoys unprecedented popularity. But throughout most of its history, ice skating has been an activity limited to short seasons and possible only in countries where lakes, ponds, canals, or other bodies of water provide frozen surfaces on which skaters could enjoy the challenge and excitement of gliding across natural ice. In the ancient world, long before skating became a recreational activity or a sport, those same frozen surfaces provided a different kind of challenge. Passage over them was a necessity for survival during harsh winter months. This chapter traces the history of ice skating before the advent of competitive figure skating. It discusses mythology and the earliest skaters; the earliest skates; an early account of recreational skating; skating as a tool of warfare; figure skating's patron saint, the virgin Lydwina of Schiedam.

F. Mueller, ‘The Murray-scrub, Sketched Botanically’, 1850: A Humboldtian Description of Mallee Vegetation

Although best known as a descriptive botanist, Ferdinand Mueller published an early account of the South Australian Mallee in the style of his scientific hero, Alexander von Humboldt. This vegetation type is found across southern arid Australia and includes several distinctive botanical features that Mueller sought to highlight. While his article was republished twice, each issue was in German and consequently this work has tended to be overlooked in scholarship on the history of Australian botany. Mueller's article is introduced here along with a translation into English for the first time.