via SHAKESPEARE AND PHILOSOPHY.

Please submit abstracts (500-750 words) on any topic related to the work of Julia Kristeva, to kristevacircle@gmail.com.

We welcome submissions from across all disciplines. Abstracts should be suitable for blind review; include a separate document with name, paper title, affiliation, and contact information. The deadline for abstracts is March 15, 2012.

The%20Kristeva%20Circle%20-%20Call%20For%20Abstracts.

Christian belief suffered a serious setback in the first half of the 19th century, when critics like Ludwig Feuerbach and David Friedrich Strauss suggested that the Bible was a story-book like any other – a multi-authored compilation of fact, fiction, folktale and fantasy, a fabrication on a par with the Iliad, the Aeneid or the Niebelungenlied.

In theory the Christians could have turned the challenge back on their assailants: they could have accepted that their holy books were works of myth-making, while affirming that they told the greatest stories in the world. In practice however the case was not so easy to make. You cannot spin much depth of character or narrative suspense from the conviction that Jesus saves and that all manner of things will be well. Even Charles Dickens was baffled. He was a supreme storyteller, and – though he was not much of a Christian – he wanted his children to know “something about the History of Jesus Christ”. In the late 1840s he wrote The Life of Our Lord and recited it to them at Christmas. “No one ever lived,” he began, “who was so good, so kind, so gentle, and so sorry for all people who did wrong.”

via Jonathan Rée – Dissing God | New Humanist.

Charles Comer: Does anyone teach Levinas in lower level ethics? If so, what reading do you use?

Click here to see his post and to reply

via Albert Camus (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Voices of Sartre, Lukács, Chomsky, Harvey and others in conversation with New Left Review.

The extended critical interview is especially flexible as a form, by turns tenacious and glancing, elliptical or sustained, combining argument and counter-argument, reflection, history and memoir with a freedom normally denied to its subjects in conventional writing formats. Lives on the Leftbrings together sixteen such interviews from New Left Review in a group portrait of intellectual engagement in the twentieth century and since.

Four generations of intellectuals discuss their political histories and present perspectives, and the specialized work for which they are, often, best known. Their recollections span the century from the Great War and the October Revolution to the present, ranging across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Psychoanalysis, philosophy, the gendering of private and public life, capital and class formation, the novel, geography, and language are among the topics of theoretical discussion. At the heart of the collection, in all its diversity of testimony and judgement, is critical experience of communism and the tradition of Marx, relayed now for a new generation of readers.

Lives on the Left includes interviews with Georg Lukács, Hedda Korsch, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dorothy Thompson, Jir?i Pelikan, Ernest Mandel, Luciana Castellina, Lucio Colletti, K. Damodaran, Noam Chomsky, David Harvey, Adolfo Gilly, João Pedro Stédile, Asada Akira, Wang Hui and Giovanni Arrighi.

via Amazon.com: Lives on the Left: Interviews with New Left Review (9781844676996): Francis Mulhern: Books.

I need to address the influence of Louis Althusser.  There is, as Ellen Meiksins Wood has pointed out, a trajectory that can broadly be sketched with Althusser, Poulantzas and Laclau/Mouffe as its three compass points: from Maoism to Eurocommunism to ‘radical democracy’ and the abandonment of class politics as a ‘fundamentalist’, ‘essentialist’ error.

Yet to simply read the failings of his followers back into Althusser’s project would be a travesty as unfair as E P Thompson’s execration of the ‘Stalinist’ Althusser.  It is, in fact, a bitter irony that many of Althusser’s followers ended up in the social-democratic camp, as this was precisely the fate that his audacious and original reconstitution of Marxism was intended to help avoid.  The fact that it didn’t is not necessarily a reflection on the failings of the project; rather, it shows that Althusser was perhaps over-confident in the ability of revolutionary theory to overcome the deficiencies of political practice – particularly on the part of the French communist party (PCF) of which he was a member for most of his political life.  He was to acknowledge a “theoreticist deviation” among his failings when he came to review and rectify his work in later years.

via LENIN’S TOMB: Louis Althusser and socialist strategy.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher, made a rather abrupt staccato observation – a hit-and-run strike worthy of an action hero – very much reminiscent of the fate of Elvis Presley and his Oriental sojourn:

via Slavoj Zizek and Harum Scarum – Opinion – Al Jazeera English.

• In addition to essays doing historical work, we are looking for essays taking a systematic approach or a practical approach (i.e., using or applying the phenomenological method). Final essays should be approximately 7000 words long, including notes.
• The tentative working title of the volume is Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics. We anticipate the volume being published through Continuum International Publishing Group as part of the series, Issues in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics (co-edited by one of the volume’s editors).
• Dates: Extended abstract (400-800 words) or completed paper due January 6, 2012. If accepted, your final essay will be due in July, 2012.

Send your abstract or essay in one file, accompanied by a second file with your name, affiliation, and contact information as well as a brief list of publications (suitable for a “notes on contributors” page) to the editors: Kevin Hermberg (kevin.hermberg@dc.edu) and Paul Gyllenhammer (gyllenhp@stjohns.edu). All files should be sent in .doc, .docx, .rtf, or .pdf format as email attachments. Please address any questions to Kevin or Paul at the email addresses provided.

Becoming Human belongs to two emerging trends in the study of Kant and his early reception: an increasing focus on Kant’s anthropological writings for understanding his philosophy as a whole[1] and a resurgence of interest in German Romanticism.[2] Despite its subtitle – Romantic Anthropology and the Embodiment of Freedom – the bulk of Becoming Human (at least 150 of its 280 pages) focuses on Kant, so it belongs more squarely within the first trend than the second. Wellmon uses previously little-studied works of Kant’s — his Anthropology and writings on race and history — to provoke rereading Kant’s philosophy as concerned with empirically-rooted accounts of cultivating human freedom rather than merely with a priori articulations of fundamental norms.

Unlike other contemporary studies of Kant’s anthropology, however, Wellmon’s work aims to show how “Kant’s pragmatic anthropology failed because it was not dynamic enough” (276). Wellmon can then explain how German Romanticism, through an aesthetic sensitivity to concrete particulars, provides an “endlessly revisable” category of the human that claims the tensions and paradoxes in Kant’s works as bases for “different forms of knowledge” (17).[3] Unfortunately, the book’s critique of Kant is based on exaggerated and incomplete readings of Kant’s corpus, and the Romantic alternatives are developed through readings of texts that are too focused to justify Wellmon’s claims about the prospects for Romantic anthropology. But Wellmon’s book nonetheless helpfully moves contemporary debate forward by showing that the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century reception of Kant included an important response to the empirically informed Kant that is gaining prominence today.

via Becoming Human: Romantic Anthropology and the Embodiment of Freedom // Reviews // Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame.