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The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, Volume I: Culture, Philosophy, and Religion

John J. McDermott (ed.)

Now back in print, and in paperback, these two classic volumes illustrate the scope and quality of Josiah Royce's thought, providing the most comprehensive selection of his writings currently ... More

Now back in print, and in paperback, these two classic volumes illustrate the scope and quality of Josiah Royce's thought, providing the most comprehensive selection of his writings currently available. They offer a detailed presentation of the viable relationship Royce forged between the local experience of community and the demands of a philosophical and scientific vision of the human situation. The selections reprinted here are basic to any understanding of Royce's thought and its pressing relevance to contemporary cultural, moral, and religious issues.Less

The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, Volume II: Logic, Loyalty, and Community

John J. McDermott (ed.)

Now back in print, and in paperback, these two classic volumes illustrate the scope and quality of Josiah Royce's thought, providing the most comprehensive selection of his writings currently ... More

Now back in print, and in paperback, these two classic volumes illustrate the scope and quality of Josiah Royce's thought, providing the most comprehensive selection of his writings currently available. They offer a detailed presentation of the viable relationship Royce forged between the local experience of community and the demands of a philosophical and scientific vision of the human situation. The selections reprinted here are basic to any understanding of Royce's thought and its pressing relevance to contemporary cultural, moral, and religious issues.Less

Charles Peirce's Theory of Scientific Method

Francis E. Reilly

This book is an attempt to understand a significant part of the complex thought of CharlesSanders Peirce, especially in those areas which interested him most: scientific method and related ... More

This book is an attempt to understand a significant part of the complex thought of CharlesSanders Peirce, especially in those areas which interested him most: scientific method and related philosophical questions. It is organized primarily from Peirce's own writings, taking chronological settings into account where appropriate, and pointing out the close connections of several major themes in Peirce's work which show the rich diversity of his thought and its systematic unity. Following an introductory sketch of Peirce the thinking and writer is a study of the spirit and phases of scientific inquiry, and a consideration of its relevance to certain outstanding philosophical views which Peirce held. This double approach is necessary because his views on scientific method are interlaced with a profound and elaborate philosophy of the cosmos. Peirce's thought is unusually close-knit, and his difficulty as a writer lies in his inability to achieve a partial focus without bringing into view numerous connections and relations with the whole picture of reality. This book attempts to understand Peirce as Peirce intended himself to be understood, and has presented what the author believes Peirce's philosophy of scientific method to be. The book singles out for praise Peirce's Greek insistence on the primacy of theoretical knowledge and his almost Teilhardian synthesis of evolutionary themes. Primarily philosophical, this volume analyzes Peirce's thought using a theory of knowledge and metaphysics rather than formal logic.Less

Charles S. Peirce: On Norms and Ideals

Vincent G. Potter

In recent years, Charles Sanders Peirce has emerged as one of America's major philosophical thinkers. His work has invited philosophical reflection about those basic issues that inevitably confront ... More

In recent years, Charles Sanders Peirce has emerged as one of America's major philosophical thinkers. His work has invited philosophical reflection about those basic issues that inevitably confront us as human beings, especially in an age of science. Peirce's concern for experience, for what is actually encountered, means that his philosophy forms a reflective commentary on actual life and on the world in which it is lived. This book argues that Peirce's doctrine of the normative sciences is essential to his pragmatism. No part of Peirce's philosophy is bolder than his attempt to establish esthetics, ethics, and logic as the three normative sciences and to argue for the priority of esthetics among the trio. The book shows that Pierce took seriously the trinity of normative sciences and demonstrates that these categories apply both to the conduct of man and to the workings of the cosmos. It combines sympathetic and informed exposition with straightforward criticism and deals with the gaps and inconsistencies in Peirce's thought. It shows that Peirce was above all a cosmological and ontological thinker, one who combined science both as a method and as result with a conception of reasonable actions to form a comprehensive theory of reality. Peirce's pragmatism, is not a glorification of action but rather a theory of the dynamic nature of things in which the “ideal” dimension of reality has genuine power for directing the cosmic order, including man, toward reasonable goals.Less

Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War North

Robert M. Sandow (ed.)

