Editorial Notice

This marks my final contribution to Dialectic as Editor. Samuel Douglas will act in the post until a new Editor is appointed. I am sure that Samuel, and the other Contributors, will continue to use Dialectic to promote intellectual and philosophical discourse.

It has been an interesting experience. I would like to think those many individuals whose work has made an appearance on this page.

Martin Hill.

Post Script - I will, for the foreseeable future, be contributing to Epideixis.

Epideixis

Epideixis – a new collaborative philoblog by Dialectic Contributors Rowan Blyth, Samuel Douglas (Philosophy Hurts Your Head), and Martin Hill (Hypomnemata).

Two Posts By Stanley

Jason Stanley, Brian Leiter's current guest blogger, has posted two interesting musings. Chronologically, the first is a discussion of the difference/lack of difference between analytic and continential philosophy. Stanley is interested in the point that many of the key points made in one tradition have their equivilent in the other, his example being Derrida's Of Grammatology and Quine's Word And Object. The second is a discussion of relativism's status as the key philosophicl problem for the comming decade, and catch-all methodological solutions to philosophical problems.

Long Sunday Symposium On Benjamin's 'Critique Of Violence'

The first couple of contributions to Long Sunday's symposium have been posted. 'Marc Lombardo on Benjamin: Language, Jurisprudence, and the Divine', by M. Lombardo provides an interesting contextualisation of the discussion by pointing to the difficulty inherent in discussing the text. Alain Wittman has presented a position on violence as 'Pure Means', while Jodi Dean has posted on the concept of 'Divine Violence' in Benjamin's contrast with 'mythical violence'.

Mill's - Gaston's 'Derrida And Disinterest'

"Sean Gaston's contribution to philosophical literature on the work of Jacques Derrida is to be welcomed for its serious engagement with Derrida's oeuvre and sensitive reading of his formulations of ethics and responsibility. Gaston develops an insightful and original interpretation of Derrida's work through the lens of 'disinterest' and considers the potential of this concept for contemporary ethics and politics. He highlights the eighteenth-century understanding of disinterest, in which it is seen not as the lack or absence of all interest, but as opposed to self-interest and therefore central to ethics. This understanding, Gaston contends, has been obscured through the association of disinterest with either 'private autonomy' or 'public hegemony' (vii). In returning to an ethical conception of disinterest and particularly its importance for Derrida and Levinas, Gaston elucidates Derrida's relation to Levinas, arguing that in his conception of a radical disinterest 'that founds and exceeds the interests of being', Levinas revives 'a disinterest that both redefines and reinhabits the traditional concepts of disinterest that flourished in the eighteenth century' (vii). Derrida, on the other hand, formulates a post-Nietzschean disinterest radicalized by différance, which prevents the return of the same and of identity in disinterest, effectively turning ethics toward the 'to come' (viii)." - NDPR.

Baudrillard Interview - On Simulation

"Are you saying that America represents the ideal of democracy?

No, the simulation of power.

At 76, you are still pushing your famous theory about "simulation" and the "simulacrum," which maintains that media images have become more convincing and real than reality.

All of our values are simulated. What is freedom? We have a choice between buying one car or buying another car? It's a simulation of freedom." - Continental Drift, New York Times (November 20 2005)

Zizek On Paris Riots

"So what can a philosopher do here? One should bear in mind that the philosopher's task is not to propose solutions, but to reformulate the problem itself, to shift the ideological framework within which we hitherto perceived the problem. Perhaps, a good point to start with would be to put the recent outbursts into the series they build with two other types of violence that the liberal majority today perceives as a threat to our way of life: (1) direct "terrorist" attacks (of suicide bombers); (2) Rightist Populist violence; (3) suburban juvenile "irrational" outbursts. A liberal today worries about these three disturbances of his daily life: terrorist attacks, juvenile violence, Rightwing Populist pressures." - Some Politically Incorrect Reflections on Violence in France & Related Matters [Hat Tip to Theoria].

The Ethics Of War

The Ethics Of War - a philo-blog concerned with covering the discussion of the ethics of war.

The Business Ethics Blog

The Business Ethics Blog - A new applied ethics philo-blog, out of Canada, concerned with emerging field of business ethics. Aims to be comperable with Bioethics.net, an admirable intention.

