Animal Bodies, Renaissance Cultureexamines how the shared embodied existence of early modern human and nonhuman animals challenged the establishment of species distinctions. The material conditions ...of the early modern world brought humans and animals into complex interspecies relationships that have not been fully accounted for in critical readings of the period's philosophical, scientific, or literary representations of animals. Where such prior readings have focused on the role of reason in debates about human exceptionalism, this book turns instead to a series of cultural sites in which we find animal and human bodies sharing environments, mutually transforming and defining one another's lives. To uncover the animal body's role in anatomy, eroticism, architecture, labor, and consumption, Karen Raber analyzes canonical works including More'sUtopia, Shakespeare'sHamletandRomeo and Juliet, and Sidney's poetry, situating them among readings of human and equine anatomical texts, medical recipes, theories of architecture and urban design, husbandry manuals, and horsemanship treatises. Raber reconsiders interactions between environment, body, and consciousness that we find in early modern human-animal relations. Scholars of the Renaissance period recognized animals' fundamental role in fashioning what we call "culture," she demonstrates, providing historical narratives about embodiment and the cultural constructions of species difference that are often overlooked in ecocritical and posthumanist theory that attempts to address the "question of the animal."
In this groundbreaking book, David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution. The total work of art is usually ...understood as the intention to reunite the arts into the one integrated whole, but it is also tied from the beginning to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. The synthesis of the arts in the service of social and cultural regeneration was a particularly German dream, which made Wagner and Nietzsche the other center of aesthetic modernism alongside Baudelaire and Mallarmé.
The history and theory of the total work of art pose a whole series of questions not only to aesthetic modernism and its utopias but also to the whole epoch from the French Revolution to the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. The total work of art indicates the need to revisit key assumptions of modernism, such as the foregrounding of the autonomy and separation of the arts at the expense of the countertendencies to the reunion of the arts, and cuts across the neat equation of avant-gardism with progress and deconstructs the familiar left-right divide between revolution and reaction, the modern and the antimodern. Situated at the interface between art, religion, and politics, the total work of art invites us to rethink the relationship between art and religion and art and politics in European modernism.
In a major departure from the existing literature David Roberts argues for twin lineages of the total work, a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic, which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aesthetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the crisis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890s forward.
When is political compromise acceptable--and when is it fundamentally rotten, something we should never accept, come what may? What if a rotten compromise is politically necessary? Compromise is a ...great political virtue, especially for the sake of peace. But, as Avishai Margalit argues, there are moral limits to acceptable compromise even for peace. But just what are those limits? At what point does peace secured with compromise become unjust? Focusing attention on vitally important questions that have received surprisingly little attention, Margalit argues that we should be concerned not only with what makes a just war, but also with what kind of compromise allows for a just peace.
Sous couleur de jouer : la formule est de Claude Lévi-Strauss. Elle donne à croire que la conduite ludique dissimule sa véritable essence. Que fait celui dont on dit qu’il joue ? Au départ de ce ...livre, il y a le refus de prendre le jeu pour quelque chose qui va de soi, pour une manière d’être et de faire immédiatement abordable et déchiffrable : l’intention de le considérer plutôt comme une attitude mentale, une aventure intérieure presque impossible à saisir, que l’on ne parvient à identifier, à désigner, à décrire qu’au moyen de mots. Nul ne se comprend, ne se fait comprendre qu’en passant par des façons de dire (et de penser) tirées de l’expérience commune. La Psyché de Pierre Corneille, dans son trouble, découvre cette évidence : Et je dirais que je vous aime, Seigneur, si je savais ce que c’est que d’aimer. Ainsi, le joueur ne peut dire qu’il joue, ne peut dire s’il joue – et d’abord ne peut jouer qu’à la condition de savoir ce que c’est que le jeu. Rencontrée en cet étrange détour, l’idée de Jeu relève plus d’une approche anthropologique que d’une élucidation d’ordre psychologique. Quand on s’attache à traiter de l’indicible, ne convient-il pas, au moins pour commencer, de prêter attention à ce qui s’en dit ? Publié initialement par José Corti en 1989, épuisé depuis plusieurs années, il était urgent de rééditer cet ouvrage fondamental de Jacques Henriot, permettant tout autant de penser le jeu que de critiquer des pensées trop rapides pour analyser ce qui fait jeu et, peut-être plus, le jouer.