This collection of ten essays explores the contested meanings of patriotismin the Civil War North. The words “loyalty” and “duty” vibrated across Northern society but what did they mean? How were ... More

This collection of ten essays explores the contested meanings of patriotismin the Civil War North. The words “loyalty” and “duty” vibrated across Northern society but what did they mean? How were they to be demonstrated? The central goal of this study is to scrutinize how notions of loyalty were debated and defined under the pressures of a long and destructive war. The chapters within eavesdrop on conversations about loyalty in many contexts within Northern society. Some of those settings offer a familiar frame of reference, surveying the newspapers, pamphlets, letters, and speeches that evidence partisan definitions of loyalty. These scholars, however, strain to hear those voices not just in the statehouses and capital buildings but in the churches, colleges, workshops, city streets, military camps, and even bedrooms of ordinary northern people. What emerges is not a unified consensus on loyal actions and values but a patchwork of experiences in which the meaning of loyalty was often stretched and strained for differing and sometimes conflicting purposes.Less

Conversion in American Philosophy: Exploring the Practice of Transformation

Roger A. Ward

This fresh, provocative account of the American philosophical tradition explores the work of key thinkers through an innovative and counterintuitive lens: religious conversion. From Jonathan Edwards ... More

This fresh, provocative account of the American philosophical tradition explores the work of key thinkers through an innovative and counterintuitive lens: religious conversion. From Jonathan Edwards to Cornel West, the book threads the history of American thought into an extended, multivalent encounter with the religious experience. Looking at John Dewey, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, Richard Rorty, Robert S. Corrington, and other thinkers, the book demonstrates that religious themes have deeply influenced the development of American philosophy. This innovative reading of the American philosophical tradition will be welcomed not only by philosophers, but also by historians and other students of America’s religious, intellectual, and cultural legacy.Less

Deconstructing the Death Penalty: Derrida's Seminars and the New Abolitionism

Kelly Oliver and Stephanie Straub (eds)

This volume represents the first collection of essays devoted exclusively to Jacques Derrida's Death Penalty Seminars, conducted from 1999 to 2001. The volume includes essays from a range of scholars ... More

This volume represents the first collection of essays devoted exclusively to Jacques Derrida's Death Penalty Seminars, conducted from 1999 to 2001. The volume includes essays from a range of scholars working in philosophy, law, Francophone studies, and comparative literature, including established Derridians, activist scholars, and emerging scholars. These essays attempt to elucidate and expand upon Derrida's deconstruction of the theologico-political logic of the death penalty in order to construct a new form of abolitionism, one not rooted in the problematic logics of sovereign power. These essays provide remarkable insight into Derrida’s ethical and political projects; this volume will not only explore the implications of Derrida’s thought on capital punishment and mass incarceration, but will also help to further elucidate the philosophical groundwork for his later deconstructions of sovereign power and the human/animal divide. Because Derrida is deconstructing the logic of the death penalty, rather than the death penalty itself, his seminars will prove useful to scholars and activists opposing all forms of state sanctioned killing. In compiling this volume, our goals were twofold: first, to make a case for Derrida's continuing importance in debates on capital punishment, mass incarceration, and police brutality, and second, to construct a new, versatile abolitionism, one capable of confronting all forms the death penalty might take.Less

Dewey’s Metaphysics: Form and Being in the Philosophy of John Dewey

Raymond D. Boisvert

This book presents an interpetation of John Dewey’s metahysics. Dewey spent seventy years of his life in philosophical activity. The book covers the three periods of Dewey’s career. The first is the ... More