Badiou On French Philosophy

"Let us begin these reflections on contemporary French philosophy with a paradox: that which is the most universal is also, at the same time, the most particular. Hegel calls this the ‘concrete universal’, the synthesis of that which is absolutely universal, which pertains to everything, with that which has a particular time and place. Philosophy is a good example. Absolutely universal, it addresses itself to all, without exception; but within philosophy there exist powerful cultural and national particularities. There are what we might call moments of philosophy, in space and in time. Philosophy is thus both a universal aim of reason and, simultaneously, one that manifests itself in completely specific moments. Let us take the example of two especially intense and well-known philosophical instances. First, that of classical Greek philosophy between Parmenides and Aristotle, from the 5th to the 3rd centuries bc: a highly inventive, foundational moment, ultimately quite short-lived. Second, that of German idealism between Kant and Hegel, via Fichte and Schelling: another exceptional philosophical moment, from the late 18th to the early 19th centuries, intensely creative and condensed within an even shorter timespan. I propose to defend a further national and historical thesis: there was—or there is, depending where I put myself—a French philosophical moment of the second half of the 20th century which, toute proportion gardée, bears comparison to the examples of classical Greece and enlightenment Germany. " - 'The Adventure Of French Philosophy', New Left Review.

Theoria's extented discussion is available here, of interest is the cannon of French philosophers that can be extracted from Badiou's piece. One point worth considering - if interested in these matters - is the absence of any suitable successor to Derrida qua First Man of French Philosophy according to Badiou's list ...

MacFarquhar On Baudrillard

"“I don’t know how to ask this question, because it’s so multifaceted,” he said. “You’re Baudrillard, and you were able to fill a room. And what I want to know is: when someone dies, we read an obituary—like Derrida died last year, and is a great loss for all of us. What would you like to be said about you? In other words, who are you? I would like to know how old you are, if you’re married and if you have kids, and since you’ve spent a great deal of time writing a great many books, some of which I could not get through, is there something you want to say that can be summed up?”

“What I am, I don’t know,” Baudrillard said, with a Gallic twinkle in his eye. “I am the simulacrum of myself.”" - 'Baudrillard On Tour', The New Yorker (28th November 2005).

Satan On Loneliness

"The only person who understands me is my friend Gene. Sure, he knows I'm a mythical representation of all the tragic and self-defeating fallibility inherent in the human condition, but he doesn't judge me for it. Lately though, I hardly ever get to see him." - Why Does Everybody Hate Me?, The Onion.

Notice- Internet Radio Discussion Of Sedition Laws

Dialectic contributor Samuel Douglas is, presently, slated to make an appearance on Novocastrian internet radio station Tin tommorrow (Friday) from ten (10) am Australian Eastern Daylight Savings Time to discuss the proposed ammendments to sedition laws in Australia in response to the 'spectre' of terrorism.

Morgan - Atterton, Calarco, and Friedman's 'Levinas and Buber: Dialogue and Difference'

"I waited for the publication of this volume with great anticipation. Levinas and Buber are two of the most important Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century, and yet we have no book or collection of essays in English that compares their contributions. Both are philosophically important, although Buber's philosophical significance has been much less appreciated, especially in North America. At first glance, a comparison of the two seems appropriate. Levinas privileges an interpersonal relationship he calls the face-to-face, Buber an encounter he calls I-Thou. Levinas wrote several pieces on Buber, and his discussions, while appreciative, are critical. He claims that Buber's conception of I-Thou is ethically formal and reciprocal, while the social relationship, for Levinas, is asymmetrical and ethically substantive, demanding responsibility and concern for the other's suffering and well-being. A straightforward comparison of their work is in and of itself an attractive thought, and an examination of what Levinas said about Buber and Buber's responses is also an intriguing project. When I saw the advertisement for the present volume, I was eager to read it.

Overall, the result is valuable, helpful, and informative. The questions and issues that the juxtaposition of the two thinkers raises deserve better, deeper treatment, to be sure, but there is a good deal to be learned from the essays, especially for someone coming to the comparison between Buber and Levinas for the first time." - NDPR.

Taylor - Lee's 'Epistemology After Protagoras: Responses to Relativism in Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus'

"Professor Lee's theme is the challenge to objective knowledge posed by Protagoras' relativistic thesis that 'Man is the measure of all things', and the responses to that challenge by Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus. While acknowledging the differences between Protagorean relativism and Hellenistic skepticism, she sees Protagoras and responses to him as foreshadowing some of the later debates between skeptics and dogmatists. Both Protagoras and the skeptics appeal to conflicting appearances and the lack of any criterion to determine which appearances are veridical, but draw different conclusions from these data; the skeptics conclude that is impossible to determine the real nature of things, while Protagoras maintains that the real nature of things is simply that, for each perceiver, the way things appear to that perceiver is the way they are for him/her. Protagoras is thus in skeptical terms a dogmatist, but his peculiar form of dogmatism makes him an ally of the skeptics against those, including Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus, who maintain that underlying the conflicting appearances there is an objective reality accessible to rational theory, assisted in one way or another by observation, and that theory-grounded access to that reality amounts to knowledge." - NDPR.

