CRITICAL SOCIAL THEORY

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2012.08.21 View this Review Online   View Other NDPR Reviews David DeGrazia, Creation Ethics: Reproduction, Genetics, and Quality of Life, Oxford University Press, 2012, 234pp., $55.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780195389630. Reviewed by Bonnie Steinbock, State University of New York, Albany In this excellent book, David DeGrazia addresses ethical and philosophical issues connected with reproduction and genetics. In addition to tackling the philosophical problems, he typically provides fairly detailed policy recommendations for each issue. This is quite a feat in a book not much longer than 200 pages. One of the main themes is human identity, the subject of DeGrazia's previous book, Human Identity and Bioethics (2005). In Chapter 2, he offers a tripartite view of prenatal moral status, which includes identity, the relevance of sentience to moral status, and the harm of death. Identity is crucial, according to DeGrazia, because the question of the moral status of human embryos and fetuses is answered by determining when these "prenatal human beings" become "one of us." To answer that question, we have to know what we essentially are, that is, we need a theory of numerical identity. DeGrazia thinks that a biological view is more plausible than the alternatives, all of which have counterintuitive results. For example, if one thinks that one is essentially a person, defined as a being with the capacity for relatively complex forms of consciousness, such as thought, language, and self-awareness, then this would imply that none of us was ever a newborn. DeGrazia rejects even Jeff McMahan's more plausible variant of the personhood view, which says that we are essentially embodied minds, because it implies that we are not animals, which goes against scientifically informed common sense. Instead, we should accept the view that we are essentially biological organisms, which means that we come into existence when the human organism s

1st International Conference on Nietzsche and the Philosophical Tradition 4th International Workshop on Nietzsche and Kant October, 2nd-4th, 2012 - Belo Horizonte/Brazil - October, 5th-6th, 2012 - Ouro Preto/Brazil 1st International Conference on Nietzsche and the Philosophical Tradition: Nietzsche and the Kantian Tradition The conference will be held at the Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (FAFICH) of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) from the 2nd to the 4th of October, in Belo Horizonte, and at the Instituto de Filosofia, Artes e Cultura (IFAC) of the Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto (UFOP) from the 5th to the 6th October, in Ouro Preto. This conference is intended to be the first in a series of international conferences aiming to discuss Nietzsche's relation to a variety of schools and traditions within the Western philosophy. The series of international conferences on Nietzsche and the Philosophical Tradition is an academic project conceived by GruNie (Nietzsche's Research Group of the UFMG). In its first edition, the International Conference will have as theme Nietzsche and the Kantian Tradition, which shall include not only the different sorts of reception of Kantian themes by Nietzsche (acceptance, assimilation, refusal and reformulation of recognizable Kantian views in the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, morals and aesthetics), but also the role played in this reception by various authors of the nineteenth century German philosophy (for instance, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Albert Lange, Afrikan Spir, Otto Liebmann, Otto Caspari, Gustav Teichmüller and Hermann von Helmholtz); and, finally, an assessment of the relevance of Nietzsche's criticism of certain aspects of the Kantian philosophy in the light of contemporary reinterpretations of Kantianism. Confirmed plenary speakers include: Peter Bornedal (American University of Beirut/Lebanon)

Symposium on "Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Theological-Political Problem and the Problem of Natural Right" Wanneer 25-05-2012 van 14:30 tot 20:00 Waar Kardinaal Mercierzaal Naam Kaspar Bulling Voeg agenda item toe aan kalender vCal iCal Programme 14.30 Wout Cornelissen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam): Strauss' Recovery of the Political: With and Against Schmitt 15.30 Kaspar Bulling (KU Leuven/FWO Vlaanderen): The Tension Between the Universal and the Particular in the Exchange between Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss 16.30 Coffee-break 17.00 Dr. David Janssens (Tilburg University): Holy Moly: The Nature of Natural Right 18.00 Prof. Heinrich Meier (Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung / Universität München): Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: Re-enacting the Confrontation of Political Theology and Political Philosophy 19.15 Reception Practical Information Institute of Philosophy Kardinaal Mercierplein 2 3000 Leuven [Kardinaal Mercierzaal] Organized by: Research in Political Philosophy Leuven (RIPPLE) Registration at: wulf.bulling@hiw.kuleuven.be About the speakers Prof. Heinrich Meier is the editor of Leo Strauss's Gesammelte Schriften in German, and is one of the world's foremost experts on both Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, on both of who he has published widely. His seminal study on Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt (engl.: Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss. The Hidden Dialogue, University of Chicago Press 1995/2006), lastingly altered the reception of Carl Schmitt's thought; his subsequent works on Schmitt (engl.: The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy, UCP 1998) and Strauss (Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem,  CUP 2006) constitute hallmarks of the scholarship on these authors. Prof. Meier will present the latest results of his research into the distinction between political theology and political philosophy, as exemplified by the figures of Schmitt and Strau