This book presents an interpetation of John Dewey’s metahysics. Dewey spent seventy years of his life in philosophical activity. The book covers the three periods of Dewey’s career. The first is the idealistic phase, then the experimental phase, and finally the naturalistic phase. The book begins by discussing responses to two major problems in Deweyan scholarship and to a third issue of a more purely theoretical character. There are scholars who dismiss the Deweyan attempt at formulating a metaphysics as superficial, irrelevant, and contradictory. There are others who provide a caricature of Deweyan metaphysics as describing a natural world given over solely to flux, process, and change. There there is also a general need for contemporary philosophers to deal with the issues encapsulated in the term form. The book concludes that Dewey’s metahysics presented in this book has a direct bearing on a much-discussed topic in contemporary philosophical literature: the dispute between foundationalists and anti-foundationalists.Less

Experiments in Exile: C. L. R. James, Helio Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness

Laura Harris

Comparing the radical aesthetic and social experiments undertaken by two exile intellectuals, James and Oiticica, Harris chart a desire in their work to formulate alternative theories of citizenship, ... More

Comparing the radical aesthetic and social experiments undertaken by two exile intellectuals, James and Oiticica, Harris chart a desire in their work to formulate alternative theories of citizenship, wherein common reception of popular cultural forms is linked to a potentially expanded, non-exclusive polity. By carefully analyzing the materiality of the multiply-lined, multiply voiced writing of the “undocuments” that record these social experiments and relay their prophetic descriptions of and instructions for the new social worlds they wished to forge and inhabit, however, Harris argue that their projects ultimately challenge rather than seek to rehabilitate normative conceptions of citizens and polities as well as authors and artworks. James and Oiticica’s experiments recall the insurgent sociality of “the motley crew” historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker describe in The Many-Headed Hydra, their study of the trans-Atlantic, cross-gendered, multi-racial working class of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reading James’s and Oiticica’s projects against the grain of Linebaugh and Rediker’s inability to find evidence of that sociality’s persistence or futurity, Harris show how James and Oiticica gravitate toward and seek to relay the ongoing renewal of dissident, dissonant social forms, which are for them always also aesthetic forms, in the barrack-yards of Port-of-Spain and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the assembly lines of Detroit and the streets of the New York. The formal openness and performative multiplicity that manifests itself at the place where writing and organizing converge invokes that sociality and provokes its ongoing re-invention. Their writing extends a radical, collective Afro-diasporic intellectuality, an aesthetic sociality of blackness, where blackness is understood not as the eclipse, but the ongoing transformative conservation of the motley crew’s multi-raciality. Blackness is further instantiated in the interracial and queer sexual relations, and in a new sexual metaphorics of production and reproduction, whose disruption and reconfiguration of gender structures the collaborations from which James’s and Oiticica’s undocuments emerge, orienting them towards new forms of social, aesthetic and intellectual life.Less

Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in Perpetual War

Rebecca A. Adelman

Figuring Violence catalogs the affects that define the latter stages of the war on terror and the imaginative work that underpins them. These affects—apprehension, affection, admiration, gratitude, ... More

Figuring Violence catalogs the affects that define the latter stages of the war on terror and the imaginative work that underpins them. These affects—apprehension, affection, admiration, gratitude, pity, and righteous anger—are far more pleasurable and durable than their predecessors. Hence, they are deeply compatible with the ambitions of a state embroiling itself in a perpetual and essentially unwinnable war. Surveying the cultural landscape of this sprawling conflict, Figuring Violence reveals the varied mechanisms by which these affects have been militarized. This book tracks their convergences around six types of beings: civilian children, military children, military spouses, veterans with PTSD and TBI, Guantánamo detainees, and military dogs. All of these groups have become preferred objects of sentiment in wartime public culture, but they also have in common their status as political subjects who are partially or fully unknowable. They become visible to outsiders through a range of mediated and imaginative practices that are ostensibly motivated by concern or compassion. However, these practices actually function to reduce these beings to abstracted figures and so make them easy targets for affective investment. This is a paradoxical and conditional form of recognition that eclipses the actual beings upon whom those figures are patterned, silencing their political subjectivities and obscuring their suffering. As a result, they are erased and rendered hypervisible at once. Figuring Violence demonstrates that this dynamic ultimately propagates the very militarism that begets their victimization.Less