Spence On Hobbes

"A central argument that provides ethical support to the new laws is the social contract argument. First raised by Plato 2500 years ago, it was developed in its modern form by the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

Hobbes said the legitimacy of the state and its citizens is rationally and ethically mandated by a notional social contract under which individuals agree to constrain their "anything goes" unlimited freedoms for the sake of security, safety, civility and public order which the state guarantees on the basis of mutually acceptable moral principles.

However, the state only holds power in trust for the collective good, and its legitimacy is ultimately founded on the implied consent of its citizens. Whereas the state has an obligation to protect and preserve the security and safety of its citizens, the citizens have an obligation to abide by the ethical and legal principles upon which the state is founded.

When individuals through deeds or words threaten the security of the state and the safety of its citizens the government has a legal and ethical obligation to do whatever is needed to protect its citizens. A government that fails to do so would rightly be deemed negligible and held culpable for such negligence." - 'Freedom, if others are restrained', Sydney Morning Herald (November 21, 2005).

Philosopher's Carnival, No. Twenty One

The twenty-first Philosopher’s Carnival is presently being hosted by For those of you at home. Seemingly down on numbers from last time, there is the usual mix of regular contributors and first-timers that makes the Carnivals dynamic.

Proposed Ammendments To Australian Sedition Laws

With the Federal Government in the process of passing the Anti-Terrorism legislation (link is to the leaked draft ... sorry about not tracking down the current draft), it seems as though a discussion of whether or not a society that values free and open speech of the type that can be considered an essential foundation of democratic processes should have laws that turn verbal and written political statements into crimes?

While on the legislation; the Federal Parliamentary Library's briefing is a more balanced location to start reading up on the ammendments and their legal implications while ABC's Media Watch has collected resources regarding the implication of the sedition ammendments, including this widely cited legal advice. The Gilbert And Tobin Centre Of Public Law at the University of New South Wales, has published this 'Briefing On Sedition Offences In The Anti-Terrorism Bill 2005'.

Berry - Richardson's 'Nietzsche's New Darwinism'

"If the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 was a watershed in the history of Western thought, it was not due merely to his suggestion that modern species were revised descendents of earlier ones. Rather, it was that Darwin had identified the precise mechanism by which one species could be revised into another, biologically distinct species. Darwin's proposal of evolution by natural selection gave immediate direction to research in the biological sciences, and it allowed the theory to begin doing important work in that arena (and beyond) by eventually closing the only significant explanatory gap that might otherwise have hindered its widespread acceptance. In his most recent book, John Richardson proposes to make Nietzsche's views on morality more coherent, more credible, and ultimately more useful by demonstrating that they are underwritten by a modified Darwinism that identifies the thoroughly naturalistic mechanisms by which human beings come to have the moral values and practices they do and through which they might realize the possibility of creating new, healthier values.

As even casual readers of Nietzsche will observe, the bulk of what Nietzsche has to say about Darwin and Darwinism is hostile. Richardson rightly points out that Nietzsche has a perhaps regrettable but nonetheless reliable tendency to bite off the hand that feeds him; the thinkers of whom he is most critical are often those from whom he takes the most inspiration. But his intellectual relationship to Darwin is more complicated still. As Richardson's examination of Nietzsche's position shows, Nietzsche's attacks appear to get wrong both Darwin's position and the biological facts of the matter. The central motif in Nietzsche's criticism of Darwin seems to be that Darwin lays too much stress on survival, and too little on power [18]. But in offering this criticism, Nietzsche "misidentifies the selective criterion in Darwinism," which is not survival, but reproduction. Moreover, "Nietzsche seems to misread Darwinian survival as an 'end' in too literal a sense: as the aim of a will or drive or instinct" in the individual [22]. It looks as if Nietzsche has missed something important about Darwinism -- namely, that it is not hopelessly teleological, but manages to handle the idea of 'ends' or 'aims' in an entirely naturalistic way. If this is the case, however, it appears that Nietzsche's hostile reaction to Darwin and his subsequent 'correction' of Darwinism are grounded in error. Richardson argues, however, that these errors might be peripheral after all, and that Nietzsche might really appreciate the main thrust of the Darwinian position. "What if," he asks, "[Nietzsche] gets right, after all, the sense of Darwinian selection -- how it is and isn't teleology -- and builds his own will to power and drives in parallel?" [24] Richardson's aim is to demonstrate that the weight of textual evidence favors our reading Nietzsche in this way, and makes it more than just "wishful thinking" [25]." - NDPR.

Thought On Critical Theory

"All it takes is a little supposition mixed with critical theorizing and you can easily stumble on a tenuous half-truth that really makes you think." - 'I'm Very Interested In Hearing Some Half-Baked Theories', in The Onion.

[Yes, it is taken completely out of context ...]