What is mathematics about? And if it is about some sort of mathematical reality, how can we have access to it? This is the problem raised by Plato, which still today is the subject of lively ...philosophical disputes. This book traces the history of the problem, from its origins to its contemporary treatment. It discusses the answers given by Aristotle, Proclus and Kant, through Frege's and Russell's versions of logicism, Hilbert's formalism, Godel's platonism, up to the the current debate on Benacerraf's dilemma and the indispensability argument. Through the considerations of themes in the philosophy of language, ontology, and the philosophy of science, the book aims at offering an historically-informed introduction to the philosophy of mathematics, approached through the lenses of its most fundamental problem.
h4Offers a new systematic account of the philosophical potential of Saint Paul's letters/h4ulliShows the present-day philosophical importance of the letters of the founder of Christianity/liliArgues ...that important ontological problems concerning dualism, nihilism and the event appear in an unexpected light when read through a Pauline lens/liliShows a new philosophical appraisal of the Pauline conception of faith in terms of an art of living/liliOffers a new systematic approach to the intriguing present-day philosophical turn to the Letters of Saint Paul in the works of Heidegger, Taubes, Badiou, Agamben and Zizek/liliDiscusses how Saint Paul allows philosophers to rethink the notions of law and community giving rise to a new type of political philosophy/li/ulpThe re-examination of Saint Paul's letters in contemporary European philosophy is one of the most important developments at the crossroads of philosophy and theology today./ppIn discussion with a range of authors contributing to this movement, including Heidegger, Badiou, Agamben, and Taubes, Gert-Jan van der Heiden offers a new and systematic account of the philosophical potential of these letters. He does so by uncovering a dialectic of exception, which revolves around the Pauline notions of the outcast and the spirit./ppAgainst a general tendency to understand the significance of Paul in politico-theological terms alone, van der Heiden focuses on the ontological potential of Saint Paul's letters by elucidating what they imply for our thinking about (non-)beings, world, event, time, exception and spirit. Ultimately, he shows how this dialectic implies a new understanding of being and thinking and gives rise to a new art of living, both ethically and politically./p
Contemporary theorists use the term “social construction” with the aim of exposing how what's purportedly “natural” is often at least partly social and, more specifically, how this masking of the ...social is politically significant. The chapters in this book draw on insights from feminist and critical race theory to develop the idea that gender and race are positions within a structure of social relations. On this interpretation, the point of saying that gender and race are socially constructed is not to make a causal claim about the origins of our concepts of gender and race, or to take a stand in the nature/nurture debate, but to locate these categories within a realist social ontology. This is politically important, for by theorizing how gender and race fit within different structures of social relations we are better able to identify and combat forms of systematic injustice. The central chapters of the book offer critical social realist accounts of gender and race. These accounts function as case studies for a broader approach that draws upon notions of ideology, practice, and social structure developed through interdisciplinary engagement with research in social science. Ideology, on the proposed view, is a relatively stable set of shared dispositions to respond to the world, often in ways that also shape the world to evoke those very dispositions. This looping of our dispositions through the material world enables the social to appear natural. Additional chapters in the book situate a critical realist approach in relation to philosophical methodology, and to debates in analytic metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language.
Ordering Knowledge Corneanu, Sorana; Hendriksen, Marieke M. A; Novgorodova, Daria ...
05/2023
Book
As the world struggles to come to grips with the rise of new populisms that call into question the legitimacy of technocratic expertise, the historical understanding of the processes by which the ...characteristically modern modes of meaning-making came into existence has never been so important. Politically-motivated attacks on ‘science’ are difficult to counter in a climate of generalised scepticism for all forms of authority, but cultural historians have an important part to play by offering an adequate historical framing for the terms of the debate. The origins of modernity are routinely associated with the empirical attitudes of the ‘scientific revolution’ and the liberal rationalism of the Enlightenment; but this story tends to be studied either conceptually by historians of science, or politically by cultural historians. For it to make sense as the backdrop to modern debates, the political and epistemological dimensions of the emergence of modernity need to be put more firmly into contact with one another. This book attempts to do so by focusing on the theme of the emergence of disciplinarity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Repenser la nature Angelini, Andrea; Arnaud, Julie; Balzaretti, Ugo ...
04/2023
Book
Dans une période postpandémique, marquée par de multiples crises écologiques, la nécessité de repenser le rapport de l’être humain avec la nature est au centre non seulement de l’actualité politique, ...mais aussi de la réflexion philosophique. Pourtant, la prise en compte de la place de l’humain dans la nature comme de celle de la nature dans l’être humain n’est pas totalement nouvelle au xxie siècle. Ce geste théorique a été l’horizon philosophique commun à trois courants de pensée du début du siècle précédent : le pragmatisme américain, la philosophie de la vie française et l’anthropologie philosophique allemande, dont respectivement John Dewey, Georges Canguilhem et Helmuth Plessner ont été des représentants éminents. En dépit de leurs différences, ces trois auteurs partagent la volonté d’élaborer un naturalisme alternatif, afin de penser l’entrelacement entre nature et culture sans réduire l’une à l’autre. Ainsi, ils ouvrent la possibilité d’une troisième voie entre deux positions symétriques, un naturalisme réductionniste et un antinaturalisme radical, qui manquent tous les deux la relation dynamique qui s’institue entre ces deux pôles. La conviction qui anime les contributions réunies dans ce volume est qu’un détour historique par les pensées de Dewey, Canguilhem et Plessner permet de faire émerger des outils théoriques et critiques féconds pour repenser la nature, outils que la réflexion contemporaine gagnerait à réactiver.