Goods: Advertising, Urban Space, and the Moral Law of the Image

Emanuele Coccia

Objects are all around us—and images of objects, advertisements for objects. Things are no longer merely purely physical or economic entities: within the visual economy of advertising, they are ... More

Objects are all around us—and images of objects, advertisements for objects. Things are no longer merely purely physical or economic entities: within the visual economy of advertising, they are inescapably moral. Any object, regardless of its nature, can for at least a moment aspire to be “good,” can become not only an object of value but also a complex of possible happiness, a moral source of perfection for any one of us. This book argues that our relation to things is what makes us human. It shows how objects become the medium through which a city enunciates its ethos, making an ethical life available to those who live among them. Humans have revealed themselves as organisms that are ethically inseparable from the very things they produce, exchange, and desire. The alienation commodities cause and express is moral rather than economic or social; we need our own products not just to survive biologically or to improve the physical conditions of our existence, but to live morally. Ultimately, this book offers a rethinking of the power of images. Through images, we already live another form of political life, which has very little to do with the one invented and formalized by the legal tradition. All we need to do is to recognize it. Advertising and fashion are just the primitive, sometimes grotesque, but ultimately irrepressible prefiguration of the new politics to come.Less

The Guide to Gethsemane: Anxiety, Suffering, Death

Emmanuel Falque

Already widely debated upon its publication in French, this book offers a provocative account of Christ’s Passion in terms not of faith but of a “credible Christianity” that can remain meaningful to ... More

Already widely debated upon its publication in French, this book offers a provocative account of Christ’s Passion in terms not of faith but of a “credible Christianity” that can remain meaningful to nonbelievers. For Falque, anxiety, suffering, and death are not simply the “ills” of our society but the essential horizon of what we confront as humans. Doubtful of Heidegger’s famous statement that the notion of salvation renders Christians unable authentically to experience anxiety in the face of death, Falque explores the Passion with a radical emphasis on the physicality and corporeality of Christ’s suffering and death, and on continuities with the mortality of our bodies. Written in the wake of a friend’s death, Falques’s study is theologically and philosophically rigorous, yet engagingly written and deeply humane.Less

Inner Animalities: Theology and the End of the Human

Eric Daryl Meyer

Inner Animalities analyses the human-animal distinction as a discursive theme running ubiquitously through Christian theological anthropology. Arguing that historically pervasive disavowals of human ... More

Inner Animalities analyses the human-animal distinction as a discursive theme running ubiquitously through Christian theological anthropology. Arguing that historically pervasive disavowals of human animality create ineradicable contradictions within accounts of human life and also install an anti-ecological impulse at the heart of Christian theology, this project constructively imagines a theological anthropology centered upon human commonality with fellow creatures. This constructive work perceives divine grace at work in human instincts, desires, and enmeshment in quotidian relations (rather than in rationality, language, and transcendence). The broadest arc of the book’s argument is that only a thickly articulated self-understanding rooted in creaturely commonality can provide an adequate basis for responding to ongoing ecological degradation. The conjunction of Critical Animal Studies with constructive theology in this study, then, aims to generate a new approach to ecological theology. The book’s analysis places ancient Christians such as Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus along with contemporary theologians such as Karl Rahner and Wolfhart Pannenberg in critical conversation with theorists of human-animal relations from Jacques Derrida and Kelly Oliver to Valerie Plumwood and Giorgio Agamben.Less

Jews and the Ends of Theory

Shai Ginsburg, Martin Land, and Jonathan Boyarin (eds)

Theory has often been coded as “Jewish”—not merely because Jewish intellectuals have been central participants, but also, this book argues, because certain problematics of modern Jewishness enrich ... More

Theory has often been coded as “Jewish”—not merely because Jewish intellectuals have been central participants, but also, this book argues, because certain problematics of modern Jewishness enrich theoretical questions across the humanities. In the range of violence and agency that can attend the appellation “Jew,” Jewishness is revealed as a rhetorical and not just social fact, one tied to profound questions of power, subjectivity, identity, figuration, language, and relation that are also central to modern theory and modern politics. Understanding Jewishness in its fluidity, this book helps articulate theory's potential to mediate pessimistic and utopian impulses, experiences, and realities.Less

Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty

Peggy Kamuf

This book pursues Derrida’s assertion, in The Death Penalty, Volume I, that “the modern history of the institution named literature in Europe over the last three or four centuries is contemporary ... More

This book pursues Derrida’s assertion, in The Death Penalty, Volume I, that “the modern history of the institution named literature in Europe over the last three or four centuries is contemporary with and indissociable from a contestation of the death penalty.” The main question this book poses is: How does literature contest the death penalty today, particularly in the United States where it remains the last of its kind, a Christian-inspired death penalty in what professes to be a democracy? What resources do fiction, narrative, and poetic language supply in the age of the remains of the death penalty? These are among the questions that guide the analyses of four literary works, each a depiction or an account of an execution, in the search for deconstructive leverage on the concepts that prop up capital punishment. Different pertinent features are isolated in these texts: the “mysteries” of literary or poetic witness; the publicness of punishment in an era of secrecy around the death penalty; the undecidable difference between death by capital punishment and by suicide—a difference that Kant enforces and that Derrida contests; and even the collapse of the distinction between the sovereign powers to put to death and to pardon, a possibility that is shown up by a poetic work when, performatively, it “plays the law.” In relation to the death penalties they represent, these literary survivals may be seen as the ashes or remains of the phantasm that the death penalty has always been, the phantasm of calculating and thus ending finitude.Less

Mapping Memory: Visuality, Affect, and Embodied Politics in the Americas

Kaitlin M. Murphy

In Mapping Memory: Visuality, Affect, and Embodied Politics in the Americas, Kaitlin M. Murphy analyzes a range of visual memory practices that have emerged in opposition to political discourses and ... More

In Mapping Memory: Visuality, Affect, and Embodied Politics in the Americas, Kaitlin M. Murphy analyzes a range of visual memory practices that have emerged in opposition to political discourses and visual economies that suppress certain subjects and overlook past and present human rights abuses. From the Southern Cone to Central America and the US-Mexico borderlands, and across documentary film, photography, performance, memory sites, and new media, she compares how these visual texts use memory as a form of contemporary intervention. Interweaving visual and performance theory with memory and affect, Murphy develops new frameworks for analyzing how visual culture performs as an embodied agent of memory and witnessing. She argues that visuality is inherently performative; and analyzing the performative elements, or strategies, of visual texts—such as embodiment, reperformance, reenactment, haunting, and the performance of material objects and places—elucidates how memory is both anchored into and extracted from specific bodies, objects, and places. Murphy progressively develops the theory of memory mapping, defined as the visual process of representing the affective, sensorial, polyvocal, and temporally layered relationship between past and present, anchored within the specificities of place. Ultimately, by exploring how memory is “mapped” across a range of sites and mediums, Murphy argues that memory mapping is a visual strategy for producing new temporal and spatial arrangements of knowledge and memory that function as counter-practices to official narratives that often neglect or designate as transgressive certain memories or experiences.Less

Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography

Christophe Bident

Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was one of the most important writers of the French twentieth century. His novels, shorter narratives, literary criticism, and fragmentary texts exercised great influence ... More

Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was one of the most important writers of the French twentieth century. His novels, shorter narratives, literary criticism, and fragmentary texts exercised great influence over writers, artists, and philosophers. As a journalist and political activist, he had a public side that matched his secret and mysterious side as someone who refused to be interviewed or photographed. Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography, the only full-length account of Blanchot’s itinerary, therefore attempts to carry out an impossible bio-graphy. It does so by drawing on unpublished letters and on interviews with the writer’s very close friends. Beyond this, it is a theoretical work that follows the genealogy of a thinking that is at once imaginative and speculative, at once aligned with literary modernity and a close companion and friend of philosophy. It is a historical work, unpacking the ‘transformation of convictions’ of an author who moved from the far-right in the 1930s to the far-left in the 1950s and after. And it is of course a biography, showing the strong links between the author’s life and an œuvre which nonetheless aspires to anonymity. In these ways, this book claims that Blanchot’s is a life that has become the œuvre, become a literature that bears the traces of that life secretly, even if they are what drives it. Blanchot’s œuvre is reconstituted in all its contexts, at a time when the critics who attack it, just like those who elevate it in unthinking fascination, often produce one-dimensional readings.Less