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2012.03.34 View this Review Online   View Other NDPR Reviews Martin Jay, Essays from the Edge: Parerga and Paralipomena, University of Virginia Press, 2011, 266pp., $39.50 (hbk), ISBN 9780813931333. Reviewed by John H. Zammito, Rice University In this new collection of essays, Martin Jay frames his long itinerary as a leading intellectual historian of his generation with a set of contributions complementing his many monographic contributions to the field. The title and subtitle foreground the simultaneously peripheral yet penetrating character of these essays. Not only does Jay take up Arthur Schopenhauer's esoteric title, Parerga and Paralipomena, but he situates the edginess of his project in terms of Jacques Derrida's exploration of parerga in Truth in Painting (1978), with its insistence on the blurring of frame and work, hence the incompleteness necessarily attending the latter and the disseminating supplementarity of the former. In all this, Jay shows how situated his own work is not only in the history of thought but in its shifting argots. The publication of such supplementing essays is not new in Jay's oeuvre. Earlier he issued a collection entitled Fin de Siècle Socialism and other Essays (Routledge, 1988) and then Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (Routledge, 1993). All these volumes serve as integument, threading together his hefty monographs without displacing their more intense and focused arguments. They also offer articulations of his sense of the métier of the intellectual historian and of the shifting theoretical frameworks in which that practice has labored in the last decades. The first essays in the new collection go back to Jay's earliest preoccupations -- with the Frankfurt School thinkers Adorno and Benjamin -- and situate his views in terms of the contested notions of authenticity and experience that are as important for his current thinking as they were c

Presentación Estudios de Filosofía es una revista editada por el Seminario de Filosofía del Instituto Riva-Agüero, escuela de altos estudios humanísticos de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, y elaborada con el esfuerzo conjunto de profesores y estudiantes de filosofía de dicha universidad. Su objetivo es crear un espacio para la publicación de textos académicamente valiosos para profesores y estudiantes de la especialidad. Ella contiene tanto trabajos de jóvenes profesores, egresados o alumnos de la Escuela de Graduados, como traducciones de textos filosóficos significativos publicados originalmente en otras lenguas. Además, la revista presenta reseñas, notas bibliográficas y una sección de noticias sobre la actividad filosófica nacional. Finalmente, ella se caracteriza por publicar un repertorio bibliográfico sobre algún filósofo clásico construido sobre la base de artículos de las revistas filosóficas de la Hemeroteca de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, para apoyar la investigación de estudiantes y profesores. ISSN 1028-835X

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Variations. International journal for critical theories publishes authors linked to the Francfurt School and contemporary critical theories (critical sociology, cultural studies, gender studies), making a special effort to translate articles in French and to select unpublished articles 

Publish or Perish The Publish or Perish Book: now $9.95 Kindle, $14.95 PDF, $26.95 paperback How to cite the Publish or Perish software What Publish or Perish is for Training resources Caveat emptor Metrics Download and install Publish or Perish Are you applying for tenure, promotion or a new job? Do you want to include evidence of the impact of your research? Is your work cited in journals which are not ISI listed? Then you might want to try Publish or Perish, designed to help individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage. Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents the following statistics: Total number of papers Total number of citations Average number of citations per paper Average number of citations per author Average number of papers per author Average number of citations per year Hirsch's h-index and related parameters Egghe's g-index The contemporary h-index The age-weighted citation rate Two variations of individual h-indices An analysis of the number of authors per paper. The results are available on-screen and can also be copied to the Windows clipboard (for pasting into other applications) or saved to a variety of output formats (for future reference or further analysis). Publish or Perish includes a detailed help file with search tips and additional information about the citation metrics. Anne-Wil Harzing welcomes user feedback to help her improve the program. Training resources A 15-minute audio & slide presentation on citation analysis and Publish or Perish can be found on slideshare. An excellent guide to Publish or Perish was produced by Stephanie Ow, librarian at the National Institute of Education Singapore. It is based on the PoP helpfile and the Publish or Perish Book, but in addition has lots of annotated screenshots to illustrate author and journals searches, as well as c

