An interesting and worrying discussion has been going on over at New APPS about OUP’s use of a ‘work for hire’ clause in contracts for contributors to certain academic publications. As contributors to the discussion make clear, this looks to be a strategic decision on the part of OUP, and one with important consequences for academics’ rights in publishing our work. Well worth keeping abreast of this one. See the relevant posts here, here and here.
Glancing again over Alain Badiou’s Deleuze book, and came across this great quotation about the virtual eternity of the great ideas of the history of philosophy, their persistence as powers able to be actualised and revivified in all manner of new contexts:
Deleuze’s “historian” style cuts across the classical opposition between objectivist history and interpretative history. It is a style in which the most precise knowledge of texts and contexts is inseparable from the movement by which they are drawn toward Deleuze. It partakes neither of archives nor of hermeneutics. For at issue is one things alone, namely, that great conceptual creations return. And the singularity of Deleuze functions as a power of reception for this return. This is why his philosophy can restore Spinoza, Bergson, or Nietzsche to their exact eternity, which is never anything other than that of their power – and as such, an eternity that is living only when actualized in living thought.
(A. Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. by L. Burchill [Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 2000], p. 99)
Adorno seems to have hit the experience of doing a PhD in the humanities on the head in his essay on ‘Free Time’ (in The Culture Industry, Routledge, 2001):
Free time is shackled to its opposite. (187)
And again:
Free time [...] does not merely stand in opposition to labour. [For the stressed-out PhD student,] free time is nothing more than a shadowy continuation of labour. (194)
Sound familiar…?
The ever insightful, incisive and entertaining Prof. Raymond Tallis will give the Francis Bacon Lecture 2012 on 29th February at the University of Hertfordshire. The lecture will be titled ‘Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Mankind’ and will discuss themes from Tallis’s latest publication of the same title. Here’s the blurb:
Neuromania is based on the incorrect notion that human consciousness is identical with activity in the brain, that people are their brains, and that societies are best understood as collections of brains. While the brain is a necessary condition of every aspect of human consciousness, it is not a sufficient condition – which is why neuroscience, and the materialist philosophy upon which it is based, fails to capture the human person. Since the brain is an evolved organism, Neuromania leads to Darwinitis, the assumption that, since Darwin demonstrated the biological origins of the organism Homo sapiens, we should look to evolutionary theory to understand what we are now; that our biological roots explain our cultural leaves. In fact, we belong to a community of minds that has developed over the hundreds of thousands of years since we parted company from other primates.
The lecture is free and open to the public, but booking is required. See the site hyperlinked above for details.
A video is now available (here) of a discussion with various US professional bloggers about their philosophical training and its role in preparing them for their future occupation. Looks to be pretty interesting.
Another IGRS series of events, this time the Spring 2011 instalment of the German philosophy seminar on Wagner and philosophy. The seminars will be on Mondays at Senate House. For details, see here (warning: pdf).
There’s a series of seminars coming up at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies in London, part of the University of London’s School of Advanced Study, on various themes surrounding rationality and psychopathology in German philosophy from 1860 to 1950 (in particular, Franz Brentano, Ernst Cassirer and Karl Jaspers).
The seminars, convened by Dr Christine Lopes (visiting fellow at the IGRS), will be from 4pm to 6pm in Room ST 276 of the IGRS. The details of the individual seminars are as follows:
27th January 2012 – What are disorders of rationality?
Contemporary analytic and phenomenologist philosophers tend to agree on the existence of disorders of rationality. We will consider in a concise manner some of the recent analytical and phenomenological accounts of such disorders, and the nature of the line that separates pathological from non-pathological reasoning.
10 February 2012 – Franz Brentano: the notions of self-evident experience and intentionality
We will discuss key passages from Brentano’s seminal Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, and critically consider what he sees as the two fundamental markers of mentality: self-evident experience and intentionality.
2 March 2012 – Ernst Cassirer: the notion of symbolic form
A concise account of the ‘Davos Disputation’ between Cassirer and Heidegger, and a critical discussion about some of the arguments involved in Cassirer’s re-conception of Kant’s theory of transcendental imagination into a system of symbolic forms. The main textual reference will be selected passages from Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.
16 March 2012 – Karl Jaspers: the notion of psychopathology
We will look into some recent philosophical evaluations of the legacy of Jaspers’ seminal work on psychopathology, and consider the difficulties involved in a philosophical reduction of the notion of psychopathology to that of pathological reasoning. The main textual reference will be selected passages from Jaspers’ General Psychopathology.
One of the great analytic philosophers of the twentieth century, Michael Dummett, died on the 27th of December at the age of 86.
Here is a link to his obituary in The Guardian by A. W. Moore.
Here‘s the Flickr site of marvellous London-based artist, Emma McNally, one of whose images serves as the cover art for the forthcoming, and equally marvellous, book on Hegel, Deleuze and the critique of representation by Henry Somers-Hall (MMU).
Merry Xmas!