The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century

Susan Zieger

The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed a mass media revolution in the widespread explosion of print; this book shows how the habits of consuming printed ephemera are still with us, even ... More

The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed a mass media revolution in the widespread explosion of print; this book shows how the habits of consuming printed ephemera are still with us, even as pixels supersede paper. Trivial, disposable printed items, from temperance medals and cigarette cards to cartoons and even novels tell us much about nineteenth-century mediated experience, and our own. For a fresh perspective on media consumption, the book examines affect, a dynamic quality of human mind and body that links emotion to cognition, self to other, and self to environment. Affect shows how mass-mediated material began to dwell in the mind – less so the rational mind of egoistic cognition, than the embodied mind of daydreaming, reverie, and feeling. In such fugitive spaces, the sovereign individual gives way to community and inter-subjectivity as he or she recreates the social body. The book makes visible an array of positions, habitable by people of different classes, genders, ages, and sexualities, such as the mass live audience member, the enchanted viewer, the information “addict,” the self-fashioner, the collector, and the re-player of experience. These positions characterize an earlier moment in a genealogy of media consumption that endures today. The book describes them by putting disposable print forms into conversation with performance, visual culture, literary fantasy, and media theories. Demonstrating the recursive relations between affects and mass media, it reveals the cultural and psychological contours of ephemeral experience.Less

The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead's Process and Reality

Elizabeth M. Kraus

This book styles itself as “a Sherpa guide to Process and Reality, whose function is to assist the serious reader in grasping the meaning of the text and to prevent falls into misinterpretation.” ... More

This book styles itself as “a Sherpa guide to Process and Reality, whose function is to assist the serious reader in grasping the meaning of the text and to prevent falls into misinterpretation.” Although originally published in 1925, Process and Reality has perhaps even more relevance to the contemporary scene in physics, biology, psychology, and the social sciences than it had in the mid-twenties. Hence, its internal difficulty, its quasi-inaccessibility, is all the more tragic, since, unlike most metaphysical endeavors, it is capable of interpreting and unifying theories in the above sciences in terms of an organic world view, instead of selecting one theory as the paradigm and reducing all others to it. Because Alfred North Whitehead is so crucial to modern philosophy, this book plays an important role in making Process and Reality accessible to a wider readership.Less

Oh Capitano!: Celso Cesare Moreno - Adventurer, Cheater, and Scoundrel on Four Continents

Rudolph J. Vecoli and Francesco Durante

Donna R. Gabaccia (ed.)

Italian adventurer and sea captain Celso Cesare Moreno traveled the world lying, scheming, and building an extensive patron/client network to establish his reputation as a middleman and person of ... More

Italian adventurer and sea captain Celso Cesare Moreno traveled the world lying, scheming, and building an extensive patron/client network to establish his reputation as a middleman and person of significance. Through his machinations, Moreno became a critical player in the expansion of western trade and imperialism in Asia, the trafficking of migrant workers and children in the Atlantic, the conflicts of Americans and Native Hawaiians over the fate of Hawaii, and the imperial competitions of French, British, Italian, and American governments in an important era of imperial expansion during the nineteenth century. This book teases out Moreno's enormous peculiarities and fascination as well as his significance. It examines how he repeatedly sought a role at the center of a globalizing world with gusto and had no qualms about lying or betraying others. Dragged by his uncontrollable polemical passions, the old Captain died alone, unloved by anyone and with no meaningful relations to others. With its focus on Moreno, this book illustrates some of the most puzzling cultural traits of emigrant Italian elites. Called a “carpetbagger,” “land pirate,” “extinct volcano,” among many other derogatory monikers, Celso emerges in this fascinating biography as a multifaceted, chameleon-like personality not reducible to a single epithet.Less