The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East Timur Kuran 4 Resenhas Princeton University Press, 04/11/2010 - 405 páginas In the year 1000, the economy of the Middle East was at least as advanced as that of Europe. But by 1800, the region had fallen dramatically behind--in living standards, technology, and economic institutions. In short, the Middle East had failed to modernize economically as the West surged ahead. What caused this long divergence? And why does the Middle East remain drastically underdeveloped compared to the West? In The Long Divergence, one of the world's leading experts on Islamic economic institutions and the economy of the Middle East provides a new answer to these long-debated questions. Timur Kuran argues that what slowed the economic development of the Middle East was not colonialism or geography, still less Muslim attitudes or some incompatibility between Islam and capitalism. Rather, starting around the tenth century, Islamic legal institutions, which had benefitted the Middle Eastern economy in the early centuries of Islam, began to act as a drag on development by slowing or blocking the emergence of central features of modern economic life--including private capital accumulation, corporations, large-scale production, and impersonal exchange. By the nineteenth century, modern economic institutions began to be transplanted to the Middle East, but its economy has not caught up. And there is no quick fix today. Low trust, rampant corruption, and weak civil societies--all characteristic of the region's economies today and all legacies of its economic history--will take generations to overcome.The Long Divergence opens up a frank and honest debate on a crucial issue that even some of the most ardent secularists in the Muslim world have hesitated to discuss.

This site contains details of books published by members of staff at the Centre for Film Studies. For details of books published by St Andrews Film Studies publishing, including the Film Festival Yearbook series,

Since we launched only 5 years ago, our department has enjoyed a vibrant research culture. We have welcomed visiting scholars such as Mette Hjort, Robert Burgoyne (who has joined us as a permanent staff member!) and most recently noted US film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. We offer numerous events to enrich the film culture of the community, both town and gown, offering a range of visiting scholars and film makers as well as film screenings. Developing our committment to film culture, we hosted International Film Festival Workshop which brought together scholars and industry professionals and have started to bring  Film Festivals to St Andrews, including the Italian Film Festival, the French Film Festival and the African Film Festival (part of the Africa in Motion Edinburgh African Film Festival). Meanwhile, we welcome an array of publications, including Dr David Martin-Jones' Scotland: Global Cinema, Dr Elisabetta Girelli's Beauty and the Beast: Italianness in British Cinema, Prof Dina Iordanova and Dr Ragan Rhyne's collection, Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit as well as Film Festival Yearbook 2: Film Festivals and Imagines Communities, edited by Prof Dina Iordanova with Dr Ruby Cheung. Joining this growing list is the newly released Moving People Moving Images, Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe, co-written by Dr William Brown, Prof Dina Iordanova, and Dr Leshu Torchin as well as Professor Robert Burgoyne's The Epic Film. Please visit St Andrews Film Books for more information.  Film Studies at St Andrews Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews is the newest department at Scotland's first university. We are dedicated to the study of cinema from a global perspective. Working at both the undergraduate and postgraduate level, we believe students of cinema should engage with a great diversity of practices, movements, genres, and forms. At St Andrews, we move beyond the canon of Hollywood and European film to examine a wide range of 'm

Nom de Dieu!  This is as unbalanced as a Rush Limbaugh monologue. How about giving equal time to supporters of Physiocracy? -----Original Message----- From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:SHOE@YORKU.CA] On Behalf Of Arnaud Orain Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2012 1:59 PM To: SHOE@YORKU.CA Subject: [SHOE] "Antiphysiocracy" Conference 2013 - Call for papers "Antiphysiocracy" Critiques and opposition to the physiocratic movement, from the end of the 1750s to the mid-19th Century International Conference Lyon (France) - 12-13 April 2013 Organised by: TRIANGLE, UMR CNRS 5206, ENS-LSH, IEP de Lyon, Université Lyon 2 IDHE, UMR CNRS 8533, Université Paris 8 LED, EA 3391, Université Paris 8 Call for papers (Deadline: September 30, 2012) Although the theories of Quesnay, his disciples and the 'dissident' physiocrats have been the focus of many studies, and while the diffusion on an international scale of physiocratic ideas and their successors during the French Revolution and in the first decades of the 19th Century have given rise to conferences and publications, the same cannot be said for the opposition to physiocracy. The theme of this conference is a subject that has remained untouched for some time, and is now becoming a topic of interest again. In fact, a seminar is scheduled to take place in Norway in September 2012, on physiocracy and the opposition that it encountered in Europe until the end of the 18th Century. Continuing and complementing this first event, the international conference in Lyon aims to cover the widest possible range of aspects of antiphysiocracy and opposition to physiocratic principles and practices. We intend to take a long-term perspective, from the foundation of the school to the critiques made of the physiocrats by economists, theoreticians and pamphleteers in the first half of the 19th Century. We also wish to be as comprehensive as possible, not restricting ourselves to economics and history in th

Thinking the Twentieth Century An unprecedented and original history of intellectual life throughout the past century. Thinking the Twentieth Century is the final book of unparalleled historian and indomitable public critic Tony Judt. Where Judt's masterpiece Postwar redefined the history of modern Europe by uniting the stories of its eastern and western halves, Thinking the Twentieth Century unites the century's conflicted intellectual history into a single soaring narrative. The twentieth century comes to life as the age of ideas-a time when, for good or for ill, the thoughts of the few reigned over the lives of the many. Judt presents the triumphs and the failures of public intellectuals, adeptly extracting the essence of their ideas and explaining the risks of their involvement in politics. Spanning the entire era and all currents of thought in a manner never previously attempted, Thinking the Twentieth Century is a triumphant tour de force that restores clarity to the classics of modern thought with the assurance and grace of a master craftsman. The exceptional nature of this work is evident in its very structure-a series of luminous conversations between Judt and his friend and fellow historian Timothy Snyder, grounded in the texts of their trade and focused by the intensity of their vision. Judt's astounding eloquence and range of reference are here on display as never before. Traversing the century's complexities with ease, he and Snyder revive both thoughts and thinkers, guiding us through the debates that made our world. As forgotten treasures are unearthed and overrated thinkers are dismantled, the shape of a century emerges. Judt and Snyder make us partners in their project as we learn the ways to think like a historian or even like a public intellectual. We begin to experience the power of historical perspective for the critique and reform of society, and for the pursuit of the good and the true from day to day. In restoring and indeed exemplifying the

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2012.03.01 View this Review Online   View Other NDPR Reviews Leon Horsten and Richard Pettigrew (eds.), The Continuum Companion to Philosophical Logic, Continuum, 2011, 637pp., $190.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781441154231. Reviewed by Katalin Bimbó, University of Alberta This volume is a collection of papers on a variety of topics that fall into the area of philosophical logic. There are 18 papers with the average length around 30 pages. The editors, who themselves contributed to some of the papers, also provide an introduction. The selection of the topics seems fresh, and the editors make very clear early on that they understand philosophical logic as applications of formal methods in philosophy. This explains the inclusion of not only a paper on the elements of probability theory, but also ones on belief revision (which is more often associated with applications of logic to computer science) and on an approach to formal decision theory (which is frequently thought to belong to economics). A reader looking for information on a particular topic will be well-oriented by the titles of the papers. However, anyone interested in grasping the structure of the volume as a whole and the editors' vision behind the selection of the topics should first read the "Introduction" and the immediately following paper, "Mathematical Methods in Philosophy." The editors see a continuing role for logic within philosophy, saying "logical formalization forces the investigator to make the central philosophical concepts precise." (p. 16) Some readers may find particularly interesting the timelines they chart to represent stages in the history of logic and of modern logic. A topic central to any investigation in logic is logical consequence, and Vann McGee's paper, "Logical Consequence," which starts the non-introductory chapters, is devoted to this topic. McGee gives an overview of the main milestones in the emergence of modern formal logi

Secret Ballot (Raye makhfi)   Iran has elections every four years in which all citizens sixteen years of age and above are entitled to vote in a secret ballot for two candidates from a list of several presidential aspirants. The current liberalization trend in Iran is due to careful selection by voters of the most progressive candidate, though laws of the parliament and actions of the executive branch are subject to veto by the council of ayatollahs. However, not everyone in Iran votes. The Iranian film Secret Ballot (Raye makhfi), directed by Babak Payami, is at once an effort to increased public consciousness about the need to vote and an explanation for nonvoting. The film takes place on the isolated desert island of Kish in the Persian Gulf. An airplane drops a box, which contains voting instructions, ballots, and a ballot box. Soon, a motorboat deposits a female election official (played by Nassim Abdi) on the shore; her job is to collect votes from various villages. In other words, instead of a central polling location for the district to which voters must travel, her job is a kind of affirmative action for voters: She brings the ballots and ballot box to the voters, albeit with the reluctant aid of a vehicle driven by a member of the border patrol (played by Cyrus Abidi) stationed where she landed. Since few citizens in the remote area have ever voted before, her first task is to provide some civic education about the way in which elections enable progress. Then, if she persuades potential voters that they can only have their voice heard regarding their problems by casting ballots, they present their identification cards, receive and mark ballots, and deposit their votes in the ballot box. The film, thus, follows the common formula of a road picture; that is, filmviewers see a slice of life in rural Iran while learning about the pervasive lack of political consciousness in the countryside. Many encounters are quite amusing, as innocent remarks